This article contextualizes Ugandan urban–rural relations through urban children's knowledge, imaginations, and experiences, which are affected by the present sociohistoric moment in Uganda. Influenced by urban–rural migration, changing notions of family and kinship, and the national government's prolific “development-through-education” campaign, urban schoolchildren imagine “the village” both as an integral imaginary space of ethnic identity origination and a location for fulfillment of national citizenship through development.

Though children's labor has been critical to African economies historically, Africanist scholars tend to treat child and adolescent workers as invisible. In this essay, the reasons for this neglect are explored, as are the consequences of such neglect for theory and empirical research. Suggestions are made for pursuing research on child and adolescent labor that places young workers within the broader context of economic, social, and political relationships and processes. The essay critically reviews the extant scholarly literature on children and work in the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and concludes that child labor is either underresearched or undertheorized to the detriment of our understanding of gender, patriarchy, agency, the formation of worker and political consciousness, capital accumulation, and the state. The essay argues that children have shaped and continue to shape history in Africa and that childhood is a terrain of struggle in which numerous social and political forces (including children, patriarchy, capital, and the state) seek constructions that suit their particular (and changing) interests. The essay makes a plea to Africanist scholars to take children more seriously in their research.

With notable exceptions, modern university education in Africa is a phenomenon of the last half century. Universities were established either immediately before or within a decade after political independence in most African countries. Since then, both the number of institutions and enrollment have expanded rapidly and continuously across the continent. The coverage of university education, nevertheless, remains inadequate for the needs of the knowledge society. With the relative decline of state support during the severe economic crisis of the 1980s, Africa's universities suffered substantial deterioration: overcrowding, infrastructure deficiencies, and inadequate access to international knowledge resources. These deficiencies led to problems of access, equity, quality, and relevance, and to an aging faculty. At the same time, higher education systems were complicated by the diversification of categories of student, types of institutions, and the kinds of knowledge demanded. In the resulting situation of institutional complexity and policy dynamism, Africa's universities were compelled to develop strategies for coping and innovation. The result has been a halt in the decline in many instances, and revival and growth in several others. Accompanying these positive results, however, have been new forms of social exclusion as well as a loss of focus on the public purpose of universities as institutions concentrate mainly on increasing institutional incomes and producing graduates for the labor market. To address these and other problems, it is necessary to insist on the irreducible responsibility of the state for the maintenance of the higher education system and the need for a proper focus on the public purposes of higher education. Systems-level policy frameworks need to be negotiated and established to guide the strategic choices that have to be made by all players in the education sector.

Media privatization, commercial growth, and new concern in the popular culture about changing patterns of marriage, love, and sexuality led to a sudden embrace during the 1990s by upwardly mobile urban Ghanaians of a previously minor element of globally circulating mass culture, Valentine's Day. Far from a story of cultural imperialism, the rise of Valentine's Day in present-day Accra shows that local adoption of global consumerist preferences is best understood as a local process imbued with local meanings and values, deliberately and rationally pursued.

In tackling the topic of current challenges to African universities, Akilagpa Sawyerr has chosen to paint with a broad brush. While giving appropriate acknowledgment to the diversity and complexity of prevailing circumstances in each country, he has elected to focus on a limited number of important issues that he believes constitute, in varying degrees, common challenges to universities across the continent. In electing this approach, he shows a preference for illuminating the dynamic interrelationships among these challenges, and for situating them with regard to some of the larger economic and political forces that have shaped African history in the latter part of the twentieth century. In consequence, he necessarily foregoes in-depth analysis of specific issues. To provide such analysis would require a book, which I sincerely hope Prof. Sawyerr will undertake in the near future.

What is valuable about this article? I would like to underscore three aspects.

First, it provides a clear overview of the main challenges that have confronted African higher education, especially during the past decade, together with helpful interpretations of the causes and consequences of these events. It also incorporates much of the very recent explosion of research on this topic, particularly by African scholars. The bibliography itself is a valuable resource for those interested in the subject.

This article examines the rise of vigilantism in southeastern Nigeria. Two opposing discourses on Nigerian vigilantism are examined. The first is characterized by the valorization of vigilantes as heroes in popular Nigerian video movies. The second is represented by a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report denouncing die vigilantes as criminals. My research utilizes ethnographic research to contextualize the video movies as a means toward understanding the ideological gap between these discourses. A close analysis of the Issakaba video series reveals a subtle treatment of the vigilante phenomenon designed to appeal to an indigenous perspective that is cognizant of the inherent risks of vigilante justice but also aware of the limitations of reform strategies such as those proposed by the HRW report.

This essay examines the cultural symbolism underpinning “Takembeng,” a contemporary, rural-based social movement of female farmers in the Northwest Province of Cameroon. It argues that the power and success of women's activism, in the context of national opposition party politics and the “new struggles” for democracy, are embedded in an institutional history and culturally legitimate etiquette of moral censure. It also suggests that the highly disruptive but mystically charged nature of these mobilizations makes them effective because they open spaces for popular dissent on the national stage. Understanding the “civility” associated with the apparent incivility of activists is indispensable to understanding the dynamism of grassroots political activism.

The idea to convene a special forum on “Islamism in West Africa” occurred to me while attending an African Studies Association Roundtable at our meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2002. A full year had elapsed since September 11, 2001, and the onset of the U.S.-led campaign to rout the Taliban from Afghanistan. Personal post-9/11 experience in Africa, as well as the writings and communications of other colleagues, had convinced me that in certain circles throughout the continent bin Laden had unexpectedly emerged as a kind of folk hero. Just how widely the Osama rage had taken hold—whether it was a fleeting Afro-pop phenomenon or a serious political challenge—began to loom as a pressing affaire d'état. Suddenly, black Africa was being reexamined by U.S. intelligence and media alike through the prism of potential apologists for “Islamic terrorism,” or worse. What, I wondered, would the African Muslim landscape look like by the time the African Studies Association was to reconvene in 2003? More important, what was the true state of Islamism in sub-Saharan Africa?

After a period of conscious neglect and dramatic deterioration, higher education in Africa is again attracting external attention, with an emphasis now on “partnerships” rather than “aid.” This report is based on an extensive survey of links between African institutions of higher education and foreign governments, foundations, and universities, with particular emphasis on links with the United States. In it, we explore the evolution, characteristics, promise, and problems of external support. Earlier, most African universities were linked to European institutions. With independence, they asserted their sovereignty and autonomy. By the 1980s, however, resources were inadequate nearly everywhere. Today, renewed attention may bring new funds, yet it also may bring new problems. Academic partnerships are often one-sided, and external support commonly carries conditions. By framing, organizing, and orienting the academic enterprise and thus ways of knowing and validating knowledge, partnerships threaten to reintroduce, in both explicit and subtle ways, the external direction of the earlier era. A consideration of these and other issues is followed by several appendixes, which contain a thorough cataloging of this material and may be used as a resource for future research.

This article discusses the role of the media in Nigeria's Fourth Republic between 1999 and 2003. Employing a case study approach, it highlights as well as analyzes the media's role in insisting on accountability and decency in Nigeria's notoriously corrupt public life. The media's crusade ran against the country's geopolitical divisions and revived the debate on the national question as well as the media's own morality. The article draws on both primary and secondary data to examine the media's role in an emergent democracy.

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.

Higher education in Africa has gone from favored focus to disparaged wastrel to development engine in two decades.

—Joel Samoff and Bidemi Carroll

First and foremost, this is an impressive piece of scholarship. It provides an invaluable framework for the study of the ever-evolving relationship between universities in Africa and the diverse, not to say motley, set of external institutions (academic and financial) that have worked with them from the time of independence to the present. As a comprehensive and largely descriptive account it covers rather fully the variety of issues that have emerged in the course of these relationships and pulls together much important information and many of the sources from which future scholarship can depart. It represents in itself a major and impressive piece of research and compilation and goes far to fulfilling its expressed aim: “to provide the foundation for frank debates about the merits, modes, and pitfalls of partnerships” (p. 72).

The report is analytical in the sense of identifying issues, but judicious in seeking balanced comment, and because it is careful to avoid judgments, it steers clear of provocation. For this reader, and no doubt for others who lived and worked throughout much of the period being described, it also has an inevitable biographical quality. For that reason I had expected to be taking issue with some, if not a great deal, of its content. Not so! Because of the circumspection, the balanced perspective, and the careful restraint with which issues are presented, it is hard to disagree fundamentally with much of the account.

This article focuses on how Hausa men in Niamey, Niger, use street side hira (“conversation”) groups to navigate their lives as migrants and to experience, negotiate, and create their own understandings of modernity. In Niamey, hira groups are the most important institution of public culture. More than any other aspect of Hausa social organization, hira groups bring together, in a concentrated fashion, circulating people and circulating ideas and thus offer a prime localized entry into the global reality of modernity.

The Zenzele clubs of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, which date from the late 1920s, were founded by mission-educated African women who sought to improve the lives of rural African women by enhancing their subsistence farming and cooking skills and educating them about household cleanliness, basic child care, and health care. Unlike associations for African women in British colonial Africa, Zenzele clubs did not evolve into political organizations. In the white-run segregated and apartheid states that persisted through 1994, Zenzele women did not engage in direct political action; rather, they sought to unite African women across class and ethnic lines and focused their efforts on community development.

Over the past fifteen years, the practice of Islam in the Gambia has undergone a perceptible change, from a tolerant and accommodating type of Qaddriyya-inspired Islam to a more radical form. This transformation has coincided with the rulership of President Yahya Jammeh, a master of manipulation of Islamic symbols. Breaking with his predecessor Sir Dawda Jawara, Jammeh has frequently blurred the line between mosque and state to reinforce his political advantage. Examples include building a mosque on state grounds and cultivating particular imams. At the same time, Jammeh has not hesitated to break with his local Wahhabi allies when he has judged it expedient to do so. Thus, in the wake of severe economic deterioration and a resulting rapprochement with the United States, the Jammeh regime has challenged the nation's prime Wahhabi leader over girls' wearing of headscarves to school. Gambia's recent experience illustrates the reciprocal relationship between religion and politics, and politicians' use of Islam for personal gain.

This article shows the links between naming practices and war. The focus is on MPLA war names used during the Angolan struggle for independence. These names are framed in the wider context of the relations between language and war. In many African contexts, names are not singular and fixed, but may change with every personal transformation. Entering the life of a soldier constitutes just such a drastic change. The article shows that through war names, a kaleidoscope of issues may be addressed, including the relations between language, rank, and power, personal history and popular culture, spirit possession and resurrection, self-description and labeling, writing and legitimacy, and secrecy and identity.