The sixties will be remembered as the decade of independence for most of Africa, independence won for the most part at the negotiating table. All too frequently the parties negotiating on behalf of African countries were a carefully cultivated elite who simply replaced the colonial administrators and set the stage for the growth of neocolonialism, coups, and counter coups. Unlike Britain and France, Portugal, until its 1974 revolution, refused to relinquish its colonies in Africa–Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola.

Guinea-Bissau, a small country on the west coast of Africa, had been a colony of Portugal for 500 years. For most of this period the relationship was one of trading. Portugal was not interested in political control so long as it had access to slaves and other goods. But with the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century, Portugal changed its attitude. Africa was being greedily divided up by the imperial powers and Portugal realized that unless it entrenched its presence and took political control, it might lose out altogether. With the coming to power of Salazar and a fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1926, the control became both brutal and complete.

In 1956 the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was founded by Amilcar Cabral and a few country people. At first PAIGC's goal was to organize workers in the towns, hoping that through demonstrations and strikes they would convince the Portuguese to negotiate for independence. It soon became clear that this was not going to happen. Each demonstration was met with violence, until the 1959 massacre of fifty dockworkers holding a peaceful demonstration at Pidgiguiti. This was a turning point for PAIGC: they realized that independence could not be won without an armed struggle, one that had to be based on the mass participation of the people. They turned their focus to the countryside and to mobilizing the peasants, who represented 95 percent of the population.

In 2007 South Africa's Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act, which had been debated since 1999. The law includes a statutory provision with new legal definitions of rape and consent. Influenced by Western human rights ideology and vocabulary, the Sexual Offences Act represents one form of discourse in South Africa about sexual coercion and consent. By using ethnographic methods, this article examines the wide disparity between some of the state discourses about coercion and consent and local beliefs and practices about the meanings of these terms in the Zulu township of Mpophomeni. Proponents of South Africa's new democracy often ignore poor young women's and men's local understandings of rape and of the violence they encounter on a daily basis. Against this background, the article offers recommendations to improve the current law and its effectiveness.

There seems to be a myth surrounding the nature of South African women's participation in the struggle against apartheid. It is one which erroneously assumes that women, who must undertake almost complete responsibility for the welfare and survival of their families, are so limited by being passive, nurturing and motherly that they cannot at the same time be powerful, independent and politically active.

Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women's Verse (Lockett 1991) forwards the cause of self-definition for the women and mothers of South Africa. The insight it provides into the political commitment and social orientation of women helps dispel the myth of Mother Africa, which, as editor Cecily Lockett describes it,

seldom allows for any role other than those of wife and mother for the black woman, who continues to be a prisoner of gender, defined only in terms of black men. Similarly, the emphasis on courage, determination, and survival as positive qualities inherent in black women tends to glamorize their real suffering and oppression as, in many cases, sole breadwinner of single-parent families (1988, 35).

Perhaps that underestimation of the power of South African women can be dispelled in light of their literary contributions, which are now surfacing with increasing momentum. The role of South African women in society, as seen in Cecily Lockett's anthology, Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women's Verse, is all encompassing and inherently proactive.

In November 2016, Uganda’s armed forces raided the Rwenzururu kingdom palace in Kasese Municipality, arresting and detaining the king and other kingdom officials on treason and other charges. This was the climax to a puzzling wave of violence that was then unfolding in the Rwenzori Region. We consider this violence an unintended consequence of the deepening politics of fragmentation, which takes two forms: “kingdomization” and “districtization.” Through fragmentation, Uganda’s ruling elites seek to weaken subnational concentrations of power, resources, and legitimacy wielded by otherwise coalesced, potentially strong, subnational authority structures and sociopolitical groups. Fragmentation fractures preexisting intra-regional unity, generates new conflicts, and reopens old wounds, leading to violent encounters at the sub-national level, between regional sub-groups, and with the central state. This unfolding of violent encounters involving both state and non-state actors has important ramifications for managing national security within socially fragile contexts and a politically fragmented polity.

The Seventh Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly Devoted to Development and International Co-operation, which ended on September 16, 1975, after round-the-clock negotiations between developing and developed nations, succeeded in producing a resolution which was adopted unanimously. The preamble of the resolution reaffirmed the General Assembly's intention “to eliminate injustice and inequality which afflict vast sections of humanity and to accelerate the development of developing countries” (U.N. General Assembly, 1975: 1). The resolution identified measures the international community could take to accelerate the pace of development. The Seventh Special Session is another indication of the developing world's determination to create a “New International Economic Order.” This article will discuss what is meant by this increasingly invoked phrase and examine the changing political realities which account for international economic issues becoming the dominant concern of bodies such as the United Nations. We will then analyze the decisions taken at the Seventh Special Session and discuss some of their possible implications for development in Africa.

The Seventh Special Session, which had been planned for almost two years, came only eighteen months after the General Assembly had convened in a Sixth Special Session to consider problems of raw materials and development. Two extraordinary sessions in such a short period of time (the first special sessions ever convened to discuss economic issues) demonstrate the seriousness of the economic crisis confronting the world.

The Sixth Special Session, convened in April 1974 on the initiative of President Houari Boumédienne of Algeria, met at a time of deepening economic turmoil.

With the onset of the twenty-first century, power distribution has become a key factor in African security. In western and southern Africa, power has become more concentrated and hierarchical, especially with the growing assertiveness of three regional powers, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and organizations (ECOWAS and SADC) which have the authority, salience and capability to mount and lead security operations. In contrast, in central and eastern Africa, anarchy remains prevalent and helps to explain the failure to enforce peace in both Rwanda and Somalia. The indigenization of peace enforcement in western and southern Africa has been accompanied by high levels of salience, as regional forces have struggled to prevent spillover of conflicts into their home countries. African forces have been more willing than the United Nations and other outsiders to accept the costs of “crossing the line,” taking sides, and enforcing peace. The record of peace enforcement and interventionism for humanitarian purposes has been mixed. For example, ECOMOG peace enforcement in Liberia and Sierra Leone prevented seizures of power and retribution and allowed peace-making to begin in which agreements were reached and implemented and in which elected governments came to power. On the other hand, ECOMOG committed its share of abuses and prolonged conflicts and humanitarian crises that could have been ended fairly quickly by force.

Alice Walker and former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado have something in common. Both advocate the cessation of female circumcision in African countries, and both tout themselves as feminists, though Walker, borrowing from African American culture, prefers to be labeled as a womanist. What the elders had in mind when they described young African American women as “womanish,” or as “omanish,” the eclipsed form of that same word, was that such girls were too fast, or that they obtruded upon areas that were not their business. While Schroeder cannot properly be called a womanist (to do so would be to misapply the term), one can say that, similar to Alice Walker, Schroeder is putting herself into other people’s business, specifically the business of female circumcision in African communities.

With few exceptions, economic development in the African states has generally been elusive and the people in sub-Saharan Africa remain among the poorest in the world. From 1970 to 1990, GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa grew in real terms by only US$80 and the region’s aggregate GNP per capita was only US$340 in 1990. In terms of annual percentage change, the region registered a 1.8 percent annual growth from 1970-77, an annual decline of 3.0 percent from 1978-84, and an annual increase of 2.4 percent from 1985-90. However, for the entire period of 1970-90, growth was statistically insignificant. During the period 1980-92 the annual growth rate of GNP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa was recorded as -1.83.

The notion of a subordinate African international system is widely posited and accepted. Political scientists have debated the means to, requirements for, and amount of political development in African states but have left largely unstudied the question of whether or not the African international system is developing--by which we mean developing a capacity to cope, by adapting to internal and external challenges. Our purpose in this essay is to study the development of the African system by examining the Organization of African Unity (OAU), with particular reference to its early years.

The focus on the OAU is easily justified. As the sole continental body to which each black African state belongs, its own development is a necessary, and almost sufficient, precondition of the system's development, if this system is also to be construed as subordinate in world politics. The possibility that an African system could develop through the creation of some other body seems remote, although it is not logically precluded. One could, of course, argue that an African system would be developing, were the states to continue the present trend of advancing their interests through more or less cohesive subregional or subpolitical groupings, such as the East African community or OCAM; but it would not be an African international system that was developing.

Throughout nearly twenty years of often tumultuous post-colonial history, Nigerian foreign policy has been surprisingly consistent. It may be too early to judge the capabilities and determination of the new civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, but if the past is any guide, the basic concerns of Nigerian foreign policy are not likely to change.

Future decisions will probably continue to reflect the pursuit of three vital and interrelated domestic objectives: to build greater national unity by overcoming deep regional, ethnic, and religious differences; to achieve rapid economic development for a nation that, despite great oil wealth, has a per-capita income of less than $400; and to complete the process of full self-determination which has yet to encompass all sectors of the modern economy. Among the three, the quest for national integration has been of paramount concern.

The Chinese presence in Black Africa has grown enormously in the last five years and is triggering a dangerous new Great Power scramble for strategic positions.

In the long run, its effect may be to repartition the continent into new ideological and economic spheres of influence. It is forcing the Great Powers to focus aid on areas of strategic value rather than on regions of greatest human need. It is also compelling communist and capitalist powers to overlook racial and social injustice in order to preserve their strategic stakes.

Lamenting the proliferation of factionalism in the Zimbabwe liberation movement during the 1970s, an observer once commented, “If you were to put two Zimbabweans on the moon and visited them the next day, you would find that they have formed three parties.” This observation was a criticism of splits and divisions that tended, some believed, to weaken the liberation movement.

Although the United States agreed to honor both the 1963 UN embargo on arms deliveries to South Africa and the 1966 arms embargo on Rhodesia, vast quantities of U.S. arms have been supplied to the two countries through a variety of clandestine and semi-legal channels. These deliveries have enabled the minority governments of Pretoria and Salisbury to intensify their control over the black majority and resist what they perceive as half-hearted calls for change on the part of U.S. officials.

In 1998, the American Association of Colleges and Universities raised the question of what higher education could do to prepare graduates to address “the legacies of racism and the opportunities for racial reconciliation in the United States.” One of the most powerful and pedagogically rich approaches to facilitate learning about race, racial identity, and the impact of racism in America today is study abroad in Africa. With a history that includes dynasties and empires; the capture and enslavement of Africans and the transatlantic slave trade; and the structures of colonialism, neocolonialism, and apartheid (which have often been conceptualized as parallel to the institutionalized racism of America), the continent of Africa can be a wonderful classroom for this type of learning. This is particularly the case when the location of study is West Africa, by most accounts where the majority of people of African descent living in the United States have ancestral ties. Visits to and interactions around the monuments to and symbols and physical remnants of the complex historical relationships between Europeans and Africans can be a catalyst for stimulating challenging but ultimately rewarding discussions and growth with regard to issues of race and racism.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

Coleridge

A contradiction hitherto not adequately examined exists between historical research and policy analysis in modern African studies. The more familiar difficulty between policy-makers, who want answers, and historians and social scientists, who find instead complexity and uncertainty, has been much discussed and is not pursued here. Rather, a more subtle tension operates in the work of those policy analysts who use historical research in their work, particularly when these analysts are government advisors in Africa.

History has always had an equivocal role in policy analysis. On one side, an important part of the profession embraces project evaluation and implementation analysis, both of which can involve historical research. In the former, the analyst tries to understand the impact of a project in terms of its past performance, while the latter uses past performance as the basis for improved design of future projects. On the other side, historical research is not considered an essential part of the analyst's graduate training, at least in the United States. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find an American public policy school that required history alongside core courses in statistics, microeconomics, law, and political science. This ambivalence over the role of historical research is best illustrated by the unheeded calls analysts themselves have made and continue to make for more historical research in their own profession. In an essay on policy analysis familiar to many U.S.-trained analysts, the author opines “historical genesis is a much underplayed aspect of the analysis of social programs” and recommends that a more overtly historical perspective should inform policy analysis generally (Nelson, 1977: 152; Chapter 8).

This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle.