This paper draws on the recent experience of Kenya and Zimbabwe to demonstrate how power-sharing has played out in Africa. Although the two cases share some superficial similarities, variation in the strength and disposition of key veto players generated radically different contexts that shaped the feasibility and impact of unity government. Explaining the number and attitude of veto players requires a comparative analysis of the evolution of civil–military and intra-elite relations. In Zimbabwe, the exclusionary use of violence and rhetoric, together with the militarisation of politics, created far greater barriers to genuine power-sharing, resulting in the politics of continuity. These veto players were less significant in the Kenyan case, giving rise to a more cohesive outcome in the form of the politics of collusion. However, we find that neither mode of power-sharing creates the conditions for effective reform, which leads to a more general conclusion: unity government serves to postpone conflict, rather than to resolve it.

Theory informs us that decentralisation, a process through which powers, responsibilities and resources are devolved by the central state to lower territorial entities and regionally/locally elected bodies, increases efficiency, participation, equity, and environmental sustainability. Many types and forms of decentralisation have been implemented in Africa since the colonial period, with varying degrees of success. This paper explores the process of forest management decentralisation conducted in Cameroon since the mid-1990s, highlighting its foundations and characterising its initial assets. Through the transfer of powers to peripheral actors for the management of forestry fees, Council Forests and Community [or Village] Forests, this policy innovation could be empowering and productive. However, careful observation and analysis of relationships between the central state and regional/local-level decentralised bodies, on the one hand, and of the circulation of powers, on the other, show – after a decade of implementation – that the experiment is increasingly governed by strong tendencies towards ‘re-centralisation’, dictated by the practices of bureaucrats and state representatives. The paper also confirms recent empirical studies of ‘the capture of decentralised actors’. It finally shows how bureaucrats and state authorities are haunted by the Frankenstein's monster syndrome, concerning state–local relationships in decentralised forest management.

The cultivation of food crops within the overall boundaries of towns and cities is not new, but has been forgotten or ignored in the last 20 years, while urbanisation has, it is thought, absorbed a disproportionate share of national resources. Can, however, an alternative form of urban development, less greedy of financial and natural assets, capable of satisfying the basic needs of the population and of reducing the vulnerability of the poorest, be envisaged, and is the food and energy system an appropriate starting point?1 The first stage in studying any neglected area is to review existing evidence and policy, in order to reveal gaps and suggest avenues for future enquiry, policy formulation, and experiment.2 In this article, the evidence presented will be from Zambia, and it will be the task of further research to assess the relevance of these findings to other towns and cities in the region.

The modernised tradition of the Gacaca courts has become the key mechanism for dealing with the past in Rwanda. The process needs to establish accountability for all acts of genocide and to foster reconciliation. Nevertheless, popular narratives and survey results reveal that a widespread ‘crisis’ accompanied the initial stages of the Gacaca process. We argue that a problematic quest for the truth is short-circuiting reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. Truth-telling is the cornerstone of the transitional justice framework due to the design of the Gacaca tribunals. On the basis of twenty months of fieldwork in Rwandan villages, we locate tensions at different levels. The Gacaca system is a distinctively modern phenomenon despite its traditional appearance. The state-sanctioned speaking of the truth according to a prosecutorial logic runs counter to the core values of the customary institution and established societal practices. This friction is further enhanced by the underlying Judeo-Christian model of truth-telling introduced with the Gacaca system in a socio-political environment mediated by a culture of deceit and dominated by a war victor. In such a socio-cultural context, communication serves the interests of the power holders (national and local), and not necessarily the interest of truth-telling and justice.

At a time when most African countries are characterised as ‘strong societies and weak states’, the tendency to afford the state ‘ontological primacy’ in explaining the nature of African political economy is being challenged. One manifestation of this has been a shift in scholarly attention to those intermediary and autonomous organisations which function and sometimes flourish in the space that exists between the state and the household – namely, the various groups which comprise ‘civil society’.

Southern Sudanese civilian populations have been trapped in a rising tide of ethnicised, South-on-South, military violence ever since leadership struggles within the main southern opposition movement – the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) – split into two warring factions in August 1991. This paper traces the devastating impact of this violence on a particularly volatile and fractured region of contemporary South Sudan: the oil rich heartlands of the Western Upper Nile Province. Foregrounding the historical experiences and grassroots perspectives of Nuer civilian populations in this region, the paper shows how elite competition within the southern military has combined with the political machinations of the national Islamic government in Khartoum to create a wave of inter- and intra-ethnic factional fighting so intense and intractable that many Nuer civilians have come to define it as ‘a curse from God’. Dividing Sudan's seventeen-year-long civil war (1983–present) into four distinct phases, the paper shows how successive forms and patterns of political violence in this region have provoked radical reassessments of the precipitating agents and ultimate meaning of this war on the part of an increasingly demoralised and impoverished Nuer civilian population.

During the last years the DRC has made itself known in the world for terrible acts of violence committed by armed men – militia and the regular army – against the civilian population. The voices of the soldiers and combatants have so far been absent in the accounts of this violence. This silence is problematic, both because it makes it harder to understand such violence, but also because it reinforces stereotypes of African warriors as primitive and anarchic, driven by innate violence and tribal hatred. Enquiry into the particular discursive as well as material circumstances of the armed conflict in the DRC, which might better redress the complex and interrelated context in which ‘people in uniforms’ commit violence, is consequently impeded. The story we recount here emerges from soldiers within the main perpetrator of violence in the DRC today: the Integrated Armed Forces. The soldiers' interview texts challenge the dominant representation of soldiers and combatants in the DRC. The soldiers made sense of the prevalence of violence (in which they too had participated) in several interrelated ways, none of which reflected any expression of ‘natural’ (if dormant) violent tendencies, hatred or vengefulness for the enemy.

‘The State Stops at PK 12’ – i.e. 12 kilometres from the capital, Bangui.

The situation described by this statement, often heard in the Central African Republic, seems to conform to the objectives of the currently fashionable policies of decentralisation and structural adjustment – for example, to end ‘too much state’. However, the absence of the state in the rural areas of the CAR is so striking that the position in certain respects has almost reached the level of caricature. It also reflects the more general situation in other parts of the continent where the excesses of a centralised, over-staffed post-colonial régime can coexist perfectly with the pronounced absence in the rural areas of certain functions which are commonly supposed to be provided by the state, including basic administration and justice, as well as social, educational, and health services.

Numbers of women in public representative office have increased dramatically in Uganda since the introduction of the National Resistance Movement's ‘no party’ system, because affirmative action measures have been taken to reserve seats for them in Parliament and local government. This article offers an assessment of the impact of these measures on women's political effectiveness, examining how far women in Parliament have been able to advance gender equity concerns in key new legislation. The article suggests that the political value of specially created new seats has been eroded by their exploitation as currency for the NRM's patronage system, undermining women's effectiveness as representatives of women's interests once in office. This is because the gate-keepers of access to reserved political space are not the women's movement, or even women voters, but Movement elites. The women's movement in Uganda, though a beneficiary of the NRM's patronage, has become increasingly critical of the deepening authoritarianism of the NRM, pointing out that the lack of internal democracy in the Movement accounts for its failure to follow constitutional commitments to gender equity through to changes in key new pieces of legislation affecting women's rights.

While the western media were directing their gaze towards South Africa's political restructuring, another democratic transition was taking place to the north that was no less remarkable and no more imaginable a few years ago. Since Malawi obtained independence in 1964, it had been governed by Dr Hastings Banda (as he was then known) and the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) under a system of absolute rule which the country's élites refused to reform or relinquish. In March 1992 the Catholic bishops issued a formal protest against President H. Kamuzu Banda's political high-handedness, initiating a popular movement for democratic reform and anti-régime demonstrations by university students and staff, as well as factory workers.1 When additional pressure was exerted by the international community, holding foreign aid hostage to democratisation, the Government finally yielded, holding a referendum for multi-party democracy in June 1993 that led to presidential and parliamentary elections in May 1994. Banda and the MCP were ousted, Bakili Muluzi and the United Democratic Front (UDF) were elected, and Malawians of all parties revelled in the freedom to be openly, aggressively political.

Civil society has been associated with challenges and popular struggles for state and democratic reforms. Though these may relate to the articulation of substantive ethnic, regional and communal demands, few studies have addressed the dynamics and ramifications of their engagement in struggles other than democratisation. This study focuses on the ramifications of the entrance of civil society into a regional resource agitation in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The study finds that civil society has flowered, taken over and escalated the struggle and constructed itself into a solid formation of regional resistance. Civil groups have reconstructed the agitation into a broad, participatory, highly mobilised and coordinated struggle and redirected it into a struggle for self-determination, equity and civil and environmental rights. The study denotes the roles that civil society can play in the sociopolitical process and reveals the dynamics of their encounters with the state and multinational corporations.

A series of murders of albinos in Tanzania's north-west mining frontier has been shrouded in a discourse of primitivism by the international and national press, sidestepping the significance of the contextual circumstances of an artisanal mining boom firmly embedded in a global commodity chain and local profit maximisation. The murders are connected to gold and diamond miners' efforts to secure lucky charms for finding minerals and protection against danger while mining. Through the concept of fetish creation, this article interrogates the agency of those involved in the murders: the miners who purchase the albino charms, the waganga healers renowned for their healing, divination and sorcery skills who prescribe and sell the charms, and the albino murder victims. The agrarian background, miners' ambitions and a clash of values comprise our starting point for understanding the victimisation of albinos.

Previous research on anti-corruption reform in Africa falls into two camps. The first explores ‘best practices’ and policy approaches to controlling corruption, while the second focuses on the politics of anti-corruption ‘reform’, arguing that official anti-corruption campaigns aim to mollify donors while using corruption charges instrumentally to undermine rivals and shore up personal loyalty to the president, and thus have no chance of controlling corruption. This paper suggests that, while the neopatrimonial context is a very significant limiting factor in anti-corruption reform, limited progress is possible. Examining the motivations and effects, intended and unintended, of anti-corruption reforms in Kenya and Nigeria, it finds that while the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission has indeed been politically marginalised and largely ineffectual, the more autonomous and activist, but politically instrumentalised, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria has had a measure of success. The analysis suggests that this is explained by the EFCC's independent prosecutorial powers and the institutionalisation strategies of its chairman.

The failure of successive generations of imported, Western development strategies and projects to deliver meaningful reductions in poverty and achieve basic needs in Africa, has provoked a deep questioning of Western concepts and methodologies of development. Non-governmental organisations and development practitioners are increasingly focusing their attention on strategies which build upon local knowledge, skills and resources. The concepts of ‘self- reliance’ and local economic development are examined in the context of development challenges which face Africa. This is followed by a detailed case study of local economic development in the rural Mpofu District of the former Ciskei Homeland, which was incorporated into the Eastern Cape province of South Africa with the demise of apartheid in 1994.

This paper investigates a paradoxical case of business success in one of the world's worst-governed states, Angola. Founded in 1976 as the essential tool of the Angolan end of the oil business, Sonangol, the national oil company, was from the very start protected from the dominant (both predatory and centrally planned) logic of Angola's political economy. Throughout its first years, the pragmatic senior management of Sonangol accumulated technical and managerial experience, often in partnership with Western oil and consulting firms. By the time the ruling party dropped Marxism in the early 1990s, Sonangol was the key domestic actor in the economy, an island of competence thriving in tandem with the implosion of most other Angolan state institutions. However, the growing sophistication of Sonangol (now employing thousands of people, active in four continents, and controlling a vast parallel budget of offshore accounts and myriad assets) has not led to the benign developmental outcomes one would expect from the successful ‘capacity building’ of the last thirty years. Instead, Sonangol has primarily been at the service of the presidency and its rentier ambitions. Amongst other themes, the paper seeks to highlight the extent to which a nominal ‘failed state’ can be successful amidst widespread human destitution, provided that basic tools for elite empowerment (in this case, Sonangol and the means of coercion) exist to ensure the viability of incumbents.

Conflicts between farmers and herdsmen are certainly not new phenomena: they already occurred at the time of the biblical patriarchs. In West Africa, conflicts over the use of scarce natural resources between farmers and herdsmen are said to be on the increase. The occurrence of such conflicts is generally attributed to growing pressure on natural resources, caused by population increase, the growth of herds and the extension of cultivated areas outpacing population growth. That such conflicts appear to oppose two ethnic groups – generally Fulbe herdsmen versus a population group of farmers – is explained by the fact that not only has overall competition over natural resources increased due to a saturation of space, but that at the same time a balance between the two groups has been broken. The convergence of production systems, as a result of farmers engaging in cattle breeding and herdsmen in agriculture, entailed the disappearance of both ecological and economic complementarity between the two groups – a process that is said to have been accelerated by the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. The interpretation of these conflicts depends on the – sometimes implicit – assumption that formerly, in an often unspecified epoch in the past, relations between farmers and herdsmen could be conceived of in terms of symbiosis – a relationship based on mutual dependence and mutual advantage with implied complementarity in the ecological and economic spheres.

While noticeable signs of change in relations between France and her former colonies in Africa began to appear in the post-cold war era, particularly since 1990, elements of continuity include their enduring historical and cultural ties; their informal, intimate, and secretive politico-diplomatic relations, typified by the bi-annual franco-African summit meetings; and the fact that when all is said and done, the contintent remains of great economic importance to France. As for the gradual process of democratisation which has swept throughout francophone Africa in recent years, there is evidence that this has been selectively supported by France according to criteria pertaining more to her core foreign-policy interests in Africa than to ideological, legalistic, or humanitarian considerations.

Observation of the 2005 Ethiopian elections in two rural communities in south-east Amhara State reveals a picture very different from that presented in national-level analyses derived largely from urban areas. Deeply entrenched attitudes to power and government in the study area make the idea of peaceful electoral competition inconceivable. Peasants are first and foremost concerned to vote for the winning side, since to do otherwise carries intense risks to their welfare and even survival. The freedom with which the main opposition party was able to campaign until a few weeks before the election convinced many peasants that the government had abdicated, and that they should vote for the opposition as the likely winners. Belated mobilisation of the ruling party and state apparatus challenged this perception and created great uncertainty. This peasantry's political, economic and cultural alienation, allied to authoritarian rule and a lack of voter information placed genuinely ‘free and fair’ elections out of reach.

South Africa's growing economic presence across the African continent has sparked a debate in public and scholarly circles as to its intentions. While some have been quick to see South African business and parastatals as part of a larger hegemonic project pursued by Pretoria, the authors’ more structured analysis of economic ties with Africa reveals a more complex picture. Institutionalised forms of regional cooperation, such as SACU and SADC, must be contrasted with the activities of South African multinationals and parastatals on the wider African stage to understand the possibilities and limitations of hegemonic practice open to South Africa. Beyond its own region, a key determinant will be its relations with the other leading African power, Nigeria, as well as its ability to compete with other external actors. Finally, the role of ideology is a crucial measure of South African hegemony, and while certainly its ‘soft power’ is evident at the societal level, some African elites actively resist the pull of South Africa-based ideas.

Religious modes of thinking about the world are widespread in Africa, and have a pervasive influence on politics in the broadest sense. We have published elsewhere a theoretical model as to how the relationship between politics and religion may be understood, with potential benefits for observers not just of Africa, but also of other parts of the world where new combinations of religion and politics are emerging. Application of this theoretical model requires researchers to rethink some familiar categories of social science.