INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World","authors":"W. Norman","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5422","url":null,"abstract":"The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World Edited by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 455. $70.00 cloth, $27.00 paper. Editors Toyin Falola and Matt Childs make an important contribution to the study of the African diaspora and the Atlantic world with this new volume of essays. Falola, a scholar of African history, and Childs. a historian of the African diaspora in Cuba, frame this work as a case study that offers insights into the historical processes that shaped the larger diasporic population. They organize the book into four sections centered on the Yoruba in Africa, the diaspora in the Americas, the culture of the diaspora, and the return of Yoruba people to their homeland. By bringing together scholars from four continents and a range of disciplines to explore the history and culture of the Yoruba diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, they have bridged the ocean in two important ways. In the first section of the book David Eltis, Paul Lovejoy, and Ann O'Hear create a portrait of the Yoruba people and the processes that created the diaspora. Eltis provides a focus on the scope and range of Yoruba enslavement and dispersal. Lovejoy takes up the question of the origin of Yoruba ethnicity and includes an important discussion of the role of Islam in shaping Yoruba identification. His work also compliments Eltis in examining the demographic trends of the trade in the region. O'Hear explicates the process of enslavement and the internal and external trade in Yorubaland to complete the section. Joao Jose Reis, Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian, Michele Reid, Russell Lohse, Rosalyn Howard, and Kevin Roberts supply important discussions on the dispersal of the Yoruba throughout the Americas in the second section. Reis and Gallotti Mamigonian show the connections between Yoruba origins and the development of Nago and Mina identities in Brazil. They carefully demonstrate the religious and ethnic distinctions within the population and how tensions were pragmatically overcome. Reid offers a similar look at the Cuban Yoruba population and how they constructed Lucumi/Yoruba identity through religious associations and cultural replications. Lohse takes the reader into the unexpected territory of colonial Costa Rica, a place with few Yoruba, and shows that a careful reading of sources recovers traces of the Yoruba past. Howard and Roberts shift the focus to the English and French Caribbean comparing Yoruba presence and contributions to the lifeways and culture of diasporic populations in Trinidad, the Bahamas, and Haiti. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71111626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda","authors":"P. Shipton","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-0468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-0468","url":null,"abstract":"Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda. By Holly Elizabeth Hanson. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. xxi, 264. $26.95 paper. A wave of European anthropologists and administrators made land tenure their focus around the 1950s-when colonial powers were losing their grip, when land matters seemed to be one of the reasons why, and when the struggle to record and fathom the \"customary law\" about landholding seemed like a race against time. Today the World Bank and other aid agencies also seem to be at a loss for answers, realizing that their strategy of promoting private property in land across Africa has not been working as planned. A new generation of scholars has taken up the questions raised by the 1900 establishment of mailo land tenure-the sudden establishment of private property in square mile chunks in the Buganda kingdom, registered under the names of chiefs and other prominent persons-questions that keep reverberating through discussions of property, wealth, and poverty, and of power and ethnicity. This is clearly a topic that speaks to more than one age. In Landed Obligation, Holly Hanson hinges her contribution on a few fairly simple observations about Ganda politics. \"When people in Buganda thought about power,\" her opener reads, \"they spoke about love.\" In pre-European and early European times, she argues, leaders and followers shared a general understanding of mutual obligation, a kind of vertical social contract in which the ruler owed the subjects as much affection and loyalty as they owed the ruler labor. When kabaka-hood (or kingship) and chiefship became brutal and arbitrary under late nineteenth-century colonial taxation and labor demands that chiefs passed on to their followers, these bonds-between farming people and chiefs, and between chiefs and king-were stretched to the breaking point. It was only after a period of fear and violence that a set of chiefs-now with altered authority and legitimacy in local eyes-persuaded London to allow them to grab title to Buganda's land in large blocks under their own names. But by then the old ties of affection had snapped, only partly through the land-grab itself. Private property in land now became the whipping hawser, the loose fire hose, that Baganda have been struggling to control ever since. After reviewing a wide variety of official and unofficial sources, Hanson is convinced of the widespread effects of the attempted property reform. She follows stories of gainers and losers, and she charts the sentiments of popular songs in claiming that \"Mailo land ... turned people into slaves\" (p. 222)-suggesting that \"mailo land led to greed, and greed led to ill will in society\" (p. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71102242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond Casablanca: M.A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema","authors":"S. Davis","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-6385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-6385","url":null,"abstract":"Beyond Casablanca: M.A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema. By Kevin Dwyer. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. ix, 433; 33 illustrations. $65 cloth, $24.95 paper. Anthropologist Kevin Dwyer's study of Moroccan director Muhammad Abderrahman Tazi strives to be neither a history of Moroccan cinema, nor an inquiry into contemporary Moroccan culture, nor a critique of the filmmaker's body of work. Instead, Dwyer is intent on \"placing us in the filmmaker's world, exploring how that world may have come about, rendering us sensitive to its most crucial issues, and constructing from this complexity a 'story' that can be communicated from place to place\" (p. 320). To keep this \"close-up\" of Tazi's life and works authentic both in tone and language, Dwyer allows the director's own words as much space as possible: most of this book consists of the verbatim, although edited and arranged, transcripts of sixteen lengthy interviews with Tazi. Through them, Dwyer explores Tazi's career, the difficulties of creating a 'Third World cinema\" in an era of globalization, and, above all, the first four of Tazi's films: The Big Trip (1981), the story of a truck driver's journey through Morocco and his increasingly unsettling encounters with locals as he moves northwards; Badis (1989), the tragedy of two women on a small Spanish-controlled island who dare to defy traditional mores; Looking For My Wife's Husband (1993), a comedy about a bourgeois Fez jeweler who foolishly divorces his third wife on a whim and then learns he cannot remarry her unless she has remarried and divorced another man in the interim; and Lalla Hobby (1997), which continues the story begun in Looking as the Fez jeweler emigrates illegally to Belgium in pursuit of his ex-wife's new husband, who has disappeared before the agreed-upon divorce. As Tazi discusses his career and these films, a picture emerges of his personal goals and his beliefs on the role of non-Western cinema. Disgusted by the stereotypical \"Orientalist\" visions of European and American film makers who come to Morocco to film Arab exoticism, Tazi attempts to depict a multifaceted \"Moroccan mosaic,\" in order to construct self-images for a Moroccan audience \"that concern them and give them worth\" (p. 67). For Tazi, too many postcolonial Moroccan films focus on rural misery and misogyny. Hence his interest in projecting \"a constructive and positive nostalgia,\" of the strong communal values of traditional Moroccan society, as well as his focus (in Looking for My Wife's Husband, the largest financial success in Moroccan film history) on the wealthy, urban classes of Fez. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Africa Policy in the Clinton Years: Critical Choices for the Bush Administration","authors":"Tiffany Herard","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim230070039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim230070039","url":null,"abstract":"Africa Policy in the Clinton Years: Critical Choices for the Bush Administration. Edited by J. Stephen Morrison and Jennifer G. Cooke. Significant Issues Series. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001. Pp. xiv, 153. $19.95 paper. J. Stephen Morrison and Jennifer G. Cooke have provided a comprehensive collection of critical essays on the institutional legacy of the Clinton administration foreign policy in Africa and the priorities for the Bush administration to craft a more coherent, effective, and in Chester Cracker's words \"realistic and sustainable\" one. Taken together, Morrison and Cooke's \"Preview of Major Findings\" and Terrence Lyons chapter on diplomacy propose approaching Africa policy from the vantage point of focusing the institutions inherited by the Clinton administration, building robust Africa policy alliances with Congress, European allies, some African states, the United Nations, media and non-governmental organizations, and, finally, rebuilding the diplomatic corps in Washington and in Africa so that reliable and consistent information about the continent can be incorporated into a sound vision of strategic U.S. interest in Africa. Finally, they argue that marshalling partnerships will promote accountability in states where misdirected, scattered, and symbolic assistance and intervention has harmed U.S. credibility and contributed to the needless loss of life in consistently high-stakes conflicts. Given the ongoing tragedies of terrorist bombings in London, Madrid, and New York and the G-8 Summit focus on African debt cancellation and development, the most conspicuously and tragically timely of the chapters of this handbook is, of course, Jendayi Frazer's and Jeffrey Herbst's recommendation for increased commitment to narrowly focused African security operations that require better interagency cooperation, assessment of the Clinton administration's diffuse policy toward conflict intervention on the entire continent, strengthening regional and Atlantic peacekeeping efforts, and soliciting better intelligence on the continent with a view toward prevention and peacekeeping. In the same vein, Peter M. Lewis considers the criticism that the Clinton administration's African Growth and Opportunity Act replaced a vastly diminished foreign aid regime with one focused on increased foreign investment. Critics argue that even the most successful investors in the energy sector in Africa have been made vulnerable by the lack of well-coordinated U.S. led incentives for African governmental reform and an improved regulatory environment for best practices on human rights and environmental protections. Without such U.S. leadership, particularly on the funding of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and re-direction of money secured from debt cancellation to immediate expansion of social services, the private sector is vulnerable to the many economic challenges that continue to outweigh Africa's economic pro","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64424117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Focus on African Films","authors":"O. Cazenave","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-3309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-3309","url":null,"abstract":"Focus on African Films. Edited by Francoise Pfaff. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. 327. $24.95 paper. As Francoise Pfaff indicates in her introduction, this collection of essays is not intended to be a critical panoramic view of African cinema or an attempt at film taxonomy in the Far id Boughedir or Mathia Diawara vein. Rather, it aims at highlighting the new trends and developments occurring in the recent years, specifically how films have moved away from dichotomous representations of idyllic precolonial Africa on the one hand and the destruction and corruption of Africa and Africans by European values on the other. Interestingly, Pfaff's choice of \"films\" rather than \"cinema\" in the title is never problematized. Yet it represents a conscious choice that raises several questions as to how we view the field and teach the subject. This is a point that should have been addressed further. Part I (on re-examining \"Official History\") explores African filmmakers' renewed interest in bringing history to the screen and filling in some of the silences of the past. Robert Cancel's article \"Come Back South Africa\" on Apartheid captures the different stages of resistance and approaches by South African filmmakers. Samba Gadjigo delineates the new strategies introduced by Sembene vis-a-vis the representation of history. With Emitai, Ceddo, and Camp de Thieroye, Sembene produced a counter-narrative to both the usual Hollywood representation of history and the official Senegalese representation and popular memory of certain events of the past. Mbye Cham's article on recent narratives and representational strategies used in African feature films and documentaries completes this picture of a revisionary construction of history. In that respect, Joseph Gugler's essay raises a key issue about the rapport between fictionality and historical representations in African films and critics' responsibility to point out some of the discrepancies between the factual and cinematic representations. Part II (on the deconstruction of contextual space) is most compelling. It includes Pfaff's analysis of African cities as cinematic texts, Madeleine CottenetHage's exploration of images of France in Francophone African films, Kenneth Harrow's new take on Sembene's Xala, and Brenda Berrian's focus on Manu Dibango's soundtrack in Ceddo and what music enables Sembene to do. Cottenet-Hage analyzes the postcolonial implications of the choice of French space as the setting to several Francophone African films. Surprisingly, the issues of invisibility and assimilation for non-European immigrants, of blending into French society, are not really addressed, as for instance in her analysis of Le cri du Coeur. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71104821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"West Africa's Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region","authors":"Edouard Bustin","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-3075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-3075","url":null,"abstract":"West Africa's Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region: Edited by Adekeye Adebajo and Ismail Rashld. Boulder CoIo.: Lynne Rienner, 2004. Pp. xviii, 448; bibliography, index, map. $59.95 cloth, $22.00 paper. The word \"security\" has lately achieved a degree of pervasiveness that can undoubtedly be traced to the 9/11 attacks, but it now pops up (at least in the West, and particularly in the United States) in connection with almost any of the recurrent forms of hardship or calamity that people worldwide have had to face (and sought to avoid) throughout the course of human history. West Africa's security \"challenges\" (another buzzword) are, for the most part, of this ancient sort, and not different from those faced by other regions of the world where the four riders of the Apocalypse continue to gallop, but one of the effects of globalization is that their \"security\" dimensions may be read quite differently by local or outside actors. This excellent and informative collection of essays deals primarily with war and (as its title suggests) with peace efforts in the region. None of the essays is exclusively devoted to a particular \"case study,\" if only because earlier publications by Adebajo and others have already addressed the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.1 Chapters in this volume, which grew out of a seminar jointly convened by the New York-based International Peace Academy (IPA)2 and ECOWAS in Abuja in September 2001, analyze the root causes of conflict, as well as the peacemaking efforts and mediating roles of ECOWAS, the United Nations, France, Britain, and the United States, but the sequels of war and its human toll are not really addressed, except when they pertain to the logistics of the conflict itself (as in the case of child soldiers, covered by 'Funmi Olonisakin). The problems of refugees and displaced persons are barely mentioned, and while several essays naturally include extensive references to specific conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone, of course, but also Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, or Nigeria), the 18 contributors deal for the most part, with broad-gauged issues, such as regionalization or integration, governance and democratization, civilmilitary relations, African unity, civil society, or regional security mechanisms. These chapters refrain, happily, from heavy handed theorizing, but review (and occasionally critique) the many pseudo- or instant theories and/or explanatory schemes that have mushroomed around such confrontations-whether in West Africa or in other parts of the \"developing world. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71104682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"U.S. Policy in Postcolonial Africa: Four Case Studies in Conflict Resolution","authors":"Tiffany Herard","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-6137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-6137","url":null,"abstract":"U.S. Policy in Postcolonial Africa: Four Case Studies in Conflict Resolution. By F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Pp. xvi, 280. $32.50 paper. F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam's study offers an extremely teachable book for area studies, global studies, and history undergraduates as well as a resource for scholars in these fields. A strong historical analysis that encourages coordination between local and international conflict resolution mandates opens the way for more productive policy less encumbered by the colonial legacy. In a book designed around the most urgent unresolved African conflicts and their regional aftermath-the Horn of Africa, Western Sahara, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda-the most critical chapter for the U.S. foreign policy specialist is Chapter 4 because of its careful descriptions of all the U.S. interventions in Africa that have promoted conflict resolution. However, this chapter is overwhelmed by decades of U.S. disregard of Africa as revealed in the case studies. When Ohaegbulam concludes that: \"Of all the members of the United Nations, the U.S. is the most reluctant to endow the organization with sufficient capacities to be effective, except on issues directly affecting American's geopolitical interest... We consider the U.S. policy the most significant obstacle to resolving the Western Sahara conflict\" (p. 127). It is abundantly evident that every conflict mentioned in the book is best understood, for this author, in the context of the woefully neglectful United States. While Ohaegbulam's text begins with a nod toward postcolonialism, this framework hangs like a forgotten footnote through most of the text. Postcolonialism is not simply the era at the end of colonialism, it is also, certainly, earmarked by new migrating social identities and the emergence of new relations and actors whose successful interrogation of concepts such as \"conflict resolution,\" ironically is modeled quite elegantly in the case chapters, if not informing the analysis of the actual conflict resolution measures. In this study, we get very little sense of the people and the key agents from Africa and their ability to negotiate these conflicts. Rather, the book is peopled with combatants and their victims, and internally displaced persons, who make for a desperately militarized independent Africa. Indeed, the 1.5 billion dollars spent by the United States on weapons in Africa from 1950-1989, the millions of people dead and displaced, and the personal and communal disasters that proliferated alongside the militarized Cold War conflict makes for a postcolonial Africa marred by anguish and oppressed by a mendacious and brutish United States. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History","authors":"P. Naylor","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-2408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-2408","url":null,"abstract":"Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History. By Richard B. Parker. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. xxviii, 285; 1 map; 14 illustrations. $59.95. It may come as a surprise to readers that North Africa, specifically the \"Barbary Coast\" of the Maghrib stretching from Tripolitania to Morocco, played a crucial formative role in the development of American diplomacy and the United States Navy. In a meticulously researched book, distinguished by the use of American, European, and Maghribi archives and sources, Ambassador Richard B. Parker presents a remarkable diplomatic history, which examines the period from 1785 to 1815. Although the fledgling American republic's principal diplomatic interests were in Europe, Parker recounts an array of international challenges posed by the Barbary states, which included hostage seizures, tribute negotiations, and wars. According to the author, \"North Africa was a field of pioneering endeavor for American diplomacy\" (p. 162). Furthermore, his last chapter argues that the Barbary experience has significant contemporary relevance. A brilliant constellation of historical stars appears in the book, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, James Madison, and James Monroe, who were deeply involved in Barbary relations. As Parker points out, Jefferson was concerned with North African affairs for twenty years. Renowned for his suspicion of a standing military, Jefferson was one of the earliest advocates for the construction of a navy to reinforce diplomacy with the Barbary states. After the Preface, which also serves as an introduction, Parker describes the Algiers Regency and its policies, which is very valuable since this veritable Ottoman state has received scant historiographical attention. Its notorious \"pirates\" were actually \"privateers,\" authorized by the state to seize ships and cargo. Hostages were also prized as a source of labor. Tributes to prevent predations and ransoms were significant sources of income for the Barbary states. James Cathcart, one of the first Americans to be seized in 1785, eventually served as the Christian secretary of the dey of Algiers. Fellow hostages were less fortunate, however, enduring hard labor and often succumbing from epidemics. Initial efforts to redeem the hostages by Jefferson and Adams, while they served as diplomatic representatives in Europe, revealed their lack of understanding of Maghribi political, cultural, and economic realities. Furthermore, American representatives such as John Lamb and Joseph Donaldson, Jr., who directly negotiated for the hostages' release with the Regency, are assessed as \"men of limited imagination\" (p. 32). Diplomatic failures also signaled American political weakness, economic parsimony, and military vulnerability. Although Donaldson achieved a peace treaty with Algiers in 1795, it was Joel Barlow who evinced rare sensibilities in perceiving the political nature of the dey and his","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"560"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71104104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy, Incorporation, and Representation","authors":"J. Allen","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-6110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-6110","url":null,"abstract":"Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy, Incorporation, and Representation. By Gisela Geister. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004. Pp. 240. $37.50/ £19.95/ euro28.00 / SEK 280 paper. In the 1990s women's representation in many Southern African parliaments significantly increased, and gender issues were forced into public debate. Gisela Geisler attempts to assess the significance and problems of changes in women's formal governmental participation and in policy, focusing on selected countries within the Southern African Development Community. The great strength of Geisler's work lies in her extensive interviews with women in politics. More than a hundred women shared their experiences and their evaluations of their parties, governments, and organizations with her, often in pithy and provocative ways, and she supplements these interviews with extensive culling of local newspapers during the 1990s for additional quotations. Her use of direct statements by African women activists produces lively, sometimes blowby-blow accounts in her chapters on the South African women's movement, on women's leagues/wings, on women's desks and ministries, on women's organizations and movements, and on women politicians. However, her chapter on nationalist and national liberation movements unfortunately tends to blur the differences between these two very different roads to political independence, and there, as in other chapters, we read more about failures than successes. Geisler conveys women's determination to make changes and obviously wishes them well, but her emphasis on \"results to date\" rather than on the direction of change produces a fairly negative picture. From this perspective, women's leagues or wings are captives of parties. Women's desks and gender machinery are underfunded, overextended, marginalized, and distrusted by activists. Women's organizations and movements (NGOs) recruit and encourage women to run for office and then complain that the women elected pursue only party lines but not \"women's interests.\" Women's organizations maintain autonomy from political parties to promote gender issues, but lack unity. They primarily represent urban, professional women and have difficulty reaching rural women. Women in office complain that women's organizations don't support them once they are in office, or don't even support them with money for election, and claim that only they, through their parties, represent rural women. Her accounts of women's political struggles read well. But she tends to generalize in ways that leave out particular countries. Regarding the country I know the most about from my own twenty years of research, I kept writing \"not in Botswana\" in the margins: e.g., in Botswana, the Women's Desk worked closely with NGOs; women's wings of parties were not created during the anticolonial struggle, but only in the 1990s in response to pressures by women politicians and NGOs; and there is considerable","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"550"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity","authors":"Solimar Otero","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-6416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-6416","url":null,"abstract":"Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity. By Christine Ayorinde. The History of African-American Religions Series, ed. Stephen W. Angell and Anthony B. Finn. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. xv, 275; 2 maps, 18 photographs. $59.95. Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity is a volume that again brings up the difficult task of understanding the category of race in Afro-Cuban religion in Cuba. Ayorinde's study is a much-needed investigation of the problematic relationship between practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion and the State. She does an interesting and thorough job of re-situating religious policy within the Cuban \"State\" in pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba. Her analysis of Afro-Cuban religions covers all the general basics for those unfamiliar with the complexity and range of different African traditions and folk Catholicism present in Cuban contexts. One must applaud her efforts in addressing a wide range of themes: religious practice, social history, and critical analysis of race on the island. Ayorinde is able to offer a glimpse of how these qualities are mutable, like Cuban history and people, and that even the \"party's position\" is often subject to change. Ayorinde also does a nice job of locating the contributions, with justified critiques, of Cuban intellectual \"vanguards\" like Jose Marti, Morua Delgado, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Romulo Lechantanere. However, one is left somewhere in between official discourses and quotidian practices, perhaps deliberately. What works best for the book is the detailed exploration of government policy towards Afro-Cuban religion after 1959, and this is an important contribution to the study of contemporary politics and religion worldwide. The author's initial, rightful understanding of competing cubanidades, Cuban-ness, becomes limited by her own efforts to distill out an unidentified \"blackness\" (pp. 5-6). Ayorinde carries out an ambitious project in trying to do with one text what many have not been able to do with the multiple volumes written on race in Cuba. Yet she never defines what she means by \"black\" identity, religion, or persons. For the volume to succeed on this level, Ayorinde needs to locate that \"blackness\" she is looking for. Others like Robin Moore, Ada Ferrer, and most successfully, Lisa Brock and Bijan Bayne, have tried to \"see\" the \"blackness\" in Cuban revolutionary and political culture, but with a more precise agenda in mind.1 Ayorinde correctly looks for a continuum of \"blackness\" as a construction; however, she never really puts this agenda, which guides the book, out on the table. Perhaps, Ayorinde is looking for that elusive \"portable blackness,\" a sort of pan-Africanism that has been explored by scholars like J. Lorand Matory and Paul Gilroy.2 At one point in the text, Ayorinde states that, \"What was now African is now Cuban\" (p. 191). It would seem that with the \"folklorization\" of Afro-Cuban religion, rather, what","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"555"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}