Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Wretched of the Earth

Geert Hofstede’s legendary national culture research is critiqued. Crucial assumptions which underlie his claim to have uncovered the secrets of entire national cultures are described and challenged. The plausibility of systematically causal national cultures is questioned.

Hofstede’s Model of National Cultural Differences and their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith - a Failure of Analysis

Jenny Aker and Isaac Mbiti examine the growth of mobile phone technology over the past decade and consider its potential impacts upon quality of life in low-income countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. They first provide an overview of the patterns and determinants of mobile phone coverage in sub-Saharan Africa before describing the characteristics of primary and secondary mobile phone adopters on the continent. They then discuss the channels through which mobile phone technology can impact development outcomes, both as a positive externality of the communication sector and as part of mobile phone-based development projects, and analyze existing evidence. While current research suggests that mobile phone coverage and adoption have had positive impacts on agricultural and labor market efficiency and welfare in certain countries, empirical evidence is still somewhat limited. In addition, mobile phone technology cannot serve as the “silver bullet” for development in sub-Saharan Africa. Careful impact evaluations of mobile phone development projects are required to better understand their impacts upon economic and social outcomes, and mobile phone technology must work in partnership with other public good provision and investment.

Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

* 1. In the Name of Democracy: The Press and Its Predicaments * 2. Media Ethics, Professionalism and Training in Africa * 3. Multiparty Politics in Cameroon * 4. The Official Media, Belonging and Democratisation * 5. The Legal Framework and the Private Press * 6. Professionalism and Ethics in the Private Press in Cameroon * 7. Creative Appropriation of ICTs, Rumour, Press Cartoons and Politics * 8. Liberal Democracy: Victim of a Partisan and Ethnic Press * 9. Communication Policies in Africa: Lessons from the West

Africa's Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging

�� striking aspect of recent developments in Africa is that democratization seems to trigger a general obsession with autochthony and ethnic citizenship invariably defined against “strangers”— that is, against all those who “do not really belong.” Thus political liberalization leads, somewhat paradoxically, to an intensification of the politics of belonging: fierce debates on who belongs where, violent exclusion of “strangers” (even if this refers to people with the same nationality who have lived for generations in the area), and a general affirmation of roots and origins as the basic criteria of citizenship and belonging. Such obsessions are all the more striking since historians and anthropologists used to qualify African societies as highly inclusive, marked by an emphasis on “wealth-in-people” (in contrast to Europe’s “wealth-in-things”) and a wide array of institutional mechanisms for including people (adoption, fosterage, the broad range of classificatory kinship terminology). In many African political formations, prior to liberalization there was an important social distinction between autochthons and allochthons, but its implications were strikingly different from today. Often rulers came from allochthon clans who emphasized their origin from elsewhere, yet had privileged access to political positions. Since the late 1980s, in contrast, autochthony has become a powerful slogan to exclude the Other, the allogene, the stranger. Political liberalization seems to have strengthened a decidedly nonliberal tendency towards closure and exclusion (cf. Bayart 1996).

Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging

* Contents * Introduction: Globalisation, Mobility, Citizenship and Xenophobia in Southern Africa * 1. Mobility, Citizenship and Xenophobia in South Africa * 2. Citizenship, Mobility and Xenophobia in Botswana * 3. Gender, Domesticity, Mobility and Citizenship * 4. Maids, Mobility and Citizenship in Botswana * 5. Madams and Maids: Coping with Domination and Dehumanisation * 6. Conclusion: Requiem for Bounded Citizenship * References

Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa

This paper draws on Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion for Africans to 'lighten their darkness' both physically and metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like p'Bitek's Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of emasculated elite.

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'Potted Plants in Greenhouses': A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa

The root of the 'anglophone problem' in Cameroon may be traced back to 1961, when the political elites of two territories with different colonial legacies - one French and the other British - agreed on the formation of a federal State. Contrary to expectations, this did not provide for the equal partnership of both parties, let alone for the preservation of the cultural heritage and identity of each, but turned out to be merely a transitory phase to the total integration of the anglophone region into a strongly centralized, unitary State. Gradually, this created an anglophone consciousness: the feeling of being marginalized by the francophone-dominated State. In the wake of political liberalization in the early 1990s, anglophone interests came to be represented first and foremost by various associations and pressure groups that initially demanded a return to the federal State. It was only after the persistent refusal of the Biya government to discuss this scenario that secession became an overt option with mounting popularity. The government's determination to defend the unitary State by all available means, including repression, could lead to an escalation of anglophone demands past a point of no return. Notes, ref

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Papers

Africa's Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging

Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging

Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa

'Potted Plants in Greenhouses': A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa

The Anglophone Problem in Cameroon