Complex In Africa Research Articles

The Quest for the Effective Use of Natural Resource Revenue in Africa: Beyond Transparency and the Need for Compatible Cultural Democracy in Nigeria

Questions about the effective use of natural resource revenues have in recent years become increasingly central to local and international efforts to address the problem of resource curse in Africa. The emerging and dominant perspective tends to emphasize the links between transparency and accountability. This approach has been instrumental to the opening of new spaces for stakeholder engagement in the bid to transform natural resource revenues into sustainable development benefits. However, despite its contribution, this transparency-accountability strategy is underpinned by a misdiagnosis of the governance failure complex in Africa. Consequently, the approach is unable to adequately facilitate the transformation of natural resource revenues into sustainable development benefits for Africans. Focusing largely on Nigeria, the paper suggests that the key to the effective use of natural resource revenue in Africa lies in addressing the structural inadequacies inherent in African state-nations and the systemic anomalies in its societies. This would require the pursuit of compatible cultural democracy, the strengthening of the technical and institutional capacities of institutions of checks and balances, the diversification of civil society strategies, an emphasis on macro- and microcorporate citizenship issues by transnational corporations, and the global regulations of their socioenvironmental impacts. The paper concludes by exploring the ramifications of its arguments for the resource curse literature.

What Happened to the African Renaissance? The Challenges of Development in the Twenty-First Century

The essay discusses the trajectory of the African renaissance as an idea and a project, a task that in essence entails examining Africa's postcolonial development paradigms, performances, and prospects. It is argued that this idea represents a recurrent yearning for a usable future aching deep in the consciousness of a people with painful memories of suffering, struggle, and survival against the historical ravages of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism, a longing for sustainable development, for viable African modernities. Recently, the dreams and discourses of the African renaissance have been driven as much by Afro-optimism as by Afro-pessimism, by both the positive and the negative political and economic changes that have taken place in postcolonial Africa. The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a brief survey of the resurgence of the idea of the African renaissance in the 1990s in postapartheid South Africa. Then it examines Africa's complex and contradictory inheritances of colonialism and nationalism out of which postcolonial Africa was molded. This is followed by an analysis of Africa's development ideologies and experiences since independence characterized by authoritarian developmentalism and authoritarian neoliberalism. The essay concludes by trying to capture the current internal and external challenges facing Africa's efforts to embark on democratic developmentalism.

Kasoma's Afriethics

This article reappraises Kasoma's ethical framework of Afriethics. By locating Afriethics within the wider sociopolitical context, it demonstrates the extent to which Kasoma's religious, professional and scholarly outlooks coalesced in the formulation of Afriethics. The study rationalizes the ethical orientation in terms of its underlying epistemological and ontological framework of cultural relativism. It concludes that Kasoma's Afriethics is heavily influenced by the rhetoric of African cultural exceptionalism. The reappraisal establishes, first, how Afriethics seems to downplay Africa's complex media history. Second, its overreliance on the doctrine of African exceptionalism robs it of its analytic objectivity. Third, its theoretical grounding is not sufficiently explored in terms of normative media and social theory. Fourth, its appropriation as praxis seems to disregard the interpenetrated nature of African and western media cultures. The study concludes with a call for greater dialogue about the practicality of Afriethics in a globalizing African media context.

Translating the Nation: From Plaatje to Mpe

This article attempts to play off a much-celebrated ‘post-apartheid’ novel, Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, against what was arguably the pre-eminent literary text arising out of the first formation of South Africa as a single political entity, Sol Plaatje's Mhudi. These works are brought together through their common concern with translation, both literal and metaphorical, as a key element for a national vision forged in a non-essentialist environment. The article thus sets the novels against South Africa's complex and in many ways compromised multilingual language policy. It uses the history of that policy (loaded as it is with the dominance of English and the problems associated with standardising the African languages) as a material expression of the fraught nature of a non-exclusionary South African-ness, and investigates both Plaatje and Mpe's explicit engagement with that history. In particular, it focuses on the measured and guarded utopian drive behind Mhudi and the relation of this to the typically non-‘national’ spin of Welcome to Our Hillbrow's post-apartheid concern with identity, xenophobia, language, and AIDS.

“Injuries are Beyond Love”: Physical Violence in Young South Africans' Sexual Relationships

South Africa's complex social and political history has produced conditions for interpersonal violence of multiple kinds to flourish. Violence experienced by girls and young women, including within their sexual relationships, has become an area of intense research and policy interest since the end of apartheid. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of young people in an urban township, this article explores how violent practices are variously construed, differentiated, and legitimated, in particular through the assignment of blame and the significance accorded to bodily marking. Pointing to the cultural embeddedness of disciplining techniques in this setting, the article examines local understandings of gender hierarchy and power, young men's vulnerabilities in relation to their partners' actions, and the links between disciplining action and notions of anger, love, and shame. Violence is shown to configure lives and subjectivities and to be productive of relationships, in particular playing a part in the organization of inequality within sexual relationships.

Validation of satellite rainfall products over East Africa's complex topography

An extensive evaluation of 10 different satellite rainfall products was performed using station network over a complex topography, where elevation varies from below sea level to 4620 m. Evaluation was for two groups of products. The first group had low spatial (2.5°) and temporal (monthly) resolution and included the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP), the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center (NOAA‐CPC) merged analysis (CMAP), and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM‐3B43). The second group comprised products with relatively high spatial (0.1° to 1°) and temporal (3‐hourly to 10‐daily) resolution. These included the NOAA‐CPC African rainfall estimation algorithm, GPCP one‐degree‐daily (1DD), TRMM‐3B42, Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite and other data (TAMSAT) estimates, and the CPC morphing technique (CMORPH). These products were aggregated to a 10‐day total and remapped to spatial resolutions of 1°, 0.5° and 0.25°. TRMM‐3B43 and CMAP from the first group and CMORPH, TAMSAT and TRMM‐3B42 from the second group performed reasonably well.

Globalisation, complex humanitarian emergencies and health

A new political economy of conflict has emerged in the aftermath of colonialism and the Cold War. Complex political emergencies have been simmering in the post-colonial world for more than three decades. Intra-country armed conflict, often combined with natural disasters, at present contributes to the displacement of over 20 million people world-wide. The international community remains profoundly uncomfortable with the complex political emergencies of the new era, torn between the respect for national sovereignty upon which the international political system of the United Nations and other agencies is built, and the growth of concern with human rights and a burgeoning International Humanitarian Law. Globalisation may have brought many benefits to some but there are also many losers. The Word Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed structural adjustment policies to ensure debt repayment and economic restructuring that have resulted in a net reduction in expenditure on health, education and development. A downward spiral has been created of debt, disease, malnutrition, missed education, economic entrapment, poverty, powerlessness, marginalization, migration and instability. Africa's complex political emergencies are particularly virulent and tenacious. Three examples that are among the most serious humanitarian emergencies to have faced the world in recent times--those in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan--are reviewed here in detail. The political evolution of these emergencies and their impact on the health of the affected populations are also explored.

Translating the nation: Phaswane Mpe and the fiction of post-apartheid

This paper attempts to read a much-celebrated “post-apartheid” novel, the late Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow, against South Africa's complex and in many ways compromised multilingual language policy. It uses the history of that policy (loaded as it is with the dominance of English and the problems associated with standardizing the African languages) as a material expression of the fraught nature of a non-exclusionary South African-ness, and investigates the novel's engagement with that history. In particular, it focuses on the non-“national” spin of post-apartheid politics, asking if the novel's fictional formulations in this regard are adequate to the issues it takes on. Central to the novel's approach is its sustained use of the second person for its mode of address. The paper relates this to the way in which the autobiographical elements of the novel speak through and to post-apartheid concerns with identity, xenophobia, language, and AIDS.

Corruption – the challenge to good governance: a South African perspective

The effect of corruption in South Africa has seriously constrained development of the national economy and has significantly inhibited good governance in the country. South Africa's complex political design is a contributing factor to the rise of corruption, which has adversely affected stability and trust and which has damaged the ethos of democratic values and principles. Although the South African government has been instrumental in systems to fight the evils of corruption, practical problems have increasingly emerged over the years. The most notable problems are: insufficient coordination of anti‐corruption work within the South African public service and among the various sectors of society; poor information about corruption and the impact of anti‐corruption measures and agencies; and the impact of corruption on good governance. This paper is a part of a broader study undertaken on corruption. It addresses issues related to corruption and good governance in the South African (National) Public Service. To articulate and analyse the challenges confronting the country, issues regarding coordination of anti‐corruption agencies will be explored.

Antiwitchcraft Shrines among the Akan: Possession and the Gathering of Knowledge

Abstract: This article examines the epistemological certainties and uncertainties of Akan spirit possession and witchcraft knowledge. It is based on fieldwork carried out between 1990 and 1999 in Dormaa-Ahenkro, Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana. The article examines the transcendental knowledge found among antiwitchcraft shrine gods and their priests and how the sacred knowledge of gods is utilized to counter witchcraft in the modern postcolony. This, it is argued, is an ambiguous process, involving the partial knowledge of the shrine priest versus the complete picture of events held by the god. However, it is suggested that antiwitchcraft practices are very popular among priests because this type of knowledge allows the priest to manage uncertainty at first hand. The witch confesses directly to the priest, and this knowledge is not mediated through a god. Resume: Cet article se propose d'etudier les certitudes et les incertitudes epistemologiques de la possession par les esprits et du savoir en sorcellerie chez les Akan. Nos recherches se basent sur une enquete de terrain effectuee entre 1990 et 1999 a Dormaa-Ahenkro, dans la region de Brong-Ahafo au Ghana. Nous examinons le savoir transcendantal decouvert chez les dieux des lieux de culte anti-sorcellerie et leurs pretres, et nous montrons comment le savoir sacre des dieux est utilise pour contrecarrer la sorcellerie dans la postcolonie moderne. Nous soutenons que ce processus est ambigu car il oppose le savoir partial du pretre du lieu de culte a la vision divine des evenements, qui, elle, est totale. Nous suggerons cependant que la pratique de la sorcellerie est tres populaire chez les pretres parce que ce type de savoir permet au pretre de gerer l'incertain a la source. Le sorcier (ou la sorciere) se confesse directement au pretre et ce savoir ne passe pas par l'intermediaire d'un dieu. Introduction In recent anthropological writing, the association of African witchcraft discourses with primitive thought, tradition, and superstition has been supplanted by the view that witchcraft practices are dynamic and wide-ranging and that they crystallize the experiences of the modern world (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993, 1999; Geschiere & Meyer 1998; Moore & Sanders 2001). Witchcraft has become an authoritative symbol of the experiences of modernity and the effects of an invariable source, globalization (Englund 1996:259). It is seen as a critical comment on, for example, the accumulation of good and bad wealth (Meyer 1998), international migration and smuggling (Masquelier 2000), immoral consumption (Parish 2000), and illicit production and accumulation (Sanders 1999; Shaw 1997:2001). In this way, witchcraft invokes an imagery of new forms of modernity, reflecting the dialectic between the modern and tradition in a modernizing nation-state and expressing social conflicts within the postcolonial economy (Geschiere 1998; Geschiere & Fisiy 1994). While global witchcraft complexes in Africa provide a medium for exploring the new images and objects of modernity associated with overseas wage labor, remittances, and flows of value, the specialist body of esoteric knowledge communicated through witchfinders also articulates and dramatizes the contradictions of a changing economy, as in the case of the Atinga cult of southwest Nigeria during the 1950s (Apter 1993). Increasingly, in the postcolonial economy, possessors of sacred, secret knowledge are also international salesmen and women responding to the anxieties of modernity and employing the symbolism of commoditization and the free market (Ashforth 1996; Sanders 2001). Auslander (1993), for example, examines the symbolic politics of Ngoni witchcleansing in Zambia and the ways in which it employs modern imagery of the state and market (for example, passports) to invoke the reality of the postcolonial landscape. Yet in spite of the association of popular Ghanaian witchcraft commentaries with all things new and contemporary, Akan antiwitchcraft shrines, often located in remote rural villages, have remained something of an anachronism. …

Resistance to carbosulfan in Anopheles gambiae from Ivory Coast, based on reduced sensitivity of acetylcholinesterase.

Resistance to carbosulfan, a carbamate insecticide, was detected in field populations of the malaria vector mosquito Anopheles gambiae Giles (Diptera: Culicidae) from two ecologically contrasted localities near Bouaké, Ivory Coast: rural M'bé with predominantly M form of An. gambiae susceptible to pyrethroids; suburban Yaokoffikro with predominantly S form of An. gambiae highly resistant to pyrethroids (96% kdr). The discriminating concentration of 0.4% carbosulfan (i.e. double the LC100) was determined from bioassays with the susceptible An. gambiae Kisumu strain. Following exposure to the diagnostic dosage (0.4% carbosulfan for 1 h), mortality rates of female An. gambiae adults (reared from larvae collected from ricefields) were 62% and 29% of those from M'bé and Yaokoffikro, respectively, 24 h post-exposure. Exposure for 3 min to netting impregnated with the operational dosage of carbosulfan 200 mg/m2 gave mortality rates of 88% of those from M'bé and only 12.2% for Yaokoffikro. In each case the control untreated mortality rate was insignificant. Biochemical assays to detect possible resistance mechanism(s) revealed the presence of insensitive AChE in populations of An. gambiae at both localities, more prevalent in the S form at Yaokoffikro than in M form at M'bé, as expected from bioassays results. Our study demonstrates the need to monitor carbamate resistance among populations of the An. gambiae complex in Africa, to determine its spread and anticipate vector control failure if these insecticides are employed.

African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective

This new revised edition of African Civilizations re-examines the physical evidence for developing social complexity in Africa over the last six thousand years. Unlike the two previous editions, it is not confined to tropical Africa but considers the whole continent. Graham Connah focuses upon the archaeological research of two key aspects of complexity, urbanism and state formation, in ten main areas of Africa: Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, Ethiopia, the West African savanna, the West African forest, the East African coast and islands, the Zimbabwe Plateau, parts of Central Africa and South Africa. The book's main concern is to review the available evidence in its varied environmental settings, and to consider possible explanations of the developments that gave rise to it. Extensively illustrated, including new maps and plans, and offering an extended list of references, this is essential reading for students of archaeology, anthropology, African history, black studies and social geography.

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Susan Keech Mclntosh. ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.176 pp.

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Susan Keech McIntosh

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBeyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. Susan Keech McIntosh Graham ConnahGraham Connah Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 56, Number 4Winter, 2000 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/jar.56.4.3630948 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 2000 The University of New MexicoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Cents and Sociability: Household Income and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania

In this article we show that associational relationships and social norms of villages in rural Tanzania are both capital and social. After outlining the various concepts of social capital we tell how and why we created data on social capital using a large-scale household survey in rural Tanzania that was designed to query households about their social connections and attitudes. By using the Social Capital and Poverty Survey (SCPS) and data from a different survey, which also had information on incomes, we show that a village’s social capital has an effect on the incomes of the households in that village, an effect that is empirically large, definitely social, and plausibly causal. Finally, we use the two data sets to examine a number of proximate channels through which social capital appears to operate.

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa

Mesoscale Convective Complexes in Africa

Abstract Digitized full-disk infrared satellite imagery from the European geostationary satellite (Meteosat) for 1986 and 1987 was used to construct a climatology of mesoscale convective complexes (MCCs) in Africa One hundred ninety-five systems formed over Africa and its near vicinity during the two-year study period. From this database, characteristics of African MCCs were calculated. The results indicate that these MCCs display many of the same characteristics as those found in the Americas, the Indian subcontinent, and the western Pacific region. The systems are predominantly nocturnal and tend to form over or in the immediate vicinity of land. Much of the activity occurs over the African Sahel. while comparatively little occurs over the equatorial rain forest. The average lifetime of African MCCs is about 11.5 h, whereas systems in the western Pacific region and the Americas last about 11 and 10 h, respectively. The size distributions of the African systems are also extremely similar to those of the ...