Africa articles from March 1997

Africa archives from March 1997

Initiation into the Ugao: rethinking the structure of Tharaka symbolism.
March 22, 1997... The Tharaka live in the Eastern Province of Kenya(1) and are part of the Highland Bantu (Sutton, 1974: 82). Whether they are to be considered as a separate `tribe' (Gedge, 1892; Hobley, 1910; Champion, 1912; Dundas, 1913, 1915; Lindblom, 1914;...

Cosmologies in turmoil: witchfinding and aids in Chiawa, Zambia.
March 22, 1997... As AIDS deaths increase in the rural areas, so we must expect to see an increase in witch-hunting of the kind that has just taken place in Chiawa. This is where we expect you social scientists to help us. [A Zambian minister] I am a Christian....

Kickin' it: leisure, politics and football in colonial Zanzibar, 1900s-1950s.
March 22, 1997... As C. L. R. James demonstrated in Beyond a Boundary (1963), organised team sports could easily be read as an allegory of life in the British colonial empire. In Africa, as well as other parts of the empire, members of the colonial service,...

Sticks and stones: colonialism and Zanzibari housing.
March 22, 1997... [The] shibboleth of this little island [is] the word, dasturi(1) [custom]. It is dasturi to do this and not dasturi to do that, and between the two the finicking path of conduct and action is mapped out with the extreme of accuracy. Experience...

Creating 'Union Ibo': missionaries and Igbo language. (African ethnic groups)
March 22, 1997... Most of the earliest descriptions of African ethnic groups were produced by missionaries. They were often the first -- or among the first -- Europeans to visit African communities and, for many years, their information shaped the Westerners'...

Fathering, mothering and making sense of ntamoba: reflections on the economy of child-rearing in colonial Asante.
March 22, 1997... INTRODUCTION: THE CASE In 1992, as part of a broader study of gender and social change in colonial Asante, I found myself ploughing through volumes of customary court cases at Manhyia Record Office -- the archive attached to the...

A History of Twentieth Century African Literature.
March 22, 1997... This concisely presented volume is a welcome addition to the growing body of writing on the contemporary literatures of Africa. There have been many studies both by individual hands and by groups which attempt to present a survey of the themes...

African Francophone Writing.
March 22, 1997... Academics in Britain have only fairly recently started to become aware of the literary works of francophone African writers. Research on Maghrebian and sub-Saharan authors is now fast developing at all levels on this side of the Channel. The...

Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa.
March 22, 1997... Despite their status as the largest and at the same time the most diffuse ethnolinguistic group in West Africa, reckoning an estimated 50 million speakers of the language, the Hausa (predominant in their northern Nigerian heartland) have not...

The Gogo: History, Customs, and Traditions.
March 22, 1997... The translation of Mnyampala's book on the history and customs of his people, the Wagogo of central Tanzania, fifty-one years after its first publication in Swahili, is welcome. The book can be divided into three parts: the editor's introduction...

Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries.
March 22, 1997... The topic of identity among dispersed groups of African agro-pastoralists has been the focus of several edited books recently, including the Fulbe (P. K. Eguchi and V. Azarya, Unity and Diversity of a People, 1993), the Maasai (T. Spear and R....

I Borana: una societa assemblance dell'Etiopia.
March 22, 1997... The study of age systems in current East Africa has for a while been dormant in the British tradition, as scholars such as Spencer or Baxter have developed theoretical points related to fieldwork conducted twenty or thirty years ago. In the case...

Politics in the Portuguese Empire: The State, Industry, and Cotton, 1926-74.
March 22, 1997... Studies of cotton growing in the Portuguese empire have concentrated on the African end of the story and, within Africa, on northern Mozambique, where most of the cotton was grown. Noting that at their peak cotton purchases from Africa supplied...

A History of Mozambique.
March 22, 1997... Malyn Newitt's long awaited book is a remarkable synthesis and will surely become a work of first reference for years to come for students and researchers working in whatever language, alongside Pelissier's Naissance du Mozambique (1984) and Vail...

The Rise and Fall of Development Theory.
March 22, 1997... This collection of essays is a critical appraisal of the contributions from the main schools of development thinking: modernisation theory; dependency theory; and the dominant neo-liberal economics and its related perspective, the so-called new...

Structural Adjustment and Ethnicity in Nigeria.
March 22, 1997... The Nigerian programme of structural adjustment was launched in 1986. By late 1987 it had been given up in essentials -- that is to say, in containing the budget deficit and freeing the exchange rate. Spasmodic efforts were made to put it back on...

Theories of Famine.
March 22, 1997... The twentieth century has witnessed the gradual elimination of famine from a range of countries -- China, Russia, Bangladesh and India tragic escalation of famines in Africa: famines that kill without respite. Where famines are contained,...

World Food Aid: Experiences of Recipients and Donors.
March 22, 1997... Of all the forms of `development assistance', perhaps food aid is the most controversial. Even for the famously controversial policy-based lending (`structural adjustment' and stabilisation loans by the World Bank and IMF) there is agreement by...

A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Relating to Africa: A New Edition of Matthews and Wainwright.
March 22, 1997... James Pearson's updated version of Matthews and Wainwright's A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles relating to Africa will be universally welcomed by scholars of Africa. Any bibliographical work of this nature represents an...

Ewe: The Use of Plants in Yoruba Society.
March 22, 1997... Pierre Verger (`Fatumbi is a title given him by Yoruba sacred men and women'), who died in 1995, aged 92, was born in France and spent many years studying Yoruba epistemology and medicine, in Benin and in Nigeria. He later lived in Brazil, where...

Fotografia e storia dell'Africa.
March 22, 1997... The image of Africa has been a colonial image for a long period. Photography has been an instrument of conquest in colonial Africa. How can photography be utilised by historians as a valid source and which methodology can be used? These are the...

The Tuareg: The Blue People.
March 22, 1997... This pleasant works strikes the reader as being produced for people with scant or even no prior knowledge of the Tuareg, a rare occurrence m an age -- one might almost say -- of `Tuareg adulation' by many non-African authors. Some clearly feel...

Migrations, Development and Urbanization Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa.
March 22, 1997... It is good that a book on migration policies in African countries should appear, that it should be published in Africa, and that it should be produced in both French and English versions. The eight substantial papers collected here include almost...

Africa, Asia, and South America Since 1800: A Bibliographical Guide.
March 22, 1997... The series editor proclaims that `most items will receive some descriptive comment' but the main weakness of this volume is that few of its 5,000 or so items are annotated. Moreover, the annotations are brief, often bland, much slanted towards...

Zimbabwe.
March 22, 1997... This annotated general bibliography includes 879 entries covering almost all aspects of Zimbabwean society. The annotations are clear, concise and provide an excellent introduction to and overview of the growing literature on Zimbabwe. The...

Bibliographies for African Studies, 1987-93.
March 22, 1997... This is the most recent volume in the series Bibliographies for African Studies by Yvette Scheven, which has covered the years 1970-5 (1977), 1976-9 (1980), 1980-3 (1984), 1970-86 (1988) and now 1987-93. Although stating in the preface to her...

Bibliography of Canadian Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations on Africa, 1905-93/Bibliographie des memoires de maitrise et theses de doctorat canadiens sur l'Afrique, 1905-93.
March 22, 1997... This volume follows the publication of two bibliographies of American and Canadian doctoral dissertations and master's theses covering, between them, the period 1886-1987 and providing the incentive for this separate Canadian volume. While the...