Africa Today articles from December 2001

Africa Today archives from December 2001

Preface to the special issue on musical performance in Africa. (From the Editor).
December 22, 2001... This issue focuses on the performance of music in Africa, and emphasizes the increased attention to the arts and humanities in Africa Today. Whether music is performed in a face-to-face situation or provided as an underscore to film, it is a...

Old music and dance for new needs: local performative responses to new African realities.
December 22, 2001... The following essays originated as papers delivered as an organized panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Toronto in November of 2000. The panel, entitled "Old Music and Dance for New Needs: Local Performative...

From "dancing with porcupines" to "twirling a hoe": musical labor transformed in Sukumaland, Tanzania.
December 22, 2001... In the Sukuma area of northwest Tanzania, farmer-musicians, or farmers who compose and perform music, introduce themselves in public interactions first as farmers, with the phrase "I am a farmer, I hold a hoe," and second as performers, with...

The death of mganda?: continuity and transformation in Matengo music.
December 22, 2001... In the Matengo (1) highlands of southwestern Tanzania, musical changes reflect broad economic and political changes as well as local and gendered decisions made by men and women dancers. By analyzing the important realm of group dances over the...

Purchasing praise: women, dancing, and patronage in Malawi party politics.
December 22, 2001... Political parties in contemporary Malawi organize their female members to dance and sing songs of praise at their public functions. One of the characteristics of the political environment that produces women's praise singing and dancing in...

Pop goes the sacred: Dan mask performance and popular culture in postcolonial Cote d'Ivoire.
December 22, 2001... Ge performance--an enactment of Dan religious and ethnic identity involving masks and music--is an old form that performers today manipulate in new contexts to negotiate complex identities and get things done. Gedro, a type of ge that performs...

Comments: uncoupling the "traditional" vs. "modern" opposition.
December 22, 2001... In Daniel Reed's case study in this issue, music and dance forms that are self-defined as "traditional" are also defined as "modern." His consultants assert that "Ge performance has always operated this way in relationship to the world around...

"When hearts beat like native drums:" music and the sexual dimensions of the notions of "savage" and "civilized" in Tarzan and His Mate, 1934.
December 22, 2001... Since the advent of sound in film, music has provided a vital counterpoint to the stunning visuals and electrifying action of Hollywood productions. Offering more than a tangential backdrop of auditory color, music plays a significant role in...

Bowen, Merle L. 2000. The State Against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique.
December 22, 2001... Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2.56 pp. It is unusual for an academic book review to use such terms as "hard-hitting," "frank," "accurate," and "compelling," but Merle Bowen provides us with such a study. She examined...

Chanock, Martin. 2001. The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1901-1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice.
December 22, 2001... Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 571 pp. Martin Chanock takes a refreshing approach to legal history, viewing it as a cultural product. As such it is in constant flux, responding to the issues of the day while recreating itself. This...

Duffy, Rosaleen. 2000. Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe.
December 22, 2001... Oxford: The International African Institute in Association with James Currey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Harare: Weaver. 209 pp. An old German proverb holds that there are two sides to every pancake. With all the publicity...

Fabian, Johannes. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa.
December 22, 2001... Berkeley: University of California Press. 335 pp. Johannes Fabian is a prolific and provocative writer, always intellectually a step or two ahead of most of us. For the past thirty-some years, he has written about contemporary religions,...

Farred, Grant. 2000. Midfielder's Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa.
December 22, 2001... Boulder: Westview Press. 178 pp. Grant Farred's book deals with the novels of Richard Rive and the poetry of Arthur Nortje and Jennifer Davids. More than a third of the book is dedicated to an extended article on the role of colored...

Forster, Peter G., Michael Hitchcock, and Francis F. Lyimo. 2000. Race and Ethnicity in East Africa.
December 22, 2001... New York and London: MacMillan Press Ltd. & St. Martin's Press, Inc. 181 pp. Race and Ethnicity in East Africa is written when the memory of genocide in Rwanda is fresh in our minds and when unreported serious ethnonational conflicts are...

Kriger, Colleen. 1999. Pride of Men: Ironworking in 19th Century West Central Africa.
December 22, 2001... Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. Taking a page from Jan Vansina's call for Africanist historians to use linguistic evidence and material culture in innovative ways, Colleen Kriger has forged a well-crafted survey of smiths in Equatorial...

Langa, Mandla. 2000. The Memory of Stones.
December 22, 2001... Cape Town: David Philip; Boulder: Lynne Rienner. 366 pp. Wicomb, Zoe. 2001. DAVID'S STORY. Afterword by Dorothy Driver. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 278 pp. For nearly half a century, South African...

Mshomba, Richard E. 2000. Africa in the Global Economy.
December 22, 2001... Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 245 pp. Richard Mshomba provides an invaluable source of information for anyone wishing to understand trade and underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa. The first two chapters clearly develop his...

Nwaubani, Ebere. 2001. The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950-1960.
December 22, 2001... Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press. 338 pp. Decolonization in Africa was one of the major turning points in the history of the postwar world. Historians have cited the activities of African nationalist leaders and unfolding...

Ottaway, Marina. 1999. Africa's New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction?
December 22, 2001... Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 135 pp. How can the foundations for democracy be laid in African countries just emerging from prolonged civil conflicts? Not by proceeding straightaway to multiparty pluralism and...

Parker, John. 2000. Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra.
December 22, 2001... Portsmouth: Heinemann. This monograph on the development of urban politics and the reshaping of space in colonial Accra between roughly 1860 and 1920 is a welcome addition to the growing historiography on urban cities in colonial West...

Ranger, Terrence. 1999. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture & History in the Motopos Hills of Zimbabwe.
December 22, 2001... Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 305 pp. This book is a history of the various parts of the Motopos hills of Zimbabwe and the people who have lived in them over the century between 1897 and 1997, presented in terms of the various ways...

Rathbone, Richard. 2000. Nkrumah & the Chiefs: the Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana 1950-60.
December 22, 2001... Athens: Ohio University Press. 176 pp. Although book reviewers should begin their endeavors without preconceptions, after reading the Preface of this book I was sure I would enjoy it. I was not disappointed. Richard Rathbone is a highly...

Schubert, Benedict. 2000. A Guerra e as Igrejas: Angola 1961-1991.
December 22, 2001... Basel, Switzerland: Schlettwein Publishing. 251 pp. Angola's long civil war has finally come to an end with the death in combat of veteran guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi on 22 February 2002. What started out in 1961 as a "war of national...

Zoubir, Yahia H. 1999. North Africa in Transition: State, Society and Economic Transformation in the 1990s.
December 22, 2001... Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 299 pp. Although during the late 1980s international attention focused on the dramatic events unfurling in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Yahia H. Zoubir argues that significant changes...

Books received.
December 22, 2001... Andrews, Penelope, and Stephen Ellman. 2001. The Post-Apartheid Constitution: Perspectives on South Africa's Basic Law. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Benjaminsen, Tor A., and Christian...