The history of coffee cultivation on Mount Meru in northern Tanzania has been narrated by men and most scholars as a tale of extraordinary achievement and unfortunate decline. Meru women, however, associate coffee agriculture with gender inequality and social disorder. Complicating narratives of cash crop agriculture as a straightforward communal good, Williams uses oral histories to explore alternative renderings of Meru agricultural history, centering memories that highlight coffee’s role in reifying patriarchal power. Women’s concern with labor exploitation and emphasis on relational integrity challenge our understanding of what coffee represents in Meru history and our ideal models for pursuing sustainable growth through cash crop commodities.

The empire-building phase of the European powers in Africa, which spanned several centuries, had its climax at the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, where the colonizers carved up and allocated the African continent among themselves as their respective colonial projects. They would subsequently invade virtually all of the continent based on this arbitrary partitioning—which, among other things, created Africa’s colonial condition. Mention must be made of the fact that uncountable numbers of artworks and artefacts were looted by the invaders from various parts of Africa during those invasions and the de facto occupations that ensued. These looted treasures were scattered all over Europe and elsewhere in museums and private collections, where they currently remain largely unaccounted for.

Postcolonial Ghana faced many challenges, which led to a hunt for saboteurs of Black liberation epitomized in anti-Americanism. In 1964, Adger Emerson Player, an African American, rescued the United States flag from a Ghanaian anti-American demonstration. The differing interpretations of Player’s deed by Ghanaians and Americans reveal the contestation between racial and national identities, which is also a facet of the broader diasporic African identity dilemmas. Amoh examines this incident within the context of post-independence Ghana and the U.S. Civil Rights struggle to highlight the complexity of diasporic Africans’ relations with Africa and ongoing debates on the substance of pan-Africanism and global Blackness.

Studies of protest in contemporary Africa often fail to address three related dynamics. First, rural radicalism has long been more central to African political struggles, even urban ones, than is commonly recognized. Second, the ongoing transformation of rural political economies links them to those of urban areas and has changed struggles over land and resources. Finally, these changes have reduced the power of traditional authorities and increased the appeal of nonviolent protest, as well as shifting protest toward a more national mode in which rural populations are increasingly central. Mampilly elaborates on these propositions, which are derived from brief examinations of both historical and contemporary examples of rural protest across Africa, before applying them to a deep analysis of LUCHA, a social movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In order to reappraise discourses on the restitution vs. retention of Africa’s cultural heritage, Eyssette examines the Musée du Quai Branly (France), the AfricaMuseum (Belgium), the British Museum (UK), and the Humboldt Forum (Germany) as one representative spectrum for analysis showing the mutual imbrications of their changing strategies and practices. After detecting biases in retentionist arguments on security, accessibility, law, and ethics, Eyssette stresses symmetrical shortcomings in restitutionist discourses on provenance research and the instrumentalization of heritage for economic gains or post-colonial rebranding. The conclusion determines whether these four institutions are retentionists, rhetorical restitutionists, or truly reformed restitutionists.

On a continent where military coups, civil wars, and other forms of violent disorder have been commonplace, Kenya has appeared an anomaly. The regime of President Jomo Kenyatta has maintained uninterrupted and relatively peaceful civilian rule since the country's independence in 1963. Until recently, Kenya's postindependence body politic had shown few outward signs of social or political stress.

Kenya's era of stability may now be nearing an end, however. In early 1975 the country began experiencing a series of crises and disorders that constitute the worst violence since the 1950s nationalist revolt that brought Kenya's present elite to power. Some observers are beginning to question the Kenyatta regime's ability to contain a variety of mounting tensions and pressures (see Africa Report, 1975a: 29, 48-49; 1975b: 28; 1975c: 23-24).

In the pages that follow, I present an analysis that predicts a continually escalating state of social and political unrest in Kenya. In the first section, I argue the inherent long-term instability of the Kenyatta regime in terms of the regime's failure to adapt to the aspirations and demands of significant portions of Kenya's newly independent citizenry. In the second and third sections, I present, as a case study of the kinds of underlying social and political processes contributing to instability in Kenya, an examination of the mechanisms through which it appears that members of a growing body of unemployed school leavers are being inexorably drawn toward points of social and political rebellion.

The relative distribution of education is linked with relative social and economic development among nations and inter-regionally within the same country (Denison, 1962). Evidence from comparative studies shows that intra-national variation is usually greater than inter-national variations (Gould, 1971: 82-89) and tends to intensify among lower level political formations (Gould, 1972: 65-74).

Historical evidence indicates that the educational advantages of some regions are derived from proximity to the coast and nodal centres of growth and favorable climatic conditions conducive to missionary activities (McCaskie, 1972: 30-35). Recent studies in Africa have shown that educational development is related to sets of economic variables and modernization processes. Among these are urbanization and trade, migration and European settlement, the development of transportation network (Soja, 1968), the spread of cash crops, and emergence of new occupational structures which constitute the preconditions for the demand and diffusion of education (Foster, 1966; Brownstein, 1972). These social and economic factors, at the regional and subregional levels, exert influences that give rise to variations in enrollment at the different educational levels.

With the growing awareness of the importance of the development of human capital (Becker, 1975; Schultz, 1961: 1-17; Mincer, 1970: 1-26) and the potential political dangers when educational inequalities are linked with ethnic differentials (Diejomaoh, 1972: 318-363), public policy has become an important factor in the determination of regional distribution of education.

This paper attempts to establish the relationship between the varying regional education attainment and quantifiable regional economic, social, and locational characteristics as well as instruments of public policy. The importance of these factors over time, with a view of isolating the most potent in the attainment of the highest educational objectives, will be examined.

This article explores the role that teachers in the Côte d'Ivoire played in the democratization process in the early 1990s. More specifically, it looks at the socio-economic and ideological factors that placed teachers at the helm of the contestation movements that contributed to the end of nearly three decades of autocratic one-party rule. While this is a case study, its implications are, mutatis muntantis, more general. The principal argument developed in this article is that teachers occupy a strategic but precarious position in many African societies (Diop and Diouf 1990). They, more than any other social group, with the possible exception of students, embody the contradictory dimensions of post-colonial African politics and society. On the one hand, as Robert Fatton (1987, 63–64) notes, they are connected to the ruling class in so far as those in power often turn to them as a way to legitimate their rule. On other hand, teachers are part of Africa's fragile middle class, since they benefit from the relatively high expenditures of African governments on education. Nevertheless, they, particularly secondary and university teachers saw themselves as an alternative elite to those in power (Oyediran 1993, 221).

The Serkawa, or Sarkawa, of Yauri Division, Northwestern State, Nigeria, provide an excellent opportunity for analyzing the interrelationships of the concepts of three major theoreticians: Frederik Barth, Ward Goodenough, and Max Weber. The Serkawa describe themselves as “Hausa who fish” and have moved into Yauri in increasing numbers since the late 1960s in order to fill an ecological niche created by the building of Kainji Dam, a major hydro-electric dam at New Bussa, Borgu Division, Kwara State. These professional fishermen, an offshoot of the Sorkawa from Songhai, have moved into the riverine environment which the Gungawa (Reshe) abandoned under governmental fiat. The Gungawa (literally, ‘island-dwellers’) were resettled on the mainland.

The major theoretical problem examined in this paper is that of the interrelationship of the concepts of class, status, and party and their relationship to that of ethnicity. Finally, ethnicity as a mode of identity is examined. The primary objectives of this study are: (1) to examine the consequences of ecology on identity and presentation of self; (2) to assess the interrelationship of Weber's concepts of class, status, and party in a situation of change; (3) to suggest that these are various modes of the same phenomenon; (4) to combine the insights of Barth's optative approach to ethnicity with that of Weber; (5) to analyze the political uses of ethnicity in a multi-ethnic situation; and (6) to apply Goodenough's reformulation of status and role theory to ethnic groups.

There are a number of benefits to be derived from using such an approach. Ethnic groups in this framework become social persona whose boundaries can be defined by their distribution of rights and duties vis-a-vis other similarly defined social persona. This approach has the further advantage of making the concepts operational without forfeiting their taxonomic clarity. It also succeeds in focusing on dynamic and relational aspects of stratification rather than on those that are static and descriptive.

In 1939 Nigeria was divided into three Regions for purely administrative reasons. These regions, to all intents and purposes, did not constitute separate governments. In fact, between 1939 and 1945, these regions had no legislatures of their own. Even under the Richards' Constitution, when they had separate legislatures they had no independent powers. In practice the state legislatures under the Richards' Constitution (1946-1951) were no more than agents of the governor and the central legislature. Between 1951 and 1954, however, glimpses of a federal division of powers began to appear because the regional legislatures had powers to make laws over issues within the boundaries of their regions. More specifically, the regional legislatures exercised such powers in electoral matters. For example, in 1951, the Electoral Regulations for election into the central and regional legislatures were in two parts. The first part was the General Regulations under which the elections were conducted while the second part was the Specific Regulations which laid down the procedure for elections in each region of the country. To a large extent, although the Macpherson Constitution of 1951 was not federal, the Electoral Regulations under that Constitution paid due respect to the varieties in the nation following the tripartite administrative division of 1939. It was not until 1954 that a federal constitution with a clear division of powers and recognized spheres of influence finally came into operation.

The Efik inhabit Calabar which is the capital of the Cross River State of Nigeria. They constitute a people of about 200,000 for whom well-documented archives and bibliographies exist mainly in Nigeria and in Great Britain (Ekpiken, 1970). The Ekpe Society (Bassey n.d.), a Leopard-Spirit group of initiates, is their regulatory institution which makes use of the ukara cloth and possesses an ideographic system of writing named nsibidi.

From 1979 to 1983, teaching structuralist-synchronic linguistics and semiotics at the University of Calabar in Nigeria created some degree of student hostility. In this paper it is attempted to reply to them. To do so, the so-called semiotic square had to be misused while still defining categorial terms. This square has been framed within the evolutionary process of a regional history (Aye, 1967). Then a transformational analysis of culture which needs to be tested elsewhere is proposed. It is hoped that this model may help to structure the amorphous field of interdisciplinary research in African studies. An attempt to describe Efik self-perception and how most of them see the development of their consciousness in time follows.

Two of the most obvious objectives were: 1) to understand how change in the course of Efik history affected an African people located at the crossroads of many cultures and what could constitute the real challenge to them of building a modern society in an environment which may be characterized today by two major criteria: “non-identity” and “non-alterity;” and 2) to examine how for the Efik themselves historical events persuaded them of having lost their past or even their recently adopted identity and why this nihilist ideology left them with no desire for what seemed to be an unpromising future.

This village level study in Senegal seeks to improve the understanding of peasant behavior in developing countries. Policy makers designing programs for and interventions in the agricultural sector should benefit from an enhanced understanding of the workings of rural grain transactions. The study attempts (1) to provide a summary of principal producer grain transactions and (2) to discuss in greater detail millet marketing in rural Senegal. The methodology presented and conclusions advanced should encourage other researchers and Third World governments to recognize that evaluations of market process are vital to design effective agricultural policies.

For example, many West African countries have chosen to rely on national marketing organizations instead of using the private trader to commercialize food grains. Such reliance stems from their belief that the private market is noncompetitive and that public sector intervention will lead to efficiency gains. The conclusions of this study show that policy makers should first test the assumption of noncompetitive behavior before assuming that intervention will provide greater efficiency.

The first section of this paper provides some background information on Senegal agriculture. Next comes a summary of producer transactions. An analysis of the millet marketing process appears in the third section, while the last section indicates some policy implications.

A problem which has complicated multilateral trade negotiations like GATT's Uruguay Round is that OECD countries have adopted important departures from the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle in their trade regimes. Recently these departures have taken the form of regional trade preferences, such as the Canada-United States Free Trade Arrangement, NAFTA, the Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Arrangement or European Community and EFTA preferences for Eastern Europe. Developing countries receive important trade preferences under the OECD countries' Generalized System of Preference (GSP) schemes, and through preferences extended under the EEC Lomè Convention and the US Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).

Since the Uruguay Round will lower trade barriers on an MFN basis it poses a dilemma for preference-receiving countries. Specifically, MFN tariff reductions will erode these countries' margins of preference and cause their competitive position to deteriorate vis-à-vis other suppliers. Trade losses will occur as some preference-receiving goods are displaced (diverted) by exports from other (non-preference receiving) countries. As a result, preference-receiving countries could justifiably try to minimize reductions in MFN tariffs. Overall, the strategy which these countries might adopt vis-à-vis the multilateral trade negotiations could be determined by an assessment of whether the likely trade gains from lower MFN tariffs on their non-preference receiving goods would offset the expected losses from their preference-receiving exports.

This study examines the problem of preference erosion from the perspective of Sub-Saharan African countries. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was selected for analysis due to the extensive multiple tariff preferences these countries receive in OECD markets (i.e., GSP, Lomè Convention and, in many cases, least developed country preferences), and the fact that the region's export growth has been below that of most other countries (World Bank 1992).

The inability of most African states to find a political norm compatible with the exigencies of independence is by now a truism. The inherent lack of political order on the continent and the common recourse to political violence have been the subject of much debate among scholars and observers of African political events. Within the general framework of instability, it is apparent that there are many differences in political occurrences in seemingly colonial-inherited and weak frameworks, and a proliferation of internal variations within each state which derive from the differential impact of values and norms nurtured on the sub-national or the traditional level. These phenomena have pointed forcefully to the need to approach the study of African political processes in African terms. Indeed, the Africanization of the study of politics on the continent may perhaps be a vital precondition for the understanding of the contemporary African political scene.

The quest for African explanations for political events has, unlike parallel efforts in other disciplines, been far from smooth. Justifiably, attention was first focused on the examination of continuities and discontinuities in the political history of given areas. Such essentially micro-research efforts, while exciting in that they have uncovered new empirical data and provided important insights into the complexity of traditional African political life, are nevertheless problematic because the patterns of political thought and organization that they trace are not easily transferred to the macro level. The purpose of this paper is to isolate basic political culture constructs prevalent in the pre-colonial period in an attempt to conceptualize, in African terms, some contemporary political occurrences on the macro as well as the micro level. Two basic assumptions lie at the core of this undertaking: first, that traditional political culture models (herein defined as those general political orientations and specific political values that dictate patterns of political behavior and institutional growth) provide paradigms for political organization and action in Africa today; and second, that by examining the interaction of the concrete articulators of the various political culture models, it is possible to determine some of the main factors underlying the dynamics of political behavior in independent Africa.

In the wake of the genocide, it has been argued many times that the history of Rwanda needs to be rewritten, that past understandings of the history of this society contributed to the atrocities of 1994. Indeed, our understanding of history influences the present by lending justification to our actions today. But such a relationship of past and present works both ways. As the very demand for a new history suggests, our vision—and therefore our presentation—of history is also influenced by our contemporary view of historical process. In a sense, history is always an attempt to make sense of political and social issues for which we have no answers in the present. Therefore, at one level, historical inquiry is always an attempt to understand the present, and a history that ignores the important questions of the day becomes simply antiquarianism.

But such a reality evokes some fundamental methodological and conceptual questions. To what degree—and in what way—do present concerns influence the ways in which we proceed to construct history? At what point does history become simply propaganda? To what degree do our current preoccupations shape our questions of history, and to what degree do they mold the content of our histories? Do we base our analyses on the known empirical record, critically analyzed, in as complete and comprehensive a fashion as is feasible? Or do we simply fashion our conclusions to meet present concerns? Concern over content—not questions—leads often to a selective presentation of the record, a simplified version of history, with the selection determined by the desired outcome.

The African continent remains besieged by many conflicts. Since 1970, Africa has seen more than thirty wars which have resulted in more than half of all war-related deaths worldwide and have produced about 9.5 million refugees (The Observer, June 15, 2003). The conflicts have led to genocide in Rwanda and gross violations of human rights, including gruesome mutilations of large numbers of people, in Sierra Leone, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, the Sudan, and Uganda. In addition to causing the collapse or near collapse of some states, these conflicts have produced severe economic dislocation and disruption in the provision of public services. Moreover, there are growing indications that they have directly or indirectly exacerbated the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases.

In the popular media and in the minds of many people resident in the northern hemisphere, Africa has two major attributes: an environment filled with exotic forms of life and landscapes, and an environment threatened with ecological collapse and human suffering. These themes often work together, providing a base from which everything from international campaigns to basic research are launched. Like all broad generalizations, these are based on small amounts of truth and large amounts of fiction, and like all generalizations, their indiscriminate application can be—and has been—extremely destructive. As these ideas are elaborated, Africans are either not mentioned at all, or are cast in the role of destructive agents. The choice of “Ecology and Environmental Issues” as the overall theme for the 1993 African Studies meetings provides an opportunity to explore and dispel these perceptions—as well as the risk of contributing to their perpetuation.