Colonial Period In Africa Research Articles

Colonial Period in Africa and the Rise of New Classes of Women in Literature: A Study in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru and Women are Different

This paper highlights the African woman’s changing status from colonial period as seen through Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood and Flora Nwapa‘s Efuru and Women are Different. As such, a detailed examination of the two authors’ works reveals some courageous female characters who challenge patriarchal practices and assert themselves. Then, thanks to western education and to women’s dedication to trade, Adaku and Kehinde in The Joys of Motherhood, Efuru in Efuru and Agnes, Rose and Dora in Women are Different develop some skills and competence that help them arouse awareness of their human rights. There is the rise of new classes of women compared to the early years of colonization in Africa. This paper posits that for an integrated development of African countries, women should be educated and involved into the decision-making process. Deconstruction is the bedrock on which the analysis has been conducted as the female characters in the focus novels dismantle the phallogocentric norms.

The ovamboland expedition of 1917: the deposing of King Mandume

ABSTRACT Mandume ya Ndemufayo, the last king of the Oukwanyama, resisted the subjugation of his people by colonial powers. To the Portuguese, Germans, and South Africans (and other missionaries), he was a recalcitrant, bloodthirsty, and murderous despot. But to the people of Namibia and Angola, he is a hero of the African people, with permanent remembrance at the Namibian National Heroes’ Acre, a university named after him in the City of Lubango, with street names, monuments, and memorials commemorating his acts of resistance against colonial rule. His demise at the hands of the Ovamboland Expeditionary Force on 6 February 1917 is the archetypal story of the colonial period in Africa – and elsewhere – that opposition to colonial rule was not tolerated and subdued, forcefully if necessary. European interests, along with superior firepower, facilitated the subjugation of many indigenous populations. It was no different in Ovamboland, yet in a period where kingdoms were tumbling, the Oukwanyama resisted.

Emergency Communal Labor and Gender in Central Province During the Mau Mau War in Kenya, 1953–1960

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Kenya Colony administration’s use of communal labor as a punitive, coercive labor practice during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Faced with the Mau Mau rebellion, the administration transformed the preexisting communal labor system and began to use it on an unprecedented scale as a form of collective punishment against the mainly Kikuyu African civilian populations thought to be in collusion with the Mau Mau guerrillas. Communal labor, which was previously justified as a building block of development and used widely throughout the colony as cooperative village labor, now became an aspect of the punitive “rehabilitation” of the Kikuyu populace in Central Province. Although colonial officials directed Emergency communal labor against all of the African civilians living in the rural areas of Central Province thought to be in tacit support of Mau Mau, women were the corps of most of the communal labor work parties. As a result, this article examines the role of gender in the British administration’s wielding of communal labor as a punitive measure in Central Province during this time period. This window into the machinations of communal forced labor also sheds more light on the wider issue of gender and forced labor during the colonial period in Africa.

Constitutions and Citizenship: Lessons for African Countries

Summary Since the colonial period in Africa, ruling elites have manipulated laws regulating citizenship to advance their political and economic interests. The European colonialists used citizenship laws to enhance their ability to maintain control over the colonies and minimize the ability of Africans to fight for independence. Many Africans believed that independence and the establishment of new institutional arrangements would allow them to develop a common national citizenship, one in which all the citizens of each country would have equality before the law and be granted equal opportunity for self-actualization within all parts of the country, regardless of their racial or ethnic affiliation. However, in the post-independence period, incumbent political elites have been acting like their colonial counterparts and have used citizenship laws to get rid of critical and opposing voices by depriving these people of their nationality. In 1996, for example, Zambia’s ruling political party, the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD), adopted a new constitution, which effectively stripped the country’s independence president, Kenneth Kaunda, of his Zambian citizenship and prevented him from challenging the MMD for leadership of the country. Similarly, in 2000, then president of Côte d’Ivoire, Henri Konan Bédié, changed the constitution and introduced a citizenship clause that effectively disqualified the candidacy of his main opposition, Alassane Ouattara. South Africa’s apartheid regime, on the other hand, introduced a racially-based multilayered citizenship system in which individuals of European origin were placed at the top, enjoying full citizenship rights, and Africans were relegated to the bottom with extremely attenuated citizenship rights. Some African groups were actually forced to lose their South African citizenship. Citizenship is a complex issue and one that citizens of a country must deal with. The paper suggests that in doing so, African countries must not allow citizenship to be defined by race, ethnicity, religion, or other ascriptive traits, but by allegiance or fidelity to a set of values or ideals (e.g., democracy, rule of law, equality before the law) that define the nation.

Decentralisation and local economic development: Effective tools for Africa's renewal

The objective of this article is to show the relationship between development policies and the outcomes of development efforts in Africa. In this connection, decentralisation is used as an example of development strategy and policies, with the level of development opportunities given to local communities, very much dependent on the centralisation/decentralisation paradigm. The article argues that during the colonial period in Africa, local communities had limited opportunities to participate in their own development under the centralised and monopolistic policies of the colonial administrative systems. This model largely explains the polarised development patterns associated with colonialism. The conclusion points to the idea that decentralisation needs to be an essential part of any effort to pursue the ideals of an African Renaissance in the various African countries. The concepts of developmental state, decentralisation and sustainable development need to interact constantly to link local economic development efforts to long-term national and regional development programmes in Africa.

Mapping the desert: Arthur Rimbaud, Charles de Foucauld, and the Société de Géographie, 1884–85

This article focuses on two disparate figures in the French colonial period in Africa, the ex-poet Arthur Rimbaud and the ex-soldier Charles de Foucauld. Between 1883 and 1884, each lived in Africa in self-imposed exile of a sort, and undertook rigorous exploration of the region to which he had relocated himself. Both composed reports on their regions of the ‘dark continent,’ and both reports were submitted to, and recognized by, the Société de Géographie back in Paris. The two geographical texts – Rimbaud's Rapport sur l'Ogadine and de Foucauld's Reconnaissance au Maroc – are watersheds of life-writing, as much as they are representations of colonial Africa observed by Frenchmen. Through comparing the two desert narratives, and considering the two authors' African lives, I argue that the process of writing about the desert actually evokes the essential character of each writer's voice, a voice to which he only found access in the desert. Finally, these voices in turn provide valuable information about the relationship between France and Africa, colonial force and colony, and about the various forms of resistance to each of those roles.

Complete genome analysis of 33 ecologically and biologically diverse Rift Valley fever virus strains reveals widespread virus movement and low genetic diversity due to recent common ancestry.

Rift Valley fever (RVF) virus is a mosquito-borne RNA virus responsible for large explosive outbreaks of acute febrile disease in humans and livestock in Africa with significant mortality and economic impact. The successful high-throughput generation of the complete genome sequence was achieved for 33 diverse RVF virus strains collected from throughout Africa and Saudi Arabia from 1944 to 2000, including strains differing in pathogenicity in disease models. While several distinct virus genetic lineages were determined, which approximately correlate with geographic origin, multiple exceptions indicative of long-distance virus movement have been found. Virus strains isolated within an epidemic (e.g., Mauritania, 1987, or Egypt, 1977 to 1978) exhibit little diversity, while those in enzootic settings (e.g., 1970s Zimbabwe) can be highly diverse. In addition, the large Saudi Arabian RVF outbreak in 2000 appears to have involved virus introduction from East Africa, based on the close ancestral relationship of a 1998 East African virus. Virus genetic diversity was low (approximately 5%) and primarily involved accumulation of mutations at an average of 2.9 x 10(-4) substitutions/site/year, although some evidence of RNA segment reassortment was found. Bayesian analysis of current RVF virus genetic diversity places the most recent common ancestor of these viruses in the late 1800s, the colonial period in Africa, a time of dramatic changes in agricultural practices and introduction of nonindigenous livestock breeds. In addition to insights into the evolution and ecology of RVF virus, these genomic data also provide a foundation for the design of molecular detection assays and prototype vaccines useful in combating this important disease.

JOHN FAGE A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION

JOHN FAGE and I met first in Cambridge in 1948 as graduate students at Cambridge University, each researching on topics in the history of the colonial period in Africa. Thereafter our ways parted. He became the first full-time history teacher at the recently founded University College of the Gold Coast. I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where my initial duty was to investigate what could be recovered of the pre-colonial history of East Africa that might be brought within the scope of academic study. We met next in 1952, when a London publisher suggested that we might join in writing a History of Africa in two volumes designed for the academic market. Following this initiative, we spent a fortnight of that summer, together with our wives and children, at my house in Buckinghamshire to discuss the possibilities, and this proved to be the beginning of a close professional collaboration which was to last for more than thirty-five years.

BOOK REVIEW: Yeros, Paris. ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM IN AFRICA: CONSTRUCTIVIST REFLECTIONS AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Reviewed by: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics Cati Coe Yeros, Paris , ed. 1999. Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics. New York: St. Martin's Press. 144 pp. Perhaps no subject has involved the interaction between scholarly and popular models as much as ethnicity and nationalism; academic theories of ethnicity and nationalism, and their political uses have perhaps always been intertwined. Since the 1980s, constructivist studies of ethnicity, in which "ethnicity" is considered to be invented and imagined, were catalyzed by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (1983). Constructivist theories of ethnicity and nationalism have grown in appeal among academics at the same time as more and more local populations are making claims for greater political and human rights under the banner of ethnicity or tradition. Hence, a volume that examines constructivist theories of ethnicity and nationalism in Africa, and their political implications, is particularly welcome at this time. The seven essays in this book are overwhelmingly theoretical, seeking to review and revise constructivist theories of ethnicity and nationalism in Africa from the past two or three decades. The essays by editor Paris Yeros stress that constructivism is not a unified totality. In "Towards a Normative Theory of Ethnicity," he examines four different kinds of constructivism and their political implications: (1) Frederik Barth's transactionalism, in which ethnic groups are formed and persist through interaction with one another; (2) the instrumentalist approach of Abner Cohen and Robert Bates, in which ethnic groups coalesce as economically driven interest groups; (3) the work on the "the invention of tradition," by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in which ethnic ideology was invented and supported in colonial periods as an ideological instrument of colonial administration and social control; and (4) the "moral ethnicity" associated with John Lonsdale (Yeros also adds Steven Feierman), in which the language of ethnicity and tradition is used as a moral debate about the nature of the political community. All these studies used an empirical approach, but Yeros argues that theory should be seen as political practice, and that a moral judgment, not facts, should be the initial point of inquiry for a study of ethnicity and nationalism. His analysis shows that even empirical studies make moral claims (from which political implications follow); therefore, he argues that scholars should enter these politically fraught arenas [End Page 223] with political acumen and responsibility, in which their scholarship would contribute toward a moral universe with the most effect. However, it seems to me that academics gain their authority through the empiricist focus on facts, distance, and objectivity, and I am unsure whether the normative approach which Yeros advocates would enhance our chances of influencing these moral contestations. The other essays are more empirically oriented, but also seek to review studies of ethnicity and nationalism in Africa. Ronald R. Atkinson argues that because historians have focused on ethnicity as an invention of the colonial period in Africa, the resonance and relevance of precolonial collective identities have been ignored. Terence Ranger responds that many precolonial collective identities were based on kinship, regional cults and religious associations, lifestyle and occupation patterns, and towns, rather than on language and on blood, which he sees as the ideological basis of ethnicity. While "ethnicity" was one possible ethnicity available in precolonial Africa, it required the presence of a powerful ideological elite. In a related vein, Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that many studies of ethnicity ignore other associations and identities that are actively "imagined" and used by Africans in their daily lives, such as those based on gender, age, class, religion, town or locality, political allegiance, language, and kinship. He makes a distinction between ethnicity in Europe, where ethnicity is modeled on the abstract, distant, imagined communities in Anderson's sense, and Africa, where ethnicity is tied to kinship and reasserts its importance in times of necessity when the state fails to deliver essential goods and services. John Markakis also ties ethnicity in Africa to the strength of the state. He argues that contestations in the language of nationalism and ethnicity in the Horn of Africa were driven by the...

Polyphony in the Courts: Child Custody Cases in Kabba District Court, 1925-1979

In 1918, British colonial officials in Kabba Division of central Nigeria instituted rules for divorce and child custody in Kabba District Native Authority Court. The rules implemented in Kabba Court were ostensibly derived from customary marital practices, although no formal procedure for divorce had existed in Kabba prior to its introduction by British.2 The introduction of divorce would appear to be a classic example of command model of law in which politically dominant--in this case, British colonial officials--imposed newly-created laws upon politically subordinate; Nigerian men and women. Yet as Chanock (1985:12) has observed of colonial period in Africa, the field of customary law was one of few on which Africans were allowed to play with a winning chance. While British introduced a procedure for divorce in Kabba Court, how this procedure was interpreted, particularly in relation to child custody rulings, was affected by respective interests of male and female litigants. Thus what happened in Kabba Customary Court may be better described as an interactional process which was nonetheless affected by colonial power differences (Starr and Collier 1989:9). British colonial officers had last say in appealed cases but their position of power did not obliterate polyphony of voices--from traditional chiefs cum court officials to Nigerian men and women asserting and redefining their claims regarding introduced rules for divorce and child custody. However, in any interactional analysis of legal process, question arises of how relatively powerless are able to manipulate imposed laws to their own advantage. The Kabba Court cases on divorce and child custody are instructive here as they illustrate value of cultural concepts for reinterpreting legal innovations instituted from above. Indeed, assertions of customary, cultural ideas and practices were a particularly useful tool for Kabba litigants. Under policy of indirect rule, British colonial customary court rulings ideally were to be based on just such traditions (Mann and Roberts 1991:22). Specifically, with divorce and child custody cases in Kabba, concept of served as a focal point for reinterpreting respective claims of Bunu Yoruba women and men to children after divorce. Beliefs about how these blood ties were constituted not only differed between British and Nigerians, they were reinterpreted differently over time by Nigerian women and men. Further, disputes over cultural conception of consanguinity in divorce and child custody cases resonated with contests generated by concurrent political and socio-economic changes. An analysis based either on culturally specific concepts or broader social processes alone cannot explain course of events in Kabba (cf. Starr and Collier 1989:20), as they were dialectically related.

Documentation and Reproduction of Colonial Legal Materials in European Libraries

The emphasis in this paper is on the need for documentation and cooperative reproduction of legal documents relating to the colonial period in Africa which are mainly available in libraries in European countries. It is argued that these materials are extremely useful for research in legal and general scholarship, and that their non-availability in Africa at present is a drawback to the increase of research carried out in Africa. Documentation will make the existence of these materials more widely known in academic institutions than is the case at present, while reproduction through modern techniques will make them available to libraries. Potential demand for the documents, in view of the changing African political scenes, which are cutting across old colonial lines, emphasize the need for their availability. We have chosen the colonial period in African history because the colonial legal documents are obviously out of print and few libraries contain complete sets. As a set of literature, they are difficult for law libraries to acquire, not only in Africa, but also in other parts of the academic world where they may be needed. The International Association of Law Libraries is well placed to coordinate documentation and reprographic exchanges between libraries which have similar requirements in Europe, Africa and other parts of the world.