Africa Today articles from January 1998

Africa Today archives from January 1998

Ethnicity and the politics of history in Rwanda.
January 1, 1998... Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the Great Lakes region of Africa over the past four years. Most of them were innocent civilians massacred by armies or militias or decimated by disease or starvation as they fled from danger. These...

All the 'Bourgmestre's' men: making sense of genocide in Rwanda.
January 1, 1998... By the time I arrived in Rwanda in early October 1994 as a UN human rights monitor, genocide had become a mundane element of daily life. The evidence was strewn across the landscape. In schools, churches, rural dispensaries, soccer fields,...

The politics of history and the crisis in the Great Lakes. (Africa)
January 1, 1998... Historians of the Great Lakes region cannot remain aloof from the momentous crisis in the area, both because the various parties draw them into it and because the foundations for the future historiography of this crisis are now being established....

Summary: the French Africanist community and the Rwanda crisis.
January 1, 1998... Since 1994, French scholarly reactions to the Rwanda crisis have revealed certain weaknesses in what may be labeled, for convenience, the Community of French Africanists (CAF). No major conference mobilized a gathering of scholars for serious...

Return to sender: no such person in the house, a reply to Christopher C. Lowe's article "Resurrection How?" (response to 'Resurrection How? A Response to Michael O. West and William G. Martin's Article 'A Future with a Past,' Africa Today 44, no. 4 (1997), p. 389)
January 1, 1998... Christopher C. Lowe ought to be commended for joining the debate on the past and future of African Studies, a dialogue so ably facilitated by the editor of this journal. Lowe's intervention inaugurates the kind of exchanges among students of...

A comment on Ron Kassimir's article "The Internationalization of African Studies: A View from the SSRC." (Africa Today, no. 44, no 2 (1997), p. 155)
January 1, 1998... Ron Kassimir, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) program director for Africa, sets forth a rationale for the new joint American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/SSRC international program in his article for Africa Today's special issue...

A reply to R. Hunt Davis, Jr.'s, article. (article in this issue, p. 71)
January 1, 1998... R. Hunt Davis makes two points in his comment in this issue on my article "The Internalization of Area Studies: A View from the SSRC," one serious and accessible to intellectual debate, and one fallacious. On the serious point, Davis fixates on...

The stories we must tell: Ugandan children and the atrocities of the Lord's resistance army.
January 1, 1998... ROUX springs forward and places himself before the marchers, his back to them, still with fettered arms. When will you learn to see When will you learn to take sides(1) During the summer of 1997, I spent a short time in Uganda as a consultant...

Pursuit of truth and reconciliation in South Africa.
January 1, 1998... How do governments deal with human rights violations committed by former regimes? South Africa's solution has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a carrot-and-stick approach that offers amnesty to those who come forward to...

Human Rights and Reform: Changing the Face of North African Politics.
January 1, 1998... It takes someone who is very sensitive to abuse of power to see clearly how power is used. Susan Waltz has fought against repression in North Africa for the last twenty years through volunteering a large share of her time to Amnesty...

Feast and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888.
January 1, 1998... The reader is immediately drawn into this social history by a brief but dramatic account of a popular uprising on the East African coast in 1888. The clumsy attempt by a group of German adventurers to seize Swahili towns catalyzed crowds of...

Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences.
January 1, 1998... Feminist Political Ecology is a substantial portion, and a good value for the money, for those interested in an intellectual meal from an environmental studies menu. Anyone who gets past the rather dry, and at times tough, conceptual overview is...