Scholar-activists, by virtue of their critical engagement in the central issues of the day and their role in the production and dissemination of knowledge, have a unique opportunity to challenge the inherited orthodoxies in the academy and in the larger world in which we live. Within the field of African studies they have served as powerful critics and have broken new substantive, conceptual, methodological, and epistemological ground. To sustain this thesis, this essay explores three interrelated issues. First, it critically assesses the concept of value-free research—a notion which is commonly used to dismiss engaged scholarship as inherently flawed. Second, it documents how a number of African American scholars, passionately committed to social justice and to an end to racial oppression, produced pioneering work on Africa well before the field of African studies gained academic legitimacy in the post–World War II era. Finally, it highlights some of the critically important contributions that activist scholars have made to the study of Africa. The intellectual biographies of six prominent Africanists—Claude Aké, Basil Davidson, Francis Deng, Susan Geiger, Joseph Harris, and Walter Rodney—illuminate how political commitment can fuel theoretical and methodological innovation.

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 article is a literary analysis of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. It examines Equiano’s use of multiple discursive and rhetorical strategies in order to move the self of his slave narrator from “marginal” to “central” status in the international debate over slavery. The essay focuses on Equiano’s understanding of morality as a multicultural framework and his application of Christian rhetoric in explaining it. The main argument is that his search for religious understanding and his experiential knowledge allowed him to move between cultural “centers” and cultural “margins” while speaking with an authoritative voice against slavery.

This article examines the epistemological certainties and uncertainties of Akan spirit possession and witchcraft knowledge. It is based on fieldwork carried out between 1990 and 1991 in Dormaa-Ahenkro, Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana. The article examines the transcendental knowledge found among antiwitchcraft shrine gods and their priests and how the sacred knowledge of gods is utilized to counter witchcraft in the modern postcolony. This, it is argued, is an ambiguous process, involving the “partial” knowledge of the shrine priest versus the “complete” picture of events held by the god. However, it is suggested that antiwitchcraft practices are very popular among priests because this type of knowledge allows the priest to manage uncertainty at first hand. The witch confesses directly to the priest, and this knowledge is not mediated through a god.

In 1932 the governor of French Togoland announced an increase in taxes on Lomé market women because of the economic downturn caused by the Depression. Both the indigenous city council and a clandestine resistance movement opposed this fiscal plan, warning of social unrest. The strain triggered a protest by market women that spread beyond the colonial capital. This article offers a new explanation of the explosive tension by arguing that an organized male political campaign conjoined with a socioeconomic protest led by market women. It explores women's resistance as a performance of vodou ritual as a vehicle of shame and protest. Ultimately the violent, culturally marked protests marked the gendered perimeters of political authority for both Ewe women and men and further defined Ewe market women's conception of an Ewe self and the emergence of conflicting and contested notions of “Eweness” as a prelude to the independence struggle.

In the wake of the economic crisis in Cameroon and the disappearance of transitional pathways for youth that accompanied it, political and economic uncertainty turned into a new kind of social certainty for young people. Inspired by world-class models of success, and perceiving themselves as the “Unlimited” generation, they reacted by mapping out new biographical trajectories. Besides embracing beat-the-system strategies, they opted for migration to the West, seen as a “final port of call” at a historical juncture when the emphasis was on closure. For those who could not migrate, cyberspace provided a new space for encounters. With a view to capturing the excess energy of nonmigrating youths, political entrepreneurs created groups that sought to penetrate the state, which is still seen, even while being penetrated, as an unbounded Prometheus. In general, youths have tended to challenge a basic assumption of what has been called the “field of possibles”—that success is determined by one's cultural capital or baggage.

The focus on decentralization and civil society in Africa demands that scholars examine the factors that affect the institutions (i.e., rules and procedures) of local development organizations. Using two case studies from rural Senegal, this article investigates how the preferences of group participants, the authority positions of group actors, and the alternatives that individuals have shape the institutions of local organizations. The article then illustrates how the rules that emerge through institutional bargaining affect the decisions local organizations make about issues such as resource allocation and the implementation of development projects.

Interviews and documents are the basic elements sketching out this sociological analysis of university students in Cameroon, considered within a dynamic perspective. Our purpose is not to produce a critical analysis of the university system, but rather to listen to the discourses of students and teachers regarding the three following aspects: student life and ambitions, gender interaction in the university environment, and aims and strategies orienting their studies—knowing that the particular encapsulated society they are a part of is inscribed within a specific, global one upon which they depend, both initially (they have been socialized into it) and at the end of the process (the expectations invested in these youths). But what kind of job market—their key to a responsible, adult autonomy—do they face?

African states have become increasingly unable to provide adequate health care to their citizens due to debt, structural adjustment, poverty, and mismanagement. The health crisis is worsening in many areas and driving up mortality rates after decades of decline. This article investigates how African communities and their citizens respond in light of state inability to deliver health-related services. Drawing on a survey of more than five hundred rural Kenyans, our analysis shows that people are dissatisfied with government facilities and are turning to mission clinics and hospitals as well as to private clinics. A number of factors determine choice of health-care facility, including cost, level of education, socioeconomic background, the time taken to reach a facility, the type of disease requiring treatment, and agro-ecological zones. These findings have profound theoretical implications for health and development models, which normally are biased in favor of developed Western countries.

Nigerian parents and teachers were interviewed with the purpose of understanding how ordinary citizens view the unequal participation in education in Nigeria. Several areas of concern were identified in relation to participation in schooling such as its financial cost to families, the perceived limited value of education in adulthood, and the low quality of instruction. The interviewees acknowledged the continuing unequal participation of some groups and gave some reasons for their exclusion, though they did not seek to justify it. Specific policy suggestions are made for increasing participation in schooling by all children and for improving the quality of schooling.

This article examines the nature of conflicts over natural resources in the postwar period in Sussundenga district, Mozambique, as contextualized within a broad history of natural resource management in Mozambique from the colonial period through the postindependence and war years to the present day. The evidence suggests that the notion of a simple transition from wartime conflict to postwar sustainable development needs revision. Instead, some patterns and practices of resource use predated the war and have outlasted it, some began and ended with the peace agreement, and others accelerated or were initiated after the end of armed hostility. Throughout these periods, there have been social conflicts between and within different groups of resource users at all levels. Armed conflict did change patterns of resource use in some respects, but the result was not entirely negative for the natural resource base; forest resources in some areas actually regenerated during the war years. These conclusions build on arguments in environmental history and political ecology demonstrating that there is no deterministic relationship between humans and the natural environment. Rather, there is a range of possible interactions depending on locally varying contexts as well as broader social and political structures.

This article uses a Weberian model of patrimonialism to analyze clientalist and “staff” roles of child soldiers in the military regimes of the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. It thereby examines institutional aspects of child soldier identity and behavior not addressed in other standard models of child soldiers as coerced victims, revolutionary idealists, or delinquent opportunists. It shifts analytical attention from nation-state patrimonialism to the patrimonial dimensions of rebel regimes. It locates child soldiers within a social organization of domination and reciprocity based on violence structured through patronage ties with military commanders. It identifies child soldier “staff” functions within the administration of a patrimonial regime. A Weberian focus on the institutionalization and strategies of domination and dependency provides a corrective to views that exoticize child soldiers, decontextualize their behavior, or essentialize their “youth” as an explanatory principle.

After an Eritrea nationalist movement gained Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia in 1991, the newly formed government introduced a national educational policy based on the use of mother languages as the medium of instruction in all public schools. The stated purpose of the policy was to foster national unity, identity, and development while respecting cultural diversity. Nine different languages are spoken in Eritrea, among a population that consists equally of Christians and Muslims. The government has shown considerable flexibility in applying its language policy, particularly in its response to resistance from some predominantly Muslim segments of the population. Yet the implementation of the educational policy shows that three languages—English, Arabic, and Tigrinya—have come to dominate the majority of schools in Eritrea. This article examines how the state carried out its language policy from 1991 to 1997 and explores the problems it confronted in implementing the policy.

This article explores the movement to decriminalize sex work in the Gauteng province of Johannesburg from 1994 to 2002. In particular, I examine the actions and statements of the provincial Ministry of Safety and Security and other ministries in the decision to de facto decriminalize prostitution using the international language of human rights. This article illustrates that the movement to decriminalize sex work in the postapartheid period is not a sharp departure from the past. Rather, as early as the 1970s there were minority contingents that advocated a legalization or decriminalization of sex work, arguing for the public health or policy benefits that would follow. What is new in the postapartheid period is the justification for decriminalization, which now is based on the international language of human rights. Also new in the postapartheid period is the inclusion in the debate of voices that were not heard during apartheid, when the media was dominated by white South Africans. There is now a counterdiscourse opposing decriminalization, based on religion and on the argument that sex work is “un-African.”

This study of contemporary Hausa literature analyzes a northern Nigerian body of popular fiction currently referred to as Kano market literature and known to Hausa speakers as Littattafan Soyayya (books of love). The popularity of this genre of romance rests firmly upon its subject matter, one that has proven controversial within the conservative Muslim environment of Hausa society. On the surface, the novels are preoccupied with love and marital relationships, depicting the ordeals faced by courting lovers or married couples. However, on a deeper level, the novels have become an explorative territory for the socially, culturally, and religiously loaded issues of polygamy, marriages of coercion, purdah, and the accessibility of female education. In effect, Kano market literature reflects the rapid social change confronting Hausa society and positions itself as a voice offering a new perspective on gender relations. This article examines closely the works of arguably the most celebrated woman writer, Bilkisu Ahmed Funtuwa. Acutely aware of her rigid social and religious milieu, Funtuwa offers suggestions to young women who desire a greater level of control over their familial relationships and educational direction.

The “special relationship” between Israel and Ghana that began with the latter's attainment of independence in March 1957 endured only three years. At the January 1961 Casablanca Conference, Ghana joined in a sharp condemnation of Israel, marking the end of Israel's brief but extraordinary influence in Accra. Despite this downturn, Israel continued to fund aid and assistance projects in Ghana and to conduct civilian training programs. This article reviews the policy origins of Israel's entry into Ghana, demonstrates how both countries exploited a brief “honeymoon period,” analyzes their diverging paths, and explains why Israel did not use the fall of Nkrumah in 1966 as an opportunity to reestablish the special relationship.