More than five decades after independence, Africa still struggles with the legacies of colonial partition. On the territorial frontiers between the postcolonial inheritors of the two major colonial powers, Great Britain and France, the continuing impact of European colonialism remains most acute. On the one hand, the splitting of erstwhile homogeneous ethnic groups into British and French camps gave rise to new national identities; on the other hand, it circumvented any possibility of sovereignty via ethnic solidarity. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the ethnic groups that were divided between English- and French-speaking states in West Africa, let alone the African continent writ large. This article joins postcolonial ethnography to the emerging field of comparative borderland studies. It argues that, although norms of state-based identity have been internalized in the Anglophone–Francophone borderlands, indigenous bases of association and behavior continue to define life along the West African frontier in ways that undermine state sovereignty. Although social scientists tend to focus on national- and sub-national-level analyses, and increasingly on the effects of globalization on institutional change, study of the African borderlands highlights the continuing importance of colonial legacies and grassroots-derived research.

Every projection indicates that minorities will represent a significant portion of the American labor force in the nearest future. Yet minority groups have historically represented segments of the population least capable of competing in the national and international marketplace. This is precisely why historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) need to rise to the challenge through an implicit mandate to internationalize their member institutions and the surrounding communities. This paper takes a critical look at how HBCUs ran the two most predominant components of international education, namely, the overseas and area studies programs. The main focus of the paper is Africa. It is indeed an attempt to assess the status of international education at HBCUs, particularly the problems they encounter as they struggle to internationalize. Although in the last few years, study abroad in Africa has become increasingly popular among HBCUs, the road ahead is still very long and sometimes tortuous. In the area of African studies, most of these institutions have a much bigger challenge to meet. The basic premise of my assumption is that despite all the good intentions of the government and private donor organizations, the fact remains that sustainable and qualitative international education in the area of African studies is in large part unaffordable and thus inaccessible to most HBCUs. Numerous factors are responsible for this phenomenon.

Having recently returned from a short research trip to Rwanda (from October 15 to October 22), I want to comment on certain serious problems which threaten to weigh heavily on the immediate future of the country. I do not intend to judge the performance of the regime in power after only three months in power; it would be premature to do so, and in any case the administration lacks virtually all financial resources. Instead, I seek here only to share a few observations on the current situation.

Before this trip I believed that the essential problem faced by the country was the threat of renewed warfare by the armed forces of the former government, and their associated militias, now in exile in the neighboring countries. That is still a threat.

“They call it a country. In fact it is just a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa,” wrote The Economist in 1995. Well before then, Erwin Blumenthal, who visited Zaire on behalf of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to assess prospects for reform, warned that, despite promises from President Mobutu (1965-97) that loans would be repaid, “there is no—I repeat no—chance on the horizon that Zaire’s many creditors will recover their money.’ Meanwhile, Mobutu did not use loans to build state bureaucracies or provide services; he actively discouraged them. Even by official accounts, the modest spending of 10 percent of Zaire’s budget on education and health services in 1982 fell to zero a decade later.

Max Yergan was one of the most controversial foreign-born leaders ever associated with modern South Africa. From 1921 to 1936 he was the only black representative of the North American branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) permitted to work in the South African field. Yergan's South African service radicalized the young missionary, culminating in his resignation from the YMCA in 1936. The next decade of Yergan's life was devoted to left-wing activism. In 1948 however, ostensibly disillusioned by the onset of the Cold War, Yergan abandoned leftist activism in favor of ultraconservativism.

South Africa loomed large in each of these transformations. This article is concerned with Yergan's shift from evangelical Protestantism to revolutionary socialism, highlighting the critical role that residence in South Africa played in his early political evolution. It also brings into focus the broader subject of Afro-American linkages with Black South Africans, making special reference to the advent and larger significance of Black American YMCA work among Africans.

Max Yergan was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1892, one of several sons of a literate black seamstress named Lizzie Yeargan. While much of his early life is obscure, he seems to have been influenced by the philosophical trends of African Redemption and Ethiopianism which swept many religious communities within the African Diaspora during the last quarter of the 19th century.

In recent years, anthropologists and sociologists have been concerned with the problem of the definition of ethnic groups within various societies. This paperl suggests that the purpose of the researcher's definition largely determines the composition of the group and that research on ethnicity may be seen as analogous, in that respect, to approaches to research on language.

For some types of research, it is sufficient to equate ethnic identity with tribal affiliation. This is true in areas of the world where it makes sense to record answers from informants to the question “What is your tribe?”. However, it is necessary in such areas for the researcher to ask the question directly, rather than ask one person to label another.

In a recent article, A.N. Tucker (1973) discusses this same problem with regard to placenames. He cites, for Africa, cases where it was discovered that the official name of a particular place was not the place's name at all but had been supplied to researchers (linguists, anthropologists, geographers, or whatever) by a guide from another culture or linguistic group. Tucker (1973: 163) states that:

As research in social anthropology has turned from studying tribal units in more or less isolated areas toward urban-centered research, it has become apparent that one feature of urban social organization seems to be emergent ethnic or tribal groupings (Arens, 1973: 441). The criteria underlying such groupings, as opposed to those underlying traditional tribal affiliation, are often of a complex nature. Where, in rural areas, it has been possible to ask informants “What is your tribe?” and receive an unambiguous answer (usually related to parentage and/or land inheritance), in urban poly-ethnic communities today as well as in rural yet urban-linked areas, criteria for determining ethnicity are changing. In fact, as Arens has pointed out, in today's Africa common tribal identity in the sense of ethnic consciousness seems to be of particular importance in the cities, where ethnicity—in the absence of kinship—underlies social organization. The common assumption that rural areas are static and urban areas dynamic is being challenged.

In light of the bitterness engendered over the past 150 years between the North and South Sudan—especially during the past two decades—the Addis Ababa Agreement signed in February 1972 is indeed a singular event. (For a text of the agreement, see “Agreement Issue” 1972, pp. 18 and 22; full text on pp. 17-26.) Not only did this mark the end of the seventeen-year-old insurgency in the South, but it may well mark the beginning of a new phase in the relationships between the two regions. This is particularly important when it is noted that apparently neither side achieved their declared objectives. There is a need for caution, however. The basis for future relationships, as well as the effectiveness of the post-insurgency reconstruction, rest on the outcome of the eighteen-month interim arrangement, which is a basic part of the Addis Ababa Agreement.

The interim arrangement (February 1972-June 1973) privides interalia for an Interim High Executive Council, whose President and members are appointed by the President of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan. In effect, the Council is the “Executive and Cabinet” for the Southern Sudan during this interim period. Additionally, a number of other provisions provide for the establishment of institutions and initiate steps for integrating them into a wider national system. Implicitly, the arrangement assumes an effective relationship between the North and South from which a permanent settlement can evolve.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate how one area of social science research may contribute to social and economic development in the Third World. International aid and technical assistance programs for less developed nations began in the late 40s shortly after World War II. The interest of scholars in the study of such programs also dates from this time (Opler, 1954). Ever since the early days, we, the social scientists, have been called upon to explain the failure of many assistance efforts or to discern why new ideas and practices caused chaos in the societies into which they were introduced. An example of an early program failure was documented in Peru when village women failed to use the “good” public health practice of boiling contaminated water before drinking it after the method had been advocated in an extensive education campaign by public health personnel (Wellin, 1955: 71-103). The disorganization of a society in the face of what appeared to be a relatively minor technological improvement of an existing tool, was reported in 1952 after missionaries gave steel axes to Australian aborigines (Sharp, 1952: 66-92). The determination of the adverse social consequences of innovation was an important aspect of the early studies done by social scientists, especially anthropologists (Rogers, 1962: 27). Though there were reports of cross-cultural diffusion which did not affect societies adversely, for example, the adoption of potato growing by a Pacific Northwest Indian tribe (Suttles, 1951: 272-88), many reports appear to concentrate upon the damage done by technical assistance programs (Dobyns, 1951;Bliss, 1952;Mead, 1955; Erasmus, 1961).

English and French attitudes toward Africans in the Senegambia developed and became well-defined during the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century. These attitudes were influenced by three main factors: European ethnocentrism, the commercial relations which governed European-African intercourse, and the growth of the slave trade. During this period, Europeans expressed increasingly negative characterizations of Africans and their way of life. An ideology of African inferiority served, in part, to validate the Atlantic slave trade. It was easier to justify the enslavement of people who were considered less civilized or even a lower form of humanity. The formation of this ideology was facilitated by ethnocentric perceptions which led to a bias in favor of more westernized peoples. One important parameter by which Senegambians came to be judged inferior to their European counterparts was in the area of religious beliefs and practices.

In the Senegambia, French and English observers gradually established a sliding scale with Christians at the top, Muslims somewhere in the middle, and followers of local African religions at the bottom. The fact that Senegambians were not Christians eventually came to be cited as evidence of their cultural, intellectual, and moral inferiority. By the late eighteenth century, this approach would lead to the development of pseudo-scientific attitudes about European racial superiority.

The Senegambia is of particular interest to the study of the growth of ethnocentric attitudes. It was the region of earliest established seaborne contact between Europe and West Africa, as well as an early locus of French and English participation in the slave trade. In addition, the various ethnic groups in the region included both Muslims and non-Muslims. European responses to the different religions are well documented in the letters and narratives of traders and explorers, a fact which facilitates the study of comparative images of the different groups.

The art of filmmaking in the last two decades has been enriched by the works of various African filmmakers. This relatively modern form of visual representation seems more amenable to understanding at all levels of the social and cultural strata of the African populace than one would expect from even the earliest forms of the visual arts. Although many remarkable works have been produced by African filmmakers, few of these works have focused on the largely illiterate African majority as the target audience: this is not without reason. Filmmaking is arguably the most expensive form of art in any medium. It is difficult not to approach the profession primarily as a potentially viable business venture, or to continue in the pursuit of artistic excellence without healthy financial support. The governments of French speaking African countries, however, readily fund film projects, thereby mitigating the problem of finance for their filmmakers. As a result, for Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, filmmaking has become a very prolific enterprise. Despite the financial assistance received from the government of Senegal, Sembène does not compromise his artistic inclinations for this patronage. He has even had a serious disagreement with the government over the title of one of his films, Ceddo, 1977 (Gabriel, 1982).

Virtually all of the literature concerning the politics of South Africa analyzes the dynamics of that system within the frameworks of racism, authoritarianism, and repression. Yet, strangely, the political institution which is necessarily the bulwark of such a system—the military—has attracted scant attention except in terms of strategy and armaments.

A number of international agencies (as well as other prominent institutions and individuals) have issued reports assessing the “crises” now perceived to afflict “development” in Africa. The Organization of African Unity's Lagos Plan of Action (OAU, 1980) emphasized historical legacies, deteriorating terms of trade, and Africa's dependence on foreign markets, and set out elements for a general strategy to escape these constraints by building self-reliant, local, and regional economies. Various Food and Agriculture Organization documents (e.g., FAO, 1983) and UNICEF's State of the Children Report (UNICEF, 1983) provide particularly grim pictures of food and nutritional deficiencies. The Economic Commission for Africa, in its “silver jubilee report,” analyzing recent history, emphasized that, if present trends continue, the “scenario” after the next twenty-five years will be a “nightmare” of “poverty” and “degradation” of life (UN ECA 1983).

The World Bank's 1981 report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (hereafter Accelerated Development) also portrayed a “crisis” situation in food and agricultural production and called for some major policy changes in response. This document has probably attracted the lion's share of attention, certainly controversy. There are several reasons why the report deserves careful study and concerned discussion: it is readable, provocative, and comprehensive; it focuses on what are perceived to be “immediate problems” which “must be addressed if the widespread decline in per capita output” is to be “reverse”; it sets out an “agenda” of new “policies and programs to bring about this essential improvement” in the “production base” (World Bank, 1983: 1).

On its fortieth anniversary, the African Studies Association faces the task of forging mutuality between itself and others in the study of Africa and in relationships with Africa. This task involves three distinct challenges. The first is to overcome the historical hierarchies based on race and nationality that attended the creation and early history of the ASA. These hierarchies pushed many Africanists of color to the margins of our organization. The second challenge is to address the need for mutuality in internal policy relationships regarding Africa, particularly at a time when many American international affairs experts have said diat there are no U.S. national interests that link us to Africa and that any such assertions are divisive. However, the third and perhaps most time-sensitive challenge is that of creating mutuality in intra-ASA relationships. We must grow comfortable with the increasing diversity of ASA members. We cannot cede African studies to either black or white Africanists, but we must insist that our association, our newly trained professionals, and our ASA leadership mirror the cultural and ethnic diversity that is America.

Modeled after the U.S. presidency, the office of the president of Nigeria is easily the most powerful position in the land. The president is both the chief of state and the head of government. The authority of the nation’s chief executive expanded greatly during the patrimonial regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha. Indeed, not only was power concentrated in the hands of these despots, its exercise was also marked by massive corruption, brazen nepotism, and sustained brutality. Against this background, it was perhaps natural that the presidential election of February 27, 1999, would excite keen interest among the Nigerian populace, elite groups, ethnoregional blocs, and the international community. This article highlights some of the ethnoregional forces and elite interests that influenced the election and examines their possible implications for the sustenance of democracy and good governance in Nigeria.

This article is intended to serve as a preview of a detailed study of the two administrations of Governor Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1854-1861 and 1863-1865) which has been in preparation for some years. For despite his recognized importance as one of the founders of French rule in west Africa, he has remained surprisingly unstudied but nevertheless the subject of several myths. Although an article of this length obviously cannot pretend to be comprehensive, it will stress those general aspects of Faidherbe's two administrations—personal, military, political, and administrative—which have been most prone to misinterpretation and exaggeration.

The core of Faidherbe's achievement in Senegal was his realization of the so-called plan of 1854, the synthesis of a series of ministerial instructions (SOM: Sénégal I, 37-40: MMC to Protet, 1/4, 1/5, 11/, and 12/14/53; and 1/21, 5/18, 7/27, and 12/18/54) which had been given first to his predecessor, Captain Protet, and then to Faidherbe himself. These instructions recapitulated a plan which had been put forth in two petitions addressed to Protet which Marc Maurel of the Maurel and Prom Company of Saint-Louis and Bordeaux had written and had had signed by the major wholesalers, merchants, and other notables of Saint-Louis, the first in December 1851 (SOM: Sénégal XIII, 1a) and the second in February 1854.

This plan, parts of which went back to the 1820s, called for the French, based in small enclaves on the Atlantic coast at Saint-Louis and at a few other posts along the Senegal River, to become the dominant power in the area rather than one among many, some of whom were stronger than they.

The newly independent nations of the Maghrib inherited many political problems from their former imperial ruler. Of these, the question of frontiers was potentially the most explosive. The Algerian-Moroccan hostilities in the fall of 1963 provided clear evidence of this fact. Another territorial dispute pitted Tunisia against Algeria in a diplomatic crisis. In each case, the government in Algiers disputed claims based on the historic rights of Morocco and Tunisia. In contradiction to the ancient claims of its neighbors, the Algerian thesis was that it now owned all territories that had been controlled by the French administration of colonial Algeria (“Algerian-Moroccan Border Conflict…” 1963). In order to judge these contradictory allegations, it is thus necessary to look back to French colonial policies. Such a study inevitably leads to the conclusion that France was largely responsible for this great divisive question in North Africa. The blame might well be mitigated, however, for beyond selfish French colonial interests lay varying concepts of statehood and long-standing historical problems.

When the French conquered Algiers, they had no plan to take all of Algeria. Nor was there an Algerian state in the European sense, or an Algerian consciousness. Nationalism was apparently born out of opposition to French rule. When, about 1837, France decided to take all of the “Regency of Algiers,” no one knew exactly what the term included. French expansion in North Africa, however, quickly brought the colonialists into direct conflict with the ill-defined empires of Morocco and of the Beylik of Tunis as well as with so-called Algerian dissidents.

The Nigeria-Biafra war contributed to the rise of post-colonial moral interventionism, ushering in a new form of human rights politics. During the war, relief agencies evacuated 4,000 children from the conflict zones to Gabon and Côte d’Ivoire to protect them from the conflict. This was part of a broader international humanitarian airlift operation that brought relief supplies to the besieged Biafra territory. At the end of the war, most of the children were returned to their homes in Nigeria through an international humanitarian repatriation effort. Ibhawoh examines how state interests and the politics of international humanitarian interventionism manifested in debates about classifying and protecting displaced children, the most vulnerable victims of the conflict.

This article, part of a historical study of childbirth in the Sahel, draws upon oral interviews, ethnographic materials, and studies of midwifery to explore placenta burial in Niger. In the region the placenta is often referred to as the “traveling companion” that ushers the new human from one world to the next. Only through proper respect toward the placenta by means of careful burial can a woman’s future fertility be protected. The importance of protecting a woman’s future reproductive capacity accounts for both the centrality of this ritual to childbirth and for the appeal of the ritual expertise of elderly “traditional birth attendants” despite access to bio-medically trained midwives. Protecting a vulnerable parturient mother from the envy of those (such as co-wives) who might “tie up” her womb is an integral part of the process of childbirth. Appropriate placenta burial orchestrated by a woman’s therapy management group makes good on the cyclical intergenerational entrustment through which ancestors and descendants endure in a cycle linking birth and death, planting, and burial. “Traditional” rituals bear marks of major shifts in the agricultural economy, rapid urbanization, and ongoing adoption and reinterpretation of Islam. Multi-generational interviews reveal that across a broad range of ethnicities, status groups, and educational profiles, women in Niger share a concern for proper placenta burial. This approach to preserving women’s reproductive health and fertility is shared by adjacent neighbors, generations, and ethnicities.

Africa is experiencing an educational crisis of unprecedented proportions in higher education. Having been hailed in the 1960s as agent of modernization, social mobilization, and economic growth, most African universities are now tumbling down under the pressures of diminishing financial resources. From all indications, Africa is lagging behind other developing regions in terms of public expenditures particularly on education, availability of educational facilities, equal access to education, adequate pools of qualified teachers, and sufficient numbers of professionals and skilled workers. Pertinent data show that most African governments in the 1960s and 1970s made comparable progressive accomplishments in higher education. However, these accomplishments steadily disappeared in the 1980s. What went wrong in the 1980s? Why is higher education now such a convenient target for African leaders/governments, when pressured to trim their overextended public sector? To what extent is the lack of multiparty democracies affecting the deteriorating state of higher education in Africa? Is the declining importance attached to education in sub-Saharan Africa a reflection of the lack of education among Africa’s tyrannical rulers, hence the low appreciation of education? What role did the foreign financial institutions play in the African educational system? How can we turn the educational crisis around? These questions not only address African educational issues but also help us to explain the scope of this crisis. In a comparative analysis, this study describes the main African higher educational problems, identifies the root causes of the problems, and finally examines the implications for the twenty-first century.

There can be little doubt that the African refugee problem is a severe one that should command a good deal more attention than it has received over the past few years in the public’s eye. But if the African refugee crisis has received less than its deserved attention, the role of private voluntary organizations (PVOs) in responding to that crisis has received less. It is the purpose of this brief inquiry to assess the role of PVCs in the African refugee situation. Before doing so it is essential that the dimensions of Africa’s refugee problem be briefly outlined.