This paper is both a personal and an academic reflection on my work as a U.S.-trained Kenyan anthropologist directing a study-abroad program for American undergraduate students in Kenya. It is an attempt to address three main issues: First is to understand why students choose to come to Kenya and what they hope to achieve by studying here. Second is to get a sense of what kind of prior images and information these students have of Kenya and Africa and how this influences their interaction with Kenya. Third is to understand how I as a Kenyan anthropologist trained in America balance the tasks of cultural broker and teacher of students in Kenya as is demanded of my position as director of a study-abroad program.

Increasing attention has been paid to population growth in the Third World. Although it is commonly held that mortality decline has been responsible for the population increases that have occurred, in many instances fertility has contributed significantly to the population increases as well. Many traditional societies have relatively high fertility rates, but they are still often below the potential maximum. Fertility in these pre-modern societies has been held in check by health conditions of the society, by prolonged breastfeeding, and by sexual restraint, particularly after the birth of a child (Lesthaeghe, 1981: 3–23). The move from a traditional to a more modern society can mean increased health care and better nutritional status, both of which may improve the health of the mother and child and lead to increased fecundity and higher fertility. In addition, the relaxation of postnatal sexual abstinence and the decrease in the length of lactation which usually accompanies this transition can lead to shorter birth intervals and higher fertility levels. The time lag between the effects of fertility-increasing factors and the changes in values and norms which favor smaller family size allows rapid population growth to occur.

Evidence for this pattern of fertility increase can be found in many Third World countries (Nag, 1981). In Africa, for example, a rise in fertility during the beginning stages of modernization has been documented in Zaire (Romaniuk, 1980), Nigeria (Olusanya, 1969), and Sudan (Henin, 1969). In each case, the rise has been accounted for through the spread of social and economic change.

Doing Western-type studies of Africa will always be problematic until we are able to wrest control of the paradigm from narrow Western objectives in order to satisfy the fundamental needs of Africa and not of the West. The late Cheikh Anta Diop, the greatest African scholar of the twentieth century, put forth the idea that Western scholars as a whole would find themselves unable to extricate their research from the intellectual interests of the West in order to serve the social and cultural aims of knowledge for Africa. Whether Cheikh Anta Diop was correct or not remains to be seen. However, from what we have already witnessed the most anti-African elements, whether in terms of the research priorities, projects, careers and programmatic orientations, structures, and objectives in the field, continue to have the most awesome hold on studies of Africa. The travesty is that it has lasted for so long.

The National Consortium for Study in Africa (NCSA) was founded in 1994 by the then 15 National Resource Centers for African Language and Area Studies. The primary agenda of the NCSA is to promote high-quality and accessible study-abroad programs for North American students in Africa. In addressing this agenda the NCSA initial membership had a particular, but not exclusive, interest in programs at African universities for North American students. This particular bias develops out of a long-standing commitment on the part of National Resource Centers to work with peer institutions in Africa. African universities, their faculty, and their students are essential partners in collaborative initiatives in research, teaching, and project work, and in the continuing process of generating knowledge on Africa across the disciplines. Consequently, from its inception the NCSA has viewed its goal of expanding high-quality programming in Africa as a natural outgrowth and expansion of its members’ linkages with African universities.

Despite economic uncertainty and political instability in many regions of the world, U.S. students continue to study abroad in increasing numbers. Recently released data indicate that in academic year 2000-2001, the number of undergraduates who participated in study-abroad programs increased by 7 percent over the previous year. Yet, only 1 percent of U.S. undergraduates study abroad during their college tenures. Of this 1 percent, just under 3 percent participate in Africa-based programs.

A striking aspect of the on-going revolution in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau is the insistence on the need for the liberation of women to be an explicit and integral part of that process. “Liberation of women,” reads an oft-quoted statement of Samora Machel, FRELIMO president, “is a fundamental necessity for our revolution; a guarantee of its continuity and a precondition for victory.” In a similar vein, Amilcar Cabral, assassinated leader of PAIGC, used to state firmly that their revolution could not be successful unless it ensured the full participation of women, or, “In Guinea-Bissau we say that women are fighting two colonialisms; one against the Portuguese and the other against men.”

Studies of fake news have historically suffered from being primarily Western-centric and focusing on “news” emanating from formal media outlets. The Sahel has generated its own unique version of fake news, the authors refer to as Afrancaux News. Using nationwide public opinion surveys in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, open-source online forum ethnographic research, and postcolonial epistemological predispositions, the authors suggest that although other historical instantiations exist, the most prominent contemporary example of Afrancaux News can be seen in the fake news stories related to the French counterterrorism presence in the Sahel.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, nationalists and colonial officials in French Soudan (Mali) shared a language of development centered on the concepts of tradition, modernity, community, and individualism. This shared language permitted collaboration but also masked important differences in nationalist and colonial analyses of social change and the direction of rural development. Particular areas of contention were social evolutionary models of change, the likelihood of rising individualism, and the potential of communitarian development. The patterns of interaction in this debate reveal that intellectual exchanges between and among officials and nationalists were multidirectional and characterized not by borrowing but by exchange, adaptation, and reformulation.

This article explores the intellectual traditions of African studies, focusing on the central principles of interdisciplinarity and commitment to social and racial justice. Tracing the origins of the field to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African is t intellectuals such as Edward Blyden, it investigates these traditions historically and in the context of contemporary practice. Against the backdrop of concerns for the future of area studies, the author finds a vibrant field—both inside and beyond its traditional boundaries.

Migration debates tend to focus on the numbers of people moving, whether they are economic migrants or asylum seekers, deserving or not of protection. This categorization usually rests on national identity, necessitating simplified one-dimensional representations. Ndlovu uses a case study of Zimbabwean migrants memorializing Gukurahundi in Johannesburg to highlight the ways in which migration narratives can be more complex and how they may shift over time. She presents Gukurahundi and the formation of the MDC in Zimbabwe, along with xenophobic violence in South Africa, as examples of the ways that the meanings of national and ethnic identities are contested by the migrants and influenced by political events across time and space.

The “winds of change” had barely swept across Africa when the newly-independent nations felt the chilling gusts of the cold war. Decolonization created a power vacuum in the prevailing bipolar structure and for a time it appeared that the African continent would be one of the areas in which the struggle between capitalism and communism would be resolved. As the center of gravity of the cold war shifted towards the periphery, the USSR became increasingly interested in extending its influence in Africa. This interest was sharpened as Sino-Soviet rivalry intensified. Under Khrushchev, Soviet policy in Africa was expansionist, vigorous and unrealistically optimistic, both in its assessment of African gratitude towards Moscow and in its estimation of the socialist potential of certain regimes. A series of spectacular setbacks in the Congo, Guinea, Ghana, and Mali led Khrushchev's successors to reevaluate their Third World policies and downgrade Africa as an area deserving extensive Russian resources.

Serious consideration of ideology and economic progress is singularly appropriate at this stage in East Africa's history, in relation to the Uganda coup and the current difficulties between Tanzania and Uganda. Both events have a crucial ideological dimension and have already had deep repercussions on the economy of the two countries and of the East African Community as a whole. That the subject is appropriate, however, does not render it any easier to deal with adequately. At the outset, I encountered four basic problems.

First, the very definition of “economic performance” is itself an ideological decision, in that ultimately it requires a value-judgment on the relative importance of various possible indices of achievement. Whether rapid expansion in per capita income is more significant than the creation of a slower-growing but more regionally and sectorally balanced economy; what division is appropriate between current consumption and investment for future consumption; what economic value is attached to a certain pattern of ownership of the means of production, or to a particular policy of distribution of the economic surplus--all of these basic questions about the economic objectives of a society can only be answered ultimately by reference to ideological values. This interdependence between the terms of the topic is an index of its complexity.

On January 25th, 1971, after approximately eight hours of continuous nondescript music which accompanied the stacatto of rifle, machine gun, and anti-tank fire that even seemed to threaten us in our Makerere University preserve, the voice of Warrant Officer Sam Wilfred Aswa was heard on Radio Uganda announcing that elements of the Army had deposed President Apolo Milton Obote. Aswa listed eighteen grievances which had led the Army to take this action. The eighteen points included a number which related directly to Obote's economic ideology and policies (Uganda Argus and The People, January 26, 1971). Beginning in October 1969 Obote, a friend and disciple of Nkrumah and Nyerere, a man whose personal dedication to socialism was widely accepted in Africa, began to define a strategy which would move Uganda to the left. Whether or not a causal relationship can be shown to exist between the Obote government's attempt to embark on a socialist program and the January 1971 coup, it is instructive to examine this program. This may serve to reveal pitfalls to be avoided if a viable socialist system is to be constructed in Africa.

In relating ideology to economic performance, it might be noted that an official statement that sets forth the ideology to be followed in developing and directing a given society can have a significant impact on economic performance, or it may simply be another example of bureaucratic rhetoric. The content, the degree to which specific policy proposals are enunciated as well as the ability and dedication on the part of those charged with translating documents into action programs will determine the significance of the ideological statement.

One of the stated aims of the coup of 13 January 1972 was the restoration of a consultative democracy responsive to the needs of the people of Ghana. Thus the NRC (and later the SMC) government led by Colonel (now General) I. K. Acheampong from its inception was committed to a return to some form of democratic government at an unspecified future date. Demands for a return to civilian government started being voiced again in 1974 when it became apparent that, despite its initial appearance of decisive action (particularly in the matter of foreign debts), the NRC government was no more able to solve pressing economic problems than any other post-independence government had been. In the face of demands from the professional sector that civilian rule be restored by 1 July 1977, in January 1977, General Acheampong established a council to discuss what form a new civilian government should take. On 1 July 1977, faced with a strike by several professional groups, General Acheampong pledged to return Ghana to civilian rule on 1 July 1979, the format of civilian government to be determined on the basis of a referendum fixed for 30 March 1978, to be followed by a constitutional commission that would work out the details of the constitutional form chosen by the people in the referendum.