In a 1958 constitutional referendum, Guinea was the only French territory to reject continued colonial subordination in favor of immediate independence. Why did Guinea alone reject the constitution that laid the foundations for France's Fifth Republic? What factors stimulated political parties in other territories to accept the prolongation of French tutelage, even as activists elsewhere on the continent were agitating for independence? Focusing on the eight territories of French West Africa, this article argues that the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which led the campaign for the “no” vote, differed from other dominant parties in French West Africa in several important ways. These differences, along with the relative power of the colonial chieftaincy, contributed to Guinea's unique stance in the 1958 referendum.

The process of narrating and interpreting the African past has long been an intellectual struggle against European assumptions and prejudices about the nature of time and history in Africa. As the historian David William Cohen states, “The major issue in the reconstruction of the African past is the question of how far voices exterior to Africa shape the presentation of Africa's past and present” (1985:198). Many historians, especially those without any background or training in African historiography, have assumed, incorrectly, that prior to European contact with Africa, indigenous “traditions” were ancient, permanent, and reproduced from generation to generation without change. This is the false image of cultural isolation and temporal stagnation that has been assiduously disseminated in many parts of the world.

This article traces the history of how and why certain African groups became involved in the transnational indigenous rights movement; how the concept of the indigenous has been imagined, understood, and employed by African activists, donors, advocates, and states; and the opportunities and obstacles it has posed for the ongoing struggles for recognition, resources, and the rights of historically marginalized people like Maasai.

This article draws on newspaper commentary, Nyaturu hunger lore, and ethnographic research to describe how central Tanzanian villagers accessed food aid from the state during the East African food crisis of 2006. Through leveraging their political support and their participation in national development agendas, rural inhabitants claimed their rights. Yet it was through these exchanges that the state converted food aid into political power. The article argues that the highly ritualized gift of food aid naturalizes a contemporary political and economic order in which, counterintuitively, it is rural farmers who go hungry.

As I was writing this introduction, Guinea-Bissau was rocked by yet another “political crisis.” On the night of March 1 and 2, 2009, the army chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Waie, and the president of Guinea-Bissau, João Bernardino “Nino” Vieira, were killed in the space of a few hours. As was to be expected, articles mushroomed in the international press in the following days, sporting headlines that we have long since become accustomed to, such as “Guinea-Bissau Collapse Deepens after Leader Killed” (Pitman 2009) or “Guinea-Bissau Threatens Return to Bad Old Days in Africa” (George 2009). An article by the Economist Intelligence Unit was entitled—with a literary touch reminiscent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness—“Edge of the Abyss.” These days Guinea-Bissau, particularly since the 1998–99 civil war, seems to be the poster child for all the negativity generally attributed to African countries, an overlapping of political, economic, and humanitarian crises, in blatant confirmation of the picture of “shadowy Africa” that James Ferguson pinpoints as one of the features of international discourse on Africa today (2006:15,190).

Despite these clichéd articles (identical in tone to those that have appeared during the various crises that have characterized the last decade of Guinea-Bissau's history) and pessimistic forecasts from international experts, these violent events have not triggered any real political or civil turmoil. The following morning the capital city, Bissau, was calm. The army leaders declared that they had no intention of intervening in the upcoming elections.

This article explores how international discourses on AIDS prevention have been incorporated into national-level programs that promote particular lifestyle and livelihood strategies in Zambia, particularly within the realms of wife inheritance, widowhood, and marriage. In response, Zambian communities have recast these narratives to inform local political economies, identities, and struggles for power. Often community and national-level efforts work at odds with each other, as each seeks to legitimize various moralities and codes of behavior. At the local level actors choose the strategies that most effectively mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS and also enhance their overall well-being.

Balanta farmers of Guinea-Bissau are often regarded by neighboring communities as “backward” and as a people who have refused modern life-worlds. Despite the fact that these farmers played a very important role in the making of Guinea-Bissau, they were progressively removed from power after independence. However, they also developed original forms of contesting marginality. This article portrays the Balanta as complex historical subjects with strategic agendas. It examines the tensions between centrality and marginality in today's Guinea-Bissau and in the Balanta's own ways of imagining their place in the nation.

The winds of political change have been sweeping across Kenya for the last two decades. However, as many sections of society—the media, the church, civil society, and even ordinary people—take advantage of the unprecedented democratic space in which to engage the political establishment, the country's intelligentsia has remained aloof. The aim of this article is to interrogate discourse patterns in the Kenyan university system. Adopting a historical lens, it argues that the curtailment of intellectual freedom in the postcolonial Kenyan university is a reproduction of the colonial suppression of discourses whose objective was to ensure the political survival of the ruling class. It also argues for the adoption of critical pedagogies that challenge the status quo.

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.

This article addresses the question of identity in contemporary North African cinema, situating the issue within the larger context of Arab discourse on tradition and modernity. It concentrates on two filmmakers, the Moroccan Farida Benlyazid and the Algerian Nadir Moknèche, and their different perspectives on the formation of postcolonial identity (especially for women). While Benlyazid opts for a new form of Islamic feminism—spiritual Islam—Moknèche portrays, in a provocative style, how Algerian women choose practices that subvert the retraditionalization of their country.

Since the 1960s scholars have criticized the notion of development, arguing that the rhetoric and practice of international development serve imperialistic interests, destroying local orders and colonizing consciousnesses. Through the analysis of the “will to be modern” of a group of young boys living in Bubaque in the Bijagó Islands (Guinea-Bissau), this article shows how the very notion of development can be reworked and employed in an African context, becoming a means for exerting social demands against traditional authorities, and an idiom to express aspirations, needs, and rights.

Sacred groves figure prominently in efforts to create community-based conservation in Africa. Although they are often conceptualized in functionalist terms as relics of climax forest and peak cultural florescence, attention to the intersections of ecological and social dynamics offers a framework for understanding African sacred groves that avoids assumptions of steady states of habitat and culture. This article, based on a case study from the North Pare Mountains of northeastern Tanzania, demonstrates that the sacredness of these groves is embedded in social institutions, and that the deeply contested nature of these meanings produces African landscapes. It concludes that sacred groves, as examples of cultural and ecological co-evolution, require research based on hybrid social and natural scientific methods. The implication for conservation policy is that sacred groves are not simply local forms of conservation, and that their management demands cooperation among local, national, and global institutions.

This article explores Islam, gender, and “proper” Mandinga funerary “custom” in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, specifically the contradictions and debates between men and women about Mandinga custom and Islam as they play out in the ritual of shaking with the left hand, wailing at funerals, and visiting healers to investigate the nature of particular deaths. It suggests that far from constituting a “crisis of modernity,” these contradictions and debates have long been central to how Mandinga imagine themselves in a changing world. They have become intensified, however, in the transnational era, in which continuity among identity, place, and death has been ruptured.

The historiographic question that this article asks is: How can historians uncover actual social and economic practices without imposing anachronistic standards and terminologies on the available evidence? The analysis focuses on the relationship between landlords and zégoch—a hitherto unrecognized and socially subservient class of peasants—in the context of social, economic, and cultural realities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ethiopia. The thesis is that during this period the Ethiopian ruling classes gained their power and income primarily from ownership of rim land—a form of private property—and the labor of zégoch.

While African literature in European languages is well-studied, ʿajamī and its significance in the intellectual history of Africa remains one of the least investigated areas in African studies. Yet ʿajamī is one of the oldest and most widespread forms of literature in Africa. This article draws scholars' attention to this unmapped terrain of knowledge. First, it provides a survey of major West African ʿajamī literary traditions and examines the nexus between the pedagogy of Aḥmadu Bamba and the development of Wolofal (Wolof ʿajamī). Then, with reference to excerpts from Sëriñ Masoxna Ló's 1954 eulogy, it discusses the role of Wolofal in the diffusion of the Murīd ethos.

This article explores the question of how well South African defense policies and investments during the apartheid and postapartheid era have supported the country's overall political objectives. Perhaps not surprisingly, the single-mindedness of mission during apartheid contributed, in many ways, to a defense strategy that was more cohesive than that of the postapartheid era. In the postapartheid era, opportunities for using the country's defense assets to achieve political objectives and overall national priorities have not been fully exploited.

Current usages of the terms patrimonial and neopatrimonial in the context of Africa are conceptually problematical and amount to a serious misreading of Weber. His use of the term patrimonial delineated a legitimate type of authority, not a type of regime, and included notions of reciprocity and voluntary compliance between rulers and the ruled. Those reciprocities enabled subjects to check the actions of rulers, which most analyses of (neo) patrimonialism overlook. We apply these insights to a case study of Botswana and suggest that scholars reconsider the application of Weber's concepts to African states.

Hard work is a core value among Diola rice cultivators in Guinea-Bissau. This essay explores Diola attitudes toward work in the context of recent changes in their natural and social environment. It asks why Diola maintain a particular work regime even when they admit that it is not actually working for them. The intrinsic characteristics of wet rice cultivation, the tightly woven web of social relations involved in Diola agricultural practices, and the religious ideals with which these practices are linked reinforce one another and serve as powerful drivers of continuity. But given the decreasing viability of wet rice cultivation in this region, Diola work is increasingly detached from the products it is meant to generate. Because Diola farmers remain committed to these work practices in the face of their acknowledged inability to meet subsistence needs, Diola work has become a “paradox of custom.”

While interest in conducting fieldwork in conflict and postconflict societies continues to grow, literature addressing the specific challenges and dilemmas of this kind of research remains scarce. Based on four months of fieldwork and approximately seventy interviews, this article explores the complexities of conducting research in postgenocide Rwanda. I argue that what at first may appear to be data problems can also be important data points; problems such as historical memory, selective telling, and skewed participant demographics illuminate political structures, group relations, and societal cleavages. This article then illustrates this argument by examining how these challenges/opportunities help explain the difficulties involved in teaching history in postgenocide schools. These reflections on research in Rwanda suggest valuable lessons for fieldwork and data analysis in a number of settings by providing examples of pitfalls, dilemmas, and often unseen opportunities that are likely to present themselves in other divided societies.