China's expanded links to Africa have created a discourse of how to characterize those ties. Western political forces and media have criticized every aspect of China's activities in Africa, while Chinese, with significant support from Africans, have mounted a spirited defense. This article examines several factors that make China's links with Africa distinctive, including China's aid and migration policies, the distinctive “Chinese model” of foreign investment and infrastructure loans, and the development model known as the “Beijing Consensus.” It argues that particular aspects of China's links with Africa make the People's Republic of China (PRC) seem a lesser evil than the West in terms of support for Africa's development and respect for African nations.

The recent emergence of homosexuality as a central issue in public debate in various parts of Africa has encouraged a stereotypical image of one homophobic Africa, often placed in opposition to a tolerant or depraved West. What is striking is that this image of Africa as homophobic is promoted by both traditionalists who insist that homosexuality is a Western intrusion and by the Western media that focus on homophobic statements from African political and religious leaders. What both neglect, however, is the existence of internal debate and disagreements among Africans on the subject of homosexuality. In this article we try to counter this image of a homophobic Africa with a more nuanced discussion, including a comparison of different trajectories in the emergence of homosexuality as a public issue in four countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, and South Africa). The comparison highlights considerable variations in the ways in which the issue became politicized. There is a world of difference, for example, between the image of the homosexual as un Grand (a rich and powerful “Big Man”) who imposes anal penetration as a supreme form of subjection (as in Cameroon or Gabon, where homosexuality is associated with witchcraft and other occult forces; compare Achille Mbembe's visionary evocation of a “phallocracy”) and the often quite marginal persons who become victims of gay persecution in other contexts. More insight into the variations of what is loosely and inaccurately called “homophobia” can help connect international pressures for decriminalization and protection to local circumstances. Working through local activists is crucial for the effort to counter homophobia in Africa.

The concept of the city on the sub-Saharan continent presents a vast field of study whose limits we must define. Urbanization entails spatial, social, and temporal phenomena and thus almost by definition requires an interdisciplinary approach. Such an approach could certainly encompass history, geography, demographics, economics, political science, architecture and town planning, as well as anthropology and sociology. The interdisciplinary study of urbanization deserves emphasis because the research conducted in these different directions over the course of the past twenty-five years has been very uneven. We must not confuse the concepts of urbanization and modernization, although to distinguish the difference between the two can be a delicate matter. Since the colonial intrusion, the importance of making such a distinction is all the greater because the development of the former notion was subsumed by that of the latter.

Another remark: The author's personality, in writing this overview paper, is obviously present. As a piece of work written by an historian, this text takes into account the past of African cities and their evolutionary process, from their pristine origins to the eve of independence. This paper is mainly about the past, it touches only occasionally on the characteristics of modern African towns since independence and their likely future; in spite of social sciences constituting a whole, an individual cannot grasp everything. The analyses devoted to town planning and urban economics have been left to another specialist. In conformity with the author's education and interests, temporal dimensions will receive priority over transversal conceptual divisions; thus, the concept of time and change will tend to be neglected.

The connections between democracy and sexuality—that is, between civil liberties and the protection of nonconforming sexualities—are rarely discussed in Africa. On the contrary, nonconforming sexualities have been instrumentalized to entrench dictatorships and to weaken democracy. As was the case in early twentieth-century Europe and North America, homophobia has become a political tool used by conservative politicians to promote self-serving agendas. Heterosexuality is also idealized by an acute ahistoricization of African politics by the Western media and civil society. The problem is also compounded by the distortion of African history promulgated by the dictatorial leadership on the continent.

Temporality in contemporary Kinshasa is of a very specific eschatological kind and takes its point of departure in the Bible, and more particularly in the Book of Revelation, which has become an omnipresent point of reference in Kinshasa's collective imagination. The lived-in time of everyday life in Kinshasa is projected against the canvas of the completion of everything, a completion which will be brought about by God. As such, the Book of Revelation is not only about doom and destruction, it is essentially also a book of hope. Yet the popular understanding of the Apocalypse very much centers on the omnipotent presence of evil. This article focuses on the impact of millennialism on the Congolese experience, in which daily reality is constantly translated into mythical and prophetic terms as apocalyptic interlude.

This paper argues that even with the incorporation of land policy provisions into Kenya's new constitution, there is every reason to believe that in the near future, highly politicized land conflict will continue. This is because land politics in Kenya is a redistributive game that creates winners and losers. Given the intensely redistributive potential of the impending changes in Kenya's land regime—and the implications of the downward shift in the locus of control over land allocation through decentralization of authority to county governments—there is no guarantee that legislators or citizens will be able to agree on concrete laws to realize the constitution's calls for equity and justice in land matters. This article traces the main ways in which state power has been used to distribute and redistribute land (and land rights) in the Rift Valley, focusing on post-1960 smallholder settlement schemes, land-buying companies, and settlement in the forest reserves, and it highlights the long-standing pattern of political contestation over the allocation of this resource. It then traces the National Land Policy debate from 2002 to 2010, focusing on the distributive overtones and undertones of the policy and of the debate over the new constitution that incorporated some of its main tenets.

This survey can only be one historian's view of a large and controversial matter. African states are contested objects of study on two grounds, the one particular to the changing preoccupations of Africanists, the other common to the humanities in general. European colonialism was a living denial of the ability of Africans to organize their own sovereignties. African studies emerged out of colonialism's decay, in part a sort of recantation, in part a dimension of informal empire. The analysis of past and present African states could not fail to act as a lightning conductor of warring emotions, ideologies, and theories, categories which have often not been very distinct. The first African histories after the colonial era tended to be, as the first studies in political science were necessarily, studies in state-formation as achievement. In more recent years, it has been objected that these were really chronicles of injury, not, as was thought, of pride; for states were and are engines of oppression, not civilization (for early protests, see Soyinka, 1967; Wrigley, 1971; Chanock, 1972b; and later, Markovitz, 1977: 25-55). Moreover, most Africans did not actually live in states until colonial rule fastened Leviathan's yoke upon them. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history could be said to have been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states.

The dispute was really over the evolutionist assumption that it is in some sense “better” to live in states, a premise so deeply rooted in most of us that it can seem almost an insult to explore analytically “the notion of statelessness, long abandoned by historians of Africa” (Uzoigwe, 1980: 115).

Recent assessments of the performance and prospects of African economies portray a deepening economic crisis centered on the problem of food supplies. During the last ten years, a rapidly rising number of Africans have had an increasingly difficult time getting enough to eat. By all accounts, domestic food supplies are falling further and further behind domestic needs; both governments and consumers face serious problems in procuring the kinds and quantities of food they want at prices they can afford to pay. Chronic hunger and malnutrition are spreading, escalating quickly into famine at times of environmental or financial crisis. Covering food deficits from foreign sources has also become more difficult in the last decade. World prices of grains have risen; soaring petroleum prices have put heavy strains on many African countries' balances of payments and worsened their terms of trade; and agricultural exports have not increased sufficiently to cover rising import bills. Food aid to Africa has grown at unprecedented rates in the last decade, but it is neither adequate to meet shortterm needs, nor is it a solution to the crisis in the long run.

The question to which this review will be primarily addressed is whether the food crisis in Africa is mainly a result of lagging or insufficient agricultural production or whether it is part of a larger crisis of economic management, reflected in chronic balance of payments deficits, rising foreign indebtedness, inflation, low productivity, corruption, waste, and deteriorating standards of living for all but a privileged few. For the most part international agencies, from the OAU to the World Bank, have attributed the crisis to declining or stagnant agricultural production brought about by government policies which discourage or inhibit agricultural growth. The analysis walks on two legs. First, aggregate production indices compiled by African governments and/or the international agencies themselves suggest that, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural output per capita has stagnated or even declined in recent years. Second, studies of development policy in several Asian and Latin American economies (Little et al., 1970) showed that strategies of import-substituting industrialization (widely practiced in the 1950s and 1960s) tend to discriminate against agriculture. After independence, African governments frequently adopted similar policies with, it is argued, similar results: in Africa's largely agrarian economies, the resulting decline in agricultural output (or growth) not only led to food shortages and mounting balance of payment deficits, but also undermined the entire process of economic development.

The straightforward logic of experience and the long route along the highways and byways of ethnography and theory have brought me to the same point: a conviction that in Africa in the centuries before its conquest social and cultural life was far more inventive from day to day than we can now easily imagine, steeped as old intellectual frameworks are in the equation between non-literacy and a repetitive “tradition,” and framed as our own social life has been by the organized repositories, routinized access and incremental growth patterns that ensure order and longevity to our own legacies of knowledge. Alongside the kinship, kingship and cult of classic social organizational analysis, attentive reading of African sources suggests another and different social project: the creation of variety amongst people in their skills and intellectual reach, not only reproducing a finite set of known roles and functions with respect to a “system of thought” but also endorsing a constant and volatile engagement on its boundless frontiers.

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.

Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically different and massively unequal worlds to coexist. The disease and the humanitarian response unsettled social accommodations that had become established between existing burial practices and hospital medicine, local political structures and external political subjection, mining interests and communities, and those suspected of “sorcery” and those suspicious of them.

In the wake of the last democratic elections in Ghana, which took place in December 1996, the electoral commission published and distributed a poster that depicted a voter who was approached by both the Devil and an angel. While the former told the man to sell his vote for money, the latter made it clear that his vote was his voice, thereby insinuating that selling his vote would boil down to selling himself to the “powers of darkness.” The paper seeks to explain how Christianity, especially the pentecostal variant highly popular in southern Ghana, came to cast political discourse in religious terms. On the basis of the examination of a popular Ghanaian movie about a chief who indulges in ritual murder in order to generate wealth and power, it is shown that in Ghana a public debate is going on about the (im) morality of power. In this debate, rumors about the occult sources of power and wealth form the flip side of politicians' claims of being linked with the divine. In distinction to established mission churches, pentecostalism takes such rumors about the threat of sorcery as seriously as the aim to turn Ghana into a Christian country. Presenting themselves as the sole members of society able to contain sorcery, pentecostalists claim to have the power to reveal the occult sources of those in power and subsequently to purify politics and politicians from occult traces and draw them closer to God.

I wish first to thank the National Panels Committee and the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association for extending this kind invitation to me.

Allow me to pay homage to the man after whom this series of lectures was named. Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola has been in detention for 134 days, that is more than four months, since June 24, 1994. I had the opportunity and honor to meet him about two years ago, when I headed the Department of Culture and Communications in Benin and was in charge of a project known as “The Slave Route Project,” which was similar to Bashorun Abiola's campaign for reparations. Mr. Abiola visited Benin and had long talks with President Soglo.

Without interfering with the domestic affairs of any particular country, but also without seeking to pour oil on the fire, let me mention that it is a shame for Africa and for human civilization at the end of the twentieth century that a man should be arrested for winning elections. Every additional day Bashorun Abiola spends in detention makes the crisis more serious and more intolerable.

Whatever difficulties they face, however complex the national situation, present rulers in Chief Abiola's country should realize that they are making a martyr at their own expense and that their interest is to release, as early as possible, a man whose innocence is evident to all. What in the eyes of non-Nigerians still makes Nigeria a great country and a model to all Africa is certainly not a reign of sheer force but the tenacity and courage of Nigerian democrats in their continuing struggle for human rights and the rule of law.

South Africa's economic and political liberalization have engendered new patterns of immigration and urbanization that find South Africans and foreign migrants converging on the streets of inner-city Johannesburg. As they interact, citizens and non-nationals have developed competing idioms for relating to one another and the space they share. For South Africans, this often means appealing to a nativist idiom that locates commonality amidst an allochthonous citizenry while attempting to prohibit foreign transplantation. Non-nationals counter this with an idiom of permanent transit, a way of positioning themselves as outsiders lodged in a superior and unrooted state. These idioms represent competing visions for the inner city's future. For South Africans, the idiom is a generative node of modern nationalist formation. For those permanently passing through the city, it is an idiom of a denationalized “nowhereville.”

Broadly defined, civil society is the “private sphere of material, cultural and political activities resisting the incursions of the state” (Fatton 1992, 4-5). While such a broad definition is incomplete and in-deed simplistic, and will acquire more specificity as the analysis proceeds, it will suffice for our immediate purposes. In this general and provisional configuration, civil society represents a counterweight to state power and can thus serve as a critical agent of democratization. Civil society is thus a constant thorn in the monopolizing political claims of the state. This is not to imply that there is an unbridgeable chasm and an unmitigated opposition between state and civil society. In fact, there is a dialectical interaction between state and civil society. The state is transformed by a changing civil society; civil society is transformed by a changing state. Thus, state and civil society form a fabric of tightly interwoven threads, even if they have their own in-dependent patterns.

The state penetrates civil society through its multiple economic interventions, its disciplinary regulations of private behavior and its ideological “interpellations.” The state aspires to become totalitarian because ruling classes are predators bent on maximizing their supremacy; they seek therefore a complete appropriation of civil society. Civil society, in turn, penetrates the state through the erection of protective trenches against coercive abuse, material extraction and political compliance. Civil society aspires to negate the state, and subaltern classes, who are the state's principal victims, are determined to minimize their losses by abolishing it.

The contradiction between state and civil society is, however, not that simple.

Since the 2000s, Tanzania has witnessed the return in the public sphere of a reconfigured version of Ujamaa as a set of moral principles embodied in the figure of the first president of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere. The persisting traces of Nyerere and Ujamaa are not so evident in actual political practices or economic policies, but rather in collective debates about politics and morality—in short, in contemporary imaginaries of the nation. Contributing to a long-standing discussion of the moral stature of Tanzania’s “father of the nation,” the article explores how and why a shared historical memory of Nyerere is being built or contested to define, mediate, and construct Tanzanian conceptions of morality, belonging, and citizenship in the polis today.

Africa's involvement in the changing world economy has been a long one, and its effects on the lives of Africans have been profound. Samir Amin and W. W. Rostow, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and Samora Machel, would hardly dispute such a statement. But the question of whether this involvement has led Africans along a road toward material and social progress or into a dead end is very much in dispute.

The title of this paper is the same as that of the introductory section of S. Herbert Frankel's classic study of 1938, Capital Investment in Africa. Becoming part of the world economy, for Frankel (1938: 1-3, 7), entailed the diffusion of Europe's capital, technology, ideas, and “civilized” form of government to closed, static, and undifferentiated economies. Now, writers such as André Gunder Frank (1967), Samir Amin (1974a, 1976), Walter Rodney (1972), and Immanuel Wallerstein (1979) stress instead the inexorable logic of a capitalist world system, whose effects on Africa are stifling instead of liberating. Both views share a unitary conception of the world economy, the first through a smug assumption that existing economic structures are part of civilization, and the second through an argument that sees change in Africa as a reflection of the growth of capitalism in Europe. The first conception of a world economy defined Africa's role as little more than holding back progress on a predetermined road; the second implied that Africa's influence on the world economy was not nearly so great.

In the 1960s, scholars of Africa reversed such biases for a time. Especially among historians, an Africanist perspective emphasized “African activity, African adaptations, African choice, African initiative” (Ranger, 1968: xxi).

Increasing commercialization, population growth, and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases in which rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to land when the actual rules of access change. While this situation may sound grim, the paper also explores how women have responded to reductions in access to land. They have mounted both legal and customary challenges to inheritance laws, made use of anonymous land markets, organized formal cooperative groups to gain tenure rights, and manipulated customary rules using woman-to-woman marriages and mother-son partnerships. These actions have caused women to create new routes of access to land and in some cases new rights.