The majority of young people in Africa are today living in “waithood,” a prolonged, difficult, and dynamic transition into adult life. This experience is shared with an increasing number of young people in the developed North who are also grappling with issues of joblessness and political exclusion. This waithood generation is increasingly losing faith in the ability of its leaders to address young people’s needs and expectations, and it is rebelling against the status quo. From the youth uprisings that led to the Arab Spring and the ousting of Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal and Campaore in Burkina Faso, to political protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the U.S. and Los Indignados in Spain, young people have been at the forefront of political change. However, they have not yet been able to effect systemic change. While profound social transformation takes time, this generation is still wrestling with how to move beyond street protest and have a lasting impact on politics and governance.

This article considers what African Studies needs to look like in order for it to retain its disciplinary relevance for the next generation and in the larger context of the Black Lives movement globally. It asks questions about where we have come from in terms of race consciousness in our discipline and why this issue matters today. It begins by tracing the development of African Studies’ epistemic journey, and follows this with an examination of the recent Black student movements in South Africa and the U.S. It concludes by suggesting where we should be going.

In 1932 the governor of French Togoland announced an increase in taxes on Lomé market women because of the economic downturn caused by the Depression. Both the indigenous city council and a clandestine resistance movement opposed this fiscal plan, warning of social unrest. The strain triggered a protest by market women that spread beyond the colonial capital. This article offers a new explanation of the explosive tension by arguing that an organized male political campaign conjoined with a socioeconomic protest led by market women. It explores women's resistance as a performance of vodou ritual as a vehicle of shame and protest. Ultimately the violent, culturally marked protests marked the gendered perimeters of political authority for both Ewe women and men and further defined Ewe market women's conception of an Ewe self and the emergence of conflicting and contested notions of “Eweness” as a prelude to the independence struggle.

This article explores the changing nature of the “volunteer” as an official role within health and development interventions in East Africa. Contemporary development interventions require the engagement of volunteers to act as links between project and community. This role is increasingly professionalized within development architectures with implications for the kinds of people who can engage in volunteering opportunities. Volunteers in development interventions are likely to be drawn from public sector staff and from educated youth seeking access to positions of paid employment. Volunteering as a formal status within the organization of development programs is recognized as a kind of professional work by those seeking to engage with development organizations. Volunteers perform important work in linking development programs with beneficiaries. At the same time, volunteering provides opportunities for personal transformation.

The “neopatrimonial” character of African states has increasingly been invoked to explain the politics of agricultural stagnation across the continent. This article summarizes the literature on neopatrimonialism, reviewing how analysts have applied the concept in studies of food and agricultural policies in Africa. It then draws out some of the key contributions of such an approach, and describes limitations, both methodological and substantive. Finally, it asks how and why the concept has been deployed, and recommends greater circumspection, research, and refinement.

As the scholarship concerning women's roles in African society and politics increases, it has become clear that West African women were active participants in the making of the histories of the societies in which they lived. Much is now known about founding ancestresses (Akan), queen mothers (Kanuri, Asante, Bamileke, etc.), women paramount chiefs (Mende), iyalodes (Yoruba), women's councils (Igbo)—although a great deal remains to be done. Not so much, however, is known about women's participation in anticolonial movements in the twentieth century. With the exception of the famous Aba Women's War (Perham, 1937; Leith-Ross, 1939; Gailey, 1970; van Allen, 1972 & 1976; Ifeka-Moller, 1973; Afigbo, 1966), the one women's anticolonial event which has attracted a significant amount of scholarly attention, little is clear about the women leaders who actively organized resistance to colonial policy which they considered inimical to women's interests or as key organizers in the struggle for independence. Still less is known about the organizations they controlled. Although the first generation of leaders in independent Africa paid tribute to the important role played by women in raising political consciousness among Africans, they mention it only briefly, rarely describing women's participation in their parties in any great detail (Denzer, 1976). Nor did the scores of political scientists who flocked to West Africa in the 1950s and the 1960s notice what women were doing in the way of organizing. Nonetheless the names of quite a few women of exceptional ability and understanding and the movements they organized occur frequently in the local newspapers giving evidence to their role. In addition extensive oral history collection among surviving women's leaders, their families and their supporters enables scholars to begin the task of reconstruction of the history of women's contribution to the anticolonial movement.

While Baka “Pygmies” are regarded as among Africa's most indigenous peoples, their autochthony seems lacking in features that would give them standing for special consideration by die state. Somehow, indigenousness does not equal autochthony. Other mobile indigenous peoples such as traders and pastoralists have also been seen as less than autochthonous. These groups lack “roots in the soil,” which makes them less subject to the authority of the state than farmers. Further, as an acephalous society, Baka political culture cannot be appropriately adjusted to interact with the hierarchical structure of the state and related institutions. For this reason the problematic autochthony of Baka is less an issue of rights within the existing structure of the state—of civil rights—than of human rights. Unfortunately, this human rights issue is not really on any policy agenda, not even that of the working group for the U.N. Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

So-called canned hunts take place within fenced private game ranches and typically target animals bred in captivity solely for that purpose. Thousands of semidomesticated lions form the focal point of South Africa’s canned-hunting industry. Notions of animal welfare, “fair chase,” and conservation have been deployed to varying degrees to sway public opinion surrounding canned hunts in South Africa and abroad. While state regulatory efforts have largely failed to date, the Campaign Against Canned Hunting (CACH) has successfully promoted stricter controls on the importation of lion trophies in Australia, Europe, and the United States, in part by highlighting the recent death of Cecil, a charismatic lion shot by an American bowhunter in Zimbabwe.

Within Muslim Africa, Senegal has long been characterized by the striking dominance of Sufi forms of Islamic practice and social organization, with important consequences for Senegalese politics and society. While the Sufi model remains centrally important, it has been increasingly rivaled since the 1980s by reformist, or “Islamist,” groups and ideologies. In the wake of the historic Senegalese democratic alternation in power in 2000, and in an international context of apparent conflict between the West and the Muslim world, the growing public discourse about religion in Senegal is resulting in reinterpretations and dynamic transformations that have further blurred the boundaries between Sufism and Islamism.

While the proximal causes of drought in the Sahel and northeast Africa are known to be due to failure of seasonal rains, possibly linked with long-range climatic changes (Tanaka et al., 1975; Winstanley, 1973; Kelley, 1975; Lamb, 1977), the more persistent problem of human adaptation and survival in increasingly man-made environments during natural disasters is only gradually being appreciated. In recent years emphasis has been placed on man's activities as the major cause of rangeland degradation and famines. It is becoming increasingly clear that drought and famine do not always reflect cause-effect relationships and that the two may coexist independently and often become linked only through politico-economic conditions (Wisner, 1977; Lofchie, 1975; Ball, 1976; Franke and Chasin, 1980: 5; Grossman, 1981; Grove, 1979). In Ethiopia the famine in highland areas in 1972-74 was closely linked to the prerevolution feudal regime (Fitzgerald, 1980; Hussein, 1976; Koehn, 1979; Shepherd, 1975). In the lowlands Bondestam (1974), Cohen (1977) and Flood (1976) associated famine with recent encroachment of pastures by irrigation schemes and with reduced river flooding caused by construction of Koka Dam. However, interaction of physico-environmental and politico-economic factors resulting in the 1972-73 drought and famine and the adaptive responses of the pastoralists in the Awash Valley remain to be studied in depth. The objective of this paper is to examine these relationships among the 130,000 Afar and the 16,000 Kereyu, Arsi and Jile Oromo, the four pastoralist groups traditionally inhabiting the Awash floodplains. The ongoing irrigation development in the Awash Valley with World Bank assistance and the recurrence of drought since 1973 (“Ethiopia”, 1981; Kloos, 1977: 215) make this a timely study. The floodplain ecosystem, although for centuries providing much-needed grazing resources during the dry season, has been relatively neglected in the study of human ecology in Africa (Scudder, 1980: 383). Field work was carried out in 1972/73, 1975/76 and 1982. This was part of disease ecology studies of schistosomiasis and other parasitic infections, irrigation development and migration patterns in the Awash Valley and surrounding highlands (Kloos and Lemma, 1974; Kloos, 1977; Kloos et al., 1981; Kloos, in press) and of a cholera vaccination program in the lower Awash Valley.

Since the arrival of European missionaries in Africa, there has been charged debate over people's marriage choices. This article outlines the major elements in the academic, theological, and popular discourses on marriage in Africa, focusing on two topics: the conceptual divide between monogamous Christian marriage and African polygyny, and the claim that women automatically prefer monogamy. By comparing the assumptions in the literature with ethnographic data from the Republic of Benin, this article demonstrates that marital choices cannot necessarily be predicted by a person's gender and rarely are characterized by a definitive conceptual divide. Instead, personal motives related to economics, prestige, and competition for power are the main factors in marriage choices.

This article examines the shifting representations of and discourses produced about Chinese salesmen and their collaborators in the small West African nation of Togo. It suggests that in this context representations of China’s so-called New Scramble for Africa are troublesome, namely because they tend to silence the role of Togolese women traders as producers and as central historical and economic subjects in the making of a postcolonial commodity chain for printed African textiles. In so doing the article questions standard economic theories of global market forces, debunks stereotypes regarding the Chinese advance in West African markets, and challenges assumptions about the vulnerability of African societies.

Most rural–urban migrants maintain significant ties with their communities of origin in Africa south of the Sahara. Contrary to “modernist” assumptions that these ties would fade away, they often continue to be strong. This urban–rural connection has important consequences for rural–urban migration, for urban–rural return migration, for the rural economy, and for the political process. To understand the processes underpinning the urban–rural connection we need to distinguish different migration strategies and to deconstruct the notion of “rural.” Depending on their migration strategies, urban residents connect with a range of actors at the rural end: more or less closely related kin, kinship groups, non-kin groups, villages, larger political entities. These connections play out differently for men and women.

This article reviews campaigns against female genital cutting (FGC) directed at Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. The authors argue that campaigns against FGC using educational, health, legal, and human rights–based approaches are at times ineffective and counterproductive when they frame the practice as a “tradition” rooted in a “primitive” and unchanging culture. We suggest that development interventions that do not address local contexts of FGC, including the complex politics and history of interventions designed to eradicate it, can in fact reify and reinscribe the practice as central to Maasai cultural identity.

A decade and a half ago Chambers (1979) referred to African rural refugees as “What the Eye Does not See.” This was, inter alia, due to the remoteness of their inhabited areas and the urban bias which then characterized the responses of the international assistance regime. If rural refugees were, in the 1970s, “what the eye did not see,” today refugees in many of the African urban centers are what the eye “refuses to see.” One of the most dramatic and far-reaching impacts of war, drought and economic hardship in the 1980s in many sub-Saharan African countries has been the immense population shift from rural areas to the cities. This population shift is taking place in the absence of any structural transformation in the economies concerned. Structural transformation here refers to increases in labor productivity, a declining share of agriculture in total output, technological progress and industrialization. African host-governments see the situation in their urban centers being exacerbated by the presence of refugees who are said to compete with nationals for scarce employment opportunities and social services such as health, education, housing, water and transportation. In many African host countries where the public sector is the main employer, refugees are excluded from employment in this sector; in other countries such as Egypt and Djibouti, refugees are not allowed to take any paid employment (Wallace 1985). The policies of many African governments toward skilled urban refugees are succinctly described by Brydon and Gould (1984,4):

This article focuses on the activities of women smugglers in Cameroon in the 1990s, the period during which the national currency was devalued. Despite the generally negative connotations of smuggling, it argues that this unorthodox form of trade has had certain positive effects on the lives of individual female entrepreneurs, if not on Cameroonian society in general. Usually marginalized economically, women in Cameroon—including, in many cases, former prostitutes—are able through smuggling to support themselves and their children, make up the deficit in the household budget, and attain a respected status in society. Through their contacts with beach worker assistants and government officials, they also have contributed, for better or worse, to the blurring of lines in Cameroon between the formal and informal economy.

From 7 April, 1994, onwards, a well planned and massively executed genocide began in Rwanda, which led to the brutal slaughter of up to one million defenseless children, women and men. This genocide was the culmination of a four year period during which civil war and extremist violence cost the lives of tens of thousands of persons. Both these processes took place against the background of the never-resolved consequences of previous instances of violence, in Rwanda and in Burundi, including a massive festering refugee problem. They heralded the beginning of further violence in Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, which has lasted until now.

This article attempts to understand the socio-psychological causes of the dramatic and profoundly disturbing events that took place in Rwanda in 1994. Its starting questions are: how do situations come about in which people massively participate in brutal violence against their neighbors who have not harmed them? What kind of social and political processes have taken place that can bring people to lose the values, restraints and ethics that under normal circumstances make these actions impossible, and abhorrent to contemplate?

Research on zidovudine (AZT) for pregnant women in Africa sparked worldwide debate in the late 1990s. The debate ultimately led to the rewriting of international ethics guidelines, in at least one case specifically to prohibit use of a placebo group (the most controversial aspect of the research) when known effective treatment is available. I draw upon clinical experience in Malawi and theoretical perspectives from anthropology to reframe the controversy. The dominant bioethical position constructed research and therapy as ethically distinct. This distinction ensured that inequalities of power and resources were perpetuated, not remedied, by the AZT debates.

This article outlines some aspects of the history of West Africans in Britain during the colonial era in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular it focuses on the emergence of West African nationalism in Britain and highlights some of the political activities of those African sojourners abroad, who were also temporarily part of the diaspora. Their political organizations, especially the West African Students' Union and the West African National Secretariat, were influential in West Africa and throughout the diaspora and reflected changing political identities, consciousness, and historical conditions. Most important, they show that West Africans developed and maintained their own distinctive political aims, consciousness, and ideologies, while at the same time contributing to and being influenced by those of the diaspora. These aims and ideologies also reflected the particularities of political and social conditions in Britain, conditions that were shaped by the African presence itself. West African nationalism provided a distinctive philosophy and orientation even for West Africans' pan-African activities. Indeed they saw the future of Africa and the diaspora as determined by political and other advances in the West African colonies.

For nearly half a century politics in Côte d’Ivoire had been dominated by a single individual, Félix Houphouët-Boigny; a single political party, the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (Parti démocratique de Côte d’Ivoire, PDCI); and roughly the same cohort of politicobureaucratic elites. This rare combination of regime longevity and elite cohesion had produced considerable state competence and impressive economic growth which, in turn, fostered relative peace between the different classes, the various ethnic and religious groups, and indigenous Ivorians and foreign residents. Thus, Côte d’Ivoire was heralded as an oasis of peace and prosperity and a haven for immigrants seeking refuge from economic impoverishment and ethnic or civil strife at home.