Showing papers in "International Journal of African Historical Studies in 2012"

Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade

Abstract: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. By Gabrielle Hecht. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. xx, 451; maps, photographs, appendix, publication history, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95/£20.95 cloth.In 2003, false claims of Iraqi uranium acquisition from Niger helped provide justification for the invasion of Iraq. And subsequently, Niger was viewed as a nuclear state on the world stage. Why was Niger suddenly treated as a nuclear state as the result of false intelligence in 2003, but not as the result of years of previous uranium mining and sales as one of the largest uranium producers in Africa? For Gabrielle Hecht, this question cannot be answered in current literature on nuclear-related issues. Previous scholars have fetishized nuclear weapons leading to research focused on weapons, electricity generation, and traditional Cold War players (with the occasional addition of Japan and South Asia) that has reified an uncritical and exceptionalist understanding of "nuclear" (p. 13). In response, Hecht poses a timely and important question: "what things make a state 'nuclear,' what makes things 'nuclear,' and how do we know?" (p. 13).To answer this question Hecht introduces nuclearity, a discursive construct produced and maintained through the social production of knowledge (especially technical and scientific knowledge). Nuclearity is a site of conflict between discourses of exceptionalism and banality; something becomes or ceases to be nuclear at different points through the evolution of these tensions. Uranium is most often associated with radiation and weapons production, the things that give it its "exceptional" quality relative to other mineral resources. Concurrent with this, however, have been efforts to render uranium and nuclear threats banal, a commodity or resource, industrial ingredient, fish line weight, or a threat against which mundane procedures can ensure survival.Arguably Hecht' s most significant contribution to the literature is the empirical research on her selected case countries: Gabon, Niger, Namibia, South Africa, and Madagascar. Using a diversity of methods Hecht extensively documents sites of tension that produce, remove, and maintain nuclearity in the development and evolution of postcolonial relations, international institutions, economic structures, and working conditions. This in turn allows her to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of uranium politics and how nuclearity is strategically used (e.g., as a site of resistance or profit) or challenged by states, corporations, and workers. The strength of Hecht' s analysis is in her rejection of simple appeals to colonialism (pp. 229, 324), instead using a multifaceted approach that weaves together the politics of colonialism, race, and capitalism, rooted in contextual considerations of time, space, place, and geography, to illustrate the dynamism and unevenness of nuclearity (p. …

Forced villagization during the 'shifta' conflict in Kenya, ca. 1963-1968

Abstract: IntroductionIn June 1966, the Kenyan government adopted a policy of forced villagization in the former Northern Frontier District (NFD), a region that covered an area of approximately 102,000 square miles, about half of Kenya's total landmass. In 1962, the region had an estimated population of 200,000, which was made up almost entirely by the pastoral Somali, and ethnically related Boran, Rendille, and Gabra groups.1 During the colonial period the NFD was comprised of the districts of Garissa, Isiolo, Mandera, Marsabit, Moyale, Wajir and Samburu, although the British separately administered the latter.2 In 2008/9, when the research for this paper was conducted, the NFD area was divided between Eastern Region and North Eastern Region (NER), with Isiolo, and Marsabit belonging to the former and Garissa, Mandera, Moyale, and Wajir to the latter. The Kenyan government's villagization program required all people living within these NFD areas to reside within designated government villages under security guard. The evidence suggests that by September 1967, only about half of the total population of the NFD were successfully villagized. The Kenyan government argued that this would facilitate security force operations against shifta (bandit or rebel) insurgents, who were engaged in a campaign of militant secessionism, while winning over the hearts and minds of northern Kenyans through village development projects.3 In this sense, villagization served two purposes. It was at once a counter- insurgency measure, used as a means to gain state control over the NFD region during a period of armed insurrection, and a mechanism for implementing social reform.The fundamental idea behind villagization in northern Kenya was not novel. As a counter-insurgency measure, the use of population re-concentration has many colonial precedents. The Spanish in Cuba, the British in Malaya and Kenya, and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique all experimented with fortified villages.4 Villagization also has a long history of being used as a tool for development. After the end of the Second World War, when economic development became a major concern for colonial governments, the concept of settlement and villagization was thought to be key to the "progress" of the African population.5 Likewise, villagization programs were also common to postcolonial nation building projects, which often had a strong developmental focus. For instance in 1960s Tanzania, national development was sought through the establishment of Ujamaa villages. According to Michael Jennings, self-help was central to the attempt of the Tanzanian government to create Tanzaniane after independence, and the main instrument for the expression of popular participation in self-help activity was the Village Development Committee.6 At the same time, during the 1960s and 1970s, sedentarization was the central imperative behind pastoralist development programs. This was a period when the international development community understood development in terms of increasing Gross National Product and reducing poverty.7 As the dominant image of pastoralism is one of non- viability,8 efforts were made to move pastoralists into what was perceived to be a more productive and secure way of life, primarily through resettlement.9 Certainly, in relation to development initiatives among the pastoral Maasai in Kenya after independence, there was an official bias towards resettlement. The 1960s witnessed an expansion of Maasai agriculture and credit facilities were extended to Maasai farmers by the Kenyan government and the Agricultural Credit Agency.10However, in northern Kenya, the Kenyan government's perception and presentation of pastoralists' livelihoods moved beyond wider discourses regarding pastoralism at this time, and this had implications for the nature of developmental interventions within the pastoral sector there. Unlike colonial era settlement programs, and those initiated by the Kenyan government among the Maasai and pastoral groups elsewhere in Kenya, which were linked to notions of "progress" and "modernization," villagization and village development projects in northern Kenya facilitated a process of criminalizing pastoral activity. …

Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, Society, and Politics

Abstract: Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, Society, and Politics Edited by Markus Hoehne and Virginia Luling New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 Pp xiii, 437; bibliography, index, glossary $5500 Few scholars of Africa are as closely associated with a single ethnic group and a particular nation as LM Lewis His ethnographic and historical work among Somalis spanned more than fifty years and has appealed to a range of different disciplines, from anthropology and linguistics to history and political science Markus Hoehne and Virginia Luling have done a great service to the fields of African Studies, generally, and Somali Studies, specifically, by bringing together a stellar cast of scholars, including several Somali authors, to celebrate the contributions of Lewis It is not possible to comment on each of the individual chapters, but it is worth pointing to a few of the book's key themes and chapters that reflect important dimensions of Lewis' scholarship In the majority of chapters, individual authors attempt to address particular contributions of Lewis and their impacts on Somali studies and/or anthropology Only a few of the chapters make no or only minimal reference to Lewis' work, which implies that the co-editors succeeded in selecting contributors who both could address their own scholarship and that of Lewis's The first key theme of the volume addresses the role of kinship in Somali social and political life and is the focus of at least five different contributors (Lee Cassanelli, Luca Ciabarri, Marcel Djama, Virginia Luling, and Charles Geshekter) to the volume Many readers will be familiar with the controversy and critiques surrounding Lewis' work on kinship and clans and his insistence on their primacy in Somali social and political affairs In particular, the chapter by Cassanelli on the "total" Somali lineage system shows how the elaborate and deep kinship structures explored by Lewis provides Somalis with a "genealogical map which embraces virtually all Somalis and at its most remote level links them to a putative common ancestor" (p 54) He dodges the debate about how significant these lineage-based relations actually are in determining Somali social and political behavior, but does challenge the critique that the lineage systems was an "invention" by Europeans, including Lewis, by suggesting that early visitors and colonial administrators relied on a small group of local Somali genealogists who were Arabic literate and capable of providing these detailed lineage accounts Along similar lines, the concluding chapter by another historian, Geshekter, shows how a careful reading of Lewis on Somali kinship and clan structures demonstrates a greater sophistication and flexibility than most critics acknowledge Other themes related to Somali kinship and ethnicity are addressed in chapters by Ciabarri on trade and lineages; Ken Menkhaus on Somali Bantu identity in the Jubba and Shebelli river valleys; Djama on the political ecology of Somali pastoralism; and Luling on the "mixed" lineages and communities of southern Somalia that trace an Arabic heritage …

Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa

Abstract: Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa. By Anne KeIk Mager. African Systems of Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. viii, 232; appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. In this book, Anne KeIk Mager painstakingly details the fascinating social and political history of the commerce of beer in apartheid and contemporary South Africa. This is no ordinary account of a commodity or the industry that promotes it; rather, Mager expertly weaves history, politics, psychology, and advertising with gender analysis and anthropological notions of community and sociability to craft a thoughtful, critical investigation of corporate power, public culture, and masculinity in the changing politics of racialized South African society. Drawing on Geertz' "deep play" and Bourdieu's "exaltation of masculine values," Mager demonstrates how South African Breweries Limited (SAB), makers of Castle Lager and producers of over 90 percent of bottled beer production in the period of Mager' s analysis (p. 9), shaped social values by persistent reaffirmation of masculine beer drinking culture. By linking masculinity with notions of sociability in both its brand personalities and its beer advertising, SAB aggressively sought strategies to ensure its dominance within the national commerce of beer. SAB sponsored sports events such as football (soccer), rugby, and cricket, and depicted stereotypical masculine sports imagery, powerful male physicality, and symbolic cultural text within its promotions. The level of nuance in Mager' s analysis is particularly admirable and welcome. She demonstrates, for example, that not all sports are equal within this social and economic history of beer; rather, each sport has its own particular social history and Mager reveals SAB' s attempts to read and reflect these differences, however misguided, from the hypermasculine, white-identified rugby to the largely black-identified football and less "aggressive" cricket. However, Mager does not let the notion that advertisers and advertising just reflect societal norms and attitudes stand. She shows, on the one hand, how beer companies attempt to read and psychologize popular and gendered idealizations in ways that connect people to their brands, while she also analyzes how they shape norms and identities through advertising, drawing on gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity to create desire and link status to cultural meanings in ways that promote beer and brand consumption. …

Disputing the Floodplains: Institutional Change and the Politics of Resource Management in African Wetlands

Abstract: Disputing the Floodplains: Institutional Change and the Politics of Resource Management in African Wetlands. Edited by Tobias Haller. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xviii, 452; maps, charts, photographs, bibliography, index. $112.00 paper. Many edited volumes are patchy constellations of case studies around a central theme. This volume is refreshingly coherent and consistent, to the degree that each case study chapter discusses the same topics in the same order and format. The book is based on the work of a cohort of graduate students under editor Tobias Haller' s supervision and coordination at the University of Zurich, 2002-2005 (indeed, the volume reads at times as a condensed graduate seminar). Although the volume is narrowly focused on African wetlands, its theoretical ambition is the assertion of a general model of environmental and institutional change in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. The volume is inspired by Elinor Ostrom's contributions to New Institutional Economics, which center on the institutional characteristics that lead to functional common property management systems. One of the major critiques of Ostrom' s approach was that it paid insufficient attention to ideology and power, so Haller has merged this approach with a focus on bargaining power and legitimization from the work of economic anthropologist Jean Ensminger.1 The result is a historical and anthropological institutionalism that seeks to explain the course of environmental change. This book starts from the assumption that the precolonial resource management institutions of African floodplains were not self -correcting functional systems; rather, they developed from a series of conflicts and solutions that gradually became institutionalized into social arrangement and legitimized by cultural meanings. Thus the authors collectively argue, for example, that rituals of sacrifices to various water spirits were the foundations of functional social-ecological systems, but this is not a naive functionalism self-designed for sustainability or conservation. Rather, these constellations of social practices, traditions, rituals, and beliefs served to enhance the social status of leaders and coordinate the exchanges among different social groups. Three hypotheses follow from this position. First, the authors argue that most wetlands' precolonial common property systems have collapsed and led to open-access degradation, except when the institutions provide social or economic capital to locally powerful people. The authors call this the "rent hypothesis." Second, this change occurred because the postcolonial states claimed resource management responsibility without effective institutional capacity, which meant that many cases of open access degradation result from non-local actors legitimizing their access to "national" assets as citizens in areas that had once been controlled by particular "ethnoprofessional groups. …

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Colony: Corporal Punishment, Colonial Violence, and Generational Authority in Kenya, 1897-1952*

Abstract: Corporal punishment, the infliction of physical pain and injury on an individual believed to have committed wrongdoing, was commonplace throughout Kenya's colonial encounter. European settlers bruised houseboys and harvesters with steel-toed boots to instill a sense of station in Kenya's racial hierarchy. Schoolteachers "broke" pupils' backs to mold their minds. African chiefs conducted forced labor to the cadence of the kiboko (whip or cane) urging young men to dig roads faster and carry goods farther.1 African fathers raised walking sticks to correct absent-minded herdsboys. Colonial magistrates sentenced thousands of young Africans to caning for crimes ranging from bicycle theft to breach of contract. Today, the citizens of an independent Kenya continue to wrestle with the decision to spank mischievous sons and beat restless schoolboys.2 In Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, as Africans came into increasing contact with Europeans, the diversity of individuals and institutions laying claim to this form of violence expanded. Colonial governments relied on corporal punishment to broadcast their authority, often through military barracks, schools, courts, and penal institutions.3 Colonial courts were especially devoted to physical violence as a method of discipline and alternative to imprisonment, fines, or other forms of punishment.4 Courts in most British African colonies, from native courts in Northern Nigeria and Uganda to magistrate courts in Gold Coast and Kenya, sentenced offenders to corporal punishment to varying degrees.5 In colonies with white settlement, such as Kenya and South Africa, a cult of the cat o' nine tails formed to humiliate disobethent African chiefs, suppress resistance, and emasculate male sexuality to salve fears of black peril.6 Corporal punishment was a key instrument in establishing racial hierarchies. Moreover, the use of the kiboko in Kenya and sjambok in South Africa were common methods to coerce and discipline male African labor.7 Whether a method to punish criminal behavior, display racial superiority, or inculcate labor discipline, corporal punishment became an "essential pedagogical tool" of the colonial encounter, teaching through physical violence.8 Corporal punishment was not simply an instrument of the British colonial state; it was also a weapon of African parents and elders, used to define age and generational station.9 It separated men from boys, adults from children; it situated them on opposing sides of the kiboko and established the authority of one over the other. Fathers and elder menfolk in Kenya relied on a diverse disciplinary repertoire, which included physical violence, to correct the behavior of young men, negotiate boundaries between generations, and preserve senior authority. 10 Yet elder patriarchal power was not hegemonic. Generations contested ideas about age, transitions from one age to the next, and fulfillment of accompanying rights and obligations. The colonial encounter further complicated these relationships, often in contradictory ways. As it entrenched elder authority, it also expanded the number of alternatives for young people to accumulate wealth and redefine maturity beyond the purview of fathers and senior kin.11 Colonial rule also muddied the disciplinary landscape.12 Although colonial rule sometimes empowered elders, it also redistributed their right to punish the young among a host of other actors. Likewise, while it freed some young people from elder surveillance, it also brought them under the watchful eyes of a wider community of disciplinarians. The right to beat a boy, once the exclusive right of African parents and elder kin, increasingly included missionaries, schoolteachers, employers, chiefs, and the colonial state. Each of these disciplinarians considered physical violence an appropriate form of punishment for young males. As Dunbar T. Moodie argues for South Africa, "being beaten was a completely normal part of growing up male. …

Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio

Abstract: Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio By Harri Englund Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 201 1 Pp 294 $70/£52 cloth, $2495/£1699 paper, $2095/£1499 E-Book"Let their money take them to hospital," said an interviewee over twenty -five years ago when discussing how he felt about Africans who gained money through the opportunities afforded by colonial capitalism but who did not share that bounty with others Their stinginess "disappointed" people, but it also exposed them to witchcraft accusations, or as implied above, could endanger their physical lives The remark hinted at a moral economy that made possible a clearer understanding of the nature of nascent capitalism in colonial Malawi in exposing attitudes towards the acquisition of wealth and its fair distributionWhen reading Harri Englund 's recent book, I was time and again reminded of this experience The book is an ethnography of the Chichewa language radio program, Nkhani Zam'maboma (News from the Districts), which has been broadcast by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) since 1998 The program's inception followed the democratization of Malawian political life after the fall of the totalitarian Malawi Congress Party regime led by the late Dr Hastings Banda in 1996, and coincided with renewed interest in raising consciousness of and about human rights The ten-minute programs are broadcast at the end of the day They consist of five to ten stories that draw on real tales submitted to MBC from a public tutored in reading between the lines of aural and written text after thirty years of critical listening under autocracy Coming from the poor themselves and focusing on socioeconomic injustices and the abuse of power, Englund argues, the program is a forum through which Malawians engage in moral debate outside of the narrow confines of human rights talk which has all too often conflated equality and sameness and defined freedom as individual freedom By contrast, in the world of Nkhani Zam'maboma, hierarchy and mutual obligations are the stuff of social, economic, and political order Far from being incompatible with equality, it is equality that is at the basis of these stories and the claims implicitly made in them It is this equality that gives people license to criticize their social/political seniors So, instead of seeing equality as an elusive goal or ideal (as in Uberai thought and human rights talk), Englund argues that equality is at the basis of claim making and conversations about justice and fairnessThis book builds on ideas introduced in his 2006 monograph, Prisoners of Freedom, which provided a critique of human rights activism that has failed to address the continued existence of socioeconomic inequalities in Malawian life …

Repatriation in Colonial Kenya: African Institutions and Gendered Violence

Abstract: In contemporary Kenya it is not entirely uncommon to witness scenes of women being violently stripped at a crowded Nairobi bus stage or paraded around naked at a rural town market by an angry mob. Whether it is due to an accusation of infidelity or simply a spontaneous mob indictment about the provocative nature of one's dress, the public spectacle of these violent acts frequently show up on the pages of the popular Kenyan press.1 These incidents, part of a larger issue of state and public ambivalence to extrajudicial violence in postcolonial Kenya, are often reported as customary offences outside the scope or protection of legal authorities.2 While viewed by some as acceptable extrajudicial punishment for "cultural offenses," this style of vigilantism also points to a broader history of how public violence was used to shape the morality of civic virtue and gendered conduct in Kenya's past.3 Reading the discourse of these contemporary events reflects clear continuities with debates from the colonial past. Informants from the Luo community interviewed from 2004 to 2009 often remembered similar scenes unfolding in urban areas throughout East Africa during the 1940s and 1950s. Accounts repeatedly described urban men (regularly sent by parents) who snatched suspected prostitutes in Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret, or Mombasa. Informant testimonies typically recalled scenes of forcibly stripping an accused woman, sometimes shaving her head and parading the "suspect" in a gunny sack to be humiliated by the court of public opinion. Finally they reported how the victim was escorted away by members of various ethnic associations before she was forcibly repatriated back to her rural homeland.4 These acts of violent humiliation were meant not only to chastise "wayward women," but also served as a means to publicly demonstrate claims by a young and conservative group of labor migrants that the urban landscapes of colonial Kenya were contested zones of patriarchal authority. This article uses the case of forced repatriation of African women in colonial Kenya to examine differing notions of urban citizenship, and how a wider movement of youthful male conservatism from western Kenya shaped the acceptable limits of gendered violence in the public sphere. I argue that by justifying repatriation violence as a way to uphold customary law and promote social discipline, an uneasy partnership between African institutions and the colonial state emerged where young men and women engaged in broad moral discussions on the politics of belonging. Ethnic discipline and social welfare were influential themes of this discussion, and African men exploited state fears of urban disorder to carry out activities that were well outside the confines of the colonial legal code. While scholars have clearly shown that women carved out important and influential niches throughout the colonial period, few have focused specifically on the broader meaning of repatriation cases.5 In the realm of both legal and social history, contested views of repatriation reveal the blurred lines between discipline, crime, and the gendered social order across the colonial landscape. Placed within this broader issue on violence in colonial Kenya, repatriation cases more importantly illuminate the ways public violence was employed in the name of "tribal tradition," which allowed this form of gendered violence to fall through the cracks of the colonial legal system. As African elites used the repatriation of women to assert authority and socialize urban migrants into respectability, state officials often turned a blind eye to extra-judicial activities that promoted social discipline in the settler dominated setting of urban colonial Kenya. Examining this form of colonial violence also reveals how public debates over urban citizenship and gendered conduct provide a window into how the use of public/extra-judicial violence was institutionalized throughout the colonial experience. …

Murder and Mercy: Capital Punishment in Colonial Kenya, Ca. 1909-1956*

Abstract: I sometimes wonder whether in this country capital punishment is not inflicted on natives more often than is strictly necessary to attain the ends of justice.1 - District Commissioner, Nyeri, 13 October 1921. While military force, structural violence and alliances were crucial to the spread and maintenance of colonial hegemony across British Africa, so too were ideas of the "rule of law" and British "justice."2 As a 1934 enquiry into the administration of justice in East Africa noted: "It is the duty of Government to civilise and to maintain peace and good order, and this can only be done by the introduction of British concepts of wrong-doing. Revenge and retribution as methods of punishing criminals must go, and crime must be regarded first and foremost as an offence against the community if the peoples of these territories are to advance in enlightenment and prosperity."3 British colonial regimes placed a great emphasis on the importance of courts as the cornerstone of British "justice" and "law and order," with civilization being equated with the rule of law.4 Many historians however have questioned official commitment to the principles of the "rule of law," arguing that it was but a facade behind which to conceal the everyday practices of colonial exploitation.5 Crime historian Martin Wiener however argues that historians should not underestimate the complexities and sometimes paradoxes of events on the ground in individual colonies. These complexities become particularly apparent in the arena of colonial law and punishment, as historians seek to uncover the workings of courts in their search for "truth" and "justice."6 In Kenya, as in other colonial territories, there were persistent tensions within the colonial edifice between the desire for "good governance" and "civilised" rule, and a belief that violence was necessary to achieve control and development.7 Across British Africa many colonial officials displayed a strong cultural commitment to British "justice" and the "rule of law," which, while not making physical punishment impossible, made it ethically problematic.8 Others had few such qualms.9 Courtroom trials of murder suspects and the use of the death penalty forced colonial states, and their legal and administrative functionaries, to openly discuss such tensions, not in abstract legal or political theory, but over the body of the condemned man.10 Capital punishment formed the lethal apogee of the judicial and penal violence inflicted upon African subjects by the colonial government in Kenya, but to date there have been few efforts to investigate this violence, or to situate it- and the deaths it inflictedwithin the wider nexus of colonial power, with the notable exception of David Anderson's analysis of the Mau Mau rebellion, Histories of the Hanged. n Any discussion of state killing in Kenya would be incomplete without reference to the 1,090 executions that occurred in 1952-57 during the Mau Mau rebellion; an unprecedented level of judicial violence in Britain's twentieth-century empire. One aim of this article is to further contextualize Anderson's recent analysis of the Mau Mau hangings by tracing the path of the death penalty through Kenya's colonial period to try and understand how, and why, the state choose to so ruthlessly deploy "the extreme penalty of the law" during the State of Emergency. The death penalty is here analyzed as a lens through which to view colonial strategies of law, order, and social control, drawing on the rich archival record of 1,108 murder trials, with transcripts from 1939-1957 in particular, alongside legal papers from the Ministry of Legal Affairs and Attorney-General series in the Kenyan National Archives, Nairobi. Unlike other penal measures, capital punishment is an expressly political penalty: the final decision on whether a condemned man would hang lay not with a judge but with the governor of the colony, who could choose to "let the law take its course" or to exercise his mercy and commute the sentence. …

Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East

Abstract: Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East. By Mark Allen Peterson. Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Pp. xvii, 263; photographs, notes, references, index. $70/£54 cloth, $24.95/£16.99 paper, $20.95/£15.99 E-book. To be "connected" in Cairo, according to Mark Allen Peterson, is to hail from the upper crust of society and to share a set of tastes in "transnational goods and services" available both locally and globally that "are not luxuries but necessities." Peterson sets out to describe how the material and ideological worldview of the "A and B+ classes" is formed and perpetuated (p. 2). For all we have read in the past "revolutionary" year about hi-tech social networking, Peterson's subjects are "connected" in classic terms of kinship and social capital. There is much to this study that is enlightening. Peterson relates his points at the pace of an experienced lecturer cognizant of the degree to which his readers, especially undergraduates, require a steady dose of repetition. This would be an enjoyable book to teach, theoretically sophisticated, albeit a bit jargon-laden, but accessible. The narrative sections are engaging, whether discourses on the business of fostering and capturing cosmopolitan taste buds or descriptions of social encounters in new and traditional public spaces. Peterson taught for five years at the American University of Cairo, during which time he delved into the lives of his students and, through family connections, into the lives of siblings who read comic books and play Pokemon (high school years remain un-explored). He traces their formation as consumers with a particular set of class-defining tastes, which, by virtue of their wealth, they are able to realize. He then situates them in college, at which point their struggle to balance local Egyptian and global cosmopolitan identities become acute. He looks at language patterns and social convergence, gendered but not always segregated, outside the home, focusing on the venerable coffee shop. Then he leaves his students behind to explore the cultural capital ventures of their elder brothers (no sisters) who established the first globally inspired fast-food restaurants and cafes in Cairo. If it is fair to summarize a work in one line, I would cite Peterson's observation that his elite, cosmopolitan AUC students "complain that it is no longer clear what it means to be Egyptian" (p. 103). They describe a predicament in which contradictions of class and patriotism and an "ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with the local" (p. …

Intellectual discourse in the Sokoto Caliphate: the triumvirate's opinions on the issue of ransoming, ca. 1810

Abstract: "The Shehu was the sun ... his younger brother was the moon . . . and Bello is their legatee."1Nana Asma'u, "Sonnore Abdullahi"Introduction"Islamic intellectual history," wrote David Gutelius, "is frequently written as if intellectuals were somehow separate from the social milieu that shaped their ideas and actions."2 While he made this statement specifically to address what he sees as an underemphasis of the role African Muslim scholars played in their communities, it is just as applicable to our understanding of the written records left by these scholars. As Scott Reese has pointed out, historians have recently changed the way in which they view and examine texts produced by Muslim intellectuals.3 It had been assumed that the religious nature of a text deprived it of historical value. African Muslim scholars were treated as if they were writing in a vacuum instead of reacting to the circumstances around them. Yet, discussions on Islamic law were in many respects a form of "total discourse" since they encompassed religious, legal, moral, economic, and political facets.4 West African Muslim scholars were concerned with and influenced by the ideas, concerns, and events surrounding them. Their writings frequently addressed the ethical, political, legal, and other issues of the time and place in which they lived. This was particularly true of the founding governor- scholars of the Sokoto Caliphate- 'Uthmân b. Fudi, his brother 'Abdullah! b. Fudi, and 'Uthman's son, Muhammad Bello. The differences in their advice and policies demonstrate not only a lively intellectual discourse and debate but also the dynamism and responsiveness of the Sokoto leadership to the challenges of governing a new multicultural state. The triumvirate based their opinions, policies, and disagreements upon their understanding of Islamic jurisprudence and precedent as well as on local circumstances. One example of this is the divergent opinion between 'Abdullahi and Bello on the ransoming of war prisoners held by Sokoto forces. Ransoming refers to the practice of paying for the release of a captive at the time of capture or soon afterwards with the ransomed captive returning to their previous status in their own society. The discourse on ransoming intersects policy debate, intellectual debate, and politics. It further demonstrates the intellectual vibrancy of African Muslim intellectuals and their interconnectedness with the scholarship of the greater Islamic world.Origins and Education of the FodiawaThe Sokoto reform movement and the state that was created out of it was founded by a group of Muslim scholars concerned about the role of Islam in society and the politics and economy of the central Sudan. The movement was centered on 'Uthmân b. Fudi and his family. As a scholarly family in the central Sudan, the Fodiawa were tied into the scholarly networks of West Africa and the greater Islamic world. They came from a long line of Fulbe scholars and teachers. Indeed their name "Fodiye" means "learned man" in Fulfulde. They trace their family roots to Musa Jokollo who was said to have left Futa Toro in Guinea in the fifteenth century due to religious persecution. The family eventually settled in the Hausa city-state of Gobir. The Fodiawa were part of a larger Fulbe migration from Futa Toro into the central Sudan region that began by the fifteenth century at the latest.5 These migrants were composed mostly of cattle-herders but included scholarly families that took on the roles of teachers, preachers, and religious counsellors. Upon reaching Hausaland most of the Fulbe migrants began living a rural, semi-sedentary life far from the seats of political power in the Hausa cities. Yet, some among them, including the Fodiawa, established closer connections with the cities including with the ruling class.'Uthmân and 'Abdullahi received the typical education of the sons of an eighteenth-century scholarly Fulbe family of the central Sudan. …

Settlers, Africans, and Inter-Personal Violence in Kenya, ca. 1900-1920s.

Abstract: As Fanon noted, violence was inherent in inter-racial relations in settler colonies, and Ngugi reiterated this point specifically in regard to Kenya.1 When attempting to write a cultural history of white settlers, Ngugi found nothing of value. He observed only garish paintings in upscale Nairobi bars featuring scenes of colonial life: scrawny Africans pulling whites in rickshaws, a "long bull-necked, bull-faced settler" holding a sjambock (Afrikaans: whip) and his loyal (and well-fed) dog at his side. It was just such a scene, Ngugi reflected, that summed up white settlement: "The rickshaw. The dog. The sjambock. The ubiquitous underfed, wide-eyed, uniformed native slave."2 In the end, as Ngugi put it, "Reactionary violence to instill fear and silence was the very essence of colonial settler culture."3 As is so often the case, Ngugi cut to the heart of the matter: one cannot envision the settler without the sjambock, or in Kenyan parlance, the kiboko (hippopotamus-hide whip).4 Often settlers considered beatings as part and parcel of life in Africa, almost akin to milking the cows or cleaning the kitchen (if, in fact, Europeans ever performed such menial tasks). In the first several decades of colonial Kenya, settlers certainly did not hesitate to discuss their use of the lash. In a letter to the East African Standard in 1927, Frank Watkins bragged that, "I thrash my boys if they deserve it and I will let [African defender and settler critic] Archdeacon Owen or anyone else enquire into my methods of handling and working labour."5 The Times of East Africa believed, "Probably there is not white man in this country who has not at some time lost his temper in dealing with natives . . . and a number may have dealt out to them a sound thrashing." The editors thought these to be "natural outbursts."6 What we require is a detailed investigation into the uses and meanings of, and the ideology whites created to justify, interpersonal violence. Settlers believed that if they did not beat their workers, Africans would shirk even more than they already did; they argued that Africans were childlike and the only punishment they understood was the lash; they used whippings with the kiboko to illustrate the right and might of settler rule; they lashed African men who "insulted" white women; they beat Africans who did not immediately do their bidding or proved bothersome. Thus the native slave, the rickshaw, and the whip.7 As Arendt argued, authority cannot flow from violence. Settler violence emerged from fear and powerlessness.8 They had somehow to find a way to ensure the success, even the mere survival, of their community. Perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to rely on unquestioning state support, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of "savages": settlers had to assert power, to claim control of an anarchic situation. They turned to violence, as the East African Standard explained in 1907: So long as the world exists there will always be found some to issue protests against the just punishment of the Native, and the application of stern discipline, without which the white man in his trifling minority cannot hope to control those whom he has taken upon himself to lift up out of the mire of superstition and instinctive criminality.9 And again in 1913: For it must be remembered that in this country the black man is infinitely superior in number to the white and the latter' s position in the black man's country is one which may well be regarded as precarious. That being so, the rule of the iron hand is still absolutely essential to the very existence of the white man in B.E.A. [British East Africa], and the few individual beating indiscretions committed might reasonably be pardoned in view of the fact- and in consideration of the almost unendurable provocation which the white man is compelled to suffer on account of the indolence and insolence of the major portion of our native population. …

Violence in a Time of Liberation: Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994

Abstract: Violence in a Time of Liberation: Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994 By Donald L Donham with photographs by Santu Mofokeng Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011 Pp xiv, 237, photographs, bibliography, index $7995 cloth, $2295 paper Media commentators proclaimed in 1994 that South Africa's democratic transition was a "miracle," and that has been the received wisdom ever since It is true that the elections happened without major incident and that the apartheid government peacefully handed over power to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC)-led government But this image masks the widespread violence, resulting in the deaths of thousands, during the preceding ten years as a township uprising was met with massive repression This violence reached a crescendo after the 1990 legalization of the ANC and other formerly banned movements People and organizations engaged in shifting alliances, struggling to maintain or gain power as apartheid crumbled and the nation was redefined Donham reminds us that Frantz Fanon argued that "decolonization is always a violent event,"1 and South Africa was no exception What commentators saw as miraculous, of course, was that a struggle by a black majority to achieve citizenship rights in the face of the legalized white supremacy of apartheid did not develop into an attack by blacks on whites Instead, violence often took the form of attacks by blacks on other blacks From 1990 to 1994, the media described much of that violence as ethnically motivated, pitting Zulus against other black groups, especially Xhosa Violence in a Time of Liberation is an anatomy of a murder at a mine Donham calls "Cinderella" a few weeks after the elections On June 16, a new holiday to commemorate the Soweto Uprising of 1976, a group of workers attacked other workers, leaving two dead The killing was immediately marked, and later remembered, as an ethnic attack on Zulu workers by non- Zulus Donham' s goal is to understand why this killing occurred and why it was marked as ethnic, in order to "illustrate a critical methodology for reading ethnic violence" (p 7) This is a carefully analyzed, clearly written, and beautifully produced book Donham's careful attention to detail is nicely enhanced by South African photographer Santu Mofokeng's work, which Donham uses not only to illustrate particular aspects of the case, but also to provide readers with a first entry into the world of the mine and especially the workers' compound where the killings took place Donham' s effort to contextualize the killings is far-reaching He leads the reader through layer after layer to see how this event was embedded in a larger world of transitions in the political economy of the mines These included the introduction of unions and the economic decline of marginal mines like Cinderella, and how that transition was embedded in larger changes in the South African and global economies, these in turn connected to political struggles within and beyond South Africa …

Contemporary francophone African writers and the burden of commitment

Abstract: Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. By Odile Cazenave & Patricia Celerier. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 246; bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth, $24.50 paper. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Celerier problematize the term "engagement" by examining it through historical, political, and social perspectives. Many African writers struggle to define themselves first and foremost as authors rather than solely on the basis of nation, culture, or geography. In their introduction, Cazenave and Celerier provide an overview of the concept of engagement, highlighting the historical context of the intellectual engage starting out with Emile Zola's seminal "J'accuse" to Sartre's ideologies when referring to a litterature engagee. In the context of Francophone African writers, one cannot discuss commitment and engagement without postcolonization. Therefore the authors bring to light a number of related issues dealing with Francophone literature, such as "the origins of Black civilizations, the elaboration of a Black aesthetics, the question of authenticity and tradition, the role of or alite and vernacular African languages, the use of French and the function of the writer and critic" (p. 7). Chapter 1, "Enduring Commitments," focuses on the role of litterature engagee in Francophone African literatures. Analyzing the works of writers and critics such as Sembene Ousmane, Mongo Beti, Aminata Sow Fall, and Henri Lopes, the authors consider how the notion of engagement differs for various writers depending upon national/transnational, social, economic and political realities. Parallel to that and just as important is the role of the writer as an artist whose function is to be free to create. The second chapter, "The Practice of Memory," stresses the importance of history for postcolonial writers. Among the various questions considered are: "How do we remember?" How should history be re-written by transforming myths and heroes? The chapter highlights the Duty of Memory Project on Rwanda and the way it pushed the participating writers "to engage in a cultural and historical context mostly foreign to them" (p. 56-58). The chapter brings to light complex issues of moral responsibility and justice, the links between memory and the engage writer, the difficulty of looking at the past when you only have traces, when "official" history has been manipulated, and the challenge for writers to re-create history in order to preserve memory by linking stories and histories. …

The changing functions of traditional dance in Zulu society: 1830-present

Abstract: Introduction: The Historical Relevance of African Dance, and the Changing Functions of Zulu Dance through TimeSince the study of African history formally began over four decades ago, African dance has been largely overlooked as a means of better understanding the African past. Abundant evidence clearly indicates the ubiquity and centrality of dance in African societies, as well as the complex social and political functions it has historically performed. Furthermore, dance practices can be a wonderful source for investigating community- wide, shared cultural experiences, and analyzing these public and symbolically rich practices has great potential to add depth to our understanding of African social, political and religious structures.However, even though dance has been a central feature of most African societies, few historical studies address the forms and functions of dance practices. Terence Ranger is the only major historian of Africa to have published a book exclusively on the interplay between dance practices and history, and his book was published over thirty years ago.1 As Ranger demonstrated long ago, and as will be further argued here, investigating this relationship has the potential to open new avenues of historical scholarship. As an outside observer moves beyond simply viewing the steps, patterns, and rhythms of a dance and begins instead to look at the contexts in which dances are performed, created, and altered, the importance of dance in creating and maintaining political structures, social structures, and religions quickly becomes visible.A wealth of sources demonstrates that dance practices have long helped to shape the shared cultural identity of various African ethnic groups.2 These practices have also served to distinguish one social group from another within indigenous African communities, as one's role in a dance is often based on one's place in the social hierarchy. For instance, in the context of initiation ceremonies among the Tswana, anthropologist Jean Comaroff has written that dance often metaphorically represents social roles, especially with respect to gender.3 Distinctions based upon gender, age, and/or social status characterize most of the dances which this paper will examine, underscoring the utility of these dance practices in helping historians to understand African social systems.Dance practices can also lend valuable insight to the interactions between African and non- African societies. For instance, the permutations in Zulu dance traditions during the last century and a half can be used to analyze the experience and effects of colonial rule, from its earliest inklings to the decrease in direct European influence by the end of the twentieth century. In fact, one of the more useful analytical approaches to investigating dance practices in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts is to look at the role of tradition in different dances, and how this connection to the past has or has not played a role in the manipulation of these dance practices for political or social purposes.Before continuing further with this analytical thread, it is necessary to briefly investigate what is meant by "tradition." In the context of this paper, the concept of tradition is used refer to cultural practices that carry with them a historical weight; or, the sense that a traditional practice- in contemporary contexts- is connected to the past. Another way of thinking about tradition in this same vein, as Jan Vansina has noted, is that it can be seen to constitute "a moving continuity," capable of expressing both past and present realities.4 Historians Jonathon Glassman and Jamie Monson have also asserted that a continuous interplay can certainly exist between traditions that may have legitimate roots in the past, and traditions that claim to have a connection to the past but have been developed much more recently.5 This latter category was once famously termed "invented tradition" by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in The Invention of Tradition,6 though the intervening years since the publication of that work have witnessed the development of a much more nuanced sense of the interplay between past and present conceptions of tradition, as articulated by historians such as Glassman, Monson, Thomas Spear, Carolyn Hamilton, and even Terence Ranger himself. …

The Cambridge History of South Africa: Volume 2, 1885-1994

Abstract: The Cambridge History of South Africa: Volume 2, 1885-1994. Edited by Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 201 1 . Pp. xi, 724; appendix, bibliography, index. $165.00.During the heady days of the South African uprisings and rebellions of the 1970s and 1980s, and then the ultimate demise of apartheid in the early 1990s, a homegrown South African historiography flourished. Styling themselves as a class of radical, organic intellectuals, historians detailed the fragile hegemony of the racial order and the many challenges to it. They positioned themselves against an older tradition of "liberal" historians, such as Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, who wrote the previous Oxbridge compendium of South African history, The Oxford History of South Africa in 1968, by highlighting the capitalist underpinnings of the apartheid order. As rebellions widened the cracks in the apartheid state's authority through the 1980s, these historians also gave voice to its many victims and resistors. This volume, with many chapters penned by the doyens of these radical historians, is the best compilation and synthesis of this scholarship to date.The first approach evident among these radical historians, influenced by theoretical Marxism and other forms of structuralism, sought to expose the structures of oppression, in particular the rise of that edifice of racial capitalism- the apartheid state. Here three chapters illustrate this approach. Stanley Trapido, a leading theorist on the class alliances that constituted the rise of the settler state, carefully analyzes the economic and strategic interests during and immediately after the mineral discoveries of the late nineteenth century and their major conflagration by the end of that century, the South African War, all of which set the stage for a political incorporation that conformed to the then dominant economic interests. With special attention to the political economy during the Union years (defined here as 1910 to 1948), Bill Freund considers the consequences of this political incorporation: the establishment of an interventionist and segregationist state that attempted but failed to exert its hegemony. Insisting on the relative autonomy of the apartheid state from economic interests, Deborah Posel illustrates apartheid's statecraft and governmentality, in Foucault' s sense (although Posel is sensitive to the limits of the state's ambitions). Her contribution distinguishes apartheid chronologically within South African history and comparatively from other forms of statecraft with which it is frequently associated, such as U.S. segregation and German Nazism. This chapter will appeal to students of comparative politics, and, as an excellent analysis of the apartheid state, should find its place in many graduate and advanced undergraduate classes on South African history.The second approach of these radical historians was to detail the many ways people challenged the hegemonic order. They grappled with the role and influence of popular agency in the context of a seemingly omnipotent and oppressive racial order. Shula Marks and her many students pioneered an approach that convincingly integrated historical agency within this structural context. Her two chapters here, detailing the period from 1880 to 1910, skillfully illustrate her historiographie technique and mastery of the period in a discussion of various social and political movements and their respective ideologies, including the competing nationalisms that drove Boers and Brits to war in 1899, African popular and elite Christianity, ethnic mobilizations, and the origins of working class agency on the sprawling mines of Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. Philip Bonner achieves a similar attention to local agency in the face of broader structural forces in his analysis of South African society and culture from 1910 to 1948.Radical historians also debated and wrote about different forms of social and cultural agency. …

Introduction: Towards a History of Violence in Colonial Kenya

Abstract: On December 27, 2007, Kenya seemed poised to cement its image as one of Africa's most "mature" democracies. What Kenyans anticipated would be the most free and fair elections in their history instead devolved into one of the nation's darkest hours. From Mombasa to Kisumu citizens cast their ballots in relative peace and security. As the election results trickled in, however, rumors of irregularities in the tally surfaced. Both of the leading parties- ODM and PNU- accused the other of corrupt practices and tampering.1 As ballot counting continued and opposition candidate Raila Odinga appeared on his way to capturing the presidency, the Electoral Commission of Kenya suddenly declared incumbent Mwai Kibaki the winner. In a hastily arranged private ceremony, Chief Justice Evan Gicheru gave Kibaki the oath of office. In the weeks and months that followed, outraged political supporters of both candidates poured into the streets. Protests quickly turned violent. The police, military, and politically sponsored gangs used the tense climate not only to fight over the presidency, but also to square off over long-standing problems, from land ownership to the politics of identity. In the cosmopolitan capital of Nairobi, in the rich agricultural highlands of Kenya's former colonial settlers, in lakeside Kisumu, thousands were injured or killed with hundreds of thousands more left displaced.2 Much of the world had historically viewed Kenya as an island of peace and economic potential in a roiling sea of stateless chaos (Somalia), genocide (Rwanda), mad dictators and child soldiers (Uganda), and a decades-long civil war (Sudan). As the postelection violence mounted, however, much of the world media reverted to stock narratives about Africa. Tales of mindless "tribal" violence perpetrated by machete- wielding young men dominated the early western media coverage. Reporters found that they could easily make Kenya explicable by classifying it as a stereotypical African conflict.3 This focus on the savagery of the violence and the proffering of simplistic explanations prevented serious discussion of the root causes of the post-election violence (or PEV as it was quickly dubbed). The western press informed readers that Kenyan communities had "awakened ancient ethnic rivalries" and were "settling the score the old fashion way."4 Yet the violence was not ancient and primordial. Nor was it the result of nothing more than a deeply flawed election. What the popular narrative often failed to capture was the continuity with Kenya's violent colonial past. The roots of the post-election violence were not so deep as to be entwined in Kenyans' DNA, nor so shallow as to have grown from a seed planted on December 27. We must instead trace the roots- tangled as they are- at least as far back as the colonial epoch, when public violence was employed to assert social and political authority. The following essays do not directly speak to the 2007/2008 post-election violence in Kenya. Instead, they offer a deeper look into how the meanings and uses of public violence were shaped by the colonial encounter. From the racially charged settler society and colonial courts to the suppression of gendered and youthful defiance in schools and cities, the following essays seek to move Kenyan historiography beyond the usual discussions of violence as anti-colonial resistance and to challenge the broader portrayal of violence in histories of colonial Africa.5 In the western mind, life in Africa is nasty, brutish and short, and violent. Images and tales of mass graves and savage violence often dominate coverage of the continent by a media that thrives on a pornography of suffering. In his widely-referenced and highly influential 1994 article "The Coming Anarchy," Robert Kaplan warned that western civilization was in its death throes, and the post-apocalyptic world would look much like contemporary Africa: genocides, state collapse, warlordism.6 The causes of Africa's anomie, poverty, and crime included polygamy as well as a veneer of Christianity or Islam incapable of regulating Africans' darker impulses. …

'The history and affairs of TANU': intellectual history, nationalism, and the postcolonial state in Tanzania

Abstract: Colonial Africa's intellectual history once attracted little attention. In so far as Africa was understood to have an intellectual history, it was conceived as one that arrived late and (almost) fully formed from Europe and America.1 Yet in recent years our understanding of colonial Africa's intellectual history has been transformed, as historians have begun to tease out the ways in which political thinking was not simply borrowed from elsewhere, but rather was developed in dialogue with older modes and patterns of thinking. In East Africa as elsewhere "local intellectuals"- school teachers, clerks and local politiciansput pen to paper to reflect on a world in flux, to write about the past and to imagine a better future.2 These men, and occasionally women, considered Africa's place in the modern world, and reflected on what "modernity" should mean in an African context.3When in the late 1940s and 1950s, aspirant national politicians sought to create new constituencies, they had to operate in this intellectual framework, and to offer their own narratives of past, present and future. They were not "inventing politics," creating political and politicized subjects where none had previously existed, but rather they engaged with existing ideas which had themselves been formed through dialogue.4 John Lonsdale has argued that "[nationalism in Kenya, the imagination of community -as distinct from anticolonial resistance to 'the second colonial occupation'- was chiefly a response to gender conflict and class formation," and that it demanded political imagination, the ability to provide a compelling vision of the past and the future which responded to social conflict with a politics of hope and a re-articulation of bonds of community.5 It was this power of imagination, not mere talents of organization and mobilization, that was needed if authority were to be established, and it had to engage with local struggles.6In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere was faced with similar challenges. While the intrusive policies of the "second colonial occupation" might mobilize dissent, they produced conflict within societies as well as against the colonial state. Shambaa resistance to the anti-erosion policies of the 1950s was incorporated into ongoing arguments over legitimate authority. The existence of long-standing political debates and divisions had two implications for those who sought to offer national leadership. First, when Nyerere sought to articulate a compelling message he had to understand and incorporate local discourses into the discourses that he constructed. But second, nationalist politics meant taking sides in local struggles, rather than simply uniting the people behind a leader, and thus ensured that argument would continue into the postcolonial state. As Steven Feierman has shown, the "peasant intellectuals" of the Usambara mountains had long debated the proper location of authority and the domain of legitimate power.7If intellectual histories of the late colonial period tell a story of vibrant debate and argument, we know less about the ways in which Tanzanians thought about and reflected on the early postcolonial state. In contrast to the intellectual histories of the colonial period that have appeared in recent years, the historiography of the postcolonial period has tended to focus on statecraft and high politics and has neglected intellectual history.8 This is true not only of East Africa, but also of the continent more widely. In a recent article exploring the autobiography of a Guinean teacher in the decades following Guinea's independence, Jay Straker regretted the fact that "the new wave of autobiographically oriented historiography" had "tended to gravitate towards colonial rather than postcolonial subjects and narratives" and called for more attention to the making of postcolonial subjectivities.9This focus on the state, rather than on African thinking about the state, has perhaps helped to encourage a trend within the historiography towards a stress on continuity between the late colonial state and the early postcolonial state. …

Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History

Abstract: Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History. By Toy in Falo la and Saheed Aderinto. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 333; selected bibliography, index. $75.00. Ah, Nigeria. Some love it. Some hate it. Most who know it do both. From frequent characterization as the "Superpower of Africa" to Soyinka's famous description of the country as the "Open Sore of a Continent" there is no shortage of opposing perspectives on this enigmatic African state. In this beautifully crafted new volume Falola and Aderinto bring a new and welcome perspective to the table. In Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History they explore the depth and diversity of Nigeria's national historiography and what this body of scholarship means for Nigeria's developing self-identity and for the development of African history itself. While highlighting the many contributions of Nigerian historians, the book is not overly celebratory or hagiographie. Indeed, a key theme of this text is that from a peak of creativity and influence in the 1960s and 1970s, the production of historical knowledge in Nigeria fell into a period of decline in the latter twentieth and early twenty -first centuries. To this end, Falola and Aderinto examine Nigeria's national historiography from a number of angles. In Part One, "The Foundation of Knowledge," they provide a brief introduction to the "pre-academic" historiography of Nigeria, looking at the work of writers such as Muhammad Bello, Moses Lijadu, and Akiga Sai. A critical yet balanced eye is also turned to the work of western missionaries and colonial administrators in shaping the development of Nigerian perspectives on history and identity. A discussion of the development of post-war and independence era scholarship, including the influence of the "Ibadan School" of African history, rounds out this brief introduction. Chapter 2 of this section examines the critical contribution of K.O. Dike in the foundation of Nigeria's system of National Archives. In Part Two, "Varieties of History," the authors provide a thematic overview of the topic from political, economic, social, and women's and gender history perspectives. This section of the book both extends the chronological narrative of the introductory chapter, and also helps place Nigerian historiography in the broader context of African history. There are also occasional glimpses into connections to broader historiographical trends as well, such as the contributions of Nigerian scholars to the debates between the modernization and dependency camps of economic history. …

I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya

Abstract: I Say To You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. By Gabrielle Lynch. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 201 1 . Pp. xiii, 283; 2 maps. $80.00 cloth, $27.50 paper. Given historians' interest in the invention of tribes, it is surprising that the Kalenjin of Kenya have gone without significant scholarly attention. Perhaps their invention was too obvious, for it can be located with jarring precision. In the 1940s, a Nandi radio announcer opened broadcasts with "I say to you"- kalenjin. A variety of groups soon adopted the term as a tribal signifier to unite peoples linguistically related, but with little prior sense of cultural or political kinship, and who were spread across hundreds of miles of Kenya's Rift Valley. Our ignorance of this "tribe" is yet more surprising given that former president Daniel arap Moi is Kalenjin. That much of the post-election violence of 2007-2008 took place in the Rift Valley increases our need to understand their history In this fascinating book, Lynch offers a strikingly new interpretation of Kalenjin politics over the past seventy years. This is a full, rich book, brimming over with the personalities and intrigues typical of Kenya's high-stakes, soap operatic, political world. Lynch disabuses us of most of what we thought we knew about the Kalenjin. She emphasizes, first, that Kalenjin-ness has not replaced older identities- Turkana, Kipsigis, Tugen, Elgeyo, Marakwet, Terik, Sabaot, Pokot- but overlays them. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that Kalenjin consciousness could not have erased other group identities in so short a time. But discourses surrounding the bloc voting of the Kalenjin have been so pervasive in Kenya over the past thirty years it was easy (for outsiders) to overlook how important intra-Kalenjin debates could be. By attending to these internal divisions, Lynch explains how deeply «popular Moi was in many parts of the Rift Valley. Many Kalenjin told Lynch that Moi and his henchman (and the alleged political assassin) Nicholas Biwott created a "Tugen-Keiyo 'axis of power'" based in their home areas (p. 137). Aside from a few elite allies of Moi, the rest of the Rift Valley suffered repression, poverty, and neglect along with the rest of the country. The story of Kalenjin dominance and favoritism under Moi, Lynch argues, was largely a myth. Yet Kalenjin nonetheless did tend to vote for Moi: in 1992, Moi received over 87 percent of the votes in eleven of the sixteen Rift Valley constituencies, and nothing less than 61 percent in the other five (Table Al). In 1997, the numbers were similar: in twentythree constituencies, he garnered over 85 percent of the votes, and not less than 65 percent in any of the remaining five (Table A3). …

The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival

Abstract: The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival. By Rudiger Seesemann. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. x, 331; map, photographs, bibliography, index, glossary. $65.00. Historical scholarship concerning Sufism in Senegal has most often focused on the Murid Sufi order to the relative exclusion of the larger Tijani order (Tijaniyya) and the smaller Qadiriyya and the Lay enne. Furthermore, with few exceptions, most scholars have focused their studies on the leadership of the orders be they founding saints such as Amadu Bamba, Senegalese representatives of international orders such as Al-hajj Malik Sy, or iconic figures such as Ibra Fall. Recent scholarship has revolutionized the field through research methodology that makes critical use of indigenous written and oral sources and rejects colonial era paradigms. Rudiger Seesemann 's The Divine Flood employs this revolutionary approach in a brilliant examination of the career of Ibrahim Niasse (1900-1975), a complex figure who has been frequently overshadowed by the likes of Bamba and Sy in the literature of Senegalese Sufi leaders and yet established a transnational movement not matched by any of his predecessors or contemporaries. Niasse is chiefly known for establishing the Community of the Divine Flood within the Tijaniyya order. According to members of the community, the founder of the Tijani order, Ahmad al-Tijani, foretold that a flood, or fayda, of spiritual illumination would descend upon his followers during troubled times. In 1929, Ibrahim Niasse declared himself to be the bringer of that flood and began to teach his disciples a rigorous form of spiritual training, or tarbiya, that would enable them to perfect their faith through the attainment of mystical knowledge of God. Many in the Tijaniyya doubted Niasse. However, the opposition to his training and his status as the preeminent saint of his time and supreme leader of the Tijaniyya served, according to Seesemann, to solidify a sense of collective identity within the community as it spread far outside of Senegal, particularly after World Warn. Seesemann relies on an impressive array of Niasse' s writings in Arabic in various forms from poetry to polemics to travelogues. Use is also made of a wide range of primary sources mostly written by Tijani Sufis that have been employed over time by both supporters and detractors of Niasse. Seesemann also conducted interviews with over a dozen prominent intellectuals some of whom were sons of Niasse. …

Harnessing the Zambezi: how Mozambique's planned Mphanda Nkuwa dam perpetuates the colonial past

Abstract: Cahora Bassa, completed on the Mozambican stretch of the Zambezi River in 1974, the year before the end of Portuguese rule, was catastrophic for the approximately half-million people who depended on the river and its delta for their livelihood and for the ten sof thousands who were forcibly relocated when the dam’s lake was created. Even today, the flow management scheme required to maximize export of electricity to South Africa continues to wipe out dry-season crops and drastically reduce fishing, making life along the Zambezi barely supportable. Despite the traumatic history of Cahora Bassa, the Frelimo government is committed to a colonial-era plan to build a second dam approximately 70 kilometers downriver from the first. In many respects, Mphanda Nkuwa, as the dam project is called, looks like a replay of the colonial past. Mozambique justifies the dam in language largely unchanged from the colonial era. The overarching economic imperative driving the dam is the same—cheap energy for South Africa. According to environmentalists, Mphanda Nkuwa is being pushed through without proper impact studies. And as with Cahora Bassa, decisions on Mphanda Nkuwa have generally occurred behind closed doors. Impacted communities have had little meaningful say in what is to befall them. Yet, even with these unmistakable similarities with the Portuguese past, the new dam is not simply a re-enactment of colonial-era sins. Whatever one thinks of its merits, it is not, as Cahora Bassa essentially was, a colonial security project disguised as development. Moreover, for all the single-mindedness with which Frelimo has imposed the project on local communities, the power dynamic now is very different than in the colonial era, when an alien regime ruled by violent force. Many fewer people will have to be relocated by the second dam. Additionally, to the extent public debate occurs about construction of the dam, it is pushed by a voice that was barely audible 40 years ago—an environmental movement with global links and a toehold in Mozambique. Rather than think of Mphanda Nkuwa as an ugly history repeating itself, it is more productive to examine how Cahora Bassa and Mphanda Nkuwa are part of the same ongoing process: the harnessing of the Zambezi River largely to the detriment of the farmers and fishermen who depend on it. In this study we argue that this harmful process works in two directions. Cahora Bassa and the assumptions embedded in it continue to shape present realities. And the planning of Mphanda Nkuwa likely makes permanent the impact of Cahora Bassa, widely regarded as one of the most ecologically destructive dams in Africa. The official adulation surrounding Mphanda Nkuwa celebrates Cahora Bassa, and drowns out the memories and the lived experiences of those whom Cahora Bassa impacted. Moreover, because investors in this new project will want to maximize energy output, Mphanda Nkuwa would likely foreclose the possibility of reforming the flow pattern of Cahora Bassa and thereby of restoring riverside farming to some semblance of what it was before the construction of the first dam.Mphanda Nkuwa, that is, will freeze the colonial past in place. This paper is written in two parts. The first discusses Mphanda Nkuwa at the national and transnational levels largely from the macro perspective. It covers the legacies of Cahora Bassa, the planning of Mphanda Nkuwa, the developmentalist priorities of Frelimo, and the role of environmentalists in the process. The second part examines the community of Chirodzi-Sanangwe, whose approximately 2,000 residents will have to make way for Mphanda Nkuwa. In Chirodzi-Sanangwe, the responses to the prospective dam are varied—influenced to a large degree by one’s relative economic standing. And yet all responses are shaped in some way by the experience of Cahora Bassa. In this Valley community, the future as well as the past can be said to have sunk hooks into the present.

History and the Testimony of Language

Abstract: History and the Testimony of Language. By Christopher Ehret. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. 274. $65.00/£44.95 cloth, $29.95/£20.95 paper. For over forty years, sitting in a secure post at UCLA, equipped with an amazing recall of facts, great energy, and a fierce and confident determination to follow his chosen direction, Ehret has been blazing two trails. Along one he took the conventional methods of historical and comparative linguistics and developed new, sophisticated tools for uncovering prehistory, by showing where and when early communities lived, how they were related to others, how they lived, and how they interacted with their neighbors. On the other he applied these methods to Africa, focusing on eastern and northeastern Africa, but also including north, south, and West Africa. While there are other specialists who might know more about small parts of the African linguistic field, he is the preeminent overall scholar in these fields. Ehret is that rare phenomenon, a historian who can understand, handle, and innovate linguistic material. That is not said lightly: I recall a conversation with an African archaeologist who said that faced with a choice between evidence from archaeology and linguistics, he would always rely on the former. Not surprisingly, he, as most African prehistorians, had no training in linguistics. In any case, examination of prehistory ought to combine all viable types of evidence, it is not a black and white choice. The nine chapters of the book are mostly re workings of earlier chapters or articles, dating from 1981 to 2006, and thus cover much of Ehret' s career. The first five chapters, "Evidence and Method," reflect the first path mentioned above, the last four the second path. Chapter 1, "Methods and Myths," a general introduction, not a reworking, sketches linguistic methods for historian readers, has an overview of major contributions and contributors in the field, and presents the chapters in context. Chapter 2, "Writing History from Linguistic Evidence," introduces well the basic techniques of the reconstruction of history from linguistics, and shows how findings from linguistics and archaeology can be combined, using largely examples from Nilo-Saharan. Chapter 3, "Historical Inference from Transformations in the Vocabularies of Culture," goes on from there to examine what examination of semantic change in cultural vocabulary will reveal about the history of ideas, organization of knowledge, and human activities. He uses three semantic fieldsdomestic stock, kinship terms, time reference- and examples mainly from Bantu- and Cushitic-speaking communities. Chapter 4, "Historical Inference from Word Borrowing," presents an elaborate template for different types of word borrowings, with examples taken from inside and outside Africa. While many non-linguists think primarily of language contact in terms of words, linguists tend to think of that as only one of the several results of language contact. …