Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines最新文献

{"title":"Party Politics and Economic Reform in Africa's Democracies","authors":"M. Bourbonnière","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.987461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.987461","url":null,"abstract":"leaders, have been arrested several times, but always released. They are clearly part of the political scene, and in a pluralist political system can no longer be suppressed. Their existence and the basis of their demands has forced both the state and liberal clerics to take a stand. Though members of the ulema have defended slavery in its traditional forms, members of Tawassoul have defended anti-slavery positions, though perhaps reluctantly. In 2007, the state criminalised slave ownership. Chapter 5 goes into the ideological basis of the hratin movement, focusing on the struggle for dignity and respect, particularly in the mosque. The most interesting part is a discussion of a group of clerics of hratin origin and their struggle for acceptance. Chapter 6 involves family law and personal status and involves three cases. The first is a suit by the son of a Mauritanian diplomat who sought to have his slave mother recognised as a concubine, and thus himself as legitimate. The other two involve the unsuccessful efforts of noble families to annul marriages, one between a griot and a noblewoman and the second between the son of a slave and a noblewoman. These case studies provide a fuller picture of what the struggle for equality is about and how complex the issues are. In the third case mentioned above, the young woman’s “tutor” was her brother, who approved of the marriage and was a friend of the former slave. The book comes out at a time when the issues are very much alive, and they are likely to continue to be important. The struggle against slavery has become important because the French colonisers have done nothing to work towards its abolition and because today servile people can mobilise. For anyone who wants to understand the struggle, this book is indispensable, perhaps the best and certainly the most textured account we have of the struggle against slavery in Mauritania.","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132999202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Demystifying Chinese business strength in urban Senegal and Ghana: structural change and the performativity of rumours","authors":"Laurence Marfaing, Alena Thiel","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.935642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.935642","url":null,"abstract":"Independent Chinese entrepreneurs pursuing economic activities as diverse as restaurants, medical services and, most importantly, general trade are increasingly flocking to Africa in search of business opportunities. This article deconstructs the anti-Chinese attitudes prevalent among Senegalese and Ghanaian business people working in the trade sector. Critically, triangulated data suggest that Chinese commodities, which are said to create unfair competition for local entrepreneurs, come to the African continent through diverse import channels, not least local businesses themselves. Thus their presence is not exclusively due to the in-country activities of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs, as is commonly alleged in the daily discourses of Senegalese and Ghanaian market traders. More fundamental processes of socioeconomic change, however, are subjecting traders in Ghana and Senegal to decreasing profit margins and increasing economic competition. Fuelled by broader general myths, understood as a way of conceptualising an abstract topic in chains of cultural referents (O'Sullivan et al. 1994), about the Chinese presence in Africa, we argue that rumours alleging that Chinese traders encroach on the two countries' urban marketplaces are creative means of sense-making for locals operating in a rapidly changing economic environment.","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126058020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An obscured revolution? USAID, the North Shaba Project, and the Zaïrian administration, 1976–1986","authors":"Reuben A. Loffman","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.943135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.943135","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a major instance of United States' (US) involvement in Zaïre during the 1970s and 1980s. The paper looks at an under-studied rural development scheme, known as the North Shaba Project/Projet du Nord Shaba (PNS), which was funded by USAID from 1976 to 1986.The PNS increased maize exports from northern Shaba (Katanga) to central and southern cities in the province and aimed to curtail workers’ discontent by providing cheap food for them. Its quantitative successes and “bottom-up” rhetoric led USAID officials to call the PNS an “obscured revolution”. Unlike its colonial precedents and its post-colonial contemporaries, the project attempted to integrate village farmers’ expertise in order to drive production and provide an opportunity to change existing patterns of “top-down” development. Yet, although anthropologists facilitated some significant intercultural exchanges, the project did not wholly rely on local farming techniques. Instead, the PNS's major outcome was to briefly address the Zaïrian regime's neglect of agricultural production, thus helping it survive despite the financial pressures it was under during the 1970s and the 1980s.","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130303167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chinese interest in Nigeria's oil and the American context","authors":"I. Taylor","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.971833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.971833","url":null,"abstract":"Nigeria is an emerging strategic partner of China. This may at first glance appear to have some important implications for the United States, which has long seen Nigeria as a significant player in the region and has often cast Nigeria as an ally of some import on the continent. However, when examining Sino–Nigerian ties in the context of the United States, the hyperbole about China's role needs to be tamed. Washington, DC does not seem overly concerned by China's rising influence in the country. Though US ties with Abuja are robust, its economic interest in Nigeria is declining and is not threatened by Chinese activities.","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115003082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Veni, vidi, vici: postcolonial studies comes of age","authors":"Tony Simoes da Silva","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.952152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.952152","url":null,"abstract":"This review article offers a critical assessment of Ato Quayson's Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), engaging in passing with a debate between postcolonial theorists that appeared also in 2012 in the New Literary History (43.1 & 2). It posits that the History presents postcolonial literature, and indeed postcolonial studies, as much too settled fields, a view clearly at odds both with their genesis and with that reflected in the essays in NLH.","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131304995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ernest Noirot. Un administrateur colonial hors normes 1851–1913","authors":"M. A. Klein","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.978159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.978159","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130826560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“La bibliothèque coloniale”, la propriété intellectuelle et la romance du développement en Afrique","authors":"M. Diawara","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.992798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.992798","url":null,"abstract":"One asks oneself vigorously about the conditions of the construction of knowledge relative to the African continent as well as to its way of thinking. The influence of V.Y. Mudimbe in this regard is immense. The major categories of anthropology are examined, even called into question, and most notably the ethnic groups. As pertinent as they may be, these analyses return to the library and to the system of representation that the continent invents and raise it to a paradigm of difference par excellence. It is important, beyond the scholarly discourse, to take a look at the relationship of ordinary people with libraries. Broadcasters, for example, comment candidly on the work of one artist-musician or another. Appropriation implies the related right: “droit d'auteur(e)”, copyright or “Urheberrecht”. Anyone who fails to comply becomes a pirate. What, therefore, is the meaning of to modernise the author, the work, the copyright or the pirate not in language inherited from Western law but in that of the citizen or the average villager?","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130891406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prêcher dans le désert. Islam politique et changement social en Mauritanie","authors":"M. A. Klein","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.978161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.978161","url":null,"abstract":"This is an important study of post-colonial Mauritania. The first part of the book is a summary of the history of modern Mauritania focused on Islamisation. It is a bit surprising to speak of a cou...","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134284996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade","authors":"Katrina H. B. Keefer","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.987463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.987463","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132899676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Nigeria-Biafra War: genocide and the politics of memory","authors":"O. Ojo","doi":"10.1080/00083968.2014.948259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2014.948259","url":null,"abstract":"Volunteers pay organisations to mediate opportunities for them to help Africans and experience a foreign culture. The chapter nicely elaborates the paradox, that this help is different from what local people actually think would help them. Marijke Steegstra explores the awarding of honorary titles of development queens and chiefs to foreigners by Ghanaian local chiefs for their engagement in developing the area. The author argues that the foreigners enjoy the costly ceremony but often misunderstand its objectives and remain in the chief’s installation bubble, whereas the Ghanaian chiefs who are in control of the procedure aim at committing them to long-term friendship, hoping for more gifts and development. Wanjohi Kobicho studies romance tourism and the sex trade in Kenya. As the tourist industry is largely organised by foreign companies, young local women and men are only left with informal business and sex trade. Their activities produce diverging opinions between youth and their elders, and also between the local youth and the tourists who are “physically in the host culture but socially outside” (281). Lucy McCombes pushes these reflections still further when she analyses the Gambian love bubble. She contrasts prostitution with the romance and company that the youth offer to tourists, which is not only about sex and economic gain but more complex and open, as long-term relationships might also emerge. Finally, in her afterword, Annelou Ypeij compares the African tourism encounter and its consequences with that of the Inca Trail in Peru. This valuable book is written in an accessible style and provides exciting insights. It highlights the important role that imagination plays in the encounters and (mis) understandings of people from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. It clarifies that not only the West has its imaginings of Africa (untamed wilderness, dangerous animals, authentic inhabitants) but that local people equally have stereotypical ideas about the tourists and have a stake in the tourism industry. The concept of the bubble helps to explain why these mutual imaginings, both projected onto “the other”, remain so meaningful and long lasting. Most of the chapters provide an excellent analysis of the complexity of these encounters from multiple perspectives and refrain from simplifying dichotomies and moralising tones. The introduction could have gained from being a bit more focused and nuanced, but the further one reads, the more the arguments gain critical weight and detail the complexity of the entanglements between the different stakeholders in Africa’s tourism ventures.","PeriodicalId":172027,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126421976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}