Those of us fortunate enough to be honored with the presidency of the ASA share a common dilemma: what to say at the occasion of the presidential address. Our dilemma is not the result of taking this occasion lightly; indeed, I have been making notes to myself for at least two years. Rather, it is the problem of what is appropriate to an organization such as the ASA.

The association represents a host of different disciplines and interests. Its focus is on Africa, but not the events so much as the study of patterns and meaning of events. Its setting is in North America, but its constituency is tremendously diverse: native-born and naturalized, people of North American, African and European origin, institutional members as well as individual ones. Its officers, like myself, make campaign statements when we know the realities of the association only dimly; with time we realize how much of the continuity and wisdom of the organization come from the staff.

I did not feel comfortable with a statement about the current situation in Africa, about which we all know something, nor with a statement about Africanist scholarship, the reason for which we come to the panels and keynotes of a meeting such as this. What I do feel a call to express is a reflection on the association in relation to its history and the changing situations in Africa and North America and in relation to African studies. And so finally I would like to talk about “The African Studies Association at age 35.”

I am greatly honored to be giving the first Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Distinguished Lecture. I am grateful to the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States for giving me this role.

Although the first Abiola Lecture is being given today, the decision to launch such an annual event was taken by the ASA more than a year ago. That was of course before Chief M.K.O. Abiola entered the presidential race in Nigeria from which he seemed to have emerged the victor—but the results were never officially confirmed.

But there is another side to Chief Abiola's concerns. This is the crusade for reparations to be paid to black people for hundreds of years of enslavement, exploitation and degradation.

Africa has experienced a triple heritage of slavery—indigenous, Islamic and Western (Robertson and Klein 1983). The reparations movement seems to have concluded that although the indigenous and Islamic forms of slavery were much older than the trans-Atlantic version, they were much smaller in scale and allowed for greater upward social mobility—from slave to Sultan, from peasant to paramount chief.

Indigenous systems of slavery were uniracial—black masters, black slaves. Islamic forms of slave-systems were multi-racial, both masters and slaves could be of any race or color. Indeed, Egypt and Muslim India evolved slave dynasties. Western slave systems were the most racially polarized in the modern period—white masters, black slaves (biracial) (Winks 1972; Klein 1986; Lewis 1990).

As demands for democracy have swept across the continent since 1989, dramatic change has affected states in sub-Saharan Africa. Frustrated by declining economies and the failures of incumbent governments, people from many different social strata have called for an end to authoritarian rule. Events in Eastern Europe have served as a catalyst, and donor pressures have sometimes acted to facilitate such movements; but the real impetus for change arises from internal struggles which have been incubating for several decades. In response, authoritarian states have moved to liberalize repressive structures, allow multiparty competition and move towards competitive elections. To many analysts such trends represent an important new departure that holds out promise for a more hopeful future. But others are less optimistic, noting the legacies of authoritarian systems and other structural obstacles to sustainable democratic rule. Whatever the outcome, the struggle for the future is now hotly contested.

Meanwhile, these processes present a potent challenge for political and social analysis. Why are these demands for change occurring now? What is the role of institutional arrangements and groups in “civil society” in transitions from single-party authoritarian regimes towards multiparty systems? Who are the key actors and which groups are excluded? Do multiparty elections lead to greater tolerance, expanded participation, respect for the rule of law and more accountability? What is required to sustain democratic rule? These and other questions have spawned a lively debate among Africanists, a debate with important theoretical and practical implications.

Political analysts, both liberal and historicist, point to the quality of associational life in civil society as an important factor affecting the installation and consolidation of democratic regimes. For de Tocqueville (1966), democracy hinges on the creation of voluntary associations through which citizens learn to act politically and to demand accountability from the state. For Gramsci, organizations in civil society—such as schools, churches, unions, and interest groups—can help to legitimate the prevailing political regime by either reinforcing or challenging the way power is exercised (Femia 1981). People therefore apparently get the governments they deserve: where they associate readily, govern themselves democratically, and assert independent opinions, they can contribute to the construction of sustainable democratic institutions, even at the macro-political level; where people eschew self-organization in favor of establishing personal ties to powerful patrons and by deferring to entrenched authority, they help to reproduce at all levels of the polity the patterns of rule that already prevail within the state and the broader society.

Africanists cannot comment definitively on the character of associational life in Africa because the contemporary literature is thin in several respects. We currently lack a theoretical framework to account adequately for the development and status of voluntary associations and the relationships of such groups to the state. The available conceptual models of group formation and interest representation—such as pluralism, neo-Marxism or corporatism—were designed to account for politics in parts of the world distant from Africa. When Africanists borrow these models, we too often do so unselectively and uncritically, failing to recognize that “the goal is not to recycle theory but to reinterpret it” (Bianchi 1989, 10).

The studies of African military establishments that appeared from the late 1960s, after the first wave of coups, were very much the products of their time. The theories of modernization and political development that were their starting point were the ideas of an epoch: that of decolonization, nation-building, internationalization of capital, consolidation of U.S. hegemony, and globalization of American social science. They are of interest now because aspects of that epoch are repeating themselves: in particular, the reassertion of U.S. and western hegemony, the return to free market orthodoxy, and a “third wave” of transitions to democracy (Huntington 1991).

Three overlapping debates dominated the literature on the military in developing countries during the 1960s and 1970s. They revolved initially around the conditions of democracy and civilian control. They shifted to the role of the military in modernization or development as armies moved into politics, then focused on political order following deep hegemonic crises in developing countries themselves and in their relations with the West.

Early studies of newly formed African armies and police establishments saw them as part of an institutional transfer of western paradigms of governance, along with the Westminster model and Gaullist presidentialism. Military professionalism was integral to the neocolonial enterprise of transferring power to elites, requiring accelerated training in metropolitan and local academies of African “Narcissuses in uniform” (First 1970, chap. 3).

Parallel with and spurred on in part by the emergence of Jamaican reggae onto the international pop music scene in the mid-1970s, the Jamaican Rastafarian movement, whose origins are to be found on the island of Jamaica in the early 1930s, has within the past two decades managed to expand beyond its island homeland and attract a widespread and culturally diverse global following.

Until now, the movement has drawn its largest and most committed following from among those whose indigenous culture has been suppressed, and in certain instances completely supplanted, by Western models imposed during centuries of European and American colonial expansion. For the young unemployed or underemployed Maori in New Zealand, Havasupai Indian living on a reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, West Indian struggling for survival in Brixton and Ghanaian in Accra trying to come to terms with urban living in a multiethnic, post-colonial African society, adherence to Rastafari provides an alternative source of meaning and identity to a life frequently punctuated by hopelessness, alienation and despair in what is often perceived as a hostile, corrupt and hypocritical Eurocentric environment.

If Rastafarianism functions as an ideological corrective to the suffering, exploitation and alienation experienced by young people of color the world over, it holds an especially heightened resonance and appeal for Africans and those of African descent. And while the messages expounded by the Rastafari promote love and respect for all living things and emphasize the paramount importance of human dignity and self-respect, above all else they speak of freedom from spiritual, psychological as well as physical slavery and oppression (things Africans have come to know much about over the course of the last four centuries, be it directly via the holocaust of the Middle Passage or indirectly through the degrading experience of colonization).

The research that has been done in the various areas of development has tended to focus on the structure of the state and economic modes of production. This approach ignores the intrinsic variables such as culture and traditional Africa's modes of association which incorporated the cyclical nature of existence and experience. This work departs from the traditional mode of development analysis by articulating the concept of social death as the basis for the reinvention of the African woman, consequently enabling a rethinking of development analysis formulations from a more authentic African perspective. For the purposes of this work, “Africa” and “African(s)” refer to and include physical, abstract and intellectual spaces involving precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial experiences of Africans and/or their interaction on the continent and in the diaspora. A viewpoint based on the assumption of Africa as an all-inclusive heritage, it requires the maintenance of the match between the African experience and the acquired modes of discourse that have been used to explore and exclude that experience.

For example, the orthodox school of thought looks at development from an economic perspective whereby the macroeconomic variables are such that that which cannot be quantified, the non-visible, is not a subject of study. On the other hand the historical approach of the radical school of thought (the political economy school of thought) has not done enough to incorporate the role of the traditional African woman into its mode of analysis. Both schools of thought are derived from the western unilineal mode of analysis which forms the strong base for the development and maintenance of scientific thought and practice.

In 1976 Nigeria committed itself to the provision of universal primary education (UPE) to its children. A basic, six-year level of education was seen as a means of creating unity between the many disparate groups making up Nigeria's citizenry. It was also seen as a means of working towards the equalization of educational opportunities throughout the nation by providing a minimum level to which all children would be educated (Ozigi and Ocho 1981; Adesina 1982). The national commitment to UPE was endorsed by many, although not all, Nigerians (Casapo 1981, 1983).

A large commitment of money and the endorsement of many Nigerians were not enough to prevent a multitude of problems as UPE was put in place. The program has been a success in that many millions of children have received a primary education. However, a low quality of education was noted as an accompaniment to quantity education (Bray 1981). A survey of inspectors responsible for primary schools completed a decade after the initiation of UPE suggested that conditions in primary education were continuing to be such that quality education was difficult to obtain (Sunal, Osa, Gaba and Saleemi 1989). While some data are available describing primary schooling under the UPE program, little data are available from the teachers involved in it. The experience of primary school teachers as they perceive and report it has not been documented.

The comparative literature on regime change offers a range of plausible explanations for the democratic ferment that began spreading across Africa in 1989 (Joseph 1991; Bratton and van de Walle 1992a). Theorists of democratization in general focus on three areas of conceptual concern: structural and contingent factors that precipitate openings in authoritarian rule (Moore 1967; O'Donnell et al. 1986), the relative importance of elite behavior versus mass mobilization strategies of reform (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Karl 1986, 1990; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992), and diffusionist explanations of change (Huntington 1991). Within these broad rubrics, regional variations come into play. While many analysts readily assert that glasnost in the Soviet Union and the collapse of dictatorships in Eastern Europe influenced the rise of pro-democracy movements in Africa, leading theorists of democratic transitions have downplayed the relevance of external factors and the international context to political liberalization in Latin America during the 1980s (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Whitehead 1986; Lowenthal 1991). What this variance suggests is that theories of regime change must be historicized and contextualized in order to incorporate local conditions and circumstances.

Historian Achille Mbembe cautions against overemphasizing the specificity of Africa (1990)—but my point is different. Indeed, inasmuch as key theoretical propositions derived from the Latin American, Southern and Eastern European experiences have oriented a great deal of the recent conceptual and empirical work on democratization in Africa, the cultural dynamics of transitions bear closer scrutiny. The argument to be advanced here is that the efficacy of theories of democratic transition for analyzing political processes in any region of the world is hampered by a failure to problematize the relationship between regime change and the culture of politics.

Unlike certain area studies disciplines (Russian Studies and Oriental Studies, for example), African Studies has largely attracted scholars whose commitment to their subject transcends mere professionalism. The sensible assumption with regard to African Africanists is, of course, that their orientation would be decidedly pro-African, but within the discipline, the notion is widespread that at least for the most part, even non-African Africanists hold a patronal attitude towards the continent, its peoples and cultures and their future, routinely combining the role of champions with that of students. This paper will argue that very often, Africanist practice, while purporting to be responsive to the best interests of Africa and Africans, in fact has the effect of perpetuating notions of an Africa that never was. It will also call attention to some significant incongruities between the methodology of African Studies and the well known relational principles that inform inter-personal commerce in African cultures. Beyond exposing these discrepancies between the expected and the actual, and the incongruities between methodology and spirit, the discussion will argue for an infusion of the practice of the discipline with the attitudes that characterize African familial discourses.

I will warn at the outset that the ensuing argument adopts the position that one can make valid general statements about Africa, Africans, African cultures, African relational habits and the like, without necessarily suggesting a monolithic uniformity over the entire continent in any of the particulars. Furthermore, descriptions of, and assertions about, aspects of African life in the following pages cannot be construed as implying their eternal fixity and immutability through history.

For many young Malian men, trade offers, or seems to offer, the possibility of escape from the poverty endemic to their society. Important traders are well dressed, well fed, have large families and entree to high circles of wealth and power (Amselle 1987a). Many believe that, through dint of hard work, savvy and a with little luck, anyone can become a successful trader.

While no one knows exactly how many attempt a career in commerce, Malian cities and towns teem with boys and men engaged in petty trade. Women are also involved in trade, though most deal only in small quantities of cooked food or garden produce. Men and boys sell pre-recorded cassettes, cigarettes, kola and other inexpensive merchandise. All believe that if they do the right things, and it is the will of God, they will succeed.

Success, for men, means progressively increasing the size of their business and eventually owning a large store, several trucks or another large enterprise. Women generally do not operate financially important businesses. However, they may have substantial behind-the-scenes investment in them.

For a Malian man, becoming a prosperous merchant can be seen as a process of joining a commercial community. The members of the commercial community control access to the wealth and the connections that can transform a poor shopkeeper into a wealthy merchant. Aspiring merchants must follow a course of action that allows them to identify increasingly with and be accepted by this community.

An important feature of African village economies in the 1980s and 1990s has been the initiatives of local people in responding to the severe contraction in national economies and the structural changes introduced as part of the World Bank/IMF-inspired structural adjustment programs (SAPs) (Elabor-Idemudia 1993; Gladwin 1991; Taylor and MacKenzie 1992). This paper discusses the ongoing strategies of the women of a Ghanaian village to fluctuations in the domestic economy over the past decade, including responses to structural adjustment measures of the past few years emanating from the national center. Testimonies of women about contemporary economic changes and the impact on their households are presented to highlight women's culturally constructed ways of reflecting on their daily lives.

The ways in which changing economic situations have affected female roles in rural production and women's position in society have significant implications for national development. Moock (1986), Amadiume (1987), Beneria (1981) and Stamp (1989), among others, have pointed to the explanatory power of gender as a primary organizing principle of rural production and society. The significance of gender is twofold: first, as a means of categorizing labor and household headship; and secondly, as “fundamental to understanding structures and actions, including production relationships within and across households, the setting of goals and priorities, the mobilization of resources, risk-taking and the rights to benefits derived from increased agricultural productivity (Moock 1986, 7; see also Berry, 1985). In African rural economies, men and women have different cycles of rights and responsibilities. Through food production, women control their own cycles of rights and responsibilities. They are primarily responsible for and are concerned with the means by which the household is provisioned (Guyer 1984, 1986, 101; Henn 1983, 1984, 1; Bryson 1981). Most men earn their primary income from cash (export) cropping and the sale of their labor.

Uganda and Tanzania are two of many African countries with diverse post-colonial experiences that have taken steps towards political liberalization in the 1990s. In both countries, the continued pursuit of political liberalization is threatened by sectarianism. Any consideration of Uganda's political future immediately raises questions of how to resolve the seemingly intractable religious, regional and ethnic differences that have had devastating consequences in its recent history. Concerns voiced by non-Baganda over the recent upsurge in monarchism in Buganda and the resented perceived political advantage of individuals from western Uganda in positions of power are but two examples of the ever present issue of ethnicity in Uganda. Tanzania, which has had a less volatile recent past, was by the early 1990s seeing manifestations of religious sectarianism and undercurrents of ethnic tensions, including tensions between Muslim and Christian communities and between the African and Asian business communities, that were being expressed more openly than at any other time in its post-colonial history.

Rather than explore the new manifestations of sectarianism in Tanzania and Uganda, which remains an important task, this essay asks what are the countervailing forces within society that challenge these new or revived sectarian tendencies? Are there concurrent developments that provide bases for institutional change that might serve as alternatives to a political, economic and social order based on sectarianism? While there are no simple answers to these questions, research on the informal economy in Tanzania and its related organizations (1987-88) and currently on women's associations in Uganda (1992 to the present) suggests one arena where one finds such cross-cutting tendencies: in the emergence of new women's urban associations in the late 1980s.

There seems to be a myth surrounding the nature of South African women's participation in the struggle against apartheid. It is one which erroneously assumes that women, who must undertake almost complete responsibility for the welfare and survival of their families, are so limited by being passive, nurturing and motherly that they cannot at the same time be powerful, independent and politically active.

Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women's Verse (Lockett 1991) forwards the cause of self-definition for the women and mothers of South Africa. The insight it provides into the political commitment and social orientation of women helps dispel the myth of Mother Africa, which, as editor Cecily Lockett describes it,

seldom allows for any role other than those of wife and mother for the black woman, who continues to be a prisoner of gender, defined only in terms of black men. Similarly, the emphasis on courage, determination, and survival as positive qualities inherent in black women tends to glamorize their real suffering and oppression as, in many cases, sole breadwinner of single-parent families (1988, 35).

Perhaps that underestimation of the power of South African women can be dispelled in light of their literary contributions, which are now surfacing with increasing momentum. The role of South African women in society, as seen in Cecily Lockett's anthology, Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women's Verse, is all encompassing and inherently proactive.

History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labor, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, and limitation of political rights. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neoliberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps (Fanon 1963, 148).

Frantz Fanon's worries when he first published his book Les damnés de la terre in 1961 have been realized in Africa with a vengeance. Soon after political independence was won, most African countries degenerated into one-party authoritarianism and/or dictatorships and military rule. In many instances, one-party rule was justified or rationalized on the basis of the need for national unity or the need to devote national energies to economic development. In other instances, one party rule was said to reflect African traditional forms of democracy of consensus building, unlike western type democracy which encouraged opposition for its own sake, as reflected in the sharp divisions, class and otherwise, under capitalism (Nabudere 1989, 1-24). In some cases, one-party rule had been achieved due to the weakness of opposition parties at independence, and the ruling parties took advantage of their predominance either to legislate opposition parties out of existence, or simply make life difficult for the opposition.

In his novels and essays and most recently in the pages of The New York Times, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has repeatedly claimed that the “trouble with Nigeria” lies with its leaders (1982, 1993)—and few of those who followed the pronouncements of General Babangida would say that the actions of the Nigerian head of state were without import for the political future of the country. Achebe finds an intellectual ally in social scientist Giuseppe de Palma (1992), who argues that the actions of decision makers at critical junctures in the process of political opening shape the range of choices and the kinds of risks they and their successors face subsequently. Although the conditions that make democratic consolidation more or less difficult may be a function of levels of socioeconomic development, the presence or absence of a civic culture, or the existence of a middle class, the decisions of leaders matter. Democracies are crafted, not born whole.

This essay tries to identify the sources of difference in leadership style during a period of political reform. It proceeds from two observations. First, tactical and strategic choices of leaders are partly a function of the incentive structures political and economic institutions offer. Electoral rules, the amount of central control over important electoral resources such as the media, participation in regional monetary agreements—all of these institutions shape the options available for building coalitions.