The World Bank has become a subject of controversy, of learned discourse and endless debates between the Left and the Right. The Bank has become the foremost multilateral international lending agency, with an expanding role covering a variety of sectors and involving billions of dollars worth of loans to the Third World, on terms that are not available from commercial banks.

As its role expanded, the Bank began to draw increasing attention, both favorable and critical. The London Economist recently called it “a bank for all seasons.” It is viewed differently by different people, depending on their ideological positions or perspectives. These perspectives may be reduced to two basic positions, divided along a Left/Center axis and a Center/Right axis.

The Left critique has found the Bank—on its record—an instrument of Western corporate capital (Hayter, 1972; Payer, 1982; Bello, 1982). The thrust of the Leftist argument is that the Bank has not proved to be useful to the great mass of the Third World peoples, and that the ruling elites of its borrowing countries have derived benefits from its lending activities. The argument also holds that multinational corporations stand behind its activities also benefiting by selling their goods, which are not a matter of basic necessity to the ordinary peoples.

The Centrist position is essentially supportive of the Bank's role as an important vehicle for the transfer of resources for development of the Third World and as a facilitator of trade among nations (Reid, 1975; Hurni, 1978; Krueger, 1982; Mason and Asher, 1974).

Rwanda became a Belgian trusteeship under mandate of the Société des Nations after the first World War. With churches playing a prominent role in the political evolution of Rwanda, the two countries were closely bound together. After the 1959 revolution in Rwanda and independence in 1962, development cooperation with strong NGO input still linked them. While the genocide still has tragic influence on the new Rwanda, Belgium has undergone a political process leading to a federal state. The colonial past refers to a national past. Changes in Rwanda and Belgium question any collective attempt of mourning for a past that is very different for all parties involved.

In spite of the growing recognition of the agency of youths in volatile societies, youths continue to be an under-utilized resource in conflict management. Thus, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nigeria, Adzande examines how youths are contributing to the management of farmer-herder conflicts. This study shows that youths are involved in informal policing as community vigilantes, as well as participating in mediation and the enforcement of restorative justice. A new initiative which is yet to be evaluated is the community-based security architecture in which youths can work with other actors to facilitate early warning, prevention, and resolution of conflicts between farmers and herders.

In 2012, three male elders in Tanzania filed a lawsuit against the government and a foreign investor for trespassing, justifying the case as rightful resistance to land grabbing. Based on ethnographic research, however, Chung argues that their action is more appropriately understood as gendered lawfare; the plaintiffs drew on their multiple positions of privilege to exclude a diverse array of legitimate resource users, including their wives. Their lawfare was not only perverse in its design, but also in its effects. It increased the uncertainties surrounding the rights and status of local people and reinforced intersecting inequalities within the “local” itself.

Conversations around transitional justice often focus on concepts of victimhood and perpetration. Such has been the case in Rwanda in the decades following the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. However, even as Rwandans continue to observe state-led transitional justice reforms which divide them into victims and perpetrators, they simultaneously draw on state discourses of unity to carefully critique and re-work the language and practices which produce such divisions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Berman illustrates how a new generation of Rwandan youth is transforming political ideology by creatively engaging the discourse of ubunyarwanda (Rwandanness) to forge inclusive post-genocide politics.

“Shortcut English” is a pidgin spoken between Zambians and Chinese migrants at a Chinese-operated mine in southern Zambia. Contrary to most historical contact languages, the symbolic valences of Shortcut English favor the Zambian laborers over the Chinese mine managers and owners. In the past, Zambians at Summers have categorized Chinese as bamukuwa/ “whites.” Haruyama analyzes how the racializing dynamics of the new pidgin Shortcut English increasingly result in Chinese being figured as machainizi, a denigrated racial other whom Zambians see as unfit to run the mine, which contributes to sometimes violent resistance.

Conflicts over local land rights between groups considered as “sons of the soil” and newcomers such as refugees can trigger autochthony-inspired violence. However, such conflicts are not always manifested, even when the conditions are in place. The question we explore in this article is whether such conflicts are less likely to emerge if the “other” is from a group with a longstanding bond of interethnic allegiance with the host community. Based on ethnographic data from host–refugee communities in Grand Gedeh, Liberia, we revisit previous attempts to explain economic and social relations between majority and minority groups. Our main finding is that in this part of Africa no prior special status will fundamentally alter the established ways of incorporating strangers into the community.

Between the 1950s and the 1990s, Chinese enamelware products dominated kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms in the northern part of Nigeria. These were initially imported from China by European trading firms but later manufactured in Nigeria by Chinese-owned factories. Liu concludes that it was not only the immediately obvious “modern” advantages of the enamelware that enabled it to dominate northern Nigeria’s market, but it was also its integration into local, socio-cultural networks of meaning that granted it a significance far beyond its practical use. Such processes of integration further enabled enamelware to become an important component of local marriage customs and an essential possession for Hausa women.

Gengenbach, Comé, and Nhabinde historicize women’s responses to an agricultural “value chain” in Zavala, Mozambique. Inspired by the Green Revolution for Africa (GR4A), the initiative aims to reduce hunger by converting cassava to industrial use for SABMiller’s Impala beer. Women chafed at the proposed remaking of an agrarian foodway long anchored by this edible commodity. Cassava’s inseparable dietary and market value in precolonial times intensified under Portuguese rule even as colonizers disdained it as a feminine “subsistence” crop and then claimed its commercial potential. Weaponizing this gendered binary yet needing women’s support, the Impala scheme has struggled to achieve GR4A food security goals.

This article explores the representation of Africa in director Edward Zwick's 2006 film Blood Diamond, examining in particular the ways in which the film's liberal-humanitarian orientation works to demonize black African communities, nationalisms, and governments while constituting a white and largely American subject as the center of ethical value. The article also examines the film's account of diamond consumption as a global phenomenon, and considers the ways in which sound and vision operate to devalue black diasporic as well as black continental African subjects.

This article addresses the question of identity in contemporary North African cinema, situating the issue within the larger context of Arab discourse on tradition and modernity. It concentrates on two filmmakers, the Moroccan Farida Benlyazid and the Algerian Nadir Moknèche, and their different perspectives on the formation of postcolonial identity (especially for women). While Benlyazid opts for a new form of Islamic feminism—spiritual Islam—Moknèche portrays, in a provocative style, how Algerian women choose practices that subvert the retraditionalization of their country.

Land claims and contests have been central to the construction of political authority across the African continent. South Africa’s post-apartheid land reform program aims to address historical dispossessions, but the program has experienced numerous obstacles and limits—in terms of pace, communal land access, productivity, and rural class divides. Drawing on archival and newspaper sources, Kelly traces how the descendant of a colonially-appointed, landless chief manipulated a claim into a landed chieftaincy and how both the chief and the competing claimants have deployed histories of landlessness and firstcomer accounts in a manner distinct to the KwaZulu-Natal region as part of the land restitution process.

In Sub-Saharan Africa there has been a steady rate of urbanization. First, there are the large burgeoning cities which are in most cases industrial, commercial and administrative centers with a population ranging between 500,000 to 3,000,000 or more. Second, there are cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000. Some have industrial, commercial and administrative activities. Third, there are medium sized towns with a populations between 20,000 and 100,000. Some are district or provincial centers. Fourth, there are small sized towns with populations below 20,000 which are dotted in the countryside.

In terms of urban studies, the first and second categories usually attract the attention of scholars (Mabogunje 1980; 1968; Coquery-Vidrovich 1991; Okafor 1988, 253-63). The third and fourth categories are left out as being insignificant in terms of urbanization, population size, commercial activity and administrative importance. They are lowly rated in terms of importance to urban studies.

Although they vary in size and population, small- and medium-sized towns play similar and crucial roles in the economic, social and political development of the areas in which they are located. They serve as links between the urban centers and the rural countryside. They also act as centers of innovation and diffusion of ideas from the urban areas to the countryside and vice-versa. From the urban point of view, small- and medium-sized towns are seen and treated as forward bases for the domination of the countryside. In the rural view, they are seen and treated as either markets or distribution centers at which the produce of rural areas are collected, marketed and absorbed in the local, regional or export market economy. In short, they are seen as points at which capitalist and peasant economies meet and co-exist.

Contemporary critics of Portugal's presence in Africa charge that economic exploitation is the basis of Portuguese colonialism. They often emphasize, to the exclusion of other factors, economic reasons for Portugal's past and present stake in the tropics. These arguments contrast the actual and potential mineral wealth, agricultural produce, and abundant sources of hydroelectric power in Angola and Mozambique with the lack of them in Portugal. The Portuguese goal is often characterized as making the African dominions yield a profit on investments, furnish raw materials, and provide protected markets for metropolitan industries (Hance 1967, p. 23). In a recent issue of Africa Today, Jennifer Davis concluded that “the prospects for profit are exciting. Small wonder that the Portuguese want to keep their colonies now” (1970, p. 6). John Gellner, in a special to the Toronto Globe and Mail (1971), wrote: “Thus the strategic aim of the Portuguese is to hold what is worth holding.…Angola is a very rich country.”

African revolutionaries and their sympathizers reiterate these economic explanations of Portuguese behavior in a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and leaflets. Marxist in outlook, the authors couch their analysis of Portugal's colonial motives almost exclusively in economic terms. With the exception of revolutionary leaders such as Amilcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, who identified other reasons for Portugal's retention of African colonies, many of those favorable to African liberation emphasize the economic rationale for Portuguese colonialism. (For representative accounts, see Chaliand 1969, pp. 5-12; Dependency…, pp. 3-6; Davidson 1969, pp. 25-28.)