Africa Today articles from March 1999

Africa Today archives from March 1999

African Folk and the Challenges of a Global Lore.
March 22, 1999... The power dynamics of the global academy are such that Western researchers and institutions control the dissemination of knowledge, often excluding from recognition and valorization research by African scholars. This article advocates the...

Remembering Youth: Generation in Revolutionary Zanzibar.
March 22, 1999... This essay discusses the emergence in Zanzibar of generation as an identity in political discourse in the 1950s. "Youth" emerged in the early organization of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) and were alone responsible for executing the 1964...

Media in "Democratic" Zambia: Problems and Prospects.
March 22, 1999... Zambia's transition to multiparty politics in 1991 has not led to significant changes in state-media relations. There was a brief period (just before and soon after 1991) when it appeared that the media would become an independent influence in...

Education and Perceptions of Social Status and Power among Women in Larteh, Ghana.
March 22, 1999... In examining the status of women in developing countries, most research emphasizes the impact of development indicators, such as income or health, on women. This paper moves beyond development indicators by discussing women's own perceptions of...

Popular Ghanaian Cinema and "African Heritage".
March 22, 1999... This paper is about the Ghanaian popular cinema industry, which emerged at the end of the 1980s. Mirroring urban people's struggles, their concerns about occult forces, and their dreams about a modern way of life, these low budget movies, which...

Iku and Cuban Nationhood:Yoruba Mythology in the Film Guantanamera.
March 22, 1999... Tomas Gutierrez Alea's film Guantanamera uses Yoruba mythology as a trope for Cuban spirituality. By inserting the Yoruba mythological figure of Iku throughout the film, Alea resituates the African as distinctly Cuban. Alea's cinematic...

I SPIT ON THEIR GRAVES (BOOK TWO OF THE PAST TENSE ...): TESTIMONY RELEVANT TO THE DEMOCRATIZATION STRUGGLE IN CAMEROON.
March 22, 1999... Gobata, Rotcod. 1996. I SPIT ON THEIR GRAVES (BOOK TWO OF THE PAST TENSE...): TESTIMONY RELEVANT TO THE DEMOCRATIZATION STRUGGLE IN CAMEROON. Bamenda: Kola Tree Press; Belling, ham, Wash.: CamNexus. $10.00 (paper) Rotcod Gobata, the nom...

WADING THE TIDE: POEMS.
March 22, 1999... Doh, Emmanuel Fru. 1998. WADING THE TIDE: POEMS. 2d ed. Bamenda: Kola Tree Press; Bellingham, Wash.: Camnexus. $10.00 (paper) Rotcod Gobata, the nom de plume of a faculty member at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, has a taste for...

CAPACITY BUILDING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS.
March 22, 1999... James, Valentine Udoh, ed. 1998. CAPACITY BUILDING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 344 pp. $75.00 (cloth). Many scientists in the twentieth century have studied development in the...

WOMEN AT THE CROSSROADS: A PROSTITUTE COMMUNITY'S RESPONSE TO AIDS IN URBAN SENEGAL.
March 22, 1999... Renaud, Michelle Lewis. 1997. WOMEN AT THE CROSSROADS: A PROSTITUTE COMMUNITY'S RESPONSE TO AIDS IN URBAN SENEGAL. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. 172 pp. $21.00 (paper). Women at the Crossroads is an interesting story of a...

PLUNDERING AFRICA'S PAST.
March 22, 1999... Schmidt, Peter R., and Roderick J. McIntosh, eds. 1996. PLUNDERING AFRICA'S PAST. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 320 pp. $39.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Plundering Africa's Past is a collection of 18 essays that grew out of the...

PEOPLE ARE NOT THE SAME: LEPROSY AND IDENTITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY MALI.
March 22, 1999... Silla, Eric. 1998. PEOPLE ARE NOT THE SAME: LEPROSY AND IDENTITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY MALI. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 220 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper). "One befriends a leper, because one knows that, if he finds a ring, he will give...

SOUTH AFRICA IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: RECONFIGURING THE REGION.
March 22, 1999... Simon, David, ed. 1998. SOUTH AFRICA IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: RECONFIGURING THE REGION. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 259 pp. $44.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). The end of the cold war and the period thereafter resulted in changes...

MULTI-PARTY POLITICS IN KENYA: THE KENYATTA AND MOI STATES AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE SYSTEM IN THE 1992 ELECTION.
March 22, 1999... Throup, David, and Charles Hornsby. 1998. MULTI-PARTY POLITICS IN KENYA: THE KENYATTA AND MOI STATES AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE SYSTEM IN THE 1992 ELECTION. Oxford: James Currey. 660 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). This book is full of...

THE AFRICAN STUDIES COMPANION: A RESOURCE GUIDE AND DIRECTORY.
March 22, 1999... Zell, Hans M., and Cecile Lomer. 1997. THE AFRICAN STUDIES COMPANION: A RESOURCE GUIDE AND DIRECTORY. 2d revised and expanded ed. New Providence, N.J.: Hans Zell Publishers. 276 pp. $75 (cloth). The authors of this slim, useful volume are...

BOOKS RECEIVED.
March 22, 1999... Ajayi, J.F. Ade, ed. 1998. General History of Africa, VI: Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s. Oxford: James Currey. Asmal, Kader, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts. 1997. Reconciliation through Truth: A Reckoning of...

Pilgrimage, Power, and Identity: The Role of the Hajj in the Lives of Nigerian Hausa Bori Adepts.
March 22, 1999... This article explores the paradoxical popularity of "non-Islamic" healing practices and spirit mediumship in the Muslim heartland of Saudi Arabia by examining the role of the hajj in the lives of contemporary bori practitioners in northern...

The Development of Women's Authority in the Kano Tijaniyya, 1894-1963.
March 22, 1999... This article acknowledges Kano Muslim women's contributions to their faith through their activities within the Kano Tijaniyya. It discusses two women from the first generation of Kano Tijani muqaddamat, Hajiya Iya and Umma Makaranta, who were...

Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast.
March 22, 1999... This article explores transformations in gender relations along the Swahili Coast of last Africa through an historical examination of four domains of social life: politics, kinship, economics, and musical performance. By examining data about...

France as a Muslim Power in West Africa.
March 22, 1999... France became a "Muslim power," in the sense of an imperial nation with Muslim subjects, over the course of the nineteenth century. This practice and policy first emerged in Algeria, and from the mid-nineteenth century it was also deployed in...

Generational Changes, Political Stagnation, and the Evolving Dynamics of Religion and Politics in Senegal.
March 22, 1999... Religious institutions, in the form of Muslim Sufi orders, have been an integral feature of Senegal's stable and relatively democratic socio-political system. Over the course of the 1990s, this system has experienced strains due to two factors:...