On 27 and 28 February 1972, the news media carried reports from Addis Abada that the Government of the Sudan and the South Sudan Liberation Front had reached an agreement settling the problem of the southern Sudan. The importance of this news to the Sudan, Africa, the Organization of African Unity, the Arab world, and the United Nations lies in the fact that an armed uprising in the largest state in Africa seems to have come to an end by peaceful means.

Every year statistics seem to demonstrate another decline in the quality of life in Southern Africa. The annual growth rate per capita of agricultural production in the region deteriorated to -1.04 percent from 1978-85. In March 1987, UNICEF reported that every four minutes a child under 5 years dies in Angola and Mozambique, the highest death rate among children in the world. International agencies like UNICEF now cite the major cause of this devastation: war waged by South Africa against its neighbors.

I would argue that history students should understand that the whole body of historical writing consists of interpretations of the past. They should be able to analyse a wide variety of texts and form their own opinions on a historical topic, and should be able to construct a coherent argument, using evidence to support their opinion. In doing so, they should be actively aware that their argument is no more “true” than that offered by any other historian. It is as much a product of their personal biography and the social formation in which they live as of the evidence used in its construction. Even this evidence is the product of other personal biographies and other social forces.

PAT 101: Principles of Patronage reviews the structure, operations and results of a voluntary patronage system. It illustrates the theory of patronage by using empirical examples drawn from The University as a formal institutional structure, and from the academic and administrative operation of that institution. Patronage and educational functions are compared to show how the these two aspects of The University interact, and to document the results which follow from this interaction.

L'ouvrage récemment paru de Jan Vansina, “Le Rwanda ancien. Le royaume nyiginya”, m'a donné l'occasion de me replonger dans l'histoire de la royauté nyiginya en quittant les sentiers battus. Cet ouvrage est, en effet, le produit d'un travail minutieux de dépouillement de textes trop négligés et auxquels l'auteur applique les méthodes rigoureuses de la critique historique. Il nous conduit à une vision plus complète et plus nuancée de la royauté nyiginya que ne l'à fait aucun ouvrage antérieur pour la période pré-coloniale. Certaines hypothèses, souvent très plausibles, font irruption dans l'histoire telle que l'a produite le courant majoritaire de l'époque coloniale, la bousculent et la remettent en mouvement. Elles redonnent vie et humanisent ces rois et leur entourage. Ils quittent le carcan de l'idéologie dominante du moment, cessent d'endosser les costumes propres à satisfaire la contemplation fascinée des élites, tant locales qu'européennes. Les rois, incarnés et faillibles sous la plume de l'historien, restent cependant au centre de son ouvrage et l'interrogation demeure: qu' était le peuple des rois? Partant de l'autre point de vue, demandons-nous à quel point et de quelle façon les rois étaient présents dans la vie des populations? Peut-on faire l'histoire de ces populations? Et enfin, pourquoi est-il important de “repeupler” le pays et de faire parvenir le royaume—et ses séquelles gouvernementales—à la periode actuelle?

Comme Vansina l'écrit, l'histoire officielle rwandaise laissait de côté la population. A vrai dire, le but principal de cette histoire était de donner une légitimité à la dynastie.

The political climate of the post-war world did not permit the United States to embark on a new era of isolationism in 1945, but few Americans demonstrated much awareness of Asian or African developments. French North Africa was more familiar than many colonial areas because American military operations during the war had acquainted the public with Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. When demonstrations against French control erupted throughout the Maghrib after VE Day, a minority of Americans recognized that this region of French rule, but of intensely nationalist feelings, could become a serious trouble spot. With the subsiding of the riots, however, even the largest newspapers in the United States offered only limited information on North African events.

During the next decade, leaders of the independence movements waged a campaign to familiarize Americans with the situation in their countries and gain support for their views on how Franco-Maghribi problems could best be resolved. In outlining that campaign and discussing its strategy, this essay attempts to asses the importance which North Africans attached to American sympathy, the methods which they utilized to attain it, and the results which they achieved.

Late in 1946, a spokesman for the Committee for the Liberation of North Africa called the public's attention to the inadequacy of the coverage of the American press. In a lengthy letter to the New York Times, M. Aboul Ahrass accused France of denying foreign newsmen access to North Africa because of the fear that their reports would discredit the French administrations (December 30, 1946: 18).

This article cautions that the democratization process in Nigeria is not a foregone conclusion. Given the nature of the competing interests within Nigeria’s military hierarchy, there is nothing to suggest that every officer within the ruling military elite has embraced this transition project. This article focuses on the place of the military in the transition program.

Although entrenched military interests are not the only threat to the transition program, there is no doubt that the prominent role played by retired and serving military officers in the whole process of party formation and selection of presidential candidates has exacerbated concerns about the specter of militarism. While some in Nigeria simply see the military as the armed wing of the dominant oligarchy, others conclude that the military actually is the oligarchy.

Jungle imagery and prejudiced stereotypes still abound in American knowledge of Africa. In a 1967 survey of American schoolchildren, E. Perry Hicks and Barry K. Beyer found that the majority still saw Africa through a web of myth and unfavorable stereotypes which appeared to increase as students progressed from grade seven through grade twelve (1970, pp. 158-166). In closing remarks as President of the African Studies Association, Philip D. Curtin noted this dilemma and posed a compelling challenge to the Africanist community. “The 1970's,” Professor Curtin stated,

This essay is written in response to Professor Curtin's challenge and as an attempt to begin a dialogue on how to teach African history effectively. It is our contention that African studies is a recent enough arrival on the academic scene that teachers have not yet developed, or have not yet shared, techniques of instruction to cope with the special problems inherent in the subject matter.

In the past fifteen years African heads of state and the Organization of African Unity have striven with little success to unite liberation movements fighting the settlers and colonialists in their countries in Southern Africa. The first attempt was made by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and other leaders, and was directed at uniting the Pan-Africanist Congress and its rival African National Congress of South Africa soon after both were banned and forced into exile following the Sharpeville demonstrations. When leaders of both parties fanned out into the world to solicit support, some of the would-be supporters forced them into a makeshift marriage of convenience.

The role of Algerian women in their own society has rarely been what it has seemed. Outside observers have often indulged in generalizations based on a lack of understanding, in judgments represented by only partial truths. David Gordon's recent pronouncement (1968) that “women are the serfs of Algerian society” is, for example, a fair enough description of the position of the majority, but it is, in the end, no more accurate than Jacques Berque's (1967) axion that “there were not even any bastards” produced by the temporary sexual relations between Algerians and European settlers in the 1930s. What is quite clear is that women have played and continue to play important roles in Algerian society although they have always suffered definite legal, social, and cultural disadvantages that have not been essentially changed by independence.

Historically, Algerian women have enjoyed more freedom than is usually admitted by Western authors. In rural areas women were allowed to go about daily routines without hiding. Only in cities was the wearing of the veil normal, and even this practice can be easily explained. Germaine Tillion's interesting and convincing interpretation (1964) on this issue comes to mind: the practice of wearing a veil in countries bordering the southern shores of the Mediterranean is simply an attempt of basically nomadic peoples to maintain privacy in the crowded cities. Nor is this custom unique; Spanish women wear black, a practice that serves much the same purpose as the veil in Muslim lands.

All of us have very decided ideas about teaching. While our geographical interest may be Africa, our disciplinary training and specialties are varied, and our methodologies and ideologies lead us, not only into different research paths, but toward differing teaching goals and learning expectations. Perhaps, common interest in Africa creates a better understanding of, and cooperation among, the various disciplines, and, if that is the case, it is an indisputable advantage in our classes. Still, it would be presumptious, indeed impossible, for a historian to tell a geographer or an economist or a linguist how, or even what, to teach.

However, our profession expects two things of us: to produce original contributions to the pool of knowledge in our specialty, and to teach effectively what we have learned to undergraduates seeking a general education, as well as to graduate students whose educational goals are more akin to our own. There is no small irony in the fact that, for a variety of reasons, as the number of college students dwindles, as the cost of education spirals, and as the job opportunities for new Ph.D.s all but vanish, our peers are more demanding in their evaluation of our research, while college and university administrators are more concerned with “accountability;” that is, total student credit hours produced—our teaching.

There are three points I want to make about teaching, but first I think it is important to make a disclaimer.

As the Portuguese crept cautiously along the western coast of Africa, they met a dizzying multiplicity of African cultures but nowhere did they encounter an economic vacuum. Since their primary interest was trade (pious disclaimers to the contrary), they had to discover and then adapt to local and interregional patterns of exchange before they could hope to exploit them to their advantage.

The two centuries between the discovery of Capo Blanco and adjacent Arguim Island in 1443 and the fall of Elmina to the Dutch in 1640 circumscribe the period of Portuguese hegemony and the opening phase of European-African interaction. Though other Europeans followed close on their heels, it was the Portuguese who pioneered both physically and commercially. Ships might put in almost anywhere along the coast where they could find a safe anchorage, but there were five regions that from the beginning seemed to promise profitable and convenient trading contacts: Arguim, Senegambia and the “Rivers of the South,” the Gold Coast, Benin and the Slave Rivers, and Congo-Angola. Each of these presented a different situation and each demanded a different response.

These regions have been the subject of specialized monographs which have brought out the local characteristics of trade as they evolved, but there has been no attempt at an overview, no attempt to compare and generalize from the data now available to present a larger picture of trading patterns on the West Coast of Africa as a whole.