Africa in the New Millennium - Böcker

This volume illuminates the complex and constantly shifting social dynamics of African city making and human survival today. It explores how African urban dwellers have had to find not only effective ways of pursuing their livelihoods and other aspirations within cities but also ways of managing their interactions with often more powerful economic and political interests that seek to impose particular uses of urban space.Amidst very different socio-cultural contexts in Dakar, Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Kisangani, Jos, Zaria, Cairo and Marrakesh, the research in this volume focuses on the diverse ways Africans negotiate novel spatial practices, political-economic processes, and social relations that entangle place, identity and power in urban sites. While historically familiar patterns linking countryside and city remain, these are constantly being reworked as African agency gives life to highly diverse urban formations which are further fashioned through the geographically uneven dynamics of globalization that articulate with locally specific histories, cultural practices, and political contingencies.The result is an emphasis in Africa on city making through fluid and rapidly changing institutional structures, informal agreements, and finding innovative ways to interweave various sectors and actors. Urban change, as a consequence, is not a process easily managed.

Modernity is the unfinished business of our times. In the case of Africa, as the scholars contributing to this volume show, the continent has been through a particularly ambivalent experience of modernity. Most work has tended to emphasize, on the one hand, its alien nature in Africa and, on the other, the ways in which Africans have resisted it. While acknowledging this tension, the authors of this volume seek to show the extent to which this very tension has been constitutive of African social reality. Modernity is understood as the basic impulse behind the construction of changing African society over the past one hundred years.The issues that this volume addresses relate to the ways in which, first, Africans negotiated the terms of this modernity during the colonial period and, then, how today they are coming to terms with it in the post-colonial period. The contributors argue both that the African experience of modernity is unique and, at the same time, relevant for social theory more widely. Not only is it important to describe this experience, but also to acknowledge that such a description may provide African Studies with valuable analytical insights into African social reality. In the course of so doing, cases are presented and issues raised covering new forms of labour, changing notions and norms relating to land rights, religious conversion, internal migration, and even emigration. Indeed, one particularly significant, but often underplayed, feature that has characterised both the colonial and post-colonial periods, and which this book deals with extensively, is the variegated linkages and interactions between Africans in the diaspora and within the continent.

Democratic institutional forms and processes are increasingly widespread in Africa as dictatorial regimes have been forced to give way as a result of popular mobilization and external donor pressure. However the premises of the African scholars whose empirical research and analytical explorations are included in this volume are that democratic form and democratic substance are two different things; Western-derived institutional forms are neither necessarily the most appropriate nor the most practical in the current African context; and rooting democratic norms in the political cultures of African polities raises socio-cultural issues with which political scientists must engage.This book explores various critical questions in the context of particular elections and particular countries as diverse as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, the Congo, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. They include the continuing impact of police state apparatuses following democratic transition; factors influencing African voters' attitudes and behaviour; the impact of incumbency on electoral competition; women's electoral participation; the phenomenon of often very limited party programmatic choice in the context of huge social diversity and multi-party competition; and the controversial issues around the transplantation of liberal democratic institutions. Underlying these issues is the fundamental question of whether democratic processes as currently practised in Africa are really making any significant difference to the African struggle for economic, social and cultural progress.This volume is valuable for the original perspectives of its African contributors; the issues it explores; and the concrete democratic experiences it analyses; and the challenges it makes to the existing concepts, paradigms and practices of liberal democracy.

Democratic institutional forms and processes are increasingly widespread in Africa as dictatorial regimes have been forced to give way as a result of popular mobilization and external donor pressure. However the premises of the African scholars whose empirical research and analytical explorations are included in this volume are that democratic form and democratic substance are two different things; Western-derived institutional forms are neither necessarily the most appropriate nor the most practical in the current African context; and rooting democratic norms in the political cultures of African polities raises socio-cultural issues with which political scientists must engage.This book explores various critical questions in the context of particular elections and particular countries as diverse as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, the Congo, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. They include the continuing impact of police state apparatuses following democratic transition; factors influencing African voters' attitudes and behaviour; the impact of incumbency on electoral competition; women's electoral participation; the phenomenon of often very limited party programmatic choice in the context of huge social diversity and multi-party competition; and the controversial issues around the transplantation of liberal democratic institutions. Underlying these issues is the fundamental question of whether democratic processes as currently practised in Africa are really making any significant difference to the African struggle for economic, social and cultural progress.This volume is valuable for the original perspectives of its African contributors; the issues it explores; and the concrete democratic experiences it analyses; and the challenges it makes to the existing concepts, paradigms and practices of liberal democracy.

This study of xenophobia and how it both exploits and excludes is an incisive commentary on a globalizing world and its consequences for ordinary people's lives. Using the examples of Sub-Saharan Africa's two most economically successful nations, it meticulously documents the fate of immigrants and the new politics of insiders and outsiders. As globalization becomes a palpable reality, citizenship, sociality and belonging are subjected to stresses to which few societies have devised a civil response beyond yet more controls.

This book looks at the very different responses to the African predicament from prominent writers like Soyinka, Ngugi and Achebe, to the military men in power and the students who defy repression. It suggests that intervention by international agencies who claim to promote 'democracy' and 'empower the youth' may reinforce authoritarian attitudes and structures.The essays in the book give voice to the outrage, ridicule and revolutionary ardour, as well as to the reformist caution, of those directly affected. The shallow pretences of those in power and the hypocrisy and arrogance of the foreign helpers are also exposed. The book concludes that being an 'insider' or an 'outsider' is less important than being committed to listening to ordinary people.

Ghana has witnessed a 'revolution through the ballot box', since its return to constitutional rule in 1993. Yet this period of sustained democratic government in an era of globalization and liberal triumphalism has brought with it new demands. How has Ghana faced up to the problems of institution-building, state-market relations and democratic leadership? Can it deal with the challenges posed by security, human rights and foreign policy in the twenty-first century?This unique collection interrogates all these issues and assesses the future of the democratic experiment in one of sub-Saharan Africa's rare 'islands of peace'. In doing so, it provides an invaluable guide to Ghana's political past, present and future.

The path towards democracy in Kenya has been long and often tortuous. Though it has been trumpeted as a goal for decades, democratic government has never been fully realised, largely as a result of the authoritarian excesses of the Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki regimes.This uniquely comprehensive study of Kenya's political trajectory shows how the struggle for democracy has been waged in civil society, through opposition parties, and amongst traditionally marginalised groups like women and the young. It also considers the remaining impediments to democratisation, in the form of a powerful police force and damaging structural adjustment policies. Thus, the authors argue, democratisation in Kenya is a laborious and non-linear process.Kenyans' recent electoral successes, the book concludes, have empowered them and reinvigorated the prospects for democracy, heralding a more autonomous and peaceful twenty-first century.

The politics of development in Africa have always been central concerns of the continent's literature. Yet ideas about the best way to achieve this development, and even what development itself should look like, have been hotly contested.African Literature as Political Philosophy looks in particular at Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but situates these within the broader context of developments in African literature over the past half-century, discussing writers from Ayi Kwei Armah to Wole Soyinka. M.S.C. Okolo provides a thorough analysis of the authors' differing approaches and how these emerge from the literature. She shows the roots of Achebe's reformism and Ngugi's insistence on revolution and how these positions take shape in their work. Okolo argues that these authors have been profoundly affected by the political situation of Africa, but have also helped to create a new African political philosophy.