The papers that follow were based on presentations to two roundtables on Rwanda organized at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting held in Toronto, on November 6,1994.

At the outset, it is important to note three aspects of those roundtables. First, they were not organized as a comprehensive set of papers; instead, with one or two exceptions, the roundtables were formed of those papers which were submitted independently of each other by individual members of the ASA. I was asked simply to coordinate their presentation and prepare the papers for publication afterward. The result of this was regrettable in one major aspect: there was very little representation of Rwandans on the panels, and therefore also in this collection, although a large number of Rwandans attended the roundtables and participated energetically in the discussions, which together with the paper presentations lasted formally for nearly 6 hours, and informally far into the night.

Relations between the U.S. Africanist community and Africa are marked by complex connections, contestation, and challenges engendered by the intellectual, institutional, and ideological diversity of scholarly cultures, capacities, and commitments both in the United States and on the African continent. As we enter the new century, the scholarly enterprise on both sides of the Atlantic faces many perils and possibilities, both old and new, requiring innovative forms of engagement. Historically, as I have argued elsewhere, the patterns of academic exchange between the United States and Africa have been unbalanced. They are patterns that contemporary processes of globalization have helped reinforce and recast.

In many African countries, jokes represent one of the many means used by citizens to cope with a crisis. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa explore how Zimbabweans utilize WhatsApp jokes, which are anchored in the concept of the “everyday,” to cope with pandemic-induced lockdowns. COVID-19 jokes provide citizens momentary relief from fear and function as a defense mechanism against COVID-19 and its effects, enabling citizens to confront and rationalize fear, death, and suffering. Chibuwe and Munoriyarwa argue that jokes are also a means of speaking truth to power by disgruntled citizens attempting to cope with a health crisis, in a context characterized by corruption, state repression, and bad governance.

The written words of African Muslims have recently received renewed attention. This stems from a push to go beyond colonial archives as well as concerns with terrorism and Islamic radicalization. While Ajami—that is, African languages written in Arabic script—has been a part of this trend, Manding-language publications in the N’ko script have been overlooked. And yet, this literary industry is distinctly Islamic. Putting the writings of Sulemaana Kantè into conversation with historical authors and his contemporaries, Donaldson demonstrates that N’ko represents an iteration of Afro-Muslim vernacular thought, thereby illuminating Kantè and a body of N’ko and Ajami publications.

The Rhodesian settlement proposals of 1971 have been described by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as a just and honorable settlement, conferring advantages on Rhodesian Africans, measuring them not against an ideal solution, but against an indefinite continuation of the status quo in Rhodesia, and leading by a steady addition of Africans to the Rhodesian Parliament to majority rule.

In an interview in Sight and Sound John Akomfrah remarks that “there is the myth of African Cinema and there is the reality of it. The myth is that it is largely made by people who live and work in Africa—but my sense is that the thing is much more fluid than that.… African Cinema is a film world in search of both a constituency and a community, and it realises tfiat it is potentially a borderless cinema” (Givanni 1995: 39). Akomfrah's statement underscores the existence of slippage between transnational and continental articulations of Africa, opening the debate around the nature of the relationship between Africa as origin and African diasporic identities.

Visions of Africa created by filmmakers on the shores of the Black Atlantic undeniably challenge monolithic constructions of origin and authenticity. This paper examines the nature of this challenge through an investigation of the aesthetic and ideological projects of three films: Soleil O (Med Hondo, Mauritania/France, 1970); Testament (John Akomfrah, Ghana/UK, 1988) and Ye Wonz Maibel/Deluge (Salem Mekuria, Ethiopia, 1997). Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that although each film possesses a divergent connection to Africa, all three probe the slippage between personal and national histories as a restorative force in redefining contexts of origin and identity.

With the increasingly rapid urban growth in Nigeria in recent decades, and with its consequent multiplication and complication of the urban problems of traffic and transport, housing, health, and sanitation, the need for a more purposeful planning and management of cities has come to attract increased public policy attention. The institutional and organizational setting for city planning and management, particularly the role of municipal governments in these activities, still remain colonial and therefore ill-suited to the demands of present urban developments. City planning and management responsibilities are so fragmented among so many institutions and organizations that the municipal local governments have had very little authority over what happens in the city.

The overlapping responsibilities of the various institutions make for conflicts and the net result is general inefficiency in the planning and management of many cities. The recent (1976) Local Government Reforms which aimed at decentralizing some functions from the state and federal governments to local governments do not seem to have altered the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and city management matters.

The aim of this paper is to put the origin of the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and management into political and historical perspective. It also seeks to argue that until city planning and management responsibilities are centralized on strong, autonomous municipal governments, headed by popularly elected urban chief executives, the present chaos in Nigerian cities is likely to continue.

African agriculture needs to be transformed because of the persistent low productivity of the sector. Women play a major role in agriculture but are prevented from optimizing their performance due to socioeconomic factors such as lack of access to productive resources, deforestation, and air and water pollution. But the lack of women extension workers stands out as a major limitation. This paper highlights the plight of women farmers in Africa, using research results from Nigeria. Suggestions are made for improving female participation. These suggestions, the paper stresses, are viable only if the conditions of African women’s lives are improved. A careful implementation of these suggestions will hopefully transform African agriculture.

Farmers, agricultural scientists and politicians have become very aware of the need to increase agricultural productivity in Africa. While there has been a recognition of diverse factors that can contribute to increased productivity, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the need to change farm technology. Although the traditional farming system might have satisfied the needs of peasant society, it has not been able to supply the needs of present day Africa. In most African countries, food production has fallen behind demand (Food and Agricultural Organization, 1974). Thus, there has been a great deal of effort to change the farming practices of the peasants through the introduction of new and/or improved farm technology.

Numerous recommendations have emerged from agricultural research stations, universities and international research institutes in Africa, but the majority of African farming continue to rely on their traditional farming practices. It is therefore not surprising that the Association for the Advancement of Agricultural Sciences in Africa (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1975: iii) has concluded: “The lag between knowledge and practice is usually long, but in some parts of Africa it has seemed to be infinite. The value of research findings, however great, remains potential only until they are transmitted to him who will use them in production practices.” As a result of the failure to improve the farmers practices of African peasants, most African countries continue to spend a substantial amount of their earnings on importation of food (Monu, forthcoming).

This paper takes the view that the non-adoption of recommended farm practices in Africa is attributable in part to the strategy adopted in the introduction of farm practices and the research results which have legitimized this strategy. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to review the strategy commonly practiced in Africa and the research associated with it to point out their shortcomings. In addition, the paper suggests an alternative strategy and research approach.

An impressive feature of modern Africa is the rise of many new towns. The problems of urban unemployment, education, planning, development, and social welfare hold the attention of many Africans and Africanists; there is a wide range of urban topics worthy of study. My purpose here, however, is to speculate on the location, the growth, and the modernization of new African cities. To be brief, and to exclude cities like Cairo and Cape Town which have existed for centuries, I shall deal only with middle Africa.

It is well known that there were only a few urban centers in middle Africa in pre-colonial times: Ibadan and other Yoruba towns in Nigeria, Sudanic centers such as Kano and Timbuktu, Aksum and later Ethiopian towns, East Coast trade centers like Mombasa, and vanished cities like Zimbabwe are examples (Steel 1961).

One result of European contact and colonialism was the establishment of small coastal trading centers. Some were temporary trading posts, others surf ports that flourished for decades or centuries before declining. And a few persisted and grew into modern cities. Often a decision as to which would be an administrative center, a starting point for a railway, or the site for an improved harbor started a process of rapid growth for the favored centers and of eventual decline for the others.

Over the years, studies of materials about Africa, especially in the fields of religion, history, anthropology, culture, and sociology, have contributed to the reconstruction of the predominant modes of thought and reason that led to the rise of the people’s belief systems, values, and religious doctrines. Though limited in many ways and still in the most rudimentary stage, the study of African religion has helped in some ways in the understanding of the basis of thought and action which determine African cognitions and total experience, in other words, African consciousness of his universe, feeling, and understanding of the state of being. It is important that interest in the study of African religion should be sustained, for one is still confronted today–often by those who should know–with derisively cynical questions such as: Is there an African religion? What in fact is it if there is one? Isn’t it really the worship of ancestors? Is not African healing merely the practice of magic and mumbo-jumbo?

This paper addresses itself to the history of pluralistic medical systems in Ghana. Case studies of the systems (traditional and modern-scientific) as evolving traditions with unique premises and techniques will be discussed. Modes of medical institutionalization, recruitment, training, and allocation of resources will be explained. Finally, this paper will attempt to explain the nature of the interrelationship between the two medical orientations in terms of their consequences in health care. The essay will focus on how medical systems are used by consumers and how medical systems are created, maintained, and reformed by professional authorities.

This article documents some of the forms of sociality engendered by the massive and growing presence of private security guards around Nairobi, Kenya. A focus on violence and the logic of an ideal of the use of violence in critical security studies literature obfuscates these networks in a similar way to idealizations of public space and the public sphere in anthropological literature on private security and residential enclaves. By looking at the close ties guards maintain with their homes in rural areas of Nairobi and the associations they make with people such as hawkers, it becomes clear that their presence in the city is creating new sets of valuations and obligations all the time. These forms of sociality are not galvanized by the threat of violence that the guards evoke; rather, they are engendered alongside and at cross-currents to the idealized, securitized landscape.

An examination of personal diaries kept by Mambila people in Somié village, Cameroon, shows that everyday occurrences and small events, whose importance may have been overlooked at the time and which were forgotten soon after they took place, can be understood, in retrospect, as part of a larger struggle for power in a small Cameroonian chieftancy. This article examines the written accounts of some of these events in the context of diary narratives about community disputes, and it provides a model for the use of diaries and other personal records to illuminate the complexity of decision-making processes in the wider African context.

Set in a context where material accumulation is valorized, this article analyzes narratives of sika bone (bad money) as expressions of economic uncertainty by market women operating in an era of increased financialization. The ethnographic evidence supports previous arguments about the impact of economic change in this millennium, a change that fosters both rationality and superstition in equal measure. Salifu proposes that sika bone indicates a sense of uncertainty fostered by economic change in the supply of cash and formal credit, a sentiment that is expressed by applying old notions about occultic means of accumulation to new and equally enigmatic circumstances.

Based on an analysis of original social network data collected from 407 households in an urban community in Northern Nigeria, this article evaluates whether patronage relationships between households have consequences for children's educational attainment. A “social resources” perspective suggests that patronage ties may serve as a form of social capital that activates upward social mobility for entire families, thereby yielding more than simple transitory returns on social connections. An alternative “social constraints” perspective suggests that patronage ties may have no effects (or negative effects) on the schooling of clients' children, since patron-clientage reflects prevailing social inequalities and exists for reasons other than the promotion of dynastic mobility among clients and their families. In the case study reported in this article, the latter pattern holds, and the results are interpreted with reference to the historical record, which shows that a latent function of patron-clientage is the preservation of intergenerational status immobility.

Europe’s immigrant populations are often represented on screen by both European and immigrant filmmakers as marginalized in the violent neighborhoods of peripheral urban areas in Paris, Lyon, London, and elsewhere. The film Les Barons (Nabil Ben Yadir, 2009) seeks to counter such stereotypes. The protagonists of Les Barons are multilingual, multicultural young men with proud ties to their families and the ability, at the same time, to straddle cultural registers and global perspectives as they live their cosmopolitan Dasein, or “Being-in-the-world.”