Africa Today articles from March 2003

Africa Today archives from March 2003

Africa, the FIFA presidency, and the governance of world football: 1974, 1998, and 2002.
March 22, 2003... Since the independence movements of the late 1950s and 1960s, most African nations have remained firmly rooted at the base of the world economic and political order; however, in global sports, Africa has made its presence felt, and it is...

Imagining architecture II: "treasure storehouses" and constructions of Asante regional hegemony.
March 22, 2003... British colonial destruction of the Asante capital of Kumasi, Ghana--including the Asantehene's palace, rebuilt as a military fort on the site of a ceremonial gathering ground--profoundly altered the city's spatial organization, as well as...

Shari'a as de-Africanization: evidence from Hausaland.
March 22, 2003... Terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 overlapped with ongoing movements of Islamic fundamentalism in sub-Saharan Africa; however, these movements have not been identical, nor have they encountered uniform responses from...

The use of bombast in Nigeria: the examples of Icheoku and Masquerade.
March 22, 2003... This paper investigates the use of bombast in second-language (English) contexts as exemplified and parodied in the mass-media comedies Icheoku and Masquerade. It points out the prevalence of "bombasters" in Nigeria, identifies the general...

Demographic and housing aspects of structural adjustment and emerging urban form in Accra, Ghana.
March 22, 2003... Previous research on the nexus of global and local forces suggests that African cities such as Accra and Dares Salaam are experiencing new forms of settlement. For Accra, the new form has been described as a quality residential sprawl with...

Baah, Richard Amoako. 2000. Human Rights in Africa: the Conflict of Implementation.
March 22, 2003... Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. 122 pp. $32.50 (cloth). This book is an example of a legitimate argument somewhat carelessly presented. It strikes me as a serious scientific contribution to the unending debate about the origins...

Brenner, Louis. 2001. Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society.
March 22, 2003... Bloomington: Indiana University Press. xv + 343 pp. The schools known as medersas are the fastest growing sector of the Malian educational system. As the very name--a colonial French rendition of the Arabic term madrasa--implies, this is...

D. Elwood Dunn, Amos J. Beyan, and Carl Patrick Burrowes. 2001. Historical Dictionary of Liberia.
March 22, 2003... 2nd edition. African Historical Dictionaries, 83. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press. xxxv + 436 pp. Scarecrow Press and editor Jon Woronoff have been publishing the African Historical Dictionaries series since 1974, and these books provide...

Hodges, Tony. 2001. Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Dollar Capitalism.
March 22, 2003... Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 201 pp. $19.95 (paper). This book is an excellent study of Angola, which has remarkable resource endowments but, paradoxically, has been "associated not with development and relative prosperity but...

Hodgson, Dorothy L., and Shirley A. McCurdy, eds. 2001. "Wicked" Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa.
March 22, 2003... Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. 325 pp. Although African societies have been characterized as being male-dominated, recent research has by and large exploded representations of African women as always submissive to patriarchal authority...

MacGaffey, Janet, and Remy Bazenguissa-Ganga. 2000. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law.
March 22, 2003... Bloomington: Indiana University Press, and Oxford: James Currey, in association with the International African Institute. xvi, 190 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). Congo-Paris presents vivid and compelling portraits of Congolese...

Masquelier, Adeline. 2001. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger.
March 22, 2003... Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 348 pp. As a form of spirit possession practiced among Hausa and related peoples so important to African cultural history, bori possesses such a rich literature that surely most Africanists know...

Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. 2000. Using the Master's Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas.
March 22, 2003... New York: St. Martin's Press. 176 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Among the many and enduring research issues for diaspora-studies scholars are resistance, identity, and politics. Of these, the most prominent are resistance and identity, with a focus...

Negash, Tekeste, and Kijtel Tronvoll. 2000. Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War.
March 22, 2003... Oxford, U.K.: James Currey. 179 pp. Brothers at War is a highly useful interim account of the course and causes of the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict, which has proven so costly in human, economic, and political terms to the well-being of...

Segal, Ronald. 2001. Islam's Black Slaves: the Other Black Diaspora.
March 22, 2003... New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 257 pp. $30.00 (cloth). This book is a largely narrative history of African slaves in the Muslim world, from the earliest centuries of the faith to the present. As Ronald Segal notes in his preface, it...

Wise, Christopher, ed. 2001. The Desert Shore: Literatures of the Sahel.
March 22, 2003... Colorado: Lynne Rienner. 271pp. After the prolific debate of africanite and creolite terms praised as apt analytical tools and blamed for being restrictive moulds, this book proposes another term, which seems so far to have met little...