Liberation Of Africa Research Articles

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in theNew Negro World, 1940–1944

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the<i>New Negro World</i>, 1940–1944

Regional Trade Liberalisation as a Prisonerss Dilemma: The Case of the SADC Protocol on Trade

This paper addresses the following key question. Why is it that African governments that enthusiastically sign trade liberalisation agreements at one point, so spectacularly fail to implement subsequent liberalisation provisions; a necessary step towards mutually desirable free trade gains. Why is it that African governments, generally seem eager to embrace trade liberalisation on paper, while they loath to act cooperatively to achieve it in practice?In addressing these questions, this paper does not attempt to dispute conventional explanations of the poor record of trade liberalisation in Africa, rather it seeks to compliment these explanations by providing a more comprehensive explanation which goes beyond simple material considerations. A new dimension embraces examination of the effects of strategic factors on governments implementing a regional trade liberalisation agreement.Using the game theoretic approach, this paper analyses problems of collective action and how they may prevent a group of regional governments from realising mutually beneficial gains from regional free trade.

Agency and affordability: being black and ‘middle class’ in South Africa in 1989

This article analyses a 1991 documentary about the ‘black middle class’ in South Africa, called Nowhere to Play: Conversations with Sowetan Golfers, commissioned by Channel 4 (UK). Drawing on interviews with the filmmaker, Angus Gibson, and one of the individuals featured in the documentary, Peter Vundla, the article critically discusses the film's representation of the black middle class at a crucial point in South Africa's liberation struggle. Examining the discursive construction of the ‘black middle class’, as well as its claims to agency and affordability, the article contributes to broader debates on class, race, consumption and empowerment in the South African context.

PAN-AFRICANISM, KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND THE THIRD LIBERATION OF AFRICA

ABSTRACTPan-Africanism as an ideological and philosophical force has defined the struggle to ensure the collective realisation of the destiny of the Black race across the Atlantic by political and intellectual leaders of African descent both at home and in the Diaspora. The struggle has passed through several phases such as ending obnoxious trade in human beings, colonialism and re-assertion of African identity and sense of being. The epistemological hegemony of the West on knowledge production in African studies and their Eurocentric view of what constitutes the history of Africa as well as what are the appropriate development strategies for the continent constitute another area of struggle for emancipation. Some have argued that a combination of Western reactionary and intellectual forces has kept Africa in chains of poverty and underdevelopment for decades. A counter argument is that Africa is her own worst enemy.The need for intellectual, socio-economic and political liberation of the continent is compelling. This article argues for a Pan-Africanist approach to the realisation of the third liberation of the continent from the shackles of the global matrix of power, which manifest in the perverse form of knowledge production, economic theory and praxis and a political system, the main objective of which is transnational elite accumulation. The proposition is anchored on two historical experiences, in which the first and second liberation of Africa from slavery and colonialism were achieved due to the Trans-Atlantic cooperation between Africans on the continent and those in the Diaspora. Closely aligned to the instrumentality of Pan-Africanism as a reliable force for propelling the third liberation of Africa is the necessity of privileging indigenous knowledge production over exogenous or imported knowledge. In making a case for the decolonisation of knowledge production and complete liberation of Africa, this article employs Mafeje's Afrocentrism as the theoretical basis of interlocution.

Capital Account Policies, IMF Programs and Growth in Developing Regions

This paper examines capital account policy choices in an innovative model with adaptive learning under uncertainty. In the model, countries??? past experiences and IMF programs influence policymakers??? beliefs about impact of capital account liberalization on growth, taking into account constraints imposed by the ???Mundell???s trilemma???. The model, calibrated to data for Africa, Latin America and developing Asia, is consistent with capital account policies during 1980 ??? 2010, including the delayed capital account liberalization in Africa. One of the implications of the model is that even countries with liberalized capital accounts could revert to the use of capital controls in the presence of particularly large output shocks.

Trade liberalisation and its impact on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa

Developing and least developed countries, including countries in the sub–Saharan African (SSA) region, for example, are 'collapsing' under the pressure of the liberalised international economic environment which is characterised by the increase of food prices. For instance, it is reported in the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Food Price Index that food prices peaked in February 2011, the highest level recorded in both real and nominal terms since January 1990. It is estimated that nearly one billion people go hungry every day, and that in SSA almost one in three people suffers from hunger. Approximately about 1.5 million South African children suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and that about 14 million people are vulnerable to food insecurity with about 43% of households suffering from food insecurity. The 2012 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Africa Human Development Report shows that rapid economic progress and liberalisation in Africa has not brought food security for the substantial proportion of the population still gripped by hunger.

Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere's philosophy, contribution, and legacies

This article discusses Nyerere's African socialism (ujamaa), philosophy of education for total liberation of society, and philosophy of Pan-Africanism. The article argues that by actively using traditional African values and principles of communalism, collective production, egalitarian distribution, and universal obligation to work, Nyerere's philosophy of African socialism provided the socialist project with an indigenous African identity that was grounded in African historical memories and realities. Both the philosophy and the practice also presented the possibility of constructing socialism in non-European peripheral capitalist societies. A combination of hostile internal and external contradictions, past and present, however, made what was historically necessary historically impossible. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that Nyerere's philosophy of education challenged the relevance of colonial education and contributed to the global conversation about the pedagogy of liberation. In addition, the article maintains that Nyerere's philosophy of Pan-Africanism influenced Tanzania's unrivalled contribution to the total liberation of Africa.

Practicing pan-Africanism: an anthropological perspective on exile-host relations at Kongwa, Tanzania

This paper explores exile-host relations at Kongwa, where southern Africa's first guerrilla soldiers lived alongside villagers in rural, central Tanzania between 1964 and 1978. Drawing from the author's previous research on SWAPO's exile camps, recent publications about the ANC in exile and fieldwork conducted at Kongwa, the paper argues that Kongwa became a “pan-African community” in which inhabitants originating from eastern and southern African countries developed complex and meaningful relationships across national borders. Nevertheless, this community was vulnerable to the narrow interests of national elites and the frameworks of national histories, which have undermined subsequent recognition of the international relations which formed at Kongwa. In highlighting these points, the paper identifies tensions inherent to Pan-Africanism as discourse and practice and models an ethnographic approach to studying southern Africa's liberation struggles and their aftermath.

Budget support and Africa–European Union relations: Free market reform and neo-colonialism?

The European Commission has promised to provide African countries with budget support to facilitate poverty eradication and the broader achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Moreover, European Union officials state that modern ‘poverty reduction’ budget support aligns with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development norms of country-ownership. In particular, they assure recipients that this aid modality will not be used to coerce African states to pursue second-generation liberalisation measures. Accordingly, European Union actors in the Post-Washington Consensus appear to have learned the lessons of structural adjustment reforms undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s, opting now to promote untied aid mechanisms. This article argues, however, that European Union budget support is still very much tied to premature trade opening and economic liberalisation in Africa. Examining the cases of Tunisia, Ghana and Uganda, it points to the strategic utilisation of budget aid as a means of donor leverage for free market reform detrimental to the needs of poorer citizens. In this context, the article argues that Nkrumah’s concept of ‘neo-colonial’ states bears much significance for a contemporary evaluation of European Union budget support to Africa.

Nelson Mandela and the politics of South Africa's unfinished liberation

The death of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela on 5 December 2013 provoked unprecedented emotional outpourings: newspaper columns swelled with obituaries, politicians lined up to praise this iconic figure,...

Married to the ANC: Tanzanian Women's Entanglement in South Africa's Liberation Struggle

The end of apartheid has opened up new research possibilities into the history of the African National Congress (ANC). Yet the scholarship on the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), remains largely restricted to questions of strategic, political and military effectiveness. The transnational character of the anti-apartheid struggle is mostly absent from nationalist historiographies, while little is known about the daily lives of those who made up the ranks of MK, their interactions with host communities, and the implications of having a large, predominantly male army – with their feelings, longings and frustrations – stationed outside South Africa's borders for three decades. Morogoro, a small upcountry town in Tanzania, was one of the key sites where relations between South African exiles and Tanzanians were forged. In the early years of exile, relationships between ANC/MK cadres and Tanzanian women were not officially sanctioned by the movement, but from the late 1970s they were increasingly formalised through marriage. In this way, the lives of many Tanzanian women became entangled with the South African liberation struggle. Relationships and marriages between South African exiles and Tanzanian women were not only a significant aspect of everyday life in exile, but also key components of an ANC familyhood, linked in turn to expressions of masculinity in MK and to the making of a national community and imaginary. This article seeks to illustrate the complex implications and present repercussions of these marriages and relationships by tracing the lives of seven Tanzanian women, which reveal a multiplicity of personal and emotional entanglements that are obscured by a narrow focus on military and strategic objectives.

Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills Africa's third liberation The new search for prosperity and jobs

Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills Africa's third liberation The new search for prosperity and jobs Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2012. 249 pp., $25.00 (paper) ISBN: 978-0143528883The United Nations Human Development Index Report of 2013 has once again highlighted predicament of many African countries with respect to winning battles against poverty and underdevelopment: with exception of Afghanistan, top 20 poorest countries in world are still located in Africa. This is despite impressive economic growth rates recorded by some African countries since turn of 21st century. These growth rates have been so impressive that in its 3 December 2011 edition The Economist expressed regret for having previously labelled a hopeless a decade ago. Yet Africa's economic growth rates have not translated into jobs for its teeming population, especially its youth. Addressing gap between impressive economic growth rates and massive unemployment is therefore an imperative for many African countries in immediate future.In their book, Africa's Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs, Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills argue that gap between joblessness and economic growth in can be addressed if African countries concentrate on deepening economic liberalization reforms and allowing free market forces to redistribute benefits of such reforms without government interference. With this approach, authors maintain, Africa can show as did East Asia, that in development, nothing is inevitable (6). In their words, the long term answer to Africa's development is for leaders to make profound commitment to economic growth as their highest priority by reforming institutions and by making and then adhering to a set of policy choices that encourage private sector expansion (112). Drawing evidence from Latin America, Asia, and Middle East, authors' examples of successful economic growth and job creation policies illustrate how development can be pursued and achieved in countries that have suffered historical, political, economic, and social challenges like those still plaguing some African countries. The problem in Africa, according to Herbst and Mills, relates to economic reforms needed to encourage private sector expansion. The problem is exacerbated by bad governance, cronyism, patronage, and populist politics. In other words, despite prevalence of neoliberal reform in past three decades, economic reform in has not gone far enough to ensure that free markets are effectively put in place. Nevertheless, all hope is not lost on African continent, where liberation from joblessness, poverty, and underdevelopment can still be achieved if necessary combination of policies is implemented. Economic development should be promoted through trade, open markets, macroeconomic stability and prudence, fiscal conservatism, and centrality of entrepreneurs and human capital (220).Without a doubt, African predicament poses challenges at political, economic, and social levels. The unenviable paradox of plenty, illustrated by presence of poverty amid abundant human and material resources in Africa, requires urgent socioeconomic transformation. …

Township Histories, Insurrection and Liberation in Late Apartheid South Africa

This article reviews the literature on resistance in South Africa's African townships that emerged in response to the township insurgencies of the 1980s and early 1990s. It focuses on two bodies of writing: the literature that chronicled the revolt as it unfolded on the one hand, and the historical literature that explored township politics and culture during the first half of the twentieth century on the other. It evaluates these writings’ strengths and points to the inevitable gaps and blind spots. It also highlights the disjunctures that existed between the two. The current wave of historical writing on South Africa's liberation struggle as well as the reassertion of township-based resistance and of township history gives this survey a particular salience. This article argues for the need for both a ‘joined-up’ liberation history that gives due place to the township-based rebellions (as opposed to one that is subordinated to that of the exiled ANC in contemporary public history) and one that recognises the deeper roots of, and continuities with, earlier phases of township resistance and rebellion. It also considers this body of writing in the light of subsequent critiques of the resistance paradigm and the social history approach that dominated the study of townships in the 1980s.

African modernities and the critical reappropriation of indigenous knowledges: Towards a polycentric global epistemology

The intellectual rehabilitation of African knowledge systems remains an important moral, political and epistemological project for postcolonial Africa. It entails challenging those disparaging discourses about Africa and its supposed ineptitude that served as the pretext for the questionable right of conquest. This work argues that the best way to deal with the colonial past and its painful reality is not to dwell on its ills, but to use it as a platform from which to rebuild forms of consciousness and epistemic possibilities that reaffirm African forms of knowing. This is where the critical reappropriation of indigenous epistemologies becomes important. Reappropriation, like renaissance, considers the return to the past as a return to initiative. The aim is to attain a polycentric global epistemology in which the imperium and tyranny of Western epistemology give way to the creation of a world into which many worlds can fit. The promise of a genuine African modernity is not found in a life of mimesis, but in the ability to reappropriate indigenous forms of knowledge capable of providing alternative interpretive and normative frameworks upon which the epistemic liberation of Africa can be grounded.

Against Invisibility: Negritude and the Awakening of the African Voice in Theology

This paper discusses the emergence of Negritude and its contribution to the early development of African theology. The Negritude movement of the 1930s and 40s understands itself as a literary and philosophical movement that responds to colonial domination. It awakened a cultural voice African priests used to become legible in the discipline of Christian theology. Negritude was a contested category. For some, it was nothing more than a nativist philosophy that promoted a metaphysic of race; for others, Negritude was an initiative to recover African cultural values. This paper traces the Senghorian tradition of Negritude that began as a philosophy of black identity but evolved into a mode of thought that inspired blacks to reimagine African alternatives to the colonial state. Senghor's proposal of African socialism was a component of the broader struggle that influenced the development of a theology of liberation in Africa.

Re-Thinking the Emergence of the Struggle for South African Liberation in the United States: Max Yergan and the Council on African Affairs, 1922–1946

This article is about how African American missionary Max Yergan and other African American anti-colonial activists working through the Council on African Affairs (CAA) contributed to the emergence of the struggle for South African liberation in the United States. It subsumes Yergan's arrival in South Africa in 1922 through the establishment of the Council and its initial campaigns on behalf of black South Africans. My intent is to show that the struggle for South African liberation in the United States developed from transnational contact between African Americans and black South Africans, and that the struggle began not in the United States as is most often assumed but in South Africa under the leadership of Yergan, that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 pushed Yergan and other anti-colonial radicals more assuredly into the fight for South Africa's liberation, and that the Council on African Affairs was critical to the emergence of the struggle in the United States during this early period. It will have further served its purpose if it overturns the lingering idea that African Americans were slow to get serious about the anti-apartheid movement. To the contrary, African Americans were organised and openly protesting for the rights of black South Africans more than three decades before they had won their own civil rights and at least a decade before apartheid had been established in South Africa. Liberal whites played an important role too, especially in providing financial support for the struggle but also through their active participation. My concern is not to write them out of the history of the struggle for South Africa's liberation, but to more effectively write African Americans into it.

Establishing police authority and civilian compliance in post-apartheid Johannesburg: an argument from the work of Egon Bittner

Egon Bittner's seminal insight is that a precondition of democratic policing is a demand for it among the general population. What happens when that demand is absent? What happens, in other words, when the general population withdraws its consent to being policed? I explore this question in the context of post-apartheid Johannesburg, where compliance with police authority is patchy. I argue that there is a strong relationship between non-compliance and the density of public space, that patrols are animated by the avoidance of human density, and that when police cannot avoid density, the nature of police–civilian engagement is shaped by a sophisticated filigree of rules established by civilians. I ask why civilian compliance in contemporary Johannesburg is so patchy and find answers both in aspects of the city's apartheid history and in several policy errors made by South Africa's former liberation movement when it came to power in 1994. Looking beyond South Africa, I argue that in any urban context characterised by meagre security and endemic disorder the police ought to establish its authority by confining itself to two functions: effectively investigating violent crime and providing rapid and fair interventions whenever citizens call for help in emergencies. In South Africa and elsewhere, recent trends in police policy, inspired by professional criminology, have steered police in other directions.

Extraversion, vulnerability to donors, and political liberalization in Africa

In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat underappreciated in recent empirical studies. African countries vary in their extraversion portfolios, or the dimensions of their relations to the outside world that they can instrumentalize, and these variations correspond both to different degrees of vulnerability to the demands of foreign donors and to different preferences from the donors themselves. We find four quantitative measures of extraversion vulnerability to be statistically associated with the initial transitions of the 1989–1995 period and with the ‘consolidations’ at different levels of democracy observable between 1995 and 2011. These findings shed new light on both democratic and hybrid regime trajectories in Africa. MOST EMPIRICAL STUDIES of the determinants of political liberalization in Africa have focused on domestic variables, such as protest, the institutional features of previous regimes, the number of elections, the availability of oil rents, or the nature and structure of political parties. Few, in *Caryn Peiffer (caryn.peiffer@cgu.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University and Pierre Englebert (penglebert@pomona.edu) is professor of African politics at Pomona College. 1. On protest and the features of pre-existing regimes, see Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), pp. 159–232, and Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State failure in late-century Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008); on elections, see Staffan Lindberg, Democracy and Elections in Africa (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MA, 2006), pp. 122–3; and Staffan Lindberg, ‘The power of elections revisited’ (paper presented at the conference on ‘Elections and Political Identities in New Democracies’, Yale University, 28– 29 April 2007); on mineral and oil rents, see Nathan Jensen and Leonard Wantchekon, ‘Resource wealth and political regimes in Africa’, Comparative Political Studies 37, 7 (2004), pp. 816–41, and Luc Desire Omgba, ‘On the duration of political power in Africa: the role doi: 10.1093/afraf/ads029 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved 1 African Affairs, 00/00, 1–24 African Affairs Advance Access published June 11, 2012

African Philosophy and the Decolonisation of Education in Africa: Some critical reflections

The liberation of Africa and its peoples from centuries of racially discriminatory colonial rule and domination has far‐reaching implications for educational thought and practice. The transformation of educational discourse in Africa requires a philosophical framework that respects diversity, acknowledges lived experience and challenges the hegemony of Western forms of universal knowledge. In this article I reflect critically on whether African philosophy, as a system of African knowledge(s), can provide a useful philosophical framework for the construction of empowering knowledge that will enable communities in Africa to participate in their own educational development.

Reincarnation of winds of change in Africa: an African Union impotence?

The emergence of African states as independent by 1970 had brought hope and expectations to nationals that the winds of change were to be equated with good life and freedom. Yet, no sooner had political freedom been gained than expectations turned elusive. The causes were bad political governance that soon burdened many states, military interventions of one-party states, abuse of rule of law, mass corruption and nations disintegrating. Also, the quest for freedom and dignity was not helped by a continental union that focused solely on political liberation of Africa and ignored any concerted effort towards integration and promotion of socio-economic lives of people.This article examines the political tremors that had engulfed some states in Africa and the resultant intervention by foreign powers. It is argued, that a major cause of the political ruffle in Tunisia, the Cote D’Ivoire, Egypt and Libya had been the inability of the African Union to be pro-active in enforcing norms of good governance among member-states through its inspecting agency, the African Peer Review. The apparent political paralysis is therefore a function of an African Union impotence that needs to be resolved Underlying the tremors are issues of democracy, good governance, and public service reform for which a theoretical discourse is engaged.Keywords: African Union, democracy, governance, revolution, impotence. APRM, civil warDisciplines: Public Management, African Studies, Political Studies