Since independence Cameroon has been a hegemonic state, evidenced by the 1966 introduction of a single party, the Cameroon National Union (CNU), which was purportedly created to foster national integration. This focus on national integration led to a de-emphasis of all other issues such as fundamental human rights. And because a select elite assigned itself the task of imagining the form the nation would take, this process was naturally accompanied by a contraction of the political space. Because the national integration project had paid minimal dividends after more than two decades, Cameroonians refused to legitimize it. They had realized that it simply served as a ruse for the ruling class to convert the state into a patrimonial one. Hence, people sought to regain their voices and participation through the democratic process. Reluctantly, the state capitulated to demands for political pluralism, passing the so-called Liberal Laws of 1990. However, by allowing multiparty politics, the government ruptured the facade of cohesion of the ruling class, which resulted in elites becoming increasingly preoccupied with maintaining their power and losing interest in the national integration project.

(Readers of the Summer 1975 issue of ISSUE — entirely devoted to a discussion of the 1972 killings in Burundi — had the opportunity to take the full measure of the tragedy then visited upon the country, 18 years before the latest outburst of ethnic violence. As René Lemarchand noted at the time, “anyone for whom the name Burundi evokes more than a Lilliputian entity in the heart of Africa must look back to the events of 1972 with a sense of horror and consternation: in a matter of weeks tens of thousands of human beings were systematically slaughtered in what, in retrospect, can only be described as the nearest equivalent offered by Africa of a ‘final solution.’”

This essay examines the roles that Ogun, Yoruba god of iron and war, plays in communication and in the construction of boundaries in the systems in which he is worshipped in an attempt to gain some additional understanding about the nature of Yoruba religion.

The idea of Ogun, both in symbolic and practical expressions, is indigeneous to the Yoruba, most of whom live in the southwestern part of Nigeria. In the New World as well as Benin (Dahomey) where Ogun is also worshipped, the practice is associated with people of Yoruba descent. The god has taken, within syncretic formations, a new name in the Americas (Herskovits, 1971; Lewis, 1978; Gordon, 1979). It is St. George in Rio de Janeiro and St. Anthony in Bahia, Brazil. For those in Trinidad it is St. Michael. The Yoruba themselves have seven variants of the god (Idowu, 1962; Ibigbami, 1977). The elevation of one variant above others raises the issue of religious identity: whereas Ogun is not immune from the variety of conflicting traditions in the Old and New Worlds, it is clear that, even in the New World, Ogun's affiliation to any community is expressed in action—in the common performance of the prescribed practice and the adoption of a way of life. World writers have emphasized the syncretic adaptations of the African indigeneous cultural forms in line with Catholic dogmas and symbols the African slaves met or interacted with in their new settings (Herskovits, 1937, 1971; Mischel, 1967; Hamilton, 1970; Gordon, 1979). Their theoretical orientation is informed by a search for African retentions or survivals.

In the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Senegalese musicians produced a large body of songs addressing the coronavirus. These songs engage with prophylaxes, symptoms, instructions in case of infection, and metaphysical conceptions about the origin and meaning of the pandemic. These songs are part of a national strategy aimed at containing and eradicating the coronavirus by developing “COVID-literacy”: knowledge about the pandemic which is spread through music. In this article, we examine a socio-local history of music’s use during health crises, its place in local religious communities, and how its use interlaces linguistic, traditional, and metaphysical tenets.

This article explores the intersections of violence, morality, and place to theorize the notion of moral violence. Using narratives collected during ethnographic research in a highway town in Kenya, it suggests that when people offer moralizing sentiments about this locality they are pointing to (and sometimes reproducing) the effects of and anxieties about the decades of violence and inequalities that have engulfed the lives of the residents. Particular attention is paid to the way in which narratives about political/ethnic violence and HIV/AIDS have blended to create and sustain moral violence as a chronic and particular, historically embedded variant of structural violence.

The sports pages of the postcolonial press provide a vantage point for viewing the tensions surrounding nation-building in Nigeria. Following independence, coverage of the Green Eagles national football team reflected aspirations for a united Nigeria, but it was also an outlet for the deep political tensions plaguing Nigeria at this time. From 1960 to 1961, contentious games against Ghanaian rivals, disputes around the choice of a national coach, and clashes with referees in international matches all enabled sports journalists to become mouthpieces for both cohesion and discord. Schler and Dubinsky demonstrate that sports pages provide opportunities for viewing the links between postcolonial sports and politics.

A wealth of excellent films from Africa is readily available for classroom use, even if much of Anglophone Africa remains poorly represented. African films can serve to challenge students' assumptions and to foster a critical examination of Western films set in Africa. Extending the scope of conventional “African” courses to North Africa adds a substantial body of notable productions, some of which address current concerns such as Islamic fundamentalism. African films have to be contextualized; even when they are examined as works of art and as examples of world cinema, full appreciation requires that they be considered in their historical and cultural contexts. When films are used to introduce students to Africa, critical examination is imperative—audiences that have little factual information about Africa all too readily assume that fiction and fact coincide.

In the last four decades, transnational movements of both skilled and unskilled labor from developing countries to the advanced industrial economies have witnessed an unprecedented growth. Motivated largely by deteriorating livelihood conditions in the developing world and increasing demand for wealthy and highly skilled professionals in the developed economies, these movements have attracted a great deal of research attention and inspired public policy debates on their implications and results. Like other countries, Ghana has had a long history of movement of her nationals to various parts of the world for various reasons. However, in terms of the goal of enhancing the benefits of such emigration for Ghana, there appears to be a policy void. This article contributes to filling this gap. It discusses the merits and problems associated with the transnational movements of Ghanaian health and educational professionals and proposes ways to enhance the benefits. It also suggests pathways for aiding future migration policy formulation in Ghana.

“Queer” is a relatively recent and somewhat controversial term in African studies. Yet it is proving to be productive, not only for understanding African subjectivities of sexuality and gender, but also for situating Africa’s position in the larger economy of knowledge. Otu and van Klinken explore the productive tensions between “queer” and “Africa,” and aim to read Africa as queer and to read queer from Africa. Thus, rather than imagining Africa and queer as polar opposites, the authors seek to harness the critical, productive, and creative affinities between these two terms that are vital for the project of decolonizing and queering queer Africa.

In this day and age, Marxism-Leninism is the leading and least parochial theory of social revolution in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It strongly appeals to intellectuals who believe that capitalist imperialism in “neocolonial” forms perpetuates social injustice on a world scale; and that a “conscious minority’ ‘ or vanguard of the downtrodden should establish a “developmental dictatorship” dedicated to the pursuit of economic and social progress. Since the death of Mao Zedong and the subsequent repudiation of his economic theories in China, collectivism as an economic strategy has been reassessed and found wanting in other countries whose leaders are disposed to learn from China. For example, in the People’s Republic of the Congo, where collectivist methods, inspired by Marxism-Leninism have been discarded in favor of entrepreneurial methods, the minister of agriculture has said simply, “Marxism without revenue is Marxism without a future.”

Some members of tine African-American community were aware of European activities in the African continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As early as the 1860s, Pan-Africanist Martin R. Delany and Henry Highland Garnet, a US ambassador to Liberia reacted differently to the British annexation of part of Yorubaland. In later years, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner also addressed the issue of the manner in which Europeans were taking over African territory, and chided African-Americans for not going back to re-take and protect the African continent from the European intruders (January 1882, 1). There were more responses from the community on the subject, during tine last stages of European imperial subjugation of Africa (Jacobs 1981, 38, 49, 53 and 75).

Although some African-Americans condemned the European annexation of Africa, they were not physically involved in the resistance effort of the Africans. The Africans' heroic and tenacious defense of their states collapsed in the face of the superior military tactics and warfare technology of the invading European armies (Crowder 1971, 1-16). Thus by the first decade of the 20th century, most of the continent had come under effective European colonial domination, with the two exceptions of Liberia and Ethiopia. The Europeans wished and actually attempted to colonize these two states. Ethiopia saved itself, while Liberia eventually had to rely on the assistance of the United States of America to thwart European designs against the State.

A dialectic running through the literature on agricultural development in Africa is between coercion and incentives, between the necessity of compelling peasants to produce certain crops or employ particular technology and the possibility of motivating peasants to opt for specific production strategies through rewards. Coercion presumes peasants lack the capacity and or will to develop agriculture and must be forced. Incentives assume peasants will choose development if given the opportunity. Recent examples of coercionist approaches include Hyden (both 1980 and 1983), La-Anyane (1985), and Hart (1982:156-157). Recent examples of incentive-based approaches include Bates(1981), World Bank (1981), Brown and Wolf (1985), and Lele (1984).

Both sides of this debate are seriously flawed. Policies based on them are unlikely to break the pattern of underdevelopment in African agriculture. In fact, past policies of coercion and incentives have contributed to present conditions. Current frameworks lack an appreciation of the ways in which African agriculture has already been transformed. They therefore underestimate the structural impediments to progress.

This article calls for greater attention to the conditions and relations of production in African agriculture. Specifically, we must examine three factors. The first is the degree to which subsistence production has been undermined. This includes considering how dependent producers are on the market, to what extent out-migration has taken place and how far landlessness has spread. Second, we must look at the degree of control farmers have over production decisions. They may be restricted by such factors as competition for land with commercial growers, sharecropping and other land-tenure relations, lack of resources to provide inputs to agriculture, regulations of development projects or cooperatives, and/or by pressure to allocate resources to off-farm strategies (such as wage-labor) to meet household needs.

In a general sense, legitimization by the United Nations of African wars of national liberation means the recognition by various UN bodies that the struggle against colonialism and apartheid in southern Africa is a legitimate endeavour as far as the purposes and the principles of the UN Charter and other UN declarations are concerned. This international recognition of the African liberation movements is expressed through the offer of international aid and through the invitation of these movements to take part in deliberations at the conferences sponsored by UN agencies. The process of UN legitimization of the African struggle for freedom has been tangibly in the making since December 1960, when the world organization adopted General Assembly Resolution 1514 [XV] - the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries (or the declaration on decolonization).

African farmers vary in their access to the basic resources of agricultural production: land, labor, and capital. The availability of these resources affects farmer decisions about choice of crops, crop mixes, and strategies to optimize agricultural production. Understanding the variation in resource availability among farmers and the consequences of that variation for production is one necessary step in understanding the production strategies of contemporary farmers. Understanding their present strategies is a necessary step in transforming African agriculture to better meet the continent's needs.

This paper looks at Malinke farmers in Kita in Western Mali in light of these issues. After some background information on the area and the study, the paper delineates three strata of farmers with different access to basic production resources, the most important of which is labor. The remainder of the paper looks at the consequences of those differing resource availabilities by examining different strategies pursued by affluent, middle, and poor farmers in one crop important in the region, peanuts.

Although Africans are very concerned about food production, it is still important to look at cropping decisions in regard to crops that, like peanuts, are grown primarily for cash. In many places like Kita, these crops are the primary means by which farmers earn money, and they are reluctant to change to crops with unknown earning potential. National governments, too, are hesitant to eliminate export crops totally, for they still need the foreign exchange that they earn.

In recent times Africa has been a favourite quarry of American social scientists and humanities scholars. It has served Africanist scholars, mostly white, as a springboard for their eminently successful careers, as objects of study, and as cartographic points to which some of them could lay claim as theirs, trespass on which is often the equivalent of a capital offence in African Studies. Many of us have often been lectured, harangued, sometimes nearly insulted, because we dared to suggest that a subject on which a particular Africanist is “expert,” or one that happens to excite her or him has little relevance to the scholarly concerns of African scholars or the lives of Africans! There are variations on this theme: it wasn't so long ago that feminists of different persuasions kept looking to Africa for primal, originary matriarchies.

The phenomenon popularly known as brain drain has attracted growing concern in the United States and abroad (Tulsa Daily World, 1967; Committee on Manpower... 1967; Asian Student, 1968a: 3; 1968b: 1; 1969: 3; Institute of Applied Manpower . . . 1968; U. S. Congress, 1968; Gardiner, 1968: 194-202; Bechhofer, 1969: 1-71; Committee on the International Migration . . . 1970). The notion has been expressed that the poor countries of the world are being deprived of their talent and robbed of their human resources by the exchange of scholars and students which goes on between nations (U.S. Congress, 1968: 16-25; Mondale, 1967a: 24-6; 1967b: 67-9). Implicit is the idea that many students from these less developed countries go to the more highly developed and industrialized countries for study and decide not to return to their homeland.

In his opening address to the fifty members of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) on 18 October, 1975, the head of Nigeria’s new military government, General Murtala Ramat Muhammed, declared: “It is important that we avoid a reopening of the deep splits which caused trauma in the country.” Those splits, as was made known to the outside world during the civil war, were ethnic, regional, and, to a lesser extent, religious in nature. Of these three modes of overt division, Nigerians have always been most successful in controlling the religious aspect. General Murtala’s statement is instructive on the problem of regional splits: “The fear of the predominance of one Region over another has . . . been removed to a large extent by the simple Constitutional Act of creating more States.” Four months later, following the assassination of Murtala, the successor regime of General Obasanjo declared the creation of seven more states, bringing the number up to nineteen from the twelve established by General Gowon in May 1967. While it is evident that the existence of “regions” has not been obliterated by their subdivision into states, this development has reduced the immediate political visibility and at least some of the salience of regional boundaries.

In the preceding essay Janet Ewald has rightly stressed the critical importance of field work in revealing the manifold relations among different factors, institutions, and events in the past as well as those between the past and the present. She has also noted the disparate, eclectic, and even anarchic nature of the data obtained, making interpretation and analysis of the data a second, a perhaps even more difficult, hurdle that African historians must face between overcoming the confusions and complexities of field work and confronting the third hurdle of historical analysis. Having collected the evidence, then, our task shifts to its interpretation.

African history has been called the decathalon of the social sciences as we sought to employ seemingly complementary methodologies, data, and theoretical perspectives of history, archaeology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, and oral traditions to overcome the limited amount of documentary material available to us. The move was an audacious assault on disciplinary boundaries, but one that sometimes resulted in naive uses of data and analysis without proper consideration of the complexities of other fields. Wars between historians and anthropologists have been endemic. But we have all become more sophisticated in our use of other disciplinary perspectives in the process, so that today we see emerging both an increasingly sensitive anthropological history as well as a more subtle historical anthropology.