All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole.

Mikhail Bakhtin

In the last three or four years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in African popular art forms so strong that it promises to become a movement. The individual researchers scattered over the continent, who for decades have been pursuing their interest in these arts in isolation, are suddenly finding that there is a forum emerging. Issues formerly raised piecemeal, mainly in short articles and often as a sideline by people whose principal expertise lay in some better-established field, are now getting full-scale treatment in the detailed monographs that are appearing from different parts of Africa. It seems the right moment to set out the scope and possibilities of this field, and to lay claim to a central position for it in the humanities and social sciences.

The most obvious reason for giving serious attention to the popular arts is their sheer undeniable assertive presence as social facts. They loudly proclaim their own importance in the lives of large numbers of African people. They are everywhere. They flourish without encouragement or recognition from official cultural bodies, and sometimes in defiance of them. People too poor to contemplate spending money on luxuries do spend it on popular arts, sustaining them and constantly infusing them with new life.

This article engages the very definition/meaning of diaspora as a concept at a moment when scholars are rushing to embrace the field of diaspora studies. Much of the current discussion continues to suggest that diaspora is merely a logical manifestation of dispersion, no matter how the diaspora was created or how long it had been in existence. This essay argues that linkages that tie the diaspora together must be articulated and are not inevitable, and that the diaspora is both process and condition. As a process it is always in the making, and as condition it is situated within global race and gender hierarchies. However, just as the diaspora is made, it can be unmade, and thus scholars must explore the moments of its unmaking. Indeed, the efforts to unravel the constituent elements of the diaspora(s) raise significant questions concerning how Africa is conceptualized in relation to its diaspora. These efforts also underscore the need to examine overlapping diasporas from many historical locations.

How do African urban residents, who are conventionally assumed to operate within parochial, highly localized confines, operate at larger scales? How do they reach a “larger world”? The article looks at some of the overall effects on African cities and their residents of a global process of scalar recomposition and the reconfiguration of social cohesion that ensues. By examining renovations in a traditional Islamic institution, zawiyyah, an example is provided of ways in which urban Africans attempt to act effectively within larger domains.

Issues relating to household and community are of central importance in social scientific research on contemporary Africa and the experience of its peoples in the twentieth century. Early anthropological theory categorized African social organization, for comparative purposes, with that of indigenous America, New Guinea, and other classless and early state systems. Most of these other peoples are now minority populations in colonized states, politically and economically marginal. Only in Africa have advancing capitalism and non-peasant, relatively weakly stratified, highly flexible forms of social organization been forced into a long-term working relationship with one another over such a vast area and such a wide variety of conditions. Most recent scholarship—and the scholarship I will limit myself to in this paper—is not only concerned with substantive questions of what has happened as a result of this confrontation, but also with the methodological problems of describing and explaining it in a comparative framework.

Over the last twenty years, this has resulted in two major shifts of approach, which cut across all the divisions amongst the classic theoretical schools of thought. They are, first, a shift from explanation of local forms in terms of local social and ecological conditions to consideration of their position in regional, national, and international structures; and, second, a shift from classification of local forms in typological schema, either synchronic or evolutionary, to understanding in terms of processes of change which are to some degree indeterminate.

Taking the first issue, the increasing use of terms like “household” and “community” constitutes a relatively new departure. They are classic analytical concepts in the study of peasant societies and carry with them the implications of a local social structure and tradition of life within a wider stratified political and economic system under a state form of government.

The violent irruption of African youth into the public and domestic spheres seems to have resulted in the construction of their behavior as a threat, and to have provoked, within society as a whole, a panic that is simultaneously moral and civic. At issue are the bodies of young people and their behavior, which escape the constraints of social construction, their sexuality and pleasure, as well as the formulas of their action and presence as junior social actors. The new situation has consequences for several issues, the most important of which are the redefinition of the relationships between identity and citizenship in the whirlwind of globalization, the metamorphoses of the processes of socialization, the production of new forms of inequality accompanied by their own representations and imaginations, and the extraordinary mutation of the chronological and psychological constructions of the passage from youth to adulthood.

This paper is an analysis of state practice in respect of racial classification and its epistemological underpinnings in twentieth-century South Africa. It shows how apartheid racial categories—drawing heavily on those enacted by the segregationist state—were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control by a state animated by fantasies of omniscience as much as omnipotence. The architects of apartheid racial classification policies recognized explicitly that racial categories were constructs, rather than descriptions of real essences—a version of the idea of race which enabled the bureaucratization of “common sense” notions of racial difference and which contributed direcdy to the enormous powers wielded by racial classifiers. If constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The ubiquity of the state's racial designations, and the extent to which they meshed with lived hierarchies of class and status, meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

This paper is a general interpretation of the social determinants of health and health care in Africa over the past century. The evolution of health cannot be separated from the broader story of social change. The political and economic forces which shaped the continent's history also established the framework within which patterns of diagnosis and treatment, health and disease, emerged.

The implication of this is that healers of all kinds—whether doctors or “traditional healers”—have been less influential than we commonly think in shaping states of health or in healing the sick.

This position opens up a range of difficult problems which are addressed in the following pages. What is the exact nature of the link between the broad political-economic forces and the distribution of health or disease? Which of these forces have driven therapeutics along its historical path, and by what means? What role do healers actually play?

The body of the paper is divided into three main sections. The first explores the micro-sociology of changing treatment of illness. In most African communities several kinds of healers work side by side: physicians or medical assistants, specialists in sorcery or spirit possession, Christian or Muslim religious healers, and others. Multiple authorities co-exist, and therefore no one healer decides the cause or cure of illnesses in a way which others accept as beyond challenge. But treatment cannot exist without coordination. Someone must decide on a course of action when lives are threatened.

The recent wars in the DR Congo have led to a marked upsurge in both elite and popular discourse and violence around belonging and exclusion, expressed through the vernacular of “autochthony.” Dangerously flexible in its politics, nervous and paranoid in its language, unmoored from geographic or ethno-cultural specificity, borrowing energy both from present conflicts and deep-seated mythologies of the past, the idea of autochthony has permitted comparatively localized instances of violence in the DRC to inscribe themselves upward into regional, and even continental logics, with dangerous implications for the future. This article analyzes how the “local”/“stranger” duality of autochthony/allochthony expresses itself in the DRC through rumors, political tracts, and speeches and how it draws energy from imprecise overlaps with other powerful, preexisting identity polarities at particular scales of identity and difference: local, provincial, national, regional. Across each, autochthony operates as a loose qualifier, a binary operator: autochthony is adjectival, relational rather than absolute, policing a distinction between in and out, and yet not indicating, in itself, which in/ou t distinction is intended. Thus many speak of “Sons of the Soil,” but of which soil, precisely? The slipperiness between different scales of meaning permits the speaker to leave open multiple interpretations. This indefiniteness is a paradoxical source of the discourse's strength and weakness, suppleness and nervousness, its declarative mood and attendant paranoia.

Over the past four years the Ivoirian crisis has seen as its central dynamic the mobilization of the categories of autochthony and territorialized belonging in an ultranationalist discourse vehicled by the party in power. More than just a struggle to the death for state power, the conflict involves the redefinition of the content of citizenship and the conditions of sovereignty. The explosion of violence and counterviolence provoked and legitimated by the mobilization of these categories does not necessarily signify either the triumph of those monolithic identities “engineered” during the colonial occupation, nor the disintegration of the nation-state in the context of globalization. The Ivoirian case shows the continued vitality of the nation-state: not only as the principal space in terms of which discourses of authochtony are constructed, but also in terms of the techniques and categories that the political practice of autochthony puts into play. While in some senses the Ivoirian conflict appears to be a war without borders—in particular with the “spillover” of the Liberian war in the west during 2003—it is above all a war about borders, crystallizing in liminal spaces and social categories and on emerging practices and ways of life.

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.

This article draws attention to the structural inequalities that characterize the position of Africans within the global symbolic and political economies of African wildlife conservation, and theorizes these inequalities in ways that move beyond the critique of conservation as simply a colonial or neocolonial imposition. Conceptualizing wildlife conservation in Africa as a mode of global capitalist production, the article argues both for broadening the analytic lens through which the effects of conservation on Africa are assessed, and for redressing the global power dynamics that currently surround the protection of African wild animals.

Pastoralist societies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda) face more demands on their way of life than at any previous time. Population growth, loss of herding lands to farmers, ranchers, game parks, and urban growth, increased commoditization of the livestock economy, out-migration by poor pastoralists, and dislocations brought about by drought, famine, and civil war are increasing throughout the region. These problems are intensified as international development programs encourage privatization and individuation of formerly communally held resources. The examples of the Maasai, Boran, and Rendille of Kenya demonstrate that East African pastoralists are responding to the social, political, and economic challenges with increased economic diversification including agro-pastoralism, wage labor, and increased market integration. These changes result in increased social and economic stratification, urban migration, and diminished nutrition for women and children.

The recent upsurge of “autochthony” and similar notions of belonging is certainly not special to Africa. All over the world, processes of intensifying globalization seem to go together with fierce struggles over belonging and exclusion of “strangers.” A central question in the contributions to this special issue concerns the apparent “naturalness” of autochthony in highly different settings. How can similar slogans seem so self-evident and hence have such mobilizing force under very different circumstances? Another recurrent theme is the somewhat surprising “nervousness” of discourses on autochthony. They seem to promise a basic security of being rooted in the soil as a primal form of belonging. Yet in practice, belonging turns out to be always relative: there is always the danger of being unmasked as “not really” belonging, or even of being a “fake” autochthon. A comparative perspective on autochthony—as a particular pregnant form of entrenchment—may help to unravel the paradoxes of the preoccupation with belonging in a globalizing world.

Rapid urbanization has been perhaps the most dramatic of the social phenomena that marked the end of the colonial era in Africa. From a situation in 1950 in which the total urban population was no more than 28 million, the figure had by 1984 jumped to well over 125 million, representing a sharply increasing proportion of the total population (World Bank, 1986a). Yet, after an initial period when urbanization was welcomed as a positive tendency in the modernization of the continent (Friedmann, 1961) there is today some ambivalence as to the contributions of urban centers to the overall development of the continent. There are those (Santos, 1971; Bardinet, 1977) who argue that urban centers have failed to serve as a major force in the economic transformation of African countries but have, instead, highlighted their economic dependency and the negative social consequences that go with this. Others (Collier and Lai, 1980; Mabogunje, 1983) argue that much of the limited development that has been achieved in these countries has been due in no small measure to non-farm activities of these urban centers. Cities and towns are therefore apprehended not as the cause but only as the scene of social and economic problems, their role being to draw attention to endemic poverty and social degradation which otherwise remain buried and unobtrusive in the rural areas. When it comes to the role of urban planning and policies in resolving these problems, the pervading impression is of the failure of governments in most African countries to make any appreciable impact on the situation, a fact which has in turn provoked serious debates as to the nature of the post-colonial state in Africa (Hyden, 1983).

In Marginal Gains (2004), Jane Guyer traces the logic of African socioeconomic practices that have long confounded attempts by modern states to impose what she terms “formalization.” Nowhere is the tension between pragmatically “informal” economic life and putatively “formal” state structures more evident than in the domain of poverty interventions, which typically aim to bring state institutional power to bear precisely on those who are most excluded from the “formal sector.” This article offers a preliminary analysis of some new rationalities of poverty alleviation observable in recent South African political and policy discourse. I will argue that new sorts of programmatic thinking about poverty represent a new development within (and not simply against) neoliberalism, and that they seek, by abandoning the regulatory and normalizing functions usually associated with social assistance, to bring the formal and the informal into a new sort of relation.

This paper deals with fashion (la Sape) and its use among Congolese youth as a vehicle to borrow new identities. La Sape is an ambiguous adventure, a sort of Baudelairian voyage, that leads Congolese youth (Sapeurs), not only from a third world city to Paris and Brussels, but also from social dereliction to psychological redemption. It authenticates and validates their quest for a new social identity which the African city has failed to provide its overwhelming population of youth. It is, above all, a study of the interactions between clothing and social (and cultural) identities and the transfer of meaning from one to the other, and vice versa. La Sape allows the Sapeur to define the boundaries that separate him from the Other, but also serves as a defined social territory which distinguishes the Sapeurs from the rest of society. Ultimately, la Sape is redolent with political meanings. It is a political statement which, I argue in this paper, is directed toward the West, the former colonizer, as well as toward the authoritative structures of the African state. I also demonstrate that this political discourse is inseparable from the egotistical and hedonistic dimensions of la Sape.

It is important to make clear from the beginning what this review will cover and what it will not. Its focus will be on “traditional” and Christian religious movements in the last hundred years. By movements are meant widespread and grassroots adherence to religious ideas, symbols and rituals, sometimes brief in duration, sometimes long-lasting; sometimes lacking and sometimes acquiring formal organizational structures. The review will deal, therefore, with questions of “popular conciousness” rather than with the development of formal theologies. It will not review the literature on African Islam nor have much to say about religious movements and politics in pre-colonial Africa. Both these, of course, are major omissions, not only leaving out topics which are of great importance in themselves but also depriving analysis of modern traditional and Christian movements of an invaluable comparative and historical context. To seek to cover them also in one review, however, would be to risk a mere listing. It seems more useful to develop an argument on the past, present, and future direction of work on the interaction of religious movements and politics by focusing on a limited, but nevertheless still huge, topic and period.

“Dependence” has become the latest euphemism in a long list of such terms. No doubt its original intent was critical. The term itself emerged out of the “structuralist” theories of Latin American scholars and was meant as a rebuttal to “developmentalist” or “modernization“ theories and “monetarist” policy views. André Gunder Frank has traced its intellectual origins and its limitations in a recent combative paper entitled “Dependence is dead; long live dependence and the class struggle.”

We live in a capitalist world economy, one that took definitive shape as a European world economy in the sixteenth century (see Wallerstein 1974) and came to include the whole world geographically in the ninteenth century. Capitalism as a system of production for sale in a market for profit and appropriation of this profit on the basis of individual or collective ownership has only existed in, and can be said to require, a world system in which the political units are not co-extensive with the boundaries of the market economy. This has permitted sellers to profit from strengths in the market whenever they exist but enabled them simultaneously to seek, whenever needed, the intrusion of political entities to distort the market in their favor. Far from being a system of free competition of all sellers, it is a system in which competition becomes relatively free only when the economic advantage of upper strata is so clear-cut that the unconstrained operation of the market serves effectively to reinforce the existing system of stratification.

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.

This article explores the manner in which ethical concerns have been addressed within Africa's progressive intellectual tradition through the eras of anti-colonial, pan-African, and nationalist struggles for freedom, and into the era of globalization. Africa is characterized as the region bearing the most negative con-sequences of globalization, a reality that offers a critical vantage point well-attuned to the challenge of demystifying the global policy dictates currently dominating the global landscape. Ethical considerations are conceptualized as being framed by considerations of identity, epistemology, and methodology. It is suggested that Africa's radical intellectuals have effectively pursued anti-imperialist ethics, and developed regional and national intellectual communities of scholars who have worked for freedom, often challenging and subverting the constraints of dominant and received disciplinary approaches and paradigms. However, it is suggested that the liberatory promise of the anticolonial nationalist eras has not been fulfilled. While the fortunes of higher education and research in Africa have declined, scholars have established independent research networks in and beyond the campuses to keep African intellectual life alive. However, it is argued that Africa's intellectuals need to engage more proactively with the methodological implications of their own liberatory intellectual ethics. To do so requires that we address the intellectual challenges of Africa's complicated and contradictory location in the world and ensure that our unique vantage points inform methodological and pedagogical strategies that pursue freedom.