Leeds

African
Studies
Bulletin
Number 69
December 2007

Editor
Jane Plastow
Book Reviews Editor
Martin Banham
The Leeds African Studies Bulletin
is published annually by the Leeds
University Centre for African
Studies (LUCAS)

Editorial Assistance
Saeed R. Talajooy

All correspondence should be addressed to:

The Editor
Leeds African Studies Bulletin
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
UK
E-mail: African-studies@leeds.ac.uk

website: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/lucas

Leeds African Studies Bulletin

Number 69

December 2007

Contents

Introduction

Notes on Contributors

LUCAS News & Reports

Conference
The LUCAS Schools Project
Language in Africa
Leverhulme Professor Molara Ogundipe
The LUCAS elective module
LUCAS Seminars, Lectures and Workshops 2006-7

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9
11
12
12
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Departmental News
School of Education
School of English/Workshop Theatre
School of History
School of Modern Languages and Cultures (French)
School of Politics and International Studies
School of Theology and Religious Studies

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14
17
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Articles
Supernumeraries of the human race?
Reflections on the African holocaust by Morris Szeftel

25

The LUCAS Schools Global Citizenship Project by Jane Plastow

48

Ibadan 1960 by Martin Banham

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Book Reviews
Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon.
Clare A. Ignatowski. (Reviewed by Bill Jong-Ebot)

70

Writing Madness: Borderlines of the body in African literature.

Flora Veit-Wild. (Reviewed by Jane Plastow)

71

Globalisation and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of

Blackness. Eds.: Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas.
(Globalisation and Race) (Reviewed by Olasunkanmi Sholarin)

73

Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century.
Gregory Mann. (Reviewed by Ineke van Kessel)

74

Democratic Reform in Africa: Its Impact on Governance & Poverty

Alleviation. Ed.: Muna Ndulo. (Reviewed by Ralph A. Young)

77

Far in the Waste Sudan: On Assignment in Africa.

Nicholas Coghlan. (Reviewed by Michael Medley)

79

Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics.

Ed.: Sarah Nuttall. (Reviewed by Will Rea)

81

(A) Public and Private Universities in Kenya: New Challenges, Issues &
Achievements. Kilemi Mwiria, Njugna Ngethe, Charles Ngome, Douglas
Ouma-Odero, Violet Wawire and Daniel Wesonga.
(B) Gender in the Making of the Nigerian University System.
Charmaine Pereira.
(C) Change & Transformation in Ghanas Publicly Funded Universities.
Takyiwaa Manuh, Sulley Gariba and Joseph Budu.
(Group Reviewed by James Gibbs)

83

Aawambo Kingdoms, History and Cultural Change. Perspectives from

Northern Namibia. Lovisa T. Nampala and Vilho Shigwedha.
(Reviewed by Will Jackson)

87

African Theatre: Youth. Ed.: Michael Etherton.(Reviewed by Tim Prentki)

89

State of Violence: Politics, Youth and Memory in Contemporary Africa.

Eds.: Edna G. Bay and Donald L. Donham.
(Reviewed by Michael Etherton)
Books Received and Short Reviews
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Introduction
By the Director of LUCAS, Jane Plastow
Welcome to number 69 and the 2007 edition of the Leeds African Studies
Bulletin.
This edition features three articles, all by scholars based at Leeds University. At
the heart of the Bulletin is the long article by Morris Szeftel. Supernumeraries
of the Human Race? Reflections on the African holocaust. A version of the
article was first given as the LUCAS annual lecture in 2006, where a very large
audience received it with rapt attention. Morris Szeftel here mediates a lifetime
of scholarship through a very personal response to the enduring horrors
experienced by so many Africans, subjected to regimes both colonial and postcolonial that treat people as the supernumeraries of his title. We are deeply
indebted to him for developing the article and allowing us to publish it here.
Secondly I have contributed an article which looks at a project developed by
LUCAS, which I believe to be unique, taking African postgraduate students into
local schools to promote understanding of, and interest in, a continent which for
many young people thanks to the ultra-selective nature of media interest in the
continent is still seen as a mixture of safari park and disaster zone. The article;
The LUCAS Schools Global Citizenship Project, explores the means taken to
engage young peoples interest in a more realistic portrayal of Africa and the
benefits we found the project brought to both school children and African
students.
Finally Martin Banham looks back to his experiences of Nigeria on the eve of
independence in Ibadan 1960, as he explores the optimistic creative and
political ferment that emanated from Nigerias first university in the decade
from 1957.
I make no excuse for the fact that all these articles have a personal aspect to
them. Nor do I claim that this came about by design. But in each case I think one
can see that high levels of scholarship need in no way be compromised by
allowing room for the writers consciousness to intrude. For none of the three of
us who have written for this Bulletin is the study of Africa an academic exercise.
Rather it is something we care passionately about; for all of us in our work and
writing in relation to the continent the personal most definitely combines with
the political.

As usual we discuss the work of some of our contributing departments; the

expanding activities organised by LUCAS; and include an extensive section of
book reviews. We hope you will enjoy this latest Bulletin.
Notes on Contributors
Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, was the
Director of the Workshop Theatre from 1966 till 1998. His publications include
Osborne (Edinburgh, 1969); ed., with John Hodgson, Drama in Education: The
Annual Survey (London, 1972, 1973, 1975); African Theatre Today ( London,
1976); ed. Plays By Tom Taylor (Cambridge, 1985, one of 17 volumes in the
series British and American Playwrights 1750-1920 of which I was general
editor together with Peter Thomson); ed. The Cambridge Guide to World
Theatre (Cambridge, 1988, 1990, awarded the Barnard Hewitt Award of the
American Society for Theatre Research, later reissued as The Cambridge Guide
to Theatre, 1992, 1995, 2000); ed. with Errol Hill and George Woodyard, The
Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (Cambridge 1994, 2004);
ed. with Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Studies in Honour of Peter
Thomson (Exeter 2004); ed. A History of Theatre in Africa (Cambridge, 2005). I
am also editor, with James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, of the annual book/journal
African Theatre (James Currey, Oxford, annually since 1999).
Jane Plastow is a Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of
Leeds. She is an Africanist with special interests in African theatre, African
literature, education, development studies and politics. She has strong links with
East Africa; especially Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda,
all of which she has worked in recent years. Her publications include: Theatre &
Empowerment, Richard Boon and Jane Plastow (eds), CUP, 2004; Three
Eritrean Plays, Jane Plastow (ed and Introduced), Alumnus, 2004, African
Theatre: Women (ed) Jane Plastow, James Currey, 2002.
Morris Szeftel is a senior lecturer of Political Studies at the University of Leeds
and a member of the ROAPE editorial working group and joint Reviews Editor.
His research includes the politics of developing countries, the role of the state in
development, business and government, political corruption and conflict. He has
published on elections and problems of democracy in Africa, the one-party state,
conflict and repression, the crisis in the third world, violence in South Africa
and corruption in Zambia. He is editor of the 'Leeds Studies in Democratization'
series.

LUCAS
News & Reports

The LUCAS conference

A conference on State, Mining and Development in Africa which was held
from 13-14 September 2007 at the University of Leeds brought together more
than a hundred academics and activists from Europe, Africa and North America
to explore three key themes: what lessons have been learnt from the resource
curse days of the 70s, 80s and 90s; what opportunities for resource-led growth
have emerged in the 21st century; and what resistance exists within the continent
to the continuing politics of dispossession and primitive accumulation that has
characterised much resource extraction? One third of the conference residents
over the two days were from overseas and twenty percent from Africa. The
significant Africa representation was secured by a British Academy grant as
well as collaboration with Third World NetworkAfrica based in Accra,
Ghana, which helped facilitate a grant from Oxfam-Novib to bring African
based academics and activists to Leeds.
The conference had thirteen working sessions over two days, divided into four
broad discussion themes: capitalism and mining; mining and development;
comparative experiences of the resource curse, mining regulation and the state,
and resistance. There were also two plenary sessions over the two days. The first
of these was delivered by Dr Yao Graham from Third World NetworkAfrica
who spoke directly to the title of the conference, The State, Mining and
Development in Africa. The second plenary involved a comparative discussion
of regional development and mineral led growth in the Middle East and North
Africa given by Dr Ali Kadri from the United Nations Economic and Social
Commission for Western Asia. The African Studies Association of the UK also
invited a speaker from Kenya, Tim Murithi, to present the Mary Kingsley
Zochonis Lecture which was entitled Under-Mining Africa: The Illicit Trade in
Natural Resources and its impact on Peacebuilding and Development.
Diverse case studies from Ghana, Sudan, Zambia, South Africa, Sierra Leone,
Chad, Burkina Faso and Nigeria were discussed in the working sessions. In his
presentation, Cyril Obi explored the ramifications of the entry of Chinese state
oil companies into the volatile Niger Delta (Nigeria) for the politics of local
resistance in the region. He addressed the theoretical issues that emerge from the
globalisation of Chinese oil capital leading to inequitable and volatile social
relations in African oil producing locales, particularly the restive Niger Delta
with its history of local resistance to Western Oil majors. His analysis also
examined the likely response of the Chinese oil companies to the perceived
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threat(s) that such local resistance could pose to their extractive, profit and
energy security interests, given antecedents in other African new oil states,
particularly Sudan, where Chinese companies were targeted by rebels, and were
deeply involved with the state and dominant elite in mining oil and repressing
local resistance. The Nigerian oil industry was further explored by Wilson
Akpan. He adopted a sociological view in his analysis of joint venture petroleum
production in Nigeria, reflecting on the tensions between the economic and
social dimensions of the joint venture relationship. He argued that a new phase
is emerging in the relationship between the Nigerian state and private petroleum
companies one in which questions of socio-ecological sustainability will
increasingly become as important for the two parties as the economics and
politics of joint ventures have been over the years.
Drawing upon case study analysis from Ghana, John Childs critically examined
the potential benefits of reorganising the artisanal gold mining sector according
to the principles of Fair Trade, as well as the challenges of bringing such an
initiative to fruition. He highlighted the importance of understanding the
artisanal gold mining poverty cycle and questioned whether Fair Trades
emphasis on the producer-consumer interface conceptualises artisanal gold
mining adequately. Sierra Leone diamonds also featured in the working
sessions. Tunde Zack-Williams analysis looked at the relationship between
diamond mining, the rural economy and the war in Sierra Leone. He drew
attention to how political legitimacy during the war was ensured not by
strengthening state institutions, but by gradually building support through
patron-client relationships fuelled by revenues from diamonds. The fortification
of this shadow state meant that no serious attempt was made by successive
governments in Sierra Leone to develop a modern state that would encompass
respect for the constitution and the rule of law, and that would guarantee not just
the legitimacy of the ruling elite, but also the sovereignty of the state. Sabine
Luning moved the debate to Burkina Faso. She explored how liberalisation of
the gold mining sector has affected working arrangements of artisanal
goldminers in Burkina Faso. She demonstrated how the presence of
(international) goldmining companies works out for different categories of
miners and how their working relations are best understood in connection with
international companies and the political and economic agents they rely on as
facilitators and mediators.
Focusing on East Africa, Luke Anthony Patey moved beyond an examination of
the influence of oil companies on armed conflict and analysed the determining
9

factors of corporate behaviour in Sudan. His analysis suggested that the strategic
behaviour of international oil companies in war-torn Sudan has overwhelmingly
been driven by political pressures from governments. The authority and power
of governments is the essential factor opening and closing doors for oil
companies in conflict-affected Sudan. Both the corporate behaviour of marketdriven, western oil companies and their parastatal counterparts from Asia are
guided by the positioning of states towards their operations. The debate on
Sudanese natural resources was taken further by Aisha Hommaida in her
presentation. She examined how historical marginalisation and new
marginalisation, driven by the processes of contemporary globalisation, has
necessitated the continued exploitation of resources in the Red Sea region for the
benefit of international interests, while the people of this region continue to
suffer loss of land, inequality and hunger. Her analysis suggested that these
historical and modern forces which have led to the marginalisation of
indigenous people in the Red Sea region partly explain the rise of grassroots
resistance by the Beja people. Issues related to growing support of the Beja
Congress were analysed in the context of growing demands for greater
representation in political life and a greater share of eastern Sudan wealth.
In Southern Africa, John Lungu examined the relationship between socioeconomic justice and natural resource exploitation in Zambia, raising questions
about corporate responsibilities and the obligations of government and
multinational corporations. He assessed the labour, social, and environmental
practices of the new mining companies in Zambia and their impact on mining
communities. Focusing on South Africa, Suzanne Dansereau argued that for
mining to enhance its contribution to development, it must not only minimise
harm on indigenous communities and the environment, but should also become
integrated into the local and regional economy so as to create backward and
forward linkages in a permanent, diversified and thus sustainable local
community. It must also organise production around a labour utilisation model
based on high wages and high skills, rather than the model so frequently used
that favours low wages and low skill levels. At the same time, it must invest in
significant training, not only to ensure health and safety, but make training
available to local communities so members can access all mining jobs, including
skilled ones.
Overall, it was reported by participants and by funders who attended, and
subsequently via African study networks in the UK and overseas, that the
conference met its aims and objectives. Two future meetings are now being
10

planned to pursue the conference agenda and linked themes in Accra, Ghana
2008 and later in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A schedule is under discussion to
publish selected papers from the conference in a special issue of the Review of
African Political Economy, Vol 35, No. 116, Summer 2008. Additionally, the
conference provided the opportunity for participants to get to know the Review
of African Political Economy, to meet its editors and to discuss opportunities for
future collaboration and networking.
Philani Moyo

The LUCAS Schools Project

From 2004-2006 LUCAS ran a project co-ordinated by Jane Plastow taking
African students in to Leeds primary and high schools teaching about a range of
aspects of African politics, development, society and culture. Jane Plastows
article on the project, The LUCAS Schools Project on Global Citizenship can
be found on pages 48-60 of this issue. We are now delighted to be able to
announce that thanks to a successful bid to the Department for International
Developments Development Awareness Fund and to support from Leeds
University, an expanded project will be running for three years from September
2007. The new project will be able to employ a project co-ordinator, more
African postgraduate students studying at the University and to reach more
schools. We also intend to make the model for this project available in due
course to other institutions as we think it could well be replicated in many higher
education organisations wishing to promote international knowledge among
young people. All African postgraduates at the University of Leeds interested in
taking part in the project should contact LUCAS at ipiafric@leeds.ac.uk
Language in Africa
Following on from the establishment of a Special Interest Group of the British
Association of Applied Linguists in Language in Africa in 2005, a two day event
has been held each year at LUCAS organised by John Holmes. This years event
had the general theme Languages in Contact: Africa and the Diaspora and was
held on November 17-18th in the LUCAS library. The keynote speaker was
Joseph Gafaranga from the University of Edinburgh who gave a talk on
Language-switching in the Rwandan community in Belgium. There were a
total of 12 papers given, and the event, as before, was characterised by an
informal and collegial spirit. Participants varied from senior academics to
postgraduates and a number of research students from the School of Education.
Margaret Udo and Magnus Udo from Nigeria, Charles Ongondo from Kenya,
11

and Fatima Guilherme de Castro and Solange da Costa from Brazil, all helped to
make visitors welcome and the event to run smoothly.
Leverhulme Professor Molara Ogundipe
Molara Ogundipe was with the University of Leeds for the first semester of the
2006-7 academic year, continuing her links with LUCAS, Centre CATH and the
Institute of Post-Colonial Studies. Professor Ogundipe gave a Leverhulme
lecture at LUCAS entitled, Citizenship and Illegitimacy in Nigeria Today. She
also gave a poetry reading of her work and contributed a lecture on Gender in
Africa to the LUCAS elective module Contemporary Africas. Her tenure with
us finished in December 2006 and we thank her for her contribution across the
range of gender, poetry and African literature areas in which she is a leading
Nigerian voice.
The LUCAS elective module
Contemporary Africas: History, Society and Culture
In the first semester of the 2006-7 academic year LUCAS for the first time
undertook the teaching of an undergraduate elective module. The module was
team taught (for free!) by academic staff on the LUCAS board, with seminar
teaching from our African postgraduate students, Henrietta Abame, Elinettie
Chabwera and Oluseyi Ogunjobi. For its first year the module accepted only 40
students. Lectures were wide-ranging covering an overview of post-colonial
history, Nigerian art, language, gender, theatre for development, Christianity in
Africa, NGOs and development, and case studies on Egypt and Tanzania. We
had a few administrative teething problems, as its not easy to coordinate across
departments and faculties but students were generally very positive about the
module and this year intake will be expanded to 80 students.
The module is deliberately targeted at students who need have no prior
knowledge of Africa. Our intention is to challenge stereotypes and to interest
and excite students about post-colonial Africa.
LUCAS Seminars, Lectures and Workshops 2006-7
In the 2006-7 academic year the following seminars were given at LUCAS:
Black Mineworkers and Apartheid: From Repression to Liberation by Vic
Allen (Emeritus Professor, University Of Leeds), the Writer of The History of
Black Mineworkers in South Africa 1871-1994. (4th October 2006)
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Making Democracy a Reality?: Political participation, accountability and

(de)centralisation in Ghana by Dr Gordon Crawford, University of Leeds. 29th
November 2006)
Neocolonialism in the Neoliberal era: Insights from Nkrumah and Fanon by
Dr Branwen Gruffydd Jones, School of Politics and International Studies,
University of Leeds. (25th April 2007)
Africa Campaigns in the UK: Some Provisional Thoughts by Dr. Graham
Harrison, Reader in Politics, University of Sheffield. (2nd May 2007)
The Sawakin Experience: The Maritime Community by Dr. Dionisius A.
Agius, Professor of Arabic & Islamic Material Culture, Department of Arabic &
Middle Eastern Studies, University Of Leeds. (9th May 2007)
Modernizing Africa for Dispossession, LUCAS Annual Lecture by Professor
Raymond Bush, the Writer of Poverty and Neoliberalism, Chair in African
Studies and Development Politics, University of Leeds. (22nd May 2007)

13

Departmental News
School of Education
Professor Audrey Osler of the School of Education was a keynote speaker at the
16th Commonwealth Education Ministers Conference in South Africa in
December 2006. The theme of the conference was Access to Quality
Education and the title of the presentation was Teachers Work and Childrens
Human Rights.
Gospel Ikpeme, who did an MA at the School of Education last year and took
part in the Language in Africa Event is now coordinator of a major project to
write and produce a series of English language Textbooks in Nigeria.
Frederick Odhiambo who also figured prominently in the Language in Africa
event (See LUCAS news) and completed his MA last year, has been extremely
active on his return to his old school in Kenya. He has recently been invited by
the British Council to run workshops in the teaching of writing for other
secondary school teachers in Kenya.
John Holmes,

School of English
Post-colonial studies
Sam Durrant has been on leave this academic year working on a monograph on
the invention of mourning in postapartheid literature. From October to
December 2006 he was a visiting researcher at the African Studies Centre at the
University of Cape Town, financed by the British Academy small grant. He
gave papers to the English departments at UCT and Stellenbosch and at an
international conference on Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness Reflecting on
Ten Years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held at UCT. An article
enitled Storytellers, Novelists and Postcolonial Melancholia: Displaced
Aesthetics in Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart is due out later this year in
assays in Migatory Aesthetics, a collection he has co-edited with Catherine
Lloyd for Thamyris/Rodopi.
Brendon Nicholls has been awarded White Rose funding to lead a studentship
network on Southern Africa in the World. He has delivered a plenary paper on
New Comparativism and World Literatures and an invited seminar on African
Literatures and Cultures, both for the AHRC Doctoral Training in Colonial and
Post-Colonial Cultures at the University of Warwick. An invited conference
paper presented to the South African Association of Commonwealth Literature
14

and Language Studies conference at the University of Stellenbosch is now

forthcoming as an article entitled Apartheid Cinema and Indigenous Image
Rights: The Bushman Myth in Jamie Uys The Gods Must Be Crazy in
Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa special issue on South
Africa and the Global Media. A chapter entitled Reading Pakistan in Salman
Rushdies Shame is forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie
(ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah) and Literary Studies in Post-Apartheid Universities:
Possibilities for a New South African Literature in Ivan Vladislavis
Courage has been published in a collection edited by Michael Afolayan,
entitled Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa: Paradigms of Development,
Decline and Dilemmas (Africa World Press).
Publications
Brendon Nicholls, Literary Studies in Post-Apartheid Universities:
Possibilities for a New South African Literature in Ivan Vladislavics Courage,
Michael Afolayan (ed), Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa: Paradogms of
Development, Decline and Dilemmas, Africa World Press.
Workshop Theatre
In July 2006 Jane Plastow contributed to the Centre francais des Etudes
Ethiopiennes/British Institute in East Africa conference on youth in East Africa
with a paper entitled, The use of the arts for the empowerment of youth in East
Africa. She then went on to Makerere University in Uganda to run a week long
training workshop, sponsored by The British Council and Makerere University,
for students and staff in the departments of English and Music, Drama and
Dance, looking at devising theatre for development contexts. The workshop was
attended by approximately 20 staff, postgraduates and undergraduates and built
on years of work in this area at the University. The final part of the trip saw her
taking part in the 10th anniversary celebrations of FEMWRITE, Ugandas
women writers organisation, headed by PhD alumnus, Susan Kiguli, a Leeds
PhD alumnus who is both a lecturer in English at Makerere and the chair of
FEMWRITE.
In November she travelled to Eritrea, both to consult with Solomon Tsehaye,
with whom she is working on a British Academy sponsored project researching
into the Tigrinya language oral poetry forms of Melques and Masse, and to meet
with officials from the Bureau of Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Education
to plan the second stage of project being jointly run with John Holmes of the
Leeds School of Education, developing culturally appropriate forms of arts work
in local languages in Eritrean primary schools.

15

In February Jane Plastow contributed to a symposium organised by the Spanish

department at the University of Leeds, Parallel Lines, Parallel Lines, where she
offered a paper critiquing some of the use of Augusto Boals ideas, Practising
for the Revolution: The influence of Augusto Boal in Brazil and Africa.
In April Jane Plastow was invited to contribute to a symposium/workshop
organised by the Center for Global Communication Studies in Philadelphia,
USA, to discuss the use of the arts in promoting dialogue and peace in Darfur,
Sudan.
Colleagues
Prof Steve Abah and Dr Mufunanji Magalasi
In the past academic year The Workshop Theatre has been delighted to have the
services of two African theatre colleagues. Professor Steve Abah of Ahmadu
Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, and a PhD alumni of ours came to us for two
months in October and November 2006 to cover Jane Plastows study leave. He
was able to offer his immense expertise in Theatre and Development to MA
students and directed a play by Nigerian playwright Ahmed Yerima, The Bishop
and The Soul, in its UK premiere.
Mufunanji Magalasi of the University of Malawi has been with us all year. He
has also been able to contribute his Theatre for Development expertise and has
taught across a wide range of courses dealing with applied and African theatre.
Visitors
In May 2007 we were delighted that South Africas most famous actor, John
Kani, was able to visit us to talk about his work in South African theatre from
the days when he wrote and performed Sizwe Bansi and The Island with
Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard through to the present. He had come to
Leeds as part of the national tour of his newest work, Nothing But The Truth, in
which he also stars, and many of us had the privilege of going on to watch an
extraordinarily powerful performance that night.
Students
MAs.
The Workshop Theatre has had two MA students from Africa this year.
Ashish Beesondial from Mauritius has been studying the MA in Theatre
Making.
Coleman Ageyomah from Ghana has been studying the MA in Theatre and
Development Studies.

16

PhDs
Adesola Adeyemi from Nigeria is writing up his study of the theatre of Femi
Osofisan. It should also be noted that he edited an important festschrift for Femi
Osofisan to which both Martin Banham and Jane Plastow contributed. Portraits
for An Eagle: Essays in Honour of Femi Osofisan, Bayreuth African Studies, 78,
2006.
Evelyn Lutwama from Uganda spent much of the year in her home country
undertaking field research for her study of the use of Theatre for Development
techniques in relation to promoting womens rights.
Oluseyi Ogunjobi passed his upgrading examination and travelled to Nigeria
for his fieldwork on the theatre of Duro Ladipo.
Simon Peter Otieno from Kenya passed his upgrading examination and
returned to Kenya in December 2006 to continue his split-site PhD studying the
use of theatre amongst Kenyan youth with a focus on HIV/AIDS prevention.
Saeed Talajooy from Iran is in the final stages of writing his comparative study
of the work of Iranian playwright and film-maker Bahram Bezayee and Nigerian
playwright and activist, Wole Soyinka.
Publications
Martin Banham, Subverting the Proscenium: A Brief Note on Femi
Osofisans Stagefcraft, Ed Adesola Adeyemi, Portraits for an Eagle: Essays in
Honour of Femi Osofisan, Bayreuth African Studies, 2006, pp 45-9
Martin Banham and Jane Plastow, African Theatre and the University of
Leeds, Research in Drama Education, Vol 11, No 2, June 2006, pp 247-260
Ali Campbell with Jane Plastow, Promenade Theatre in a Sudanese
Reformatory: Divining for stories: The Cockerel and the Kings Ear, Ed Michael
Etherton, African Theatre: Youth, James Currey, 2006, pp 61-77
Christine Matzke and Jane Plastow, Sewit Childrens Theatre in Eritrea, Ed
Michael Etherton, African Theatre: Youth, James Currey, 2006, pp138-150
Jane Plastow, A Debate on Tactics for the Best Way to Overthrow Vile
Regimes: Osofisan writes back to Ngugi and Mugo, Ed Adesola Adeyemi,
Portraits for An Eagle: Essays in Honour of Femi Osofisan, Bayreuth African
Studies, 2006, pp 193-205.
Jane Plastow, Women: Women and Theater
Martin Banham, Sam Durrant, Brendon Nicholls and Jane Plastow

School of History
The past academic year has seen the continued popularity of undergraduate
African topics within the School of Histroy. In addition this year the MA
module on The History of Apartheid recruited eight students, while Africa and
17

the African diaspora features strongly in the new MA programme Race and
Resistance.
Shane Doyle spent July and August in Uganda, mainly gathering maternity
records from various hospitals and conducting a number of interviews. He
presented a paper on the demography of slavery at a conference at UCL in
March 2007, and a paper on parental attitudes towards death at a Cambridge
conference on death in Africa in April 2007. he has been awarded a British
Academy small grant for a project on changing patterns of naming in Uganda
and Tanzania.
PhDs
Will Jackson has begun a PhD this year on British perceptions of Africa and
Africans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Publications
Shane Doyle, From Kitara to the Lost Counties: genealogy, land and
legitimacy in the kingdom of Bunyoro, western Uganda, Social Identities, Vol
12.4, 2006, pp 457-470
Shane Doyle

School of Modern Languages and Cultures (French)

Kamal Salhi has received a British Academy Research Grant to carry out his
major research on North African Cinema and the legacies of conflict, and has
recently been made an AHRC award (With Ananya Kabir and Catherine Brown)
for a research network and workshops on the Religions and Society scheme. The
latter includes North Africa, Asia and their respective diaspora.
In the last two years Kamal has been Visiting Professor of North Africna Studies
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006) and the State
University of Oregon (2007).
Publications
Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Postcolonial Memories, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006
Kamal Salhi, Imaging Silence Representing Women: Ambiguous Cinematic
Strategies in North African Womens film, Quarterly Review of Film and
Video, Vol 14.4, 2007, pp 353-377

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Kamal Salhi, Slimane Benaissa from Exile in the Theatre to Theatre in Exile:
Ambiguous Traumas and Conflicts in the Algerian Diasporic Drama, Journal of
North African Studies, Vol 11.4, 2006, pp 373-407
Kamal Salhi, Essentials for Rethinking Postcolonial Cultures and Arts: the
Problematic of Minoritizing in North Africa, in N. Boudraa and J. Krausse
(eds), Mosaic North Africa: a cultural Re-appraisal of Ethnic and Religious
Minorities, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, pp 26-62
Kamal Salhi

School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)

POLIS provides a range of courses related to Africa at undergraduate and
postgraduate levels. The second year course State and Politics in Africa attracts
a large number of students, many of whom then choose to study some aspect of
Africas politics and international relations in their final year dissertation. At
postgraduate level POLIS offers the MA programme Human and Sustainable
Development in Africa.
Several members of POLIS staff have been engaged in research activities related
to Africa.
Ray Bush has recently completed a major study of poverty, accumulation and
dispossession in Africa. His book, Poverty and Neoliberalism Persistence and
Reproduction in the Global South, was published by Pluto press this year. The
book sets out how poverty, food insecurity and famine are an essential part of
modern capitalism. Using case studies from Egypt and North Africa, Nigeria,
Sudan and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa the book demonstrates, however,
that there is real resistance to neoliberal policies, and that struggles over land,
mining and resources can shape real alternatives to existing globalisation. Ray
presented these arguments in his inaugural Professorial lecture entitled
Modernising Africa for Dispossession on May 22nd 2007. he is currently
conducting further research into resistance against transnational capital in the
mining sector in Ghana, which has involved field trips in November 2006 and
August 2007. Ray is also organising the LUCAS international conference on
The State, Mining and Development in Africa (see LUCAS news).
Journal Editing.
2006 with Jeremy Keenan, Review of African Political Economy, no.108, vol33,
June pp175-372 ISSN 0305-6244
International Conference Invitations.
2007 When enough is not enough: resistance in the period of accumulation by
dispossession. Paper Presented to the Cairo Papers in Social Science
19

Symposium, American University in Cairo, 30 Years of Political and Social

Protest in Egypt, Cairo 21 April,
2006 Commissioning Africas Resources: Underdevelopment or Preparation
for Modernisation? Paper Presented to the Royal African Society, African
Studies Association of the UK biennial Conference, London 11-13 September,
School of African and Oriental Studies, London
2006 Project Africa: Modernising The Continent for Dispossession Paper
Presented to the XI International Seminar, Current Problems of Africa and the
Middle East, Centre for studies on Africa and the Middle East, Co-Hosted by the
Africa House and the Arabs House, Havana, Cuba 27-29 June 2006
2006 Land, Power and Politics in North Africa and the Middle East, paper
presented to the international conference on Land, Poverty, Social Justice &
Development Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, 12-14
January
Member of the Peer Review team for United Nations Economic and Social
Commission for Western Asia, External Peer Review of the Survey of Economic
and Social Development in the ESCWA Region, Damascus, 22-23 January 2007
Juror, African Studies Association of the UK; Best P.HD on Africa 2005-06
Juror, Global Development Network Awards 2006, Development Studies
Association of the UK and Ireland
Supervisor of PHD, Mohemmad Zahid Role of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egyptian Politics (2007)
Alice Hills has been conducting research focusing on the interaction between
police and paramilitary forces and governments, militaries and civil society in
fragile states, including fieldwork in Nigeria. This research has been presented
in several international for a. Alice presented a paper in the relationship between
presidents and their inspector generals of police, at the American Society of
Criminologys annual convention (2006); a paper on the politicised nature of
public policing at IDAS/JICA workshop on Building democratic societies in
Africa, held in Pretoria (2007); and participated in the meeting of the UNDP
International Police Advisory Council (IPAC) in Abuja (2007).
Gordon Crawford has been in Ghana during May and June 2007, undertaking
fieldwork for his current project on Decentralisation and grassroots struggles
for rights in Ghana which is funded by the British Academy. He has presented
research papers in the UK and Europe, including Decentralisation and poverty
reduction in Ghana, for the Poverty and Development seminar series, Centre
for Development and Environment (SUM), University of Oslo (March 2007);
Decentralisation in Ghana, prospects for and constraints on local democratic
development at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland (April 2007); Making
democracy a reality? Political participation, accountability and the politics of
(de)centralisation in Ghana, for the LUCAS seminar series, University of Leeds
20

(November 2006); and Decentralisation, poverty reduction and human security

in Ghana, at the CRISE conference on Decentralisation, Federalism and
Conflict, University of Oxford (October, 2006).
Branwen Gruffydd Jones is about to embark on a new research project
examiniaing forms of resistance to the neo-liberal social order in Africa, which
is funded by a grant from the British Academy. This will include periods of
fieldwork in Mozambique and Gahan in 2007-8. In November 2006 she
presented a paper, Neocolonialism in the Neoliberal Era: Insights from
Nkrumah and Fanon at the conference Africa in the World at the University of
Manchester, and in June 2007 she presented Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy
Victories: Possibilities and Contradictions of Emancipatory Struggles in the
Current Neo-Colonial Condition, examining the work of Frantz Fanon and
Amilcar Cabral, at a workshop at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
She has also been working on developing a critique for failed states with
reference to Africa.
Publications
Ray Bush, Poverty and Neo Liberalism, London: Pluto Press, 2007
Ray Bush, Mubaraks Legacy for Egypts rural poor: returning land to the
landlords, in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Saturnino M. Borras and Cristobel Kay
(eds), land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization, London:
Routledge, 2007
Ray Bush, market Violence in Egypts Countryside, Peace Review: A Journal
of Social Justice, Vol 19.1, 2007, pp15-21
Ray Bush, Staying Hungry: Food Politics and Egypt and the Near East, in
Maha Abdelrahman, Iman A. Handy, Malak Rouchdy and Reem Saad (eds),
Cultural Dynamics in Contemporary Egypt, Cairo papers in Social Science, Vol
27.1/2, 2006, pp 156-172
Ray Bush with Jeremy Keenan, North Africa: Power, Politics & Promise in
Review of African Political Economy, No 108, Vol 33, 2006, pp175-184
Gordon Crawford and C. Hartmann (eds), Decentralisation, poverty reduction
and conflict management in Africa, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2007
Gordon Crawford, The EU and democracy promotion in Africa: high on
rhetoric, low on delvery? In A. Mold (ed), EU Development Policy in a
Changing World: Challenges for the 21st Century, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2007
Gordon Crawford, Assessing EU democracy assistance to Ghana, in A
Junemann and M. Knodt (eds), The European Union as an External Deomcracy
Promoter, 2007
21

Gordon Crawford, The EUROPEAN union and Strengthening Civil Society in

Africa, in M. Carbone and M.R.Lister (eds), New Pathways in Development:
Gender and Civil Society in EU Development Policy, Ashgate, 2006
Branwen Gruffydd Jones and Janet Bujra (eds), special issue of Review of
African Political Economy on Contradictions on the left in Southern Africa,
March 2007.
Alice Hills, The wrong stuff: Washingtons Counter-Terrorism aid to Africas
police, World Defence Systems, Vol 9.2, 2007, pp 157-173
Alice Hills, Police Commissioners, presidents and the governance of security,
Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol 45.3, 2007, pp 1-23
Alice Hills, Trojan horses? USAID, countrt-terrorism and Africas police,
Third World Quarterly, Vol 27.4, 2006, pp 629-643
POLIS PhD Students Working on African Related Subjects
Mrs Henrietta Abane: Sustainable Rural Livelihoods and Women's Access to
Resources in a Forest Community in the Central Region of Ghana.
Miss Christiana Abonge: Gender and Micro Enterprise Development: An
effective Strategy for Poverty Allleviation in Anglophone Cameroon?
Adesoji Adeniyi: Challenges of Development: Environmental Management
and Sustainable Development of the Niger Delta Region.
Joshua Alabi: The Dynamics of the International Oil Market and Challenges to
Governance and Development in Nigeria.
Hannah Cross: The political economy of border security and migration from
North Africa to Europe.
Mehrinaz El Awady: Gender based violence in Egypt.
Heba Hagrass: Remarketing the Unmarketables: A critical examination of
disabled people in Egypt's labour market.
Giuliano Martiniello: Incorporation of Southern African within the capitalist
world economy.
Hannah McDowell: Shifting Patterns of Governance in Fair Trade Handicrafts,
Home Accessories and Fashion Supply Chains: The position of African Women
Producers.
Philani Moyo: 'HIV/AIDS and Food Security in Matabeleland.
Jide Okeke: Identify conflict and humanitarian intervention: changing global
priorities and Inernational inaction in Darfur.
Aida Opoku Mensah: Media and Democratization in Africa: The Role of
Radio in Ghana's December 2000 Elections.
Nahla Zaazoua: Reasons for the failure or success of USAID projects in
Egypt
Girum Zeleke: Democracy, Federalism and Decentralisation - The role of the
post 1991 Ethiopian politics in Famine Prevention.
Ray Bush
22

Theology and Religious Studies

The department offers a rasnge of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate
level which deal with Africa: a first level course introducing students to the
three traditions of religion in contemporary Africa (traditional religion,
Christianity and Islam); a second level course focusing on African Traditional
Religions, and a third level course exploring issues of religion and apartheid in
South Africa. As part of a first year module entitled Key Texts significant
writings with religious themes we study Achebes Things Fall Apart. There is
a taught MA module on Religion, Theology and Development Issues (part of a
joint programme with Development Studies).
Kevin Ward has recently been successful in attracting external funding for a
research proposal in collaboration with the School of Geography. The project
will examine, from spatial and religious perspectives, the present crisis in the
worldwide Anglican communion over issues of homosexuality from the contexts
of Britain, the United Sates and Africa (particularly South Africa).
Dr Ward is also researching on evangelical Christianity in Rwanda, Burundi and
Southern Uganda, dealing with such themes as the minority status of British
Protestantism during Belgian colonialism, attitudes to ethnicity, and the
influence of the Revival on African spirituality throughout east central Africa.
PhDs
There are a number of PhD candidates with African interests in the department,
ranging from issues of liturgy and inculturation in Uganda, African Christian
understandings of leadership and power in Kenya, and theologies of
development in East Africa and the Congo Democratic Republic. The Adrian
Hastings scholarship fund aims to give financial help to African PhD students.
Publications
Kevin Ward, A History of Global Anglicanism, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2006
Kevin Ward

23

Articles

24

Supernumeraries of the Human Race?

Reflections on the African 'holocaust'*
by Morris Szeftel
In 1972 I was one of several thousand people who managed to cram into the
Manchester Free Trade Hall to listen to a speech by Amilcar Cabral, the
agronomist then leading a revolution against Portuguese colonialism in GuineaBissau. Explaining why they were fighting their revolution, Cabral remarked
that we are fighting to recapture our own history. Its a comment that has
always remained with me. Not only did it encapsulate the hopes generated by
the struggle for African independence but it also reflected a particular moment
of great optimism in Africas history (and with it in African studies), an
optimism that began in 1957 with Ghanas independence and was to last,
probably, until the middle of the 1970s. Within a year of that speech, Cabral was
dead, assassinated by dissidents within his own movement. Within four or five
years, Africa was in the throes of a massive debt crisis in which it remains
locked to this day and which has undermined most of the modest economic and
social gains made in the 1960s, producing chronic political instability and
turmoil.
As a result, the expectation we shared with Cabral back then, that Africas
independence would bring development, democracy and a restoration of national
sovereignty, has proved largely illusory. Fifty years after Ghanas independence,
Africa has not reclaimed its own history (however we would measure it).
Instead, we are faced with a continent ravaged by high levels of poverty,
inequality, disease and violence produced by economic and political forces over
which Africans have little or no control. Millions lead lives at the margins of
existence, lives afflicted by brutality and suffering, lives that are precarious and
insecure. The contrast with Cabrals vision of a reclaimed history could not be
more stark.
In 1994, Colin Leys summed it up, perhaps as well as anybody has.1 In an article
published just as the Rwanda genocide unfolded, Leys wrote:
What is happening in Africa is a perhaps irreversible decline towards
that capitalism-produced barbarism of which Rosa Luxemburg warned.
What it comes down to is that in sub-Saharan Africa most people are
facing a future in which not even bare survival is assured: to use Andre
Gorzs term, they are being made into the supernumeraries of the human
race.
*

The Annual African Studies Lecture, Leeds Centre for African Studies, 2 May 2006.
Colin Leys, (1994) Confronting the African Tragedy New Left Review 204, March April,
33-47.
1

25

In the decade since, although there have been some changes and even some
meagre improvements, it is very hard to be much more optimistic than Leys was
back in 1994. During that decade, millions perished in conflicts across the
continent and millions more became refugees. Even where conflicts did not
erupt, poverty, hunger and declining mortality rates have been all too normal (in
Zambia, the country of my birth, to take one example, the countrys Human
Development Index score declined annually for 15 consecutive years; and,
despite its being the worlds third largest exporter of copper, more than 80 per
cent of the population live on less than $2 a day).
What Leyss formulation indicates are two aspects of the problem that informs
this lecture today. One is this idea of barbarism, which Luxemburg saw as a
distinct likelihood where there was no agency to promote fundamental change at
the moment of deep capitalist crisis.2 In similar vein, I take Leys to mean that
the crisis of peripheral capitalism in Africa, in a situation where there is no
agency to promote transformative change or greater social justice, has produced
a barbarism of debt, hunger, famine, disease, warlordism and so on. The
brutality that Africans endure leads directly to the second aspect of the problem
set out by Leys: that this crisis results in them becoming supernumerary as far as
the rest of the world is concerned, in some way superfluous or irrelevant, not
worth counting. It calls to mind a comment made in the 1970s in South Africa
by the then Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration, one Blaar Coetzee,
justifying the eviction of African women and children from the towns: they
were, he said, superfluous appendages and these superfluous appendages,
some three million of them, were removed to rural areas to suffer malnutrition
and tuberculosis. It was one of the great crimes of the apartheid period.3 In the
last three decades, increasing numbers of Africans throughout the continent have
seemingly become superfluous and there is not apartheid for us to blame it
on.
It is this combination of brutality and of indifference to peoples suffering, this
sense that they dont count, that it doesnt really matter what is done to them or
what happens to them, that concerns me today. Since that speech by Cabral, few
of us have much hope that development, democracy or a restoration of
sovereignty are achievable in Africa for the foreseeable future, or even that they
are still on the agenda. And, because Africas immediate future looks so bleak,
the complacency many of us displayed in the 1960s and 1970s about such levels
2

The alternatives for her were socialism or barbarism. See especially Rosa Luxemburg, The
Junius Pamphlet in Mary-Alice Waters, ed., (1970) Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York,
Pathfinder, 257-331.
3
See Laurine Platzky & Cheryl Walker for The Surplus People Project, (1985)The Surplus
People: Forced Removals in South Africa, Braamfontein, Ravan Press.

26

of suffering is no longer excusable or acceptable, if it ever was. Back then, it

was possible for us to tell ourselves, and to believe, that we were on the way to
something better, that cruelty and violence were part of the pain of building a
new Africa, that such suffering was regrettable but that there would be
something better at the end of it. We know now that there isnt something better,
that there is often something worse, and a consequence of that realisation must
be that it is or should be - an absolute value that Africans ought not to die or
suffer in the numbers that they do and that the present situation is intolerable and
inexcusable. We can debate what kind of government is or is not appropriate,
what distribution of resources are needed, what economic policies should be
followed, or who should rule, but not this principle. Despite those who currently
suggest that killing ordinary people can be morally justifiable, most of us accept
that it is not. Yet the indifference with which the world responds to what is
happening in Africa is something that needs to be confronted.
My concern here is not with the motives of those who kill. Ive little interest in
how those with power and the means of violence justify their contribution or
indifference to human suffering, why mass murderers say they murder or why
armed groups terrorise civilian populations. Their reasons are usually selfserving. More importantly, they are invariably ludicrous when set against the
injury being inflicted. Those who commit atrocities or implement policies that
inflict suffering on others invariably offer reasons for what they do as if their
cruelty or barbarism was somehow reasonable, the consequence of reason. As
Jean Renoir put it in 1939: the terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons. 4
There is a danger that when we become wrapped up in such reasons we render
their actions somehow reasonable and thereby become complicit in them.
Much more important, it seems to me, is to ask why people tolerate what is
happening, why they do not stop it, why they even sometimes excuse it. This
last week, as I prepared the final parts of this lecture, one television news
bulletin after another has brought news from Darfur and described the kind of
suffering going on there. Westerners visiting the region have returned shocked,
horrified that such things can be done to innocent people. And yet it is a
suffering which is tolerated year on year. If Tony Blair is right that Africa is a
stain on the conscience of humanity, then humanity, it seems, is living fairly
comfortably with that conscience. As citizens and as intellectuals we have a
responsibility to question why it is allowed to continue. The difficulty is that
once we pose such a question, it becomes clear that the grim events that have
4

La Rgle du Jeu, (The Rules of the Game), Nouvelle Edition Francaise, 1939, directed and
scripted by Jean Renoir. The film can be read as a sardonic commentary on French society as
European fascism gathered force and the remark, spoken by Renoirs own character in the film,
as a comment on the tendency in democracies to mistake ideological self-justification for
principle.

27

unfolded since Leys wrote his article are not new in Africa; indeed, that there is
a long history of suffering and indifference to it. Any understanding of the
supernumerary treatment of Africans must necessarily be rooted in that
history.
We see this pattern of brutality well documented from the beginning of colonial
conquest, for example in the case of the Belgian Congo. In King Leopolds
Ghost, 5 Adam Hochschild brought together a wide range of source materials to
present us with a powerful and disturbing history of how Leopold II of Belgium
and his agent, Henry Morton Stanley, annexed one-thirteenth of the African
continent in the Congo basin as a private colony of the king, and proceeded to
set up a militarised state which extracted its wealth through what Hochschild
calls officially sanctioned terror.6 Tens of thousands of Africans were pressed
into service as porters. Linked to each other by a chain around their necks, 7 they
marched long hours, to take Stanley from one place to another, to move goods
around what came to be called Stanley Falls, or to move inland from the river.
They became a transmission belt for disease. They also died in vast numbers.
Ivory, the initial source of Leopolds wealth in the Congo, was generally
collected by agents using armed raiding parties and then transported through the
conveyor belt of porters to the coast. Joseph Conrads classic account of a
journey up the Congo River in search of one such company agent, Mr. Kurtz 8
(transformed into the renegade Marine officer in Vietnam in the movie
Apocalypse Now), describes him as positioning human heads on sticks around
his house to remind local people of the cost of disobedience. Hochschild
suggests that Conrad modelled Kurtz on an actual Belgian official named Rom.9
Ivory was soon eclipsed by rubber and with it by a regime which was, if
anything, even more brutal. The wild rubber vines, which grew thick in the
Congo rain forest, required exhausting manual labour to extract the rubber by
cutting a nick in the vines to tap the rubber - dangerous work with a high
mortality rate. Not surprisingly, the local population were unwilling to
undertake it and so force was used to make the men work. Soldiers pressed
them into service and, to ensure their obedience, also rounded up the women in
the villages and held them hostage until the men returned with their quota of
rubber. Where they failed to make their quota, they were sometimes flogged,
5

Adam Hochschild, (1998) King Leopolds Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in
Colonial Africa, New York, Houghton Mifflin.
6
Ibid., 121.
7
In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad describes the labourers building Stanleys railway thus:
each had a collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain. The novel, he
wrote, is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the facts of the case.
Quoted in Hochshild (1998), 143.
8
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Penguin, 1973, first published 1902.
9
Hochschild, (1998), 145-9

28

sometimes shot or, sometimes, the women were shot.10 The practice of
amputating the hands of defaulters was institutionalised. Where whole villages
resisted:
State or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight,
so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions,
some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to
their soldiers, they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill
someone not wasted in hunting, or worse yet saved for possible use in
a mutiny.11
The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a
corpse: sometimes, one officer told a missionary, soldiers who had used a
cartridge hunting animals then cut off the hand of a living man. In some
military units, there was even a keeper of the hands.
The death toll in this system was staggering:
Many men were worked to death, while the women hostages were
starved. Not surprisingly, the birth rate plummeted. Few able-bodied
adults were left in villages to harvest food, hunt or fish. Famine spread.
During two decades of widespread but unsuccessful rebellions more
people died. Others fled the forced labour regime, but they had nowhere
to go except to more remote parts of the forest, where there was little
food or shelter. Years later, travellers would come upon their bones. The
greatest toll came as soldiers, as well as caravans of porters and large
numbers of desperate refugees, moved through the country, bringing new
diseases to people with no resistance to them. All these caused the
death of millions.12
In l920 a Jesuit missionary estimated that perhaps 80 per cent of the Bakongo
had died in this process. In l919 a Belgian commission of inquiry thought that
perhaps half of the overall population of the Congo in l879 perished as a result
of this political economy. Hochschild in various places estimates that between
five and ten million people died under this regime13 until, eventually,
international protest forced the Belgian parliament to end Leopolds private
ownership of the Congo. For Joseph Conrad what he saw of Leopolds
enterprise was the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of
human conscience.14
10

Ibid., 161-2, 230-32, 236-7, 250.

Ibid., 165
12
Adam Hochschild, (2005) In the Heart of Darkness, The New York Review of Books, 52 (15)
6 October.
13
Hochschild, (1998) especially 232-5.
14
Ibid., 4.
11

29

Nor is this dreadful story all that unique. Within a decade of this system being
introduced in Congo:
similar forced labour systems for extracting rubber were in place in
the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Portugueseruled Angola and in the nearby Cameroons under the Germans. For the
concession companies in the Cameroons, the model from which they
professed to derive their inspiration, writes one historian, was that
of King Leopold IIs ventures in the Congo Free State, the dividends of
which evoked admiration in stock-broking circles. In Frances
equatorial African territories the amount of rubber bearing land was
far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal.
Forced labour, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages,
paramilitary company sentries and the chicotte were the order of the day.
The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial forest owned by
France is estimated, just as in Leopolds Congo, at roughly 50 per cent.15
Around the same time, also, faced with a stubborn anti-colonial rebellion in
Namibia, the German general von Trotha took to trying to exterminate the
Herero. Mamdani suggests that in l904 alone perhaps 80 per cent of the Herero
were killed.16 If other colonial regimes in Africa were less brutal, they
nevertheless imposed a huge cost on African society: hunger, low life
expectancy and coercion were features of most of them.
In hindsight, that moment of optimism that we might reclaim our own history
now seems to be no more than a 15 year interlude in a long and continuous
history of brutality in which African lives have counted for little. The end of
imperial domination did not bring a post-colonial peace; instead Africans have
become the victims of inexorable global economic forces and of brutal,
rapacious and incompetent internal political forces. Thus the Rwanda genocide
unfolded as the ink dried on Leyss article. Its model (if one were needed) was
the slaughter of some 200,000 civilians in communal violence in Burundi in
l972.17 Since Rwanda, we have seen the RUFs atrocities in Sierra Leone and
Charles Taylors crimes against humanity in Liberia. Similar warlord predation
is ongoing in Chad, Uganda and Ivory Coast. The conflict in southern Sudan has
claimed the lives of untold numbers of non-combatant civilians over some forty
years (and seems likely to re-ignite when the question of southern secession is
taken up again). And then there is Darfur, from where eye-witness accounts are
15

Ibid., 280
Mahmood Mamdani (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the
Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton University Press, 10-12; and see Hochschild (1998) 282.
17
Ren Lemarchand (1994) Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, New York, Columbia University
Press. See also Mamdani (2001), 215, 235-6, 287.
16

30

such as to make one wonder if the dead have not been more fortunate than some
of the still-living.18 And, as if the people of Congo had not suffered enough,
civil war and foreign incursion after the death of Mobutu may have accounted
for another 2 to 4 million dead.19 In the Kivus of eastern Congo, where private
armies replace the state and plunder local resources, the issues of the Rwanda
genocide are still being fought out. Even in countries which are not
disintegrating, the human costs are high: in March this year, for instance, a
Nigerian government document estimated that 3.4 million people had been
displaced by communal violence in Nigeria.20 These are not isolated atrocities,
therefore; nor are they small atrocities. Looked at historically, it is peace rather
than conflict that is unusual, suffering rather than human happiness that is
normal.
Africa and the Holocaust
Reflecting on the human cost of Leopolds African colony, Hochschild suggests
that it represents a death toll of Holocaust dimensions. 21 It is this allusion to
the Holocaust that was, in many ways, the trigger for this lecture, in that the
Holocaust informs fundamental intellectual and personal issues for me - as for
so many. The Holocaust is the lens through which I came to see Africa and the
world. Both the stories and the experience of the Holocaust were the stuff of my
childhood and their lessons shaped the way in which I have understood political
issues as both academic and activist. Long before I was able to engage with
African politics in the colonial society in which I grew up, my opposition to
racism and colonialism was formed out of the moral lessons of the Holocaust.
With your indulgence, I would like to make a few brief points about this
intellectual and personal legacy which have relevance for my subject today.
Setting aside those in denial, there have been two kinds of response to the
Holocaust. One is that it is unique, sui generis, and as such there is nothing to
learn from it about any other atrocity. The other is its seeming opposite, namely
that the Holocaust is not unique, that there have been similar atrocities in which
just as many people have died and that, therefore, there is no need to give undue
moral significance to the Holocaust.22 Both views seem to me to cut off the
18

The systematic use of mass rape as an instrument of terror against the local population is too
well-reported to be doubted. What kind of people do these things still remains to be revealed.
19
On Kivu and the Congo, see: Ren Lemarchand, (2002) The tunnel at the end of the light
Review of African Political Economy (29) 93/94, 389-98 and that issue generally; Mamdani
(2001), ch. 8; and Human Rights Watch reports which are constantly updated
http://hrw.org/africa.
20
The Independent (London) 15 March 2006.
21
Hochschild (1998), 4.
22
If numbers of victims are our concern, for example, more people may have died in the Congo
than in the Holocaust and more died during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Such
evidence can be, and has been, used to diminish the Holocaust among some sections of the

31

Holocaust from the rest of history and thus to limit our ability to learn important
lessons from it. As Zygmunt Bauman 23 has suggested:
There are two ways to belittle, misjudge, or shrug off the significance of
the Holocaust for the theory of civilization One way is to present the
Holocaust as something which happened to the Jews; as an event in Jewish
history. This makes the Holocaust unique, comfortably uncharacteristic, and
sociologically inconsequential. Another way apparently pointing in an
opposite direction, yet leading in practice to the same destination is to present
the Holocaust as another (however prominent) item in a wide class which
embraces many similar cases of conflict, or prejudice, or aggression. At worst,
the Holocaust is referred to the primeval and culturally inextinguishable,
natural predisposition of the human species At best, the Holocaust is
dissolved in the broad, all-too-familiar class of ethnic, cultural or racial hatred
and oppression .24
I would suggest that we can learn about Africa from the Holocaust precisely by
understanding its uniqueness rather than diminishing it in an attempt to make it
fit other concepts and paradigms more comfortably. The Holocaust was, and
remains, unique. There is no other case in history where the technology of an
advanced industrial economy and of a modern state administration were put to
work for the purpose of exterminating an entire people (indeed, two peoples):
not to subordinate them, not to punish them, not to expropriate their possessions,
not to injure or torture them, not even to ethnically cleanse them; but, instead,
to exterminate them. Only in the case of the Rwanda genocide of 1994 do we
find an African case where the intentions were similar. And even then,
Mamdani25 notes that:
Unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide was not carried out
from a distance, in remote concentration camps [it] was executed with
the slash of machetes rather than the drop of [gas] crystals, with all the
gruesome detail of a street murder rather than the bureaucratic efficiency
of a mass extermination. Whereas Nazis made every attempt to
separate victims from perpetrators, the Rwandan genocide was very
much an intimate affair.
So the Holocaust is different. The millions who died as a result of the
exploitation of the colonial economy and brutality of the colonial state were the
Left. Why that should be so is not easy to explain but, among some groups, it may have owed
something to Stalins personal anti-Semitism which then became intellectualised through the
Comintern and transmitted through satellite parties throughout the world.
23
Zygmunt Bauman, Sociology after the Holocaust, The British Journal of Sociology XXXIX,
4, 469-97.
24
Ibid., 470.
25
Mamdani (2001), op.cit., 5.

32

victims of very different policies and processes than those operating in the Final
Solution. We cannot slap the label of Holocaust on these other crises, at least
not without distorting and destroying its meaning and doing disrespect to the
suffering of their victims. 26 And yet, I want to suggest, there is a sense also in
which Africas atrocities are comparable with the Holocaust: in the scale of
human suffering, in the cruelty of those inflicting suffering, and above all in the
indifference exhibited to this suffering - these things are often comparable.
Further, even where the differences are marked, there are still lessons to be
learned. Moreover, when we go beyond the military-bureaucratic apparatus
employed for the extermination of Jews, to events on the ground and in more
remote localities, or to killings that occurred before the full apparatus of
extermination had been set up, we see that the killing often did have the face-toface cruelty, the intimacy of which Mamdani writes with regard to Rwanda.
And this brings me to the personal factor in my interest in the Holocaust and
Africa. To explain, I need to tell a little of my family story. Ivye (sometimes
Iwie), in what is today Belarus, is a small town of no great significance, other
than that it stands at the junction of several regional economic routes. From the
16th Century, Ivye was transferred from one country to another as boundaries
were adjusted by various treaties; it belonged successively to Lithuania, Russia
and, when the Holocaust came to it, to Poland. This gave it a mixed population
of Polish Catholics, white Russian Orthodox, Lithuanians, Muslim Tatars and
Jews, who had become 76 per cent of the district population in 1921, largely as a
result of people being displaced there by Russian purges, pogroms and ethnic
cleansing; by 1938, there were just over 3000 Jews, most of them poor
villagers.27 In July 1941, the area was invaded by the Nazis who quickly
ghettoised the Jews and won over the rest of the population by organising a
violent pogrom in which the local participants were rewarded by being able to
loot Jewish possessions. About six months before I was born, on 12 May 1942,
the SS and Gestapo, supported by Lithuanian collaborators, surrounded the
ghetto, separated out various families (mainly according to skill: medical
personnel being among those spared, for example) and marched the majority out
into a forest nearby. They were made to dig a mass grave, and then shot so that
they fell into it. The accounts of survivors (mostly those detailed to cover the
grave) indicate that babies were not shot so as to save bullets and fell into the
grave in the arms of their mothers to be buried alive. The wounded, too, were
buried whilst still alive and members of the burial detail who tried to reach them
26

Because of this I have used the term with some caution, referring to the African holocaust in
my title, rather than to the African Holocaust, which would be a misnomer. The current
tendency to appropriate words to promote a political cause, regardless of how inappropriate they
might be, is not one I wish to join.
27
Meyshe Kaganovitsh, ed., (1968) In Memory of the Jewish Community of Iwie (Ivye, Belarus)
http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/ivye/ivye.html, ch. 1

33

were shot. Today a monument at the spot records the death of 2524 Jews; the
necrology of Ivye lists among them my grandparents, an aunt and various other
relatives. 28
The Ivye massacre was a small one compared, for instance, with that at Babi Yar
where more than 100,000 were shot over a period from 1941. But it illustrates
the way in which the Holocaust, on the ground and at the periphery, resembled
much more the intimacy of violence and cruelty to which Mamdani refers.
Reading the descriptions of witnesses, there are clear echoes of what happened
in Ivye in the massacre conducted by Portuguese troops in Mozambique at
Wiriamu in December 1972.29 There, too, Africans were made to dig mass
graves, before being shot and thrown into them. In the early l980s, the Fifth
Brigade conducted a campaign of state terror in western Zimbabwe, in
consequence of which mass graves were later uncovered (this time the victims
all had their hands bound).
In all these cases, the cruelty of the tormentors is matched by the helplessness of
the victims, their sense of isolation, and the inevitable psychological damage
which is created among the survivors, and which is irreparable. As I grew up I
came to realise increasingly that those around me were often severely damaged
people. It is impossible for me to begin to imagine how one lives with the
experience of genocide or with the guilt of being a survivor, or with the
knowledge that there were (are) people who thought one needed to be
exterminated, or even with the knowledge that those around you did not feel all
that bothered about your possible extermination.
Now one sees similar kinds of psychological damage in the faces of some
African survivors. Just this weekend, I watched television news-footage of a
woman in Darfur who had suffered multiple gang rapes; every time the
janjaweed arrived on their horses and destroyed her village, she and her
daughters were raped. She sits mute in this newsreel, unable to speak to all the
Western journalists pottering about around her and trying to extract some
28

Ibid., Necrology for Ivye. Unsurprisingly, various members of my family had different
experiences. A small group of younger people led by an uncle of mine, and including his wife
and youngest sister, escaped the roundup to hide in the nearby Morin Forest. Here they
eventually became one of the partisan groups attached to the Alexander Nevsky Brigade of the
Soviet Army and, at the end of the war, the two aunts were among the four survivors of this
group and were decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union. Another uncle survived in
Auschwitz, though his wife and two daughters did not. Another aunt spent the war interned in
Siberia with her daughter; her husband did not survive detention. None of the experiences was
good.
29
The massacre carried out at Wiriamu by the Portuguese army on 16 December 1972, was
described by Domingos Ferrao, a Mozambican Catholic priest and published in London in The
Times by Adrian Hastings.

34

comment from her. Her suffering has reached a point where she is absolutely
silent and there is instead a resignation, an exhaustion and a rage. How will she
endure these memories in the years to come? I recall a report of girls at a school
near Kigali requiring mass counselling. They had heard the sounds being made
nearby by actors portraying the Interahamwe during the filming of Shooting
Dogs and become seriously distressed. And I remember some years ago seeing
video footage of a peoples court session in Rwanda involving a Hutu man who
had taken a machete to his Tutsi wife and their children, killing the children and
leaving the wife for dead. Now, having completed a period of imprisonment and
re-education, he asked to be allowed to rejoin the village. His wife, on the other
hand, wants him to be executed for what he did (though this is not an option
before the court). As the court debates the matter, we see the two protagonists.
Neither is able to speak much: he is silenced by shame and contrition; she is
mute with anger as the villagers and court over-rule her and grant the man his
request.
It seems that this crime was not unusual during the Rwandan genocide.
Mamdani 30 records that in Ntarama in April 1994, about a third of Tutsi women
were married to Hutu men. The Interahamwe insisted that these men first kill
their wives, to prove their loyalty, before going on to the rest of the genocide;
those that refused or argued were themselves killed. Shaharyar Khan, the UN
special representative appointed immediately after the Rwanda genocide wrote
that even the killing fields of Cambodia and Bosnia pale before the gruesome,
awful depravity in Rwanda. He describes how the Interahamwe would kill
children in front of their parents by slowly dismembering them, and then kill the
parents after they had been forced to watch their children die. 31
The damage done by such atrocities is not ended by the restoration of peace or
even by bringing them to judicial account. Against such suffering, the banalities
of reconciliation and counselling are of small value. People cannot simply
move on, however impatient bystanders are for them to do so; these are things
that people carry with them for the rest of their lives. It shapes the way history
unfolds subsequently. And that makes it even more urgent that the world not
tolerate such cruelty.
What my grandparents in Ivye and the victims in Africa have in common most
of all is that the world stood by, in silence, and allowed them to be massacred. It
is a complicit silence: sometimes it is a silence of helplessness, sometimes of
indifference, sometimes even of approval. But it is always a silence that
30

Mamdani (2001) op,cit., 4-5.

Shaharyar Khan, (2000) The Shallow Graves of Rwanda, London, IB Tauris, quoted in Romo
Dallaire, (2003) Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Toronto,
Vintage/Random House, 461-2.
31

35

facilitates the killing and dying. All too often the silent take refuge in the
prejudice that the victims have brought their suffering on themselves.
The Indifference of the Bystander
I have been greatly influenced by the work of an old and close friend, Norman
Geras, who has explored the philosophical implications of the Holocaust with
much distinction. One of his books 32 examines the lessons of the Holocaust
precisely from the perspective of this question of the bystander as a silent and
complicit figure. He describes situations in which people were marched off to
the death camps whilst onlookers stood by, some of them passive, some jeering
or laughing or spitting, some so appalled at being unable to do anything that
they turn their backs and go away. Geras refers to this as this mental turning
away, a process that leaves for the victims the loneliness of the doomed, their
own sense also of having been abandoned. 33 For the Holocaust to have been
possible, he notes, it was necessary for the German people to be indifferent to
what was taking place, and for a process to occur which, in Baumans words,
increased the physical and mental distance between the purported victims and
the rest of the population. 34 Today it is rather more difficult to remember that
few if any noticed or cared or knew the names of those people in Ivye when they
were shot down. That we now do know something about them is, in fact, one of
the points of my story a point to which I will return later. But this idea of a
mental turning away from people at the moment they most need help is at the
heart of the African malaise also. It is a process that, I would suggest, continues
even now, even with our knowledge of the atrocities that have occurred and are
occurring. If the self-styled international community can spring into action,
however belatedly, over Bosnia or Serbia, it remains reluctant to do so over
Somalia or Darfur or Zimbabwe.
Now there is an obvious objection to what I have been saying. It is that, in
arguing that the world doesnt care that Africans die, I completely ignore, or
belittle by implication, those who have struggled all their lives to awaken the
worlds attention and so end suffering. In every catastrophe, there are those who
resist and work to save lives, usually at the risk (or cost) of their own lives. One
of the most moving sections of the remarkable Yad Vashem museum in
Jerusalem honours the righteous among the nations who worked to rescue
people from the gas chambers. The film, Hotel Rwanda, pays tribute to Paul
Rusesabagina who saved some 1200 lives in terrifying circumstances. And we
should never forget that a quarter of the 800,000 slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994
were Hutu moderates, so-called presumably because they did not go along
32

Norman Geras, (1998) The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the
Holocaust, London, Verso
33
Ibid., 6, 8.
34
Ibid., 18, quoting Ian Kershaw and Zygmunt Bauman.

36

with the excesses of Hutu Power. In the international community, too, there is a
line of people, from Wilberforce on, who have spent their lives in struggle
against the sort of events we have described here. In the case of the Congo, for
instance, there is E.D. Morel, an employee of Leopolds, who noticed that ships
arriving in Antwerp brought ivory and rubber but returned to the Congo loaded
with soldiers, guns and ammunition; that there was no trade, only plunder. He
began a world-wide movement, joined by Roger Casement, Arthur Conan
Doyle, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, among others, which was ultimately to
end Leopolds personal control of the territory.35 Today a multiplicity of NGOs
work tirelessly in Africa. And what of those who went to Darfur to look after the
suffering, trying with few resources to keep people alive? What about the people
who campaigned to make poverty history? What about all of them?
I have no wish to diminish such efforts in any way. On the contrary, I regard the
contribution of many such bystanders as heroic, deserving of all honour.
Sometimes, where movements or groups have articulated a clear message and
objective, as in the Anti-Apartheid Movement or in Morels campaign, they
have even changed history. But, in response, I would still insist that, overall,
widespread indifference prevails. Firstly, for all the valuable and remarkable
effort of all these people, they remain a tiny minority. The vast majority go on
with their lives and do not notice or couldnt care. We honour a Wilberforce, a
Morel, a Rusesabagina precisely because they are so unusual. Secondly, there is
a tendency for support for victims, even where aroused, to be fleeting, to
evaporate all too quickly. Hochschild observes that, once Leopold had been
stripped of his control of the Congo, support for Morels campaign quickly
dissolved (despite the fact that little had changed on the ground), to be followed
by what he calls the great forgetting. 36 Morel bemoaned what had happened
to the campaign: the Belgian parliament took over the ownership of the Congo,
removing the worst excesses, but the same illiberal policy went on.
[He] considered the Belgian takeover of the Congo only a partial
victory. He knew that the system Leopold had set up would not be
quickly dismantled; it was too profitable. The same men who had been
district commissioners and station chiefs would now simply get their
paychecks from a different source. The Force Publique didnt even
bother to change its name. The new Belgian minister of colonies was a
former official of a company that had used thousands of forced labourers
to build railways in the eastern Congo. As long as there was big
money to be made from rubber, white men, with the help of the gun and
the chicotte, would force black men to gather it. 37
35

Hochschild (1998). See especially Part III.

Ibid., ch. 19.
37
Ibid., 271.
36

37

To the end of his days, both as MP for Dundee 38 and after he left parliament,
Morel fought for land to be restored to Africans, insisting that they could not
have a viable future otherwise. But the world had long since had enough of the
Congo.39 And, finally, thirdly, I would suggest that, at the level of officials and
functionaries, whether of governments or multilateral organisations, one too
often finds cynicism and indifference. All too often there is a tendency to move
on an issue only when the public is sufficiently agitated about it, and then as
minimally as possible and only insofar as it will draw the teeth of the protest.
Sometimes, and here I would go further than Geras, indifference actually
becomes embedded in the process of intervention itself as in Rwanda.
The Obscenity of Indifference in Rwanda
We see this problem starkly illustrated in the Rwandan genocide and,
particularly, in the failure of the international intervention that took place. Here
we are fortunate to have the chronicle of the Canadian general who was in
charge of the UN peacekeeping mission to the country at the time.40 General
Romo Dallaires harrowing account, Shake Hands with the Devil, is an attempt
on his part to make sense of what was going on around him. It provides an
agonising description of events as, day after day, the violence continued and,
day after day, his efforts to end the killing proved futile. Dallaire is a soldier
rather than a politician or social scientist; his book often lacks the analytical eye
which either could have brought to the situation. But, precisely because of that,
he is able to provide us with an unvarnished record which illuminates the
magnitude of the failure of humanity in Rwanda (his sub-title). One sees, at
every level, the kind of indifference that I have been talking about, the sense that
Africans dont matter all that much, the mental turning away that took place
once it was clear that Rwanda was a difficult problem.
Dallaire starts with a mea culpa:
I was unable to persuade the international community that this tiny poor,
overpopulated country and its people were worth saving from the horror
of genocide even when the measures needed for success were
relatively small. 41
38

He was elected in 1922 after being released from prison for refusing to support the war effort.
He defeated Winston Churchill, one of the ministers who had had him interned.
39
The Congolese, however, did not forget. At independence in 1960, there was an upsurge of
rage against the white settlers in the mining areas of Katanga, many of them being forced to flee
to (then) Northern Rhodesia as refugees.
40
R Dallaire (2003), op.cit. See also, for an equally disturbing account of the genocide, Peter
Gourevitch (1998), We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our
Families, New York, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
41
Ibid., 515.

38

Subsequently, Dallaire was to go through a long period of depression, attempted

suicide and alcoholism; the book was written, to some extent, as part of his own
rehabilitation. But once the self-recrimination is dealt with, what emerges is an
indictment of the UN effort and the UN system that is so shocking as to be
almost unbelievable. Almost, but not quite. First, the UN officials handling
Rwanda failed to provide any real leadership or enterprise in confronting the
crisis. The group around the Rwanda desk officer during the genocide, one Kofi
Annan, proved unwilling to respond to Dallaires appeals for help and even
berated him for trying to mediate rather than maintaining an observers brief (the
general came to be seen as a loose canon who needed to be replaced). Their
unwillingness to annoy the permanent members of the Security Council
compromised the peace-keeping effort from the start and eventually ensured that
there was no peace. And the career diplomat in charge of the UN mission in
Rwanda emerges as a buffoon, seemingly impervious to what was going on
(Shaharyar Khan was only appointed once the killing had stopped).
Second, the resources given to the UN force were grossly inadequate. Dallaire
asked for 5,500 troops to police what was supposed to be a peaceful
reconciliation between two warring sides and the formation of a government of
national unity. Instead, he had to settle for 2,500 not enough to patrol the
whole country and not all of whom ever arrived. When peace disintegrated and
the genocide began, instead of bolstering this force so that it could cope, the
Security Council, pushed by the US and Belgium (and supported by Britain),
reduced the 2,500 to 250 (some of whom, notably from Bangladesh, had little
combat capability). Although Dallaire managed to keep some troops there
against the express wishes of their governments, he was left with a force of 400
soldiers spread across Rwanda. Third, during the genocide, the UN consistently
acted to weaken rather than strengthen its presence. The Security Council
reaffirmed rules of engagement which required the soldiers not to act to prevent
the killing. It debated events (and worried about costs) endlessly but resisted any
call for concrete action (Dallaires use of the BBC to tell the world what was
happening was angrily resented). Generally it sent the wrong message to the
gnocidaires for instance, by announcing that, if the killing did not stop, it
would withdraw its forces entirely. Given that the extremists wanted the UN to
leave, and resented what little protection the UN soldiers were able to offer a
small number of people, many connected with the aborted interim government
of unity, this simply encouraged further killing.
Yet is on the international community and the great powers, rather than the UN,
that Dallaire focuses his anger. If the genocide was the ultimate responsibility
of those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and ultimately conducted
it:
39

The international community, of which the UN is only a symbol, failed

to move beyond self-interest for the sake of Rwanda. While most nations
agreed that something should be done, they all had an excuse why they
should not be the ones to do it. As a result, the UN was denied the
political will and material means to prevent the tragedy. 42
He is particularly critical of the roles played by France and the United States.
Frances part in the tragedy was particularly reprehensible: it trained the
Rwanda army and the Presidential Guard, much of which joined the extremists
in conducting the genocide; and once it was clear that the Hutu extremists were
in retreat, it intervened military to provide a shield behind which they could
conduct their retreat west (eventually into eastern Congo where they remain to
this day), to give them a safe haven and to evacuate Europeans and some leading
gnocidaires.43 Protected by French forces, and with the complicity of
international aid agencies, the killers were able to move into the refugee camps
in the Kivu provinces of eastern Congo whilst retaining their weapons; they
quickly took control of some camps and set themselves up as a warlord army.
Thus, the present continuation in Congo of the Rwandan civil war, which is in
turn a significant part of the conflict in that region, was put in place with
international assistance.
The American role was less direct but still decisive. As noted, the US (through
Madeleine Albright) led the call to reduce the UN presence in Rwanda when
there was need to expand it. Moreover, for a long time, it continued to deny the
events on the ground, even though they were taking place in full view of its
embassy staff in Kigali. There is a notorious interview given by Christine
Shelley of the US State Department, in which she insisted that while acts of
genocide were occurring, there was no evidence that a genocide was going on
(part of this interview features in Hotel Rwanda). 44 But perhaps nothing

42

Ibid., 515-6.
Ibid., especially ch. 14. And see also the report by Stephanie Maupas, Le Monde, 7 April
2005, which alleges not only that some gnocidaires were given asylum by France but also that
documents lodged with the International Criminal Court in Arusha indicated that extremists had
met in the French embassy after Habyarimanas death to plan setting aside the interim
government of unity. Frances unsavoury role in Africa has a long history, going back to the
rubber trade in the Congo, as we noted.
44
In 2004, former President Clinton attended a ceremony in Kigali to commemorate the dead in
the genocide. He apologised publicly for Americas inaction, saying that they would have done
things differently had they known what was happening. Yet it was impossible for them not to
have known and so the apology would seem to be almost as cynical as the indifference exhibited
by Clintons administration at the time. This ceremony, in 2004, was the one at which the French
delegation walked out in angry protest at President Kagames criticism of their role in the
genocide. Subsequently, some right-wing French sources in Paris began a campaign to smear
Kagame with responsibility for the genocide.
43

40

expresses American and international indifference to the loss of African life

as well as this encounter reported by Dallaire:
As to the value of the 800,000 [dead] in the balance books of
Washington, during those last weeks [before the end of his tour of duty],
we received a shocking call from an American staffer He was
engaged in some sort of planning exercise and wanted to know how
many Rwandans had died, how many were refugees, and how many
were internally displaced. He told me that his estimates indicated that it
would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the
life of one American soldier. It was macabre to say the least. 45
It would be cause for some optimism if the world had learned the lessons of
Rwanda. But the evidence is that the ritual chanting of never again has not
been matched by any new commitment, that the mental turning away continues.
As noted, the Rwanda civil war has been displaced to the eastern Congo with the
help of the international community.
From the Rwandan exodus in 1994 until genocide broke out again in
2003, it has been estimated that four million human beings have died in
the Congo and the Great Lakes region Five times the number
murdered in Rwanda in 1994 have died and, once again, only when the
television cameras captured the event were nations embarrassed into
sending a half-hearted temporary mission to try and stop the killing. 46
Needless to say, the killing has not stopped despite endless meetings and
resolutions. And then there is Darfur. For years now, the Security Council has
met, debated, and warned Sudan that this time it is serious, this time it intends to
act. Token peace forces, without resources, suitable mandates for action or
numbers, have been inserted as they were in Rwanda. Not even the Rwanda
genocide, it would seem, has moved the conscience of the world.
The Underpinnings of Indifference
Popular explanations for this inaction in the face of African suffering tend to
focus on immediate, contingent factors, such as Americas failure in Rwanda
stemming from its experiences in Somalia or, less charitably, from Rwandas
lack of oil reserves. Yet, whatever momentary factors might be in play (and
there can be little doubt that economic crisis over 30 years has been important),
any historical perspective suggests that the persistence and regularity of
atrocities are more deeply rooted in structures and beliefs. It is not possible here
45

Dallaire (2004) op.cit., 498-9. By this accounting, America should have contributed 9.5
soldiers rather than none to the UN force.
46
Ibid., 518-9.

41

even to begin to explore them; instead I would merely suggest three (interrelated
and interdependent) areas that need to be part of any agenda for further research.
First, Africas integration into the modern global economy and the capitalist
world-system was, from the very start, characterised by the implicit assumption
that African life was expendable. The human cost of the slave trade is too well
known to need rehashing here. It inspired what might be regarded as the first
truly international protest movement; but it was also defended fiercely, on moral
and practical grounds, for over half a century (at least in the west). We have
seen, also, that the colonial economy that developed in central Africa, much
admired for its profitability and civilising mission in its early years,47 may well
have killed half the people exposed to it. If the Belgian colonial government
subsequently moderated its worst excesses, the system remained in place in its
essential features until the middle of the twentieth century and was, moreover,
institutionalised in the plantation economies under French and Portuguese rule
where there was no international outcry and hence less pressure for reform.
If the plantation economy represents colonial oppression at its worst, the
political economies set up throughout colonial Africa all had built in to them the
assumption that African life was cheap and almost infinitely replaceable.
Agricultural export production, in all its forms, made no provision for the
decline in food security which followed the diversion of family farming to cash
commodities. The migrant-labour economies of southern Africa ensured that
business obtained large supplies of low-paid workers whilst keeping their
families confined to rural areas. By dividing families in this way,48 wages could
be set at the level of the individual workers subsistence rather than that of the
family. And the costs of social provision, of housing, education and health
services, could be minimised or even avoided. Thus, Marxs dictum that wage
levels would never fall below the cost of subsistence and reproduction of the
working class as a whole could be set aside. High mining profits, and the
dividends accruing to their investors in London and New York,49 were
underwritten by the poverty of rural African families left to fend for themselves,
many suffering hunger, malnutrition and tuberculosis. Everywhere on the
continent, life expectancy was low, work safety minimal, and mortality rates and
malnutrition and its associated diseases high. 50 It is difficult to believe that the
47

Hochschild (1998) op.cit., especially ch.1-6.

See, for instance, Colin Murray, (1981) Families Divided: the Impact of Migrant Labour in
Lesotho, Cambridge University Press.
49
In the South African mining industry, probably the most technologically advanced in the
world, company investment was low. Even into the 21st century, miners strikes remain as often
about the lack of safety as about the persistence of low wages.
50
See, among many, Charles van Onselen, (1976) Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern
Rhodesia, 1900-1930, London, Pluto; Harold Wolpe (1972) Capitalism and cheap labour power
in South Africa, Economy and Society 1; Michael Burawoy (1976) The functions and
48

42

mortality rates on which Africas contribution to the global economy rested

would have been politically tolerable anywhere else outside of prison labour
camps.
Second, these political economies rested on a conception of state power which
was authoritarian, at best, and brutal, at worst. Without the force of the state, it
would not have been possible to sustain economic processes so wasteful of
human life. Political power had to be exercised with the assumption that African
life was expendable if these system of extraction were to be profitable. We have
already seen that the rubber economy of the Congo rested on militarised state
force and what Hochschild called officially sanctioned terror. If the terror was
later lifted by the demise of Leopolds rule, it was replaced by a highly
authoritarian, coercive and racially discriminatory political order in which, in
Mamdanis formulation, Africans were never entitled to citizenship but were
excluded permanently from any participation in society other than as conquered
subjects.51 In southern Africa, the migrant labour system was maintained by vast
administrative and judicial structures which regulated the movement of African
workers and families between rural labour reserves and the (usually urban)
centres of the colonial economy. Inevitably, driven by increasing poverty and
hunger in the reserves, families evaded the controls and managed to settle in the
towns; where they did so in South Africa, however, there was always a Blaar
Coetzee to deport such supernumeraries to the rural backwaters and the
astronomic levels of malnutrition and disease that awaited them there. More
recently, we have seen a return to the economics of plunder, usually by warlord
gangs; thus expressions like conflict diamonds and looted coltan have become
part of the Africanists vocabulary.
Nor, unfortunately, did the end of colonialism end political oppression as Cabral
and so many others had hoped. If anything, the post-colonial state has proved as
authoritarian as its colonial predecessor and, at times, as brutal as anything
Leopold and Stanley devised. The weakness of post-colonial elites, unable to
deliver development, dependent on public resources for their own personal
welfare, and low in democratic legitimacy, has meant that democratic
institutions have been rendered nugatory and that power, what there is of it, has
been held by force. Coupled with economic crisis and debt, this abuse of power
has hastened the disintegration of political institutions, leading to the steady
retreat and erosion of the state. In the worst vases, power has fragmented,
reproduction of migrant labour: comparative material from South Africa and the United States,
American Journal of Sociology, 81, 5; Ruth First (1983) Black Gold: the Mozambican Miner,
Proletariat and Peasant, Sussex, Harvester; Robin Cohen (1987) The new helots: Migrants in
the International Division of Labour, Aldershot, Gower; and Robert Miles (1982) Racism and
Migrant Labour, London, Routledge.
51
Mahmood Mamdani, (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of Late
Colonialism, London, James Currey.

43

creating space for armed warlords and criminal gangs and even reducing the
formal state rulers to being one warlord among others.52 As they have fought
and looted, civilians have been put to the sword, beaten, raped and otherwise
brutalised, subjected to horrific crimes which often cannot be absorbed by the
imagination. It is difficult to find reasons which exonerate Africas political
classes, so lacking in conscience or contrition, from culpability for the crimes
we have been discussing. All too often, confronted by the evidence of abuse,
African political leaders round on critics and friends alike with cries of
imperialism and racism instead of confronting their own collaboration with
foreign interests or their own ethnic prejudices. The psychological distance
between the political class and the civilian victims of brutality seems as great as
in colonial times. As Crawford Young has noted, the colonial state did not just
disappear; instead it has had an afterlife in the post-colonial state.53 It is
interesting that Bula Matari, the name that the Bakongo gave to Henry Morton
Stanley in recognition of his brutality, (it means the breaker of rocks),54
became the name by which they came to refer first to the colonial and then the
post-colonial state.55 The exercise of power in Africa, like the realisation of
profit, has always held African life in low esteem.
Third, and finally, economic and political processes rest on, and have helped to
create historical experiences and deep-rooted cultural beliefs and prejudices
which underpin the indifference of bystanders and entrench the mental distance
between victims and others. If racial prejudice against Africans is not quite as
old or as deeply-embedded psychologically as anti-Semitism, it is nearly so. The
history of slavery, plunder, conquest, colonial rule and administrative practice
have all acted to produce racial stereotypes which increase the mental and
physical distance between victim and tormentor and between victim and
bystander. One has only to put the caricatures of Jews and Africans alongside
each other (as found in European language, idiom and popular print, even in
science), to see similar processes at work. Deeply-held beliefs about racial
superiority and inferiority readily surface to offset conscience, permitting a
mental turning away in times of crisis. We see this at play everywhere in the
ideological simplifications about Africa that abound in western academic,
political and media narratives.

52

Among many contributions, see Chris Allen, (1995) Understanding African Politics Review
of African Political Economy 65, 301-20, for an attempt to theorise the malaise of the postcolonial state.
53
Crawford Young, (1994) The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, Yale
University Press, esp. ch.9. In the Senegalese film, Xala, Ousmane Sembene depicts a ritual in
which African personnel replace Frenchmen without anything else changing.
54
Hochschild (1998) op.cit., 68
55
Young (1994) op.cit., esp. ch.1.

44

One example is the constant reduction of African affairs to problems of

corruption and tribalism, Without minimising the seriousness of these two
problems in any way (my own work has been about them to a large extent), it is
a device which legitimises indifference, a mantra asserting that African
problems arise from inherent African failings. This reductionism conveniently
excludes the contribution of bystanders themselves to the continent's malaise.
Moreover, since it also ignores the forces that give rise to corruption and ethnic
conflict, it thereby strengthens the impression that, rather than being historically
specific or transitory phenomena, they are somehow defects within the African
personality itself.56 It is a means of blaming the victims for their own suffering.
Such cultural stereotypes and prejudices facilitate international inaction,
allowing the world to abandon the victims in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia or
Darfur, to death or suffering in much the way my grandparents were in Ivye. For
all the distance between Ivye and Darfur, the victims might be forgiven for
feeling that all that is different is that now there are international organisations
where the comfortable and prosperous people meet, deplore what is happening,
and do nothing or nothing much. It is this mental turning away that leads to the
belief that 85,000 Rwandans have to die before a single western life might be
risked. Too few leaders stand trial for their crimes before international courts;
too many escape into comfortable exile provided by fellow leaders with an
interest in limiting culpability. All too often, conflict resolution brokered by the
international agencies is predicated on reconciliation between victims and
perpetrators. This reinforces assumptions that the victims are of little account
and that punishment for serious crimes is not regarded as a necessity. There is
little international support for local judicial processes despite the fact that these
give victims and local communities some measure of ownership of the postconflict settlement.57
56

It was my practice, in teaching a course on African politics to British students, to present them
with a report from a most respected English newspaper about Zambian factional conflict in the
1960s. In it the late Arthur Wina was described as the leader of the Lozi tribe. Students were
invited to discuss the images which this label suggested to them. They were then told that Wina
was also the holder of a postgraduate degree in economics from UCLA, the countrys first
African finance minister, the director of several companies (including membership of the local
boards of a number of international banks) and that he flew his own private aircraft. They then
discussed the profound ways in which this readjusted their images.
57
It is interesting that there has been widespread approval of South Africas Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and little or no approval of the peoples courts which have tried
low-level criminals for their actions in the Rwanda genocide. The TRC had no judicial function,
imposed no sanction on those who committed atrocities and, because it was unable to call more
than a few, voluntary witnesses, did not even suffice as a truth-telling exercise. Whilst it did
provide a legitimation process for the transition from apartheid, universal approval stems largely
from the fact that the only pain it caused was to the victims who had hoped for retribution and
reparation. See E.N. Isaac (2005) A Critical-Theoretic Study of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. In contrast, critics of the

45

Conclusion: The Need to Change the Moral Climate

The scale of the African tragedy and the speed with which it has spread since
Leys wrote his article indicates the urgency for action to protect the poor and
weak. But it is difficult to see from where international action might come. The
grand plans articulated at various gatherings, within the continent and abroad,
about new deals for Africa, seem strangely divorced from what is happening on
the ground. The five great powers consistently act cynically in ways that
undermine international law, and most states, large and small, persistently
ignore the principles enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights when
dealing with their own citizens. The UN and the international system generally
have been shown to be incapable of acting outside the limits set by national
governments. Little could more starkly exemplify what Geras called the
loneliness of the doomed.58
There needs to be a change in the moral climate to challenge this prevailing
indifference. If it is to happen it will have to happen through committed groups
and individuals walking in the footsteps of people like Morel. Here, by way of
conclusion, let me suggest one small way in which this might begin to be done.
It is the last lesson I want to draw from the Holocaust and it is this. One of the
greatest achievements of the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants
was to hold the worlds conscience to account for the horrors of the death
camps. A core element in this was the historical exegesis and reconstruction of
what happened, the naming of the guilty, the identification of the victims, and
the restoration of their existence as people rather than numbers. It is difficult to
recall that those people in the mass grave in Ivye died alone, abandoned and
unknown; it was the construction of a necrology and a history after the war
which restored their names and thereby ascribed a value to them as human
beings. The world did not always enjoy this holding-to-account (Holocaust
diminishers have been plentiful) but it bought their descendants almost 50 years
of relative peace and freedom from the discrimination and pogroms of the preHolocaust world.
By contrast, Africans die in the numbers they do because it remains easy for
them to die, easy to kill them. In one atrocity after another, they die alone and
abandoned, almost always anonymously; often their own relatives are not sure
of what has happened to them. In Kigali today, there is a small monument to the
ten Belgian soldiers killed by the Rwandan gnocidaires, their names inscribed
on a plaque. No such monument or necrology exists for the 800,000 African
Rwandan Gacaca courts focus on their retributive role and often deplore what they see as a
settling of scores. See, for instance, A. Corey and S.F. Joireman, (2004) Retributive justice:
the Gacaca courts in Rwanda, African Affairs 103, 73-89. It seems to me that there are scores
to be settled and that it is important to establish that such crimes will be punished.

46

victims. There are piles of skulls in a church but no names and nothing else.
African lives are accorded value only in the mass, not as individuals. Similarly,
those buried in the mass graves at Wiriamu and all the other victims of whom
we have spoken here died abandoned and unknown. There is a need to do for
them all what was done to mark the Holocaust; a need to identify them, to give
them individual worth by marking their names, and to name and mark their
killers. It is a step towards creating a culture in which mass murder is held to
account and the value of every life is asserted. It is something that must be done
by Africans, not by foreigners, as a way of asserting their rights and worth as
citizens over those with guns and machetes who regard them as expendable. It is
a step, perhaps, towards Africa beginning to reclaim its own history.

47

The LUCAS Schools Global Citizenship Project

by Jane Plastow
Background
The LUCAS Schools Global Citizenship Project was a pilot programme that
ran from September 2004 to July 2006. The aim of the project was to give an
opportunity for African postgraduate students at the University of Leeds to share
their knowledge of Africa with young people in Leeds primary and high schools,
in order to support both the national curriculum global citizenship agenda and to
promote a wider knowledge of African culture, politics and development among
young people in the city. The project ran with the financial support of a DfID
mini-grant and funding from the University of Leeds Widening Participation
Fund, plus in kind assistance from LUCAS, primarily in the form of free
administration and project management.1
The project worked with four high and six primary schools.2 Thirteen African
students were trained and offered part time employment, and approximately 700
children benefited from the scheme.
The Objectives
The idea for the project was brought to me as director of LUCAS by our board
member, Michael Medley, and a then student at the University, Saidie Parker.
Parker had previously worked for the Leeds Development Education
Association (DEA) and was aware that they administered a mini-grant scheme
on behalf of DfID. She suggested that a project taking African students into
Leeds schools might well fit with the objective of the scheme in widening
community awareness of development issues; in our case from a specifically
African viewpoint. We then developed a proposal with the support of Richard
Borowski of our local DEA with three objectives:
1. To raise awareness, and assist in the delivery, of the global dimension of
the National Curriculum in Leeds schools.
1

Due to the limited amount of funding available from a DfID mini-grant the project ran on
approximately 10,000 per annum. This was insufficient for administrative support so LUCAS
supported the project through help from our administrator, and I co-ordinated the project in my
own time. Many of the difficulties in running the project efficiently arose from the lack of paid
support time.
2
The high schools involved were: City of Leeds High School 2004-6; Intake High School 20046; Lawnswood High School 2005-6; Leeds Girls High School 2004-5;
The primary schools involved, all in the 2005-6 academic year, were: Beckett Park; Burley St
Matthias; Hawksworth Wood; Iveson; St Chads Primary School; Weetwood Primary School

48

Global citizenship is a relatively recent addition to the UK national curriculum

that requires all children to increase their awareness of the world around them
and their rights and responsibilities as a global citizen.1 Many teachers have
little or no training in this area and are poorly equipped to deliver teaching on
global citizenship. At LUCAS we had an extraordinary resource in the number
of African postgraduate students studying at the University who could offer
expert knowledge about their continent, and we therefore wished to offer this
expertise to the wider community.
2. To raise awareness of Africas contribution towards global development.
All too often Africa is presented as a basket case. DfID is concerned that young
people engage with a sense of responsibility towards development agendas, and
particularly the Millennium Development Goals. However it is also important
that wider recognition is given to the achievements of Africa and its
contributions to the world in terms of wealth creation, natural resources, culture,
language and so on, in order to help children develop a more balanced view of
the continent.
3. To raise the aspirations of children in Leeds.
The project wished to support children of African heritage, who have in recent
years often under-performed academically in the UK.2 There are very few black
teachers in Leeds,3 and we sought to encourage aspiration in young people of
ethnic minorities by putting African role models in front of them, and raising
esteem of and interest in African studies among the general school population.
4. From the point of view of the African students we aimed to contribute to
their personal and professional development by preparing and
supporting them in working in a UK school environment.
5. For LUCAS we sought to widen interest in and understanding of Africa
in the local community, and to widen our outreach into the Leeds school
system.
1

Global citizenship became a compulsory element of the primary school curriculum in 2000 and
the high school curriculum in 2002.
2
See The Guardian leader on March 8th, 2005 reporting on a consistent pattern of
underachievement by black boys, both Caribbean and African, in the UK educational system
over many years.
3
The most recent figures I have been able to locate date back to 2001. At that time, and after a
black teacher recruitment push, there were only 112 black and Asian teachers in a city where 6%
of the population was reported as non-white. BBC Education. 30th June 2001.

49

Setting up the Project: Year 1

The Schools
The project began work in the 2004/5 academic year. We approached four local
high schools with very varied pupil intake, in order to assess whether different
academic environments would affect delivery of the project. The schools invited
to benefit from the project (for free) were:
1. City of Leeds High School
This is the school nearest to the University. It is an inner city school with a very
mixed ethnic intake. A high proportion of children are from deprived
backgrounds, and a significant proportion come with statements of special
needs.
2. Intake High School
This is a school operating in a largely white working class area. It is also a
specialist performing arts school, with a selected stream of students accepted
from across the city who wish to focus their studies on performance.
3. Lawnswood High School
This is a very large school with a 10 form entry. It accepts children from a wide
range of social and ethnic backgrounds.
4. Leeds Girls High School
This is a private girls high school, near the university with mixed ethnic intake
and very high academic standards.
All schools accepted the invitation to take part in the project and were offered up
to 20 hours of free classes for year 7 (the first year of high school) pupils. They
were then invited to a meeting at LUCAS to discuss their aspirations for the
work and to agree which staff would link with LUCAS in a coordinating
capacity. We also made it clear at this time that school staff must be in class at
all times and that our students would not be responsible for disciplinary matters.
The Students
At the same time that negotiations were underway with schools LUCAS
advertised at the beginning of the University academic year for African PhD
students who wished to take part in the project. Eight students attended a first
meeting with myself, as project coordinator, and our two development education
trainers, Saidie Parker and Richard Borowski.
We were well aware that the school environment in the UK was likely to be very
different from those our African students had experienced, whether or not they
had previous experience of school teaching. In the vast majority of African
schools the environment is teacher-centred with large amounts of rote and
50

blackboard learning. Pupils are usually expected to be quiet and disciplined, and
corporal punishment remains common.
We wished to excite and interest Leeds school children about Africa and we
therefore required students to take part in a training programme during the first
semester, prior to going into schools in the period after the Christmas holidays.
This training was to introduce students to more pupil-centred, activity-based
teaching models, and to support them in devising individual packages of lesson
plans. We also knew it would be vital for students to visit their schools in
advance as the school room environment would be radically different from any
they were used to. If students successfully completed the training they would be
offered teaching of up to 20 hours at 20 per hour plus travel expenses. We
would also seek to help them deliver lessons focussing on particular areas of
expertise.
Eventually four students took part in the training programme.
Henrietta Abane is a political geographer and would run a 10
week course in Ghanaian geography at Leeds Girls High School.
Oluseyi Ogunjobi is a Nigerian artist and performer and would
run a four week performance project for children at Intake High
School focussing on Nigerian art forms.
Adesoji Adeniyi and Prosper Ogonga are also Nigerians but
working in the area of social sciences, would collaborate in
working on PHSE curriculum areas at City of Leeds and
Lawnswood Schools.
Undoubtedly the biggest shock for our students was going in to the classroom on
initial observational visits. All were amazed and to some extent appalled - by
the latitude given to children in terms of their behaviour, and the way they
sometimes spoke to members of staff.
For LUCAS the early problems centred around getting some students to attend
training regularly, and the lack of time for project organisation. Due to the small
budget for the pilot I was coordinating the project alongside my normal duties;
though with invaluable help from Saeed Talajooy, the part time LUCAS
administrator, who also had his usual work to get on with. Undoubtedly this lack
of dedicated organisational time was a problem throughout the project; most
notably in terms of ensuring good communications between all parties: students,
schools, trainers and LUCAS; but also at times in producing materials and
schedules, supporting evaluation, and making sure students were paid promptly
and properly.
Our trainers were devising their programme as they came to understand student
needs and ability. The focus, however, was always on child-centred
51

participatory learning, and students found this fascinating, though at times a

considerable challenge.
First Year Delivery to Schools
Ultimately in the first year we worked with only three schools. Despite
numerous liaison attempts it became evident that no teacher at Lawnswood
School really wanted to take on the project. Enthusiasm for the scheme had
come from the head teacher; but when we found responsibility seemed to have
been left with an un-briefed teaching assistant we decided to suspend work at
Lawnswood for the year.
At the other extreme our greatest success was probably at Intake High School
where both Deputy Head and a number of arts teachers showed great enthusiasm
for the performance project for Year 7s, based on African story-telling, that was
delivered by our experienced workshop leader and theatre PhD student, Oluseyi
Ogunjobi.
At Leeds Girls High School, Henrietta Abane had a relatively straightforward
job teaching Ghanaian geography. The only issue here was that the programme
was not fully delivered as we had not been informed of interruptions to the
schedule occasioned by training days and special events.
City of Leeds probably presented our greatest challenge. The PHSE teacher, Pat
Santin, had been extremely supportive of the project, but after a few weeks she
contacted us to say that she did not feel our two Nigerian students were able to
manage the class and for the remaining sessions they worked in support of the
teacher. At her request I went to observe one the classes taking place. Although I
had worked on a voluntary drama project at the school before, this was different.
The group had extremely challenging behaviour, and it was evident that only a
highly skilled, experienced teacher, would have any chance of managing such
classes. We agreed that the following year activities would take place in close
liaison with the teacher and under her control.
Lessons from Year One
By the end of year one we had learnt a huge amount. The key lessons we took
away to develop were:
The need for improved communication with all parties.
This was basically a matter if putting more effort in to ensuring that
everyone knew what they were doing, when; and completing more
promptly all the necessary paperwork, phone calls, visits and emails.
52

The need to modify training arrangements to encourage full

participation.
We decided to move training to fewer, but longer sessions on
Saturdays, and to pay students 5 per hour to attend training and
lower the teaching rate to 15 per hour.
The need for fully committed lead teachers to collaborate in
ensuring the smooth running of the project.
We had found that to maximise effect one really needed support from
both head teachers and the classroom teacher who worked with the
project in its delivery stages. We would therefore try to ensure more
meetings with staff and visits to all schools by the project coordinator
and by students in advance of teaching taking place, as well as
making sure they knew who to contact if any difficulties arose.
The need to continue to reinforce participatory learning
methodologies in training and seek out students with previous
teaching experience.
Our trainers would seek to further support participatory learning in
the training programme and be more available to students to consult
once teaching began. We would also recruit African MA students
from the School of Education since their prior training in education
methodologies would be helpful to the project.
One other key factor affected developments in the second year of the project.
Both Lawnswood (now back on board) and City of Leeds High Schools
belonged to the same family of schools, 1and this group was developing a
project linking high and primary schools in its membership with the aim of
supporting educational and pastoral improvements during the transition years
(Years 5 8) when academic achievement has often been found to falter.2 I was
invited to attend meetings in relation to this scheme and it was agreed that
LUCAS would widen the project remit in its second year to include Year 6
primary school children. The intention would be that work they made in Year 6
at primary school could be carried through to early Year 7 work in high schools
from the same family, which as feeder schools they would be likely to be
attending.3
1

At the time of the project all Leeds Schools were organised into families, bringing together a
group of primary schools that fed into particular high schools. This system has subsequently
been modified.
2
See Transition to Secondary Schools: A literature review, New Zealand Ministry of Education,
2003.
3

In the final event it was not possible to transfer work from primary to secondary schools as it
was not felt that enough feeder schools had taken part to allow the work to move forward as a
transition project.

53

Year Two
As a result of the project development our second year of work involved nine
schools. Leeds Girls High School did not respond to a repeat invitation, but
Lawnswood was now fully on board with an agreed link teacher. We decided we
could cope with working in 6 primary schools; and all of these were drawn from
the North West Leeds family of schools.
The project would run essentially as before in high schools, but for our primary
school clients we offered a 1-3 day programme of events, to be delivered by a
team of African students. The idea was to stimulate interest in Africa across a
range of activities. Each session would run for 4 hours of the school day, and the
sessions would take place after the childrens SAT exams when they would be
relatively free from normal curriculum pressures. All schools opted for the three
day maximum offering.
As before we advertised for students interested in taking part in the project. Two
returned to us from the first year; Oluseyi and Adesoji. Oluseyi would return to
work at Intake High School, this time running special day-long story-telling, art,
textile and drumming workshops for 100 children selected by the school, either
because they were part of the performing arts stream, or as a reward for good
behaviour. Adesoji would work with a new Nigerian partner, Akande Akinmade
at both City of Leeds and Lawnswood in support of the global citizenship
elements of the PHSE course. Our 20 hours per school rule, meant that students
at Lawnswood would have only 2 hours each as there is a 10 form entry, while
at City of Leeds the 4 year 7 groups could have 5 hours of teaching each.
Our training programme drew on, and developed from, the work in year one.
Parker had left the University and was replaced as a trainer by Becky Moore.
The main challenge for the trainers was to develop with the students schemes of
work for the primary school three day packages of events.
Evaluation of Project Results
The remainder of this paper will focus on the evaluation of the project and what
was learnt through that process. It draws heavily on the on the Evaluation
Report produced by our independent evaluator, Bob Hirst,1 with additional
material produced by me from meetings with pupils in primary and high
schools.

Bob Hirst is A Voluntary Sector Management Consultant. His report can be accessed in full on
the LCUAS website: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/lucas/

54

In his Overall summary of findings, Hirst states that:

This project has benefited the African students, been received positively
by the school teachers and has had an impact on the pupils involved, and
all has been achieved extremely efficiently and economically. These are
major achievements and will always outbalance the more minor
weaknesses. (p5, 2006)
Such findings were naturally very pleasing to LUCAS, but here I will focus on
what we were able to identify as particularly useful to participating groups, and
the weaknesses that can be learnt from.
High Schools
Teachers
Hirst went into participating high schools at the end of the first year of the
project to interview teachers. His discussion in all schools primary and
secondary focussed around 7 possible learning outcomes.
1. Pupils understand that Africa is a continent and that the student is from
one country in that continent.
2. Pupils understand that countries in Africa can be extremely different in
terms of climate, types of people, religion, political and social structures,
culture, economic circumstances and so on.
3. Pupils know something about the students country.
4. Pupils know something about the student his/her work, background,
experience, opinions, hopes, etc.
5. Pupils have a positive attitude towards countries in Africa.
6. Pupils have some understanding of global issues that affect the students
country and that affect the UK.
7. (At least some) pupils are interested in taking positive action in relation
to the global issues they have explored. (Hirst, 2006, p27)
All teachers agreed that aims 1-5 were addressed, though one school was less
sure that 6 and 7 had been dealt with. One school was keen to add that the
aspirations of black and ethnic minority pupils had been raised. All were keen to
continue with the project, though all felt that it would have been better if more
of the school had witnessed some of the work and if teachers had carried out
more preparation and follow-up. (Hirst, 2006. p28)
Primary Schools
Primary school staff were interviewed at the end of year two of the project.
These teachers generally had a more intimate knowledge of exactly what
55

happened in the project as they were, unlike high school teachers, present
throughout. Their responses were therefore more detailed than for high schools.
Teachers generally felt that points 1 and 2 had been well achieved. For points 3
and 4 some said they had been well achieved but more said this had only been
accomplished to some extent. Teachers were often unsure how much more of a
positive attitude children had to Africa (point 5). For 6 and 7, scores were
between to some extent (3 schools), not at all (1 school) and not sure (1
school), Hirst explains that: The lower level of achievement in these outcomes,
as judged by the teachers, was accounted for in part by the student sessions not
addressing them and in part by some teachers feeling these are a bit stretching
for many Year 6 pupils. (Hirst, 2006, p7)
Interestingly the question of benefit to ethnic minority pupils was again raised.
In four of the six schools involved there were African students in classes and
teachers made a point of discussing how good the event was for these children.
He got more excited about it hes usually quiet, but got more involved.
He played a leading role. Helped to raise his self-esteem.
We were pleased with the effect on him. Weve had some minor
difficulties with him, but [these sessions] gave him kudos.
[The sessions] brought them out a lot really good for them. They
contributed more than usual. (Hirst, 2006, p9)
Overall the teachers felt that the work divided into two parts. When the children
were active and involved they were interested and engaged. However, a
common point raised was that at times the students talked too much, at times in
a Victorian or lecturing style, and that then children switched off or generally
lost interest. This point relates both to the fact that not all the students have any
previous teacher training and that African education systems are generally not
interactive. It certainly emphasised the need to develop even further interactive
skills in the LUCAS training programme.
All teachers said the project was a good idea and that they would wish to
continue to be involved with it.
Pupils
All pupil interviews were carried out by me in the second year of the project, as
soon as possible after teaching had taken place usually within a week. In each
case focus groups were chosen by teachers who were asked to select children
from as wide a social, ethnic, academic and gendered mix as possible. Children
were interviewed from 3 high schools and four primary schools, and the
interviews were informal and generally lasted around 20 minutes.
56

High Schools
All the children knew where their visiting students came from, and nearly all
seemed sure that Africa was made up of many countries.
Many expressed considerable surprise that Africans were not all helpless and
poor.
I used to think everyone was poor, but now I know they can make lots of
things themselves.
I thought it was all animals and poor people, but now I can tell people
that they have their own culture and can do things themselves, like
making cloth and houses.
Children obviously liked the more activity-based exercises.
It was good fun. I learned lots, specially about making tie-die.
It was different from our usual lessons: history and maths and English.
You can learn lots without writing stuff down and that.
He taught us whats it called? Pidgin, it looked hard at first, but them I
could understand it.
However in our most challenging school a class on West African food had made
an impact, but not an obviously positive one.
They brought in food from Africa
They use some food like us rice.
I ate some crayfish. It was stinky.
I didnt like gari.
My impression was that ideas about Africa had been changed and in most
cases both for the better realising that Africans are creative, not helpless and
have interesting cultures and in ways that got rid of some stereotypes the
realisation that Africa is not just full of poor people and wild animals. In the
school with most in-depth exposure (full day workshops) the impression was
definitely both stronger and more positive than in a school where students were
only working in support of a class teacher. In the former the seventh learning
objective about positive action had definitely resonated with one child.
Id really like to go to Africa. I keep asking my Mum to take me. When
she asks me why Id like to go I say its because I want to see their
culture. I used to think it was all animals, but now I know theres lots of
people and Id like to go for ten days.
In the latter, many children couldnt really see why the students were there and
had no interest in developing knowledge about Africa.
They introduced themselves in the first lesson and where they come from,
Nigeria. But then they just stand at the back.
Id like to learn about different countries in Africa and societies.
I dont want to go to Africa.
That was a waste of time.
57

Learning contexts were hugely different between schools, but both choice of
activities and depth of interaction seemed to make a very big difference in how
children reacted.
Primary Schools
Like the high schools the primary schools we worked with also catered for a
wide social and ethnic range of children, with some in much more prosperous
areas than others. It is also important to realise that different activities took place
in different schools, with different groups of students, some much more
experienced teachers than others.
As in high schools most children knew where their teachers came from, a little
about their countries, and realised that Africa had many nations that were
different. Similarly, like the high schools, the biggest surprise to the children
seemed to be the sophistication of African societies and the simple fact that they
were not full of the destitute poor and wild animals. Attitudes to Africa had
definitely changed.
I thought everyone was poor, but they wear jeans and hoodies like in
England.
Some of the buildings were beautiful, there are grand houses. [The
children saw videos and internet material on Africa.]
I didnt know there were computers in Africa, in the cities.
I didnt know there were buses in Africa.
This surprise may seem superficial but it seemed important in that it brought
ideas about African people closer to the children. Africa became simultaneously
more interesting and approachable and less exotic.
The range of activities had generally gone down very well. These included
African songs, music, dances and games, work with making clothes, looking at
African food, work on African animals, learning about Fair Trade, learning
some Pidgin, looking at the Nigerian film industry, internet research and
watching videos. Like their teachers, children raised the issue of teaching style.
When sessions were active they were much enjoyed, but in most schools
children also said that sometimes the African students spent too much time
talking at them. One school had no criticisms of the students and the children
said that the participatory style had been a nice change from usual classes, that
they all knew much more about Africa, and many wanted to go there
particularly popular seemed the idea of going on safari! Elsewhere generous
praise and obvious interest was mixed with some reservations about delivery.
On the positive side came many comments such as:
58

We learned about Fair Trade. How if a bar of chocolate cost a quid the
farmer only gets 8p, and how all the different people get their money.
I liked the songs. We learnt a welcome song.
I learned African words. How to say Hello.
On the negative I was told:
Sometimes they talked too much, so we just sort of switched off.
They gave us homework, but we couldnt really understand it. Wed only
done half an hour in class on Pidgin. It was a bit demoralising.
When he was talking about Pidgin it was interesting, but sometimes he
spoke in a monotone.
There were far more positive than negative comments, but the need for a
consistently active participatory approach came through very strongly.
Students
The evaluator only met the students once, and as a group, so the information
gathered was less than for schools. The students were asked what they hoped to
gain from the project and they raised five points.

The money earned was significant for most students since many
struggle financially, and the general consensus was that they
payment rate was good.
Most valued the teaching experience and better knowledge of
British schools.
Several mentioned being an ambassador for Africa as
important.
The work was seen as good for ones CV, and the certificate of
training was valued.
The students enjoyed working in teams and felt they had learned
much from this.

More informally LUCAS staff and trainers observed considerable and growing
enthusiasm from the group during the time they were involved. The desire to
impart knowledge about Africa, and the enjoyment of team activities seemed to
be particularly strong once students went into schools.
Students were generally very positive about the training they had received,
which they saw as helpful, useful and well prepared. The main problems seem to
have had two centres. Firstly, students said it would have been useful to go into
schools more prior to teaching beginning. This fitted in with teacher comments
about a desire to liase better with students in advance. Students said many
schools cancelled planned visits. Undoubtedly there was some confusion here
that needed to have been better managed. Secondly students felt they needed
59

more paid planning time in order to be best prepared for their sessions. This had
not been taken into account. Since students recognised the issue of too much
talking, more planning time might well go some way to helping with the
problem.
Overall students were positive, feeling that they had learned much, and that their
gain was more than just monetary. There was also a strong sense of camaraderie
among the group.
LUCAS
The main benefits of the project to LUCAS were the increase in links with the
wider community, the opportunity to promote knowledge about and interest in
Africa, and the opportunity to bring African students into contact with the Leeds
schools community.
I had undoubtedly underestimated the amount of time involved in making the
project work well, and at times the management and administration workload
was barely sustainable given other commitments. But all involved in
management, administration and training learned a huge amount about how to
deliver such a project, and the possible value it contained.
The Future
When the project concluded we decided to apply for a larger DfID award from
the Development Awareness Fund to expand the project throughout Leeds. In
June 2007 we learned that this bid had been successful, and the University
offered additional support, so that our new stage of the work will begin in
September 2007.
The new project will run for 3 years and will be open to a wider number of
Leeds schools. The expanded funding will enable us to employ a part time
project coordinator which should enable a much stronger support package to be
developed, and we will continue to develop training and new delivery packages,
with the aim of not only reaching Leeds schools, but of developing a
methodology that can be utilised by others interested in similar outreach project
across the UK.

60

Ibadan 1960
by Martin Banham
A paper given to the AHRB Centre CATH Seminar on Ibadan 1960 at the
University of Leeds, September 23rd/24th, 2004. Martin Banham taught in
Nigeria at the University College, Ibadan, later the University of Ibadan,
between 1956 and 1966.
Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold flung and scattered
among several hills like broken
china in the sun1
John Pepper Clarks wonderful image of Ibadan in the 1960s evokes energy and
anarchy in equal measure. It is an affectionate and graphic picture that anybody
who lived in Ibadan in those years will recognise. My own recollections will
have about them the same randomness: they are images that remain with me
nearly half a century on from going to teach in Ibadan in 1956 an innocent
abroad, if ever there was.
Im taking the liberty of interpreting 1960 very broadly. My 1960 started four
years earlier but I think we are looking not at a date, but at a time. What I now
see marked that time most significantly for me was politics and specifically the
politics of emancipation. In 1957 I stood on the Ibadan campus when, from
every student and staff radio set, the national anthem of the newly independent
Ghana was played at full volume, directly relayed from the celebrations in
Accra. Nkrumah called for an encore and, the University College students sang
and danced with their distant colleagues knowing that Nigerias own freedom
was near. It was a time of great optimism. Constitutional conferences, internal
regional self-government, political manifestoes, newspaper debates, all
dominated thought and action. It has to be remembered that as this new sense of
freedom was sweeping through West Africa, colonial and oppressive regimes
still dominated in Kenya, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola and, of course, South
Africa. I dont think it an exaggeration to say that Nigerians saw themselves in
the vanguard of the struggle for the whole continent. Political refugees from
these areas found a welcoming home in West Africa, many of them as teachers
at Ibadan, enriching our understanding of the continent and informing and
radicalising our politics. Certainly on the campus there was a sense of
confidence. The students an elite group of 600 men and women when I arrived
looked forward to their own role as the administrators and ambassadors of the
1

Clark-Bekederemo, J. P., The Poems 1958-1998, Longman Nigeria, Lagos, 2002, p.23.

61

new Nigeria. No doubt there were incipient political tensions and rivalries, and
indeed they were to arise only too destructively over the next few years, but they
were not apparent to a young expatriate lecturer. It is interesting to note,
however, that in 1952 seven Ibadan students from different ethnic backgrounds
Wole Soyinka, Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, Olumuyiwa Awe, Nathaniel Oyelola,
Pius Oleghe, Ralph Opara and Ben Egbuchelam, founded the Pyrates
Confraternity specifically to combat elitism and tribalism. A note in the
recently published WS: A Life in Full2 shows how the Pyrates grew nationally
and internationally over the years, formally registering with the Federal Ministry
of Internal Affairs in 1980 with the name National Association of Seadogs and
having as its creed Against Convention, Against Tribalism, For Humanistic
Ideals, and for Comradeship and Chivalry. I recall, however, the optimism
symbolised by the Federal election manifesto of Obafemi Awolowos Action
Group, a democratic socialist document, directed beyond the partys Yoruba
heartland to the peoples of the East and the North, that spoke of universal health
care, free education, theatres and arts centres in every regional capital! And,
vitally, political emancipation brought with it cultural emancipation, an
outpouring of pride in the indigenous arts, skills, languages and traditions of the
nation.
Ill return for a moment here, if I may, to the elite student body that I referred
to. Inevitably they were high-flyers, people who had come through the very
competitive Government Colleges, or through the major high schools in Lagos.
600 students from the whole of Nigeria! But there were also students often in
their middle age who had fought against all odds, persevering in their
determination to reach UCI. I think that, at the age of 23, most of my students
were my own age or older. The academic route that had brought them to Ibadan
was entirely based on a traditional British schools curriculum. At the university
college they got more of the same. As a recent graduate I was made tutor to a
very bright student, Ben Obumselu, and we spent hours discussing T S Eliots
The Waste Land. There were moves made by staff to bring into the English
curriculum works from a more international - and specifically Commonwealth
base, and ease it away from its rather precious Oxbridge bias where twentieth
century writing itself was regarded as dangerously immature. But these were
generally resisted from on high. I suspect that it was the creation of the School
of Drama in the early 60s, hosting Kola Ogunmolas wonderful travelling
theatre company in a version of Tutuolas The Palmwine Drinkard staged by
Demas Nwoko, together with the enterprising work of the Student Dramatic
Society and the Travelling Theatre (with, for instance, an adaptation of Nkem
Nwankwos Danda) that did most to shift a focus towards Nigerian writing and
performance. That and the 1959 productions of Soyinkas The Swamp Dwellers
and The Lion and the Jewel in the Arts Theatre. I became close in those early
2

ed. Bankole Olayebi, WS:A Life in Full, Bookcraft, Ibadan, 2004, p.137.

62

days with John Pepper Clark, who was then a student in the English Department
and who has become a life-long friend. We were about the same age and almost
shared a birthday. The Pepper in Clarks name was a nickname given to him
by his brother on account of his hot temper, and based on the familiar name
given to an equally irascible British District Officer in the Rivers, a certain
Captain A.P.Pullen. Clarks tale of how he received an education amazed me
and has stayed with me always, and it heightened the admiration I felt for the
students who had made their way to Ibadan. In a nutshell, Clarks father, from
his home at Kiagbodo in the Rivers, determined to obtain an education for his
sons, sent J.P. at the age of 7, together with his two elder brothers, down the
Forcados River in a canoe to the Native Administration School at Okrika,
placing them under the guardianship of a man called Yekpe they had never met,
and who, I believe, their father knew only by reputation, described by Clark as
the most feared man in town. It was there I think that Clark heard for the first
time the great Ijaw epic of Ozidi, a version of which he was both to record and
to use as the basis of his own play of that name. I record this anecdote because it
brought home to me the extraordinary cultural resources that so many students
brought with them but which were for far too long ignored by the educational
system to which they were subjected. No wonder that once the floodgates
opened so much poured out. Clark, incidentally, has recently published a
collection of new poems entitled Once Again A Child3 which is an
autobiography of his childhood, presented in verse. Typically, his inscription in
my copy reads with warm greetings from the stroppy one!
I now want to try and illustrate the mood and vigour of those times, particularly
in the cultural field, through looking at various publications, created in Ibadan,
which flourished in the 1960s.
I start unapologetically with - in Chinweizu et als phrase - the poisonous LeedsIbadan connection which honoured me by a direct association with Wole
Soyinka as joint agents of neo-colonialism!4 This was the creation of the student
magazine The Horn, modelled on the Leeds Poetry & Audience, founded by
myself and a group of English department students, funded by me (1), and first
edited by J.P.Clark. A simple circa 12 page cyclostyled magazine, laboriously
typed on to sticky stencils and run off in the English department office,
predominantly devoted to student verse and selling for threepence, The Horn
went on to be edited by a roll-call of talented Ibadan students, amongst them
Juliet Udezue, Abiola Irele, Minji Karibo, Dapo Adelugba, F. Onyema Iheme,
Tayo Morgan, and Omolara Ogundipe. Abiola Irele, in his introduction to
Clarks Collected Plays 1964-1988, comments that The Horn eventually
3

Clark-Bekederemo, J.P. Once Again A Child, Mosuro, Ibadan, 2004

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, Ihechukwu Madubuike, Towards the Decolonization of
African Literature, Fourth Dimension, Enugu, 1980. pp.196-7.
4

63

developed into something more than an outlet for new poetic talent; it came as
well to function as a medium of intellectual reflection and in particular as a
forum among the students for debate about the place of culture in the new
Nigerian society that we felt, as if on our very pulses, was coming into
existence.5 It was in Volume 4, no. 1 of The Horn that Wole Soyinkas
challenge for national cultural self-confidence appeared: [T]he duiker will not
paint duiker on his beautiful back to proclaim his duikeritude; youll know him
by his elegant leap. From work in The Horn I published in 1960 a slim volume
called Nigerian Student Verse 1959.6 Sadly, it contains nothing of Clarks early
work, as in true peppery style he said he wrote poetry, not verse and I think he
was right! But the collection gave rise to two interesting comments when it was
reviewed in a later issue of The Horn (Vol. 4, No. 1). Wole Soyinka said I can
say, very fairly, that this booklet proves that the student writer at least has
overcome the Golden Treasury days of his poetic formation. This is a highly
cheering revelation. Abiola Irele, rightly chastising me for being too cautious in
my claims for the verse, makes some important points about the tension the
young Nigerian writer often found him or herself experiencing at this period. He
says however conversant we have been with English, it still remains for us
something of a second language, if not less. The difficulties of expressing our
own national sentiment and our own native sensibility in a language radically
different from ours are no less for constantly hearing the language and using it in
our academic workThe truth is that we not only study in English, we study it
we do not, like an English undergraduate, come up to read it. Irele continues to
observe that the young writer in this context is unable to avoid influences, and
then goes on: The result is perfunctory or an unnaturally detached treatment of
the themes that should form the nature of our national literature, themes that
form the centre of our myths, our folk tales, and our indigenous religions, and
are expressed in our oral literature. Before we leave that issue of The Horn we
should note that it was the 1960 independence issue. On the back page the
associate editor Dapo Adelugba now, of course, Professor of Theatre Arts at
Ibadan dedicating The Horn to the cause of a national literature, writes To the
fanatically negritudinous who like to assert with Roy Campbell:
True sons of Africa are we,
Though bastardised with culture
Indigenous, and wild, and free
As wolf, as pioneer and vulture
we extend our hand of welcome, no less than to those whose concept of culture
is more sympathetic.The cock has crowed: it is day: let us work to uphold the
glories of the new nation.
5

Clark-Bekederemo, J.P, Collected Plays 1964-1988, Howard U.P., Washington DC, 1991,
introduction by Abiola Irele, p. xvii.
6
Ed. Martin Banham, Nigerian Student Verse 1959, Ibadan University Press, Ibadan, 1960.

64

There were other campus based publications, including the often parochial
Ibadan journal which rather gave away its other-worldliness by carrying a pretty
cover design created in Ipswich. But it was in the town, and specifically at the
Mbari Writers and Artists Club, of course, that publications of great richness and
significance flourished, many of them the initiative of Ulli Beier and often
magnificently illustrated by Suzanne Wenger. Beier is described by Wole
Soyinka as a wanderer who came, saw, and was conquered, whose approach to
life rescued the word expatriate from its usual negative connotations.7 The
Mbari club itself was situated in the heart of Ibadan, in a district called Gbagi,
close to the thriving Dugbe market. Soyinka, in his memoir Ibadan: The
Penkelemes Years8 aptly describes the members of Mbari as a suspect breed of
artists and intellectuals. Soyinkas memoir, incidentally, is a rich source of
information on the artistic and political life of Ibadan in the early 1960s,
penkelemes being described by Soyinka as a deliberate, populist corruption of
peculiar mess.9 A suspect breed, that is, to the Lagos-based arts establishment
that was so confused by the play A Dance of the Forests that Soyinka submitted
as an independence celebration that it turned it down, allowing the playwright to
stage it himself with his company The 1960 Masks. Here was a play that opened
with the stage direction An empty clearing in the forest. Suddenly the soil
appears to be breaking and the head of the Dead Woman pushes its way up. It
then developed into what I, at the time, could only grasp as a vast kaleidoscopic
pageant of Yoruba myth, history and lore, engaged with characters and events
from the contemporary world. I cant pretend I fully understood this complex
play in many ways I believe the source book for everything he wrote
subsequently but I knew that, in terms of imagination, character, language,
comment and theatrical dynamic, I was seeing something extraordinary. I take
encouragement from the fact that Ulli Beier had some of the same difficulty
with aspects of the play. Reviewing the text in Black Orpheus10 he comments
that the play is almost as obscure as the second part of Faust. Staged as an
alternative contribution to the 1960 independence festivities the play made
clear that Soyinkas satiric view of events was a deal more sceptical than that of
the official programme organisers. Here, bursting onto the stage, was theatre
that, in common with so much new dramatic writing from Nigeria, made much
contemporary western theatre look positively anaemic.
Returning to Mbari, the club, though Ibadan based, was both national and
international in its membership and significance. In addition to Beier, Soyinka,
7

Ogundele, Wole, Omoluabi: Ulli Beier, Yoruba Society and Culture, Bayreuth African
Studies 66, Bayreuth, 2003, p. 9
8
Soyinka, Wole, Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years. A Memoir 1946-65, Minerva, London, 1995,
p.302
9
Soyinka, 1995, p xiii
10
No.8, pp.57-8

65

Clark, the poet Christopher Okigbo, the South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele
and artists Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke were founder or early members.
Wole Ogundele describes the founding and early years of Mbari in some detail
in his tribute to Beier, Omoluabi: Ulli Beier, Yoruba Society and Culture11
recently published by Bayreuth African Studies. The early days of Mbari were
packed with artistic action exhibitions, readings, discussions and productions,
the last famously or perhaps infamously including Soyinkas production on
Mbaris open courtyard stage of J.P.Clarks first powerful play Song of a Goat
in which, at least in early performances, an attempt was made to sacrifice a live
goat on stage. The line by the character Zifa - My wife, see how with one stroke
of my knife/ I sever the head from the trunk - was not always successfully
followed by the action, but no one could fault the director on his demand for
realism! The lasting legacy of Mbari may well, however, be its publications.
They ranged from the magnificent Black Orpheus which though officially
published by the Ministry of Education in the Western Region had its spiritual
home in Mbari - to exuberantly produced collections of poetry, plays, art and
cultural commentary. The production standards were confident and ambitious.
This was probably one of the most exciting and concentrated publishing
ventures in the arts that one can imagine. A novel, A Walk in the Light by Alex
la Guma, Drawings by Uche Okeke, Clarks Song of a Goat and Poems 1962,
Heavensgate and Limits by Christopher Okigbo, African Songs by Leon Damas,
Oriki by Bakare Gbadamosi, Three Plays by Wole Soyinka, and so on. These
publications not only celebrated Nigerian arts, but also introduced, through
translation, work from other parts of Africa or the diaspora. And this latter
quality was one of the defining attributes of Black Orpheus and of Mbari, and
one of the great influences on the arts of Ibadan in the 60s. In the first issue of
the journal in 1957 the editors, Beier and Janheinz Jahn wrote:
The young African writer is struggling hard to build for himself a
literary public in Africa It is still possible for a Nigerian child to
leave a secondary school with a thorough knowledge of English
literature, but without even having heard of such great black writers as
Lopold Sdar Senghor or Aime Csaire. One difficulty, of course,
has been that of language; because a great deal of the best African
writing is in French or Portuguese or Spanish. Black Orpheus tries to
break down some of these language barriers by introducing writers
from all territories in translation[W]e shall not forget the great
traditions of oral literature of the African tribes. For it is on the heritage
of the past, that the literature of the future must be based.12

11
12

Ogundele, 2003, pp.104-26.

Black Orpheus, No 1, September 1957, p.4

66

The subsequent handsome issues of Black Orpheus were astonishing in the

range of writers introduced, in the vigour of critical debate, the promotion and
discussion of traditional and contemporary arts, and the encouragement of new,
specifically Nigerian, writing. Appropriately the journal celebrated
independence in its 8th issue with a poem translated from the Yoruba of
Adebayo Faleti by Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier:
There is nothing so sweet as independence.
It is a great day on which the slave buys his freedom.
When a slave can go to fetch water
And nobody will tell him: you are coming late!
When a slave will fetch firewood
And use it to cook is own food!

No day is like the day when the elephant served under the duiker.
Duiker sent elephant to the river,
But elephant did not return in time.
Duiker beat elephant until he was unable to shit!
Duiker beat elephant until he was unable to piss!
Duiker abused elephant on the bridge.
He reminded elephant he was rich enough to own him.
But the elephant accepted the punishment with love.
He said: it is not because I am stupid,
Or because I have not grown up.
If the slave moves carefully,
He may still buy his freedom after a long, long time.
It is not too late for the elephant
To buy himself free and become head of the animals.
Let us learn wisdom from the elephant.
Let us shake off our suffering with patience.
Gently we will kill the fly on our own body.
Let all of us get ready to buy ourselves back
After all: we have land, and we have hoes.
We have cocoa trees and we have bananas.
We have palm kernels and we have groundnuts.
Let us fight, so that we may cultivate our own farm
To escape from being slaves and pawns
Let all our people be free.13
Finally, a thought about the outside world, from which Ibadan was by no means
isolated. I have recorded the fact that political refugees from other parts of
Africa homed in on Ibadan, conscientizing both students and staff. External
13

Vol.4, no.3

67

events were reacted to vigorously, whether protesting Britain and Frances

invasion of Egypt and the Suez Canal in 1956, or the murder of Patrice
Lumumba in 1961. On the latter The Horn14 carried a poem by Akpan Esen
graphically accusing western powers of complicity in his death and anticipating
a revenging Russia:
Rape, ravish, grab!
Till that Red Eagle from the Ural Heights
With beak of Hammer, claws of tested brass
With vengeance swoop upon your murderous heads
And raise the fallen.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) lobbied energetically, with
phone links to protest meetings in Britain and the US: this, you will recall, being
the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russias achievement in sending the first
satellite into space caused astonishment: The Horn, ever in the forefront of
comment, carried Ralph Oparas light-hearted Ballad of Sputnik in which the
imagined Russian inventor, Professor Shinksy, unable to buy whisky from
America, gives his wife an alternative birthday present:
Take this, my dear, your birthday gift;
Tis SPUTNIK, he did croon;
Though WHISKY cheers, yet Sputnik, dear,
Trajects you to the moon!!
In May 1964 The Horn15 editorialised against the banning by the Western
Nigerian government of the Hubert Ogunde Concert Party with their play
Yoruba Ronu! (Yoruba Awake!), saying that their only crime is that they have
not been chanting hallelujah to a crippled and blinkered regime. The then editor
said Politics is outside the authority of The Horn but the fact of the matter was
that in one way or another politics, in one guise or another, dominated the period
around 1960, and astonishingly often found its most vigorous expression in the
arts.

14
15

Vol.4, no.3
Vol.3, no.3

68

Book
Reviews

69

Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon. Clare A.

Ignatowski. Indiana U.P., Bloomington, 2006. Pp. 272. ISBN 0 253 21794 6
(pb.) $24.95
The challenges facing post-colonial Africa include attempts to cope with the
complexities of modernity and tradition. On one hand, the long arms of
globalization, including giant multinational corporations, sophisticated
telecommunications gadgets, and powerful Western media programs, have
penetrated every corner of the continent. On the other hand, Africa continues to
cling to its traditions: witchcraft, bride wealth, and rituals such as initiations,
dance and song.
It is most appropriate to understand Africas challenges through village life and
city neighbourhoods given that the continents problems are mired in its past as
well as its present. In Journey of Song: Public Life and Modernity in Cameroon,
Clare Ignatowski illustrates how the Tupuri in northern Cameroon mediate and
experience these global forces through their local cultural systems and how the
local systems, including communications and governance, impact the countrys
institutions.
The ancestral gurna dance of the Tupuri people is presented as a powerful
institution that serves as the communitys moral compass and an arena where
reputations are built and conflicts are resolved. The book provides a window
into the interactions between the gurna institution and forms of socialization,
governing, justice, and communication. The reader is invited into Tupuri society
through dance and song and allowed to experience daily life that includes death
celebrations dances, rainy season dances, and state-sponsored dances.
Specifically, the gurna serves multiple functions in Tupuriland. First, it serves as
a communicative system. It is a license to speak publicly in a country not
known for according its citizens any expressive rights through the conventional,
government-controlled media. The gurna song is a poetic license to
communicate announcements to the larger community; and a vibrant institution
that coexists and competes with the conventional media. This communication
function not only reinforces the importance of the gurna song and dance
association, but it also satisfies the peoples appetite for information and offers
them alternative forums for expression.
Second, the gurna song serves a significant social function in Tupuriland: a
license to shame and embarrass individuals, to regulate community conduct and
determine what is respectable behaviour; and a home for the disillusioned and
elite city dwellers. Performances offer an opportunity to debate societal issues,
vent grievances through insults and satire, correct transgressions, and examine
the society as a whole. Dance gestures and song lyrics reveal the moral position
70

of Tupuris on topics such as Christianity, and the abundance of formal education

without jobs. Tupuris sort out and negotiate conflicting moral orders through
dance and song, seek justice as well as retribution, pushing aside official law
and order avenues. Cultural performances take on the role of social
governance.
Third, gurna song is also about power and prestige. For a country in a state of
political, economic and social decline since the 1980s, gurna song offers an
opportunity for the powerless to challenge authorities, including some traditional
leaders who have been co-opted by the government. While the Tupuri may
respect the gurna, they also see it as an outlet to criticize those in authority.
Gurna songs and dances are also full of praise and admiration for individuals,
indirectly conferring prestige and legitimacy to those in authority and
consolidating their power base. Clare Ignatowski has taken readers on a journey
through Tupuriland, introduced them to the song and dance lessons that begin
with the long dry season, the solidarity offered by the gurna, and the rich local
stories. But this study is more than just an exposure to gurna ritual or a
performance of wounded words. It offers a critique of what happens when a
state breaks down and the ruling party becomes a dictatorship. Examples of the
gurna exist in many corners of Cameroon, providing the people with a safety net
they can rely on, given that their government has failed them. Since the political
troubles arising from the 1992 elections, the ruling party has neutered its
opponents and clamped down on freedom of expression.
For the Tupuri in particular and for many Africans, verbal arts may be the only
safe arena to resist neo-colonialism and the dictatorship of the modern state.
As Africans navigate the complex waters of modernity and tradition, rituals such
as dance and song will continue to offer opportunities for social and political
commentary. These social organizations offer some hope for viable politics in
Africa.
Bill Jong-Ebot,
Florida Memorial University
Writing Madness: Borderlines of the body in African literature. Flora VeitWild. Oxford: James Currey, 2006, 174pp, ISBN 0 85255 583 0
Critical writing on African literature is still often single author, country or time
based; it is therefore pleasing to see a book that is topic led, looking at madness
in African literature, and particularly at how that madness is often expressed
through portrayals of grotesque, excessive or abused bodies. Having said this
Veit-Wilds book does often read like a collection of essays loosely held
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together by a series of interests, including women and gender, anthropology and

surrealism, alongside madness and the body, which gives it a rather
uncomfortable bagginess. It becomes something of a portmanteau, full of items
of interest that dont always sit comfortably together.
At the centre of Writing Madness are three exciting chapters on Dambudzo
Marechera, Lesego Rampolokeng and Sony Labou Tansi. Veit-Wild sees these
three experimental writers as emerging from the surrealist tradition she discusses
in chapter three which so engaged the Francophone poets, Senghor, Cesaire and
Tchicaya U Tamsi. The post-colonial writers use language in a far more
grotesque, scatological, even monstrous manner than their surrealist forbears but
Marechera explains. If one is living in an abnormal society, then only abnormal
expression can express that society. (89) Veit-Wild discusses the writers
rejection of the African writer label as they draw on a Bakhtinian
carnivalisation of language (94), at the same time that their production is
profoundly influenced by the madness of the particular postcolonial societies
that they find themselves in, full of Ubuesque dictators in love with violence and
sexual excess. Veit-Wild is particularly good on analysis of poetry, though she
also examines Marchera and Labou Tansis novels in some detail. Sadly these
writers prolific theatrical production and the theatricality of Rampolokengs
performance poetry is scarcely mentioned. I do wonder why so many literary
critics continue to fail to engage with drama.
Even within these chapters there is some unease as to focus. We are told that
Veit-Wild is interested in how madness is written, not in the possible insanity of
the writer, but she gives the reader considerable detail about Marecheras
struggles with sanity. She also tells us a fascinating story of how his mother
apparently cursed the young Dambudzo as a child, and analyses how his poetry
is similar to some scatological Shona initiation poetry, but apart from saying that
Marechera himself rejected identification with his African heritage she then fails
to engage with these issues she herself has raised. The ambivalence of the
positioning of these writers in relation to African and world literature is never
satisfactorily interrogated.
The first two chapters of Writing Madness are heavily anthropological. VeitWild looks at how colonialists saw African bodies as distorted, as in the
disgusting exploitation of Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus who became
the object of prurient fascination when she was exhibited in the Europe in the
early nineteenth century. She goes on to examine how Africans were seen as
infantile and necessarily inferior at this time. Chapter two somewhat strangely
concentrates almost entirely on the relationship of a white South African
psychoanalyst with a local healer in the 1930s. Wulf Sachs, the psychoanalyst,
appears to have projected his wishes on to his subject, and I suppose this relates
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to Veit-Wilds point about colonists seeing only what they wished to in African
subjects, but no clear bridge is then laid for the subsequent analysis of madness
in African literature. Certainly I feel uneasy with the apparently casual and
unexplored linking of the surrealist form to madness that then follows.
The final section of this book moves on to study three women novelists; Bessie
Head, Rebecca Njau and Tsitsi Dangerembga. Chapter eight looks at how
womens bodies can become the site of their madness because they have control
over little else in their lives. The sections on Heads A Question of Power and
Dangerembgas Nervous Conditions seemed to me over-brief, simply picking up
a few points that neatly fitted into Veit-Wilds interest in relating these writers
to more anthrolopology; in this case relating them to an idea of stray women;
that is women who became outcasts because they could not fit in to their
societies. However the section on Njaus Ripples in the Pool, though also brief,
was a welcome inclusion of a writer often neglected in contemporary criticism.
The final chapter looks at Dangerembgas film, Kare Kare Zvako, based on a
folktale about a woman killed by her lazy husband in order to provide him with
food in a time of famine. Madness is not a focus at all here, rather Veit-Wild
links the film to Nervous Conditions, arguing that both are concerned with food,
womens bodies and male exploitation.
These is much of interest in Writing Madness and the central section on the
surrealist poets of the grotesque brings voices from Francophone and Southern
Africa into fascinating dialogue. Veit-Wild concentrates throughout on these
two regions with some additional references to East Africa. The work on women
writers seems to me too cursory to do more than look at a few points about how
women, as opposed to the men previously focused on, see their often exploited
bodies. The anthropology often throws up entertaining nuggets of information,
but Africa is huge continent and the particular examples chosen have been rather
arbitrarily selected and are not by any means fully integrated into the text as a
whole.
Jane Plastow
University of Leeds
Globalisation and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of
Blackness. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds. Duke
University Press, 2006. Pp .407. ISBN 0-8223-3772-X (pb). 14.95
This book belongs to the first series of academic materials that project the social
and cultural values of people of African descent in the international arena. The
authors fearlessly investigate how these virtues are being used to redefine the
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perception of blackness in the minds of others within the global village. The
book towers above others in its category in the sense that it draws on the
anthropology and rich cultural identity of Black People to express their social
and cultural heritage.
The authors, in a constructively argued manner, query the low level of
significance currently being attached to macroanalytics of racialization . This is
in spite of the fact that it is a widely held notion that racial formations
dynamically reflect and shape global processes, and not merely effect them. In a
way, this book has succeeded in arguing the case that race has both constituted
and been constituted by global transformations.Relying on the unique attributes
of their music, dance and fashion, the people of African descent are ferociously
questioning the global perception of blackness, while at the same time reshaping
such global perceptions. This book explores the deep-rooted desire of many
Africans in the diaspora not to be alienated from, but rather openly expressing
their affinity to, their ancestral homeland and continent.
The authors must be commended for their blunt refusal not to be mindless about
the vices that punctuate the virtues which, again, globalization has bestowed on
the Africans in the diaspora. They discuss these vices with no less tenacity.
Through this book, I have come to realize the changing meanings and politics of
blackness, and how the contemporary processes of globalization are both
changing and being shaped by these changes. As a reader you are bound to
realize the same.
Dr. Olasunkanmi Sholarin
University of Westminster,

Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century.
Gregory Mann. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C. & London, 2006. pp. 344.
ISBN 0-8223-3768-1 (pb).14.95.
This elegantly written study of the complex pattern of ambiguous relationships
between France and the West African veterans of the French army is as much
about the present as the past. Although the subtitle refers to the 20th century, the
author illustrates how notions of reciprocity, mutual obligation and a blood
debt feed not only into the controversy surrounding the veterans pensions but
also into the current debate on immigration. Africans played an important part in
protecting France during World War I and a vital role in the liberation of la
74

Patrie in World War II. Roughly a quarter of all French casualties on WW II

battlefields were North and West Africans.
Published in July 2006, Native Sons was launched just two months before the
release of the movie Indignes, which caused an unprecedented upsurge in
French soul-searching about its colonial past. The story goes that, after a private
showing in the Elyse, Madame Chirac urged her husband to do something
about the issue of veterans pensions. African army pensions had been frozen in
1959, on the eve of independence; and subsequent adjustments were haphazard
at best and lagged behind increases granted in France itself. Back in 2001, the
Council of State had ordered the French state to pay equal pensions to all war
veterans, regardless of their current nationality. But implementation of this
ruling had stalled time and time again. On the day that Indignes was released,
Chirac announced that the pensions of African soldiers who had fought in the
French army would be brought in line with those of French veterans. Both the
movie and its largely French-born North African cast have been touring the
suburbs of larger French cities (les banlieues). The film provides powerful
ammunition for contemporary claims in immigrant communities, particularly
among the sans-papiers, who feel that France is ignoring its obligations
towards its erstwhile colonial subjects. Spokesmen on behalf of North and West
African immigrant communities insist on talking about a blood debt that has
yet to be repaid.
While Indignes focuses on North African soldiers, the subjects of Gregory
Manns book are the soldiers from West Africa, formerly known as the
Tirailleurs Snegalais. Native Sons cannot hope to have such a deep impact on
public opinion in France but it does provide a detailed and carefully argued
study to underpin current debates about the debts incurred by France in its recent
colonial past. But beyond the history of French-African relationships, the author
tells a more universal tale of absence and belonging, of migration and return, of
loyalty and betrayal, of citizenship and nationhood.
The most compelling parts of the book are Chapters 1 and 2. Based on a wealth
of archives and oral histories, Mann demonstrates how relationships predicated
on slavery were recast in new patterns of dependency and patronage in the
colonial army, with its concurrent language of mutual obligation and reciprocity.
The point of departure is the town of San in Mali, home to a large number of
Tirailleurs Snegalais. The detailed story of the military and subsequent civilian
careers of two brothers, Krtigi Traore and Nianson Coulibaly, demonstrates
how soldiers used the language of obligation and merit to further their social
standing and political ambitions in their home communities.

75

In the following chapters, the story moves to France, then on to the Maghreb and
South East Asia, and back again to West Africa and France. Through
remittances and correspondence to fathers, brothers and wives, the soldiers have
maintained a stake in family life and some measure of control over their
domestic interests.
Towards the end of the book (p196), the author rightly raises the question about
why forty-odd years after independence a political discourse about veterans
entitlements continues to inflect discussions about the rights of West African
immigrants in Frances Fifth Republic. He also asks what, if anything, this
might tell us about empire and postcolonial politics. Unfortunately, no answer is
forthcoming.
All European colonial powers made extensive use of native soldiers in their
colonial armies. Even if equal treatment of European and native troops was
practised during army service, this certainly did not extend to the payment of
pensions and benefits to men who subsequently became nationals of newly
independent states. Why then this soul-searching in France, while public opinion
in former colonial powers such as Britain and the Netherlands remains
untouched by the plight of their African or Asian veterans? The pensions of
Gurkha soldiers are still far lower than those of British ex-servicemen. The
Moluccan soldiers in the Dutch colonial army were dismissed from army service
when they set foot on Dutch soil in 1949, and were sent away with humiliating
social benefits rather than the pensions they were entitled to. To be sure, public
opinion in Britain and the Netherlands did voice sentiments of a debt of
honour towards these veterans but these feelings were limited to these
particular groups of ethnic soldiers who had built up a reputation of loyalty
over the centuries. Veterans in Indonesia or in West or East Africa do not figure
in these discussions, and links to the current debate on immigration issues are
totally absent.
France was unique, no doubt, in that large contingents of West African and
North African troops actually participated in the liberation of la Patrie, fighting
and dying on French soil. The African and Asian troops in the British and Dutch
colonial armies fought and died in distant parts of the empire. Which other
elements could help explain the different attitude in France compared to that in
other former colonial powers? The author points towards the peculiar
characteristics of Mali as not only a post-colonial, but also a post-slavery
society, with ingrained concepts of mutual obligation. This is an interesting
perspective, but it has little relevance for the discussion in France itself, where
no distinction is made between the claims of North African and West African
veterans and immigrants.
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Gregory Mann makes no attempt at a comparative perspective that could situate

the French-African experience in the wider context of colonial and post-colonial
ties. A comparative view would perhaps go some way to resolving the questions
that Mann rightly poses. However, interesting books generally raise more
questions that they can hope to answer, and Native Sons is no exception. It is an
engaging and compelling history and it leaves the reader with some intriguing
issues to chew on.
Ineke van Kessel,
African Studies Centre,
Leiden,

Democratic Reform in Africa: Its Impact on Governance & Poverty

Alleviation. ed. Muna Ndulo. James Currey, Oxford, and Ohio University Press,
Athens, Ohio, 2006. Pp. 304. ISBN 978-0-85255-946-8 (pb), 18.95. ISBN 9780-85255-945-1 (hb), 50.00.
Democratic Reform in Africa presents a diverse collection of essays focusing on
issues of governance, democratic development and economic reform. The
contributors come from notably varied academic and organisational
backgrounds. The contributions generally adopt an overview and summary
approach, but there are case studies relating to Ghana, South Africa and
Zimbabwe as well as a critical examination of the NEPAD peer review
initiative. Echoes of the optimist viewpoint still relatively common a decade
ago appear here in more muted form, and in their overall thrust the reflections
offered on Africas current democratic prospects are sobering.
The opening chapters by Muna Ndulo, Johann Kriegler, and Ann and Robert
Seidman mark out themes which recur elsewhere in the contributions. One is the
primacy of the rule of law, democratic development and human rights too long
neglected in favour of prioritizing economic development in Africa, and (as
another contributor notes) even now still accorded a lesser importance by most
donors than the pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals. The other is the
importance of reform processes being driven by African priorities if they are to
acquire either legitimacy or sustainability. The complexities (and often
dysfunctional aspects) of the relationship between external pressures and local
initiative in the African case are addressed on the economic side by Tsatsu
Tsikatas discussion of Ghanas structural adjustment experience and, in its
political dimensions, by Reginald Austins account of the difficulties Zimbabwe
has experienced in evolving a constitutional order that meets both internal
acceptability and external credibility. The attempts to institutionalize what were
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originally Western conceptions of human rights in African constitutional

practice are in turn explored in a trio of chapters by John Hatchard on the
experience of human rights commissions in Commonwealth Africa, by Penelope
Andrews on the role of the South African Constitutional Court, and in Douglas
Anglins analysis of the interplay of external and intra-Africa pressures over
NEPADs introduction of peer review of the democratic and human rights
performance of African regimes.
While Anglin observes that the initiators of peer review committed a strategic
error in not enlisting the early involvement of African civil society networks, the
question remains as to whether this means of anchoring the reform process
within African society is actually available. Certainly the Ghanaian and South
African legal service NGOs that Daniel Manning examines indicate that
agencies are evolving to help individuals and local communities to defend their
rights. But the impact of African advocacy NGOs more generally is modest due
to limited staff and financial resources and their uncertain legitimacy; as Peter
Takirambudde and Kate Fletcher note, only nine African states allow such
organisations to operate with little attempt to regulate their activities. Thomas
Lansners discussion of the media singles out of the role of radio in AIDS
awareness campaigns and in peace-building in conflict situations, but he
suggests that the private print media still lacks the professionalized cadres and a
secure economic base to play an effective watchdog role vis--vis most
African governments.
Joel Barkans review of Africas current democratic evolution points
nonetheless to areas meriting cautious optimism: if the democratic reform
momentum of the early l990s stopped well short of sweeping away the old
order, a resurgent authoritarianism has not re-emerged, and the number of
reasonably stable multiparty systems should gradually increase, especially as
younger and more reform-minded politicians establish a presence. Brian Levy
identifies a range of indicators that the economic reforms undertaken by African
governments under IFI supervision are bearing fruit, though he cautions that
reforms made against a backdrop of crisis, and under donor pressure, might
prove unsustainable. Moreover, Africas economies still lack the diversification
needed to underpin democratic consolidation. Ndulo stresses the gains that
devolution offers as a counterweight to the overcentralisation of African states,
but notes that governments have shown limited interest despite their prominence
on the governance agenda. Colleen Lowe-Morna charts the political progress of
African women under conditions of increased electoral competitiveness; while
the proportion of female legislators is similar to Europe (disregarding the Nordic
states), and while women politicians have won some significant victories in
removing discriminatory legislation, they tend to remain ghettoized at cabinet
78

level; women havent yet learned how to translate electoral participation into
real policy impact.
Despite the absence of topics that might usefully have extended this volumes
core concerns the evolving patterns of African presidentialism, for example, or
the changing role of legislatures under the impact of multipartyism this is a
valuable collection given the ground that it does cover and the range of its
thematic interests. While one or two of the chapters this reviewer found difficult
to relate to, the contributions overall are carefully argued and illuminating;
some, and particularly that by Anglin, proved outstanding.
Ralph A. Young
University of Manchester

Far in the Waste Sudan: On Assignment in Africa. Nicholas Coghlan.

McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal and London, 2005. Pp. 344. ISBN
HB 0773529357. 22.95.
For three years between 2000 and 2003, Nicholas Coghlan was Canadas top
diplomat in Sudan: not Ambassador (the holder of that post was stationed in
Addis Ababa), but head of the embassys Khartoum office. It was an office that
Coghlan himself was obliged to set up, using rooms in the (much more
substantially-endowed) British Embassy. Evelyn Waugh might have invented
the early episode in which the newcomer attempts to affix his national crest at
the door of his suite, and is told that it must be balanced by another one
representing the mother country. When this arrives he is billed nearly fifteen
hundred pounds.
As in a Waugh novel, landscapes, people and institutions are exposed in series
of episodes, through their interaction with a slightly bemused central
protagonist. But in the present case the procession of scenes seems much longer,
and there is little plot. Nor is there an attempt to build any systematic thesis.
Coghlan has evidently been an efficient maker of notes, and he appears willing
to transcribe anything that could be of interest. He holds discussions with
politicians and warlords; oil-workers and aid-workers. He travels to the deserts
of the North and the forests of the South; to Darfur in the West and Dinder in the
East. He sees the crumbling balconies of Suakin, the dune-lapped pyramids of
Meroe, the mine-strewn mountains of Nuba, the moribund industrial complex of
Nzara. He watches Dinka dancing in Wau, and Dervish dancing in Omdurman.
He goes boating with the Blue Nile Sailing Club and airborne food-dropping
over the war-torn South with Operation Lifeline. He makes the appropriate local
79

allusions to Herodotus, Kitchener and Leni Riefenstahl. In short, he covers a

high proportion of the things that the modern expat is expected to do in Sudan.
He also thinks a high proportion of the thoughts that the modern expat is
expected to think. He feels anger at the unending pervasiveness of acute
suffering, amazement at the resilience of the people who suffer, dismay at the
expense and inefficiencies of international aid, irritation with the frequent smallmindedness of officials, indignation at the callousness of politicians and
warlords. Like most of us, in his discomfort he is driven to moralize not quite
fairly or consistently, and to assert or imply more than he can assuredly know.
Why was the machinery of Nzara idle?
Its the war, everyone shrugged. No. It was neglect, pure and simple.
Pure and simple explanations are what dignitaries come up with when they are
feeling badgered.
To say that little in the book is very new is not to condemn it as worthless. A lot
in the book is slightly new. A record of the particular dates and places at which a
politician, project or institution was disposed in a certain way may well be of
value to later students, if only as a touchstone for other material. Taken as a
whole, this volume is probably a more complete representation than any other of
the mainstream Western view of Sudan at the turn of the millennium. It hardly
claims to be an academic work; there are no footnotes or formal references. But
it has a serviceable index, so that one can imagine turning to it on occasion to
see what Coghlan found in relation to a given topic. It is of particular interest,
however, in relation to the oil controversy. The Canadian government had
appointed Coghlan largely with a view to handling national and international
concern over the role of a Canadian extraction company Talisman which
was accused of cooperating with the Sudanese regime in scorched-earth tactics
to protect the installations from Southern insurgents.
With such topics and uses in view, the books lack of an overall argument is
perhaps no disadvantage. Coghlans observations reflect standard Western
preoccupations, but they do not seem to have been deliberately selected and
spun for purposes of self-vindication or anything else. The prose style
throughout is clear and straightforward. At only slightly over twenty pounds for
a beautifully-produced hard-back volume (and royalties going to a Canadian
NGO), a reference copy should be purchased by any sizeable university library.
A few more episodes do stand out. The account of Maygoma orphanage in
Khartoum in which some months, forty or fifty of the sixty or so admissions
would die is shocking even by the standard of Sudanese horror stories. The
three Antonov planes queuing on a runway to depart for the war-afflicted South
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and bearing respectively food, medicines and bombs, make a telling emblem.
Perhaps more evocative still is the portrait of the newly-appointed Wali of
Abyei, who invites himself into a plane chartered by the Canadians, slots
ammunition into a small shiny handgun, binds it into his turban, and settles
down to sleep.
Michael Medley
University of Bristol

Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Ed. Sarah Nuttall, Duke
University Press in conjunction with the Prince Claus Fund, Durham and
London, 2006. Pp 416, 126 illustrations 17.99
This is a beautiful book that is, the production values given to the publication
by Duke University Press and no doubt supported by the Prince Claus Fund are
wonderful, beautiful even. The essays are supported by the kind of colour
reproduction that it is rare to find even in the museum catalogues of blockbuster
exhibitions. The essays are even colour highlighted, and there is an over all feel
to the book of sumptuous quality. This is a book destined for bookshops that
exist as the essential adjunct of the modern art gallery. As such it is no doubt
going to picked up and read by a metropolitan art elite of the type well versed in
post modern / postcolonial / deconstructive / discourse analysis; the question
though is whether the book doesnt simply add more exotica for the art hungry
savages of the west desperately seeking Africa?
Beautiful Ugly is both a timely book and a book of its time. It is an irritating
book as well as one that contains some surprises and some genuine importance.
Beautiful Ugly indeed. In general it is a book that purports to explore the idea of
beauty and/or ugliness and/or the sublime within African discourses of the
aesthetic or perhaps, more broadly, taste. It is however, firmly orientated toward
investigating the expression of that beauty /taste within the (what is becoming
something of a clich) contemporary African and African diaspora situation.
Through these essays, some of which have been previously published, but most
seemingly written for this volume, the authors track something that might be
called beauty or be called the aesthetic through a series of different situations,
idioms and places that all in some way relate to Africa.
Immediately the title starts flagging up the habitual warning signs that
accompany any discussion of African aesthetics. One does not have to have
read Barry Hallens (1979) critique of Robert Farris Thompsons categories of
Yoruba aesthetics to realise that this is fraught and dangerous territory,
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intertwined in the politics of identity and the relationships that inhere between
categories of taste and judgement found in the West and those found in African
societies. Here is one of the irritating things. There is a long and complicated
history of thought behind the idea of the aesthetic as it appears as a
philosophical concept in African societies but this book makes little reference to
these debates. Rather it firmly sets out in search of an aesthetic within the
contemporary African situation. So, despite Gikandis and Mbembes opening
pieces, I am not sure upon what philosophical grounds the book is standing.
Maybe this is an unjustified criticism, perhaps the book doesnt pretend to a
philosophy, it is after all an art book and perhaps its intention is no more than
to be illustrative of a diverse set of practices loosely organised around the theme
of beauty / ugliness within some undefined contemporary historical period. The
problem with this is that then the book potentially becomes no more than a type
of modernist connoisseurship, collecting cultures where they conjoin to art. And
this book clearly attends to more than this. Yet placing together a set of
disparate, albeit desperately elegant papers, under the rubric of (an) African
beauty (however that is figured) gives the impression of a metaphysical object
that is universally applicable. We are back with Picasso and his sense of a
universal African emotionalism (something well critiqued by Gikandi in the first
essay of the book but something unfortunately other authors here seem
incapable of avoiding). More than this, I suspect that what is really being
discussed in many of the papers here is neither beauty nor ugliness, the sublime
or the grotesque, but something that might be more recognisable as style.
What is good about this book is that it brings together some very interesting
papers around the issue of art and politics and it clearly underlines Enwezors
(2000) statement that some time ago contemporary art in Africa became
imprisoned in theories of history, materiality and ethnicity. And that What has
been lost is a consideration of the form of the aesthetic that made up /makes up
the experience of art within the post colony. This book carries within it where it
deals with the local situations a clear understanding of the need to engage with
the forms of contemporary aesthetic production as they develop within histories
and ethnicities, but which are not subordinate to either. For this, and for Nuttals
very clear introduction of the terms of the artistic debate about aesthetics
(although, as I say, not the philosophical one), the book is a valuable resource,
and one that if read carefully certainly enhances ways of thinking through some
African relations to beauty in the world savages notwithstanding.
Will Rea
University of Leeds

82

Public and Private Universities in Kenya: New Challenges, Issues &

Achievements. Kilemi Mwiria, Njugna Ngethe, Charles Ngome, Douglas
Ouma-Odero, Violet Wawire and Daniel Wesonga. James Currey, Oxford, and
East African Educational Press, Nairobi, 2007. Pp. 204. ISBN 978-0-85255-4425 (pb). 14.95
Gender in the Making of the Nigerian University System. Charmaine Pereira.
James Currey, Oxford and Heinemann Educational Books (Plc), Ibadan, 2007.
Pp.203. ISBN 978-0-85255-172-1 (pb). 14.95
Change & Transformation in Ghanas Publicly Funded Universities.
Takyiwaa Manuh, Sulley Gariba and Joseph Budu. James Currey, Oxford and
Woeli, Accra. 2007. Pp. 175. ISBN 978-0-85255-171-4 (pb). 14.95.
The universities established in Africa after the Second World War were
designed to produce graduates who would supply what were sometimes
described with hostages to fortune as the high-level manpower needs of
new nations as they joined the community of independent sovereign states. In
Anglophone countries Oxbridge patterns were influential and the University of
London was the degree-awarding institution for the newly-established
University Colleges. Such high standards were insisted on that University
College at Ibadan became known as a failing factory whose rejects and ejects
often succeeded in winning the golden fleece of a degree from a university in
the mother country.
For some years after independence, Anglophone African universities held
tenaciously to imported patterns. I recall Ivy Compton-Burnett was on the
syllabus in a resolutely British-oriented English Department of the University of
Ghana, Legon, during the late sixties. It took a revolution by young lecturers in
Nairobi to establish a new trend in which English Departments were replaced by
Literature Departments centred on local experience. Since then Africa has
been swept by confused alarms sounded by world movements that have
included a new wave of feminism, the digital revolution and the HIV/AIDS
epidemic or pandemic. African universities grappled with these while being
asked to increase student intake, cope with political appointments, manage on
reduced staffing levels, survive on very limited subsidies, and assess the quality
of the student experience.
The three studies listed at the head of this review appear in the Higher Education
in Africa series and examine aspects of the University system in three African
countries in order to initiate debate. Each provides information that gives
grounds for concern, but will not surprise those who have been keeping an eye
on the situation since Compton-Burnett was on the syllabus at Legon. Details
83

from the books themselves vividly indicate the circumstances under which
undergraduates in Africa study. For example, library provision is often
inadequate, attempts to increase numbers of female undergraduate are
sometimes thwarted, and tensions over accommodation have been building up.
These studies tell stories that shock even those familiar with the under-funded,
over-stretched, constantly-scrutinized British university system. From the study
on Kenya, we learn that the Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Library originally
intended for 6,000 readers, now caters for 16,715, and that at Moi University
400 students sometimes chase one or two books. (40) Figures produced by the
Nigerian National Universities Commission for 2001 highlighted the worrying
failure to attract more female students to universities in the north. Figures for the
universities in Bauchi and Yola showed the number of female students actually
fell between 1992 /3 and 1997/8 from 615 to 412 in one case, and from 818 to
581 in the other. Staff levels are worryingly low in Nigerian universities. The
source just quoted indicates that the University of Ilorin only had 531 academic
staff, a shortfall of 1090. In Ghana the so-called Universities for Development
Studies and for Education had no subscriptions to any journals (74).
Accommodation was an area in which the universities in Ghana failed students
just as spectacularly. However, the authors of the relevant study listed above
were sanguine, observing: In terms of residential facilities, the crunch in
student housing has led all the universities to increase investment in campus
housing. The authors avert their eyes from the overcrowding that has up to six
students at Legon perching in rooms designed for one, and that has made
impossible demands of the sewage disposal system. They write of the
construction of a 400-bed hostel and gesture to the multi-billion cedi housing
complex, known as Jubilee Hall, that, when completed, will accommodate over
1,000. They write as if the crunch had been felt and relieved, the repercussions
monitored, and the student experience made uniformly satisfactory. As we will
see, this is far from the case.
The three books share a Preface that is signed by the Presidents of the four
funding bodies: the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford, Macarthur and Rockefeller
Foundations. Together these major funders constitute the Partnership for Higher
Education in Africa. Although giving away fortunes made by men who were
typically launched into their prosperous careers by apprenticeships, the grantmakers share a belief in higher education and in the transforming power of
universities. The Preface speaks of the ability of African universities to
transform themselves, and to promote national development. (Pereira, xiii) This
faith is expanded into a creed that enshrines the conviction that an independent
scholarly community, supported by strong universities goes hand in hand with a
healthy, stable democracy. Amplified, this emerges as the doctrine that,
appropriately transformed, universities can produce generations of engaged
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citizens (who) will nourish social, political, and economic transformation in the
continent. Steadfast in this conviction, that I would like to share but cannot
wholly, the grant-makers pooled resources to advance the reform of African
universities. $150,000,000 was contributed during the first five years of the
Partnerships life and a minimum of $200,000,000 has been pledged for the
second five-year programme. This began on 16 September 2005, and saw the
addition to the Partnership of the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations.
As the titles of the three books considered here indicate, the case studies vary
somewhat in approach. All, however, find a place under the Major Aims of the
Partnership that are listed as
Generating and sharing information about African universities and higher
education
Supporting universities seeking to transform themselves
Enhancing research capacity on higher education in Africa
Promoting collaboration among African researchers, academics and university
administrators
Initially the Partnership chose Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa,
Tanzania and Uganda for attention on the grounds that the universities in these
countries were already initiating positive change, developing a workable
planning process, and demonstrating genuine commitment to national capacitybuilding, in contexts of national reform. (xiii) An election later Kenya has been
added, but Zambia and Sierra Leone, for example, must be wondering how they
blotted their copy books. And it would not be surprising to hear concerned
Francophones scanning the list and muttering about les Anglo-Saxons.
The scholars and administrators funded by the Partnership to collect and collate,
research and recommend represent a range of academics and administrators,
many of them relatively junior. It is instantly apparent that these voices are from
the Senior Common Room rather than from, say a Committee of ViceChancellors or the cabal that meets in the Vice-Chancellors Lodge. The most
adventurous choice is the sole author of the Nigerian volume, Charmaine
Pereira, who stands outside the main university system as the National Coordinator of the Network for Women's Studies in Nigeria. Her published
research, that includes a robust study of Zina (roughly adultery) and
transgressive heterosexuality in northern Nigeria, has already taken her into
sensitive areas and she engages with the contested topic of gender in Nigerian
universities trenchantly in this series. From the books on Kenya and Ghana, it is
apparent that gender reflects an important preoccupation for the series. Gender is
on the series agenda, along with the use of ICT and responses to HIV/AIDS.
These topics are addressed, or at least acknowledged, in each of the books, and,
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from time to time, we glimpse the yawning chasm of the digital divide or feel
the chill shadow of the ravages of HIV/AIDS.
Pereiras work, like that of all the others, is based on extensive consultation. But
it is unlike the others in adopting a conventional academic approach. For
example, she begins with a glossary, shows an awareness of other studies in the
field, provides an historical analysis, and then examines the current situation.
She is meticulous, and persuasive, mingling statistical analysis (she includes 26
Tables and 14 Lists of Figures) with vivid testimonies. Her final chapter, entitled
Conclusions and Recommendations, opens with a statement that sums up her
intention: This study has sought to engender an understanding of the workings
of the university system. It was an ambitious goal and one hopes that the
approach adopted will be successful. One hopes that the momentum begun by
her interviews and encouraged by the publication will be maintained. However,
Pereira provides abundant evidence why progress on gender issues in Nigerian
universities might be slow. Her distressingly long list of ways in which male
academics indicate their lack of respect for female counterparts begins with:
jokes, snide remarks, insinuations, (and) derogatory comments in class to
students... (160) In light of this, one wonders if Pereiras work will be given the
attention it deserves.
That all is not well in African academia is clear. At the time of writing this the
news coming from the University of Ghana indicates new depths of
dissatisfaction have been reached and that students have shown their disaffection
in new ways. The shortage of accommodation recently prompted the
administration to introduce an in-out-out-out system whereby students will
spend their first years on campus and succeeding years off campus. Student
opinion has run fiercely against this and in favour of an in-out-out-in pattern.
That is to say, a return to campus for the final year. Feelings have run so high
there has been a weaponising of bodily waste and angry students have
disrupted end-of-year assessment processes by shit bombing examination
halls. The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Clifford Tagoe, has responded by
announcing that the University of Ghana has secured a 260 billion loan from a
consortium of banks for the construction of a 7,100-bed facility. That the
situation has deteriorated so far and that student numbers have so far outstripped
provision is entirely at odds with the approach advocated by Pereira and the
other authors. The concern with the process of consultation and the commitment
to planning embodied in the series is at odds with the situation glimpsed by the
student action and the V-Cs panicky response. The episode stands in
juxtaposition to the optimism of the grant-makers Preface.
It is not clear how much of the Partnerships funding has gone into the
preparation of these books and the others in the series. The funders have
86

certainly been well-served by the authors and publishers who have produced
challenging, substantial and elegant volumes. But it is by no means certain that
the books, which have been some five years in the making, will result in any
change. There is no guarantee that Vice-Chancellors and their management
teams will give them the attention they deserve. I hope they do, and, as the
cleaners get to work in the examination halls at Legon, I hope that faith in the
transforming power of universities is vindicated.
James Gibbs,
University of the West of England

Aawambo Kingdoms, History and Cultural Change. Perspectives from

Northern Namibia. Lovisa T. Nampala and Vilho Shigwedha. P.Schlettwein
Publishing, Switzerland, 2006. Pp.275. ISBN 3-908193-16-8 (pb). CHF 48.00
In 1851, Francis Galton encountered King Nangolo dhAmutenya of Ondonga,
one of the seven kingdoms of, what is today, Northern Namibia. As was
customary, the white man came bearing gifts, in this case a theatrical crown that
Galton had purchased in Drury Lane. According to Galtons account, Nangolo
accepted the crown with alacrity, though Nangolos own gift to Galton of his
niece offered, presumably, as a temporary wife was received with less
enthusiasm.
This is a minor anecdote but its inclusion in this volume is illuminating. As
explorers, missionaries, and, later, the officers of the colonial state, arrived in
Africa, they brought with them constellations of belief and practice alien to
socio-cultural formations already in place. By offering a European crown to an
African king, Galton was subverting indigenous tradition, and yet Nangolo,
seeing the opportunity that such novelties presented, did not hesitate to take the
prize.
Vilho Shigwedha and Lovisa T. Nampala here set out to reconstruct the social
and cultural effects of the arrival of Europeans in the Aawambo kingdoms of
Northern Namibia. In so doing, they seek to retrieve the authentic significance
of pre-colonial African culture, for so long dismissed or misunderstood; as
heathen by the missionaries, as primitive by the anthropologists and as
savage or backward by the colonial officials who came to rule over them.
Guided by an overarching intention to refute the mistaken assumptions of
colonial ethnography, Shigwedha and Nampala depict the intricacy and
sophistication of African cultural practice before and during a century of
transformation.
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While Shigwedha and Nampala share the (unsurprising) belief that the
missionary and colonial presence contributed to the decline of indigenous
African culture, they also show how African cultures have resisted, responded to
and adapted themselves towards the arrival of the Europeans. The two accounts,
presented side by side, offer fresh perspectives on the colonial encounter.
Yet more significant, however, is the role this research may play in the process
of decolonization still ongoing in Africa and elsewhere. Namibia, it should not
be forgotten, did not gain independence until 1990. The University of Namibia
was not founded until 1992. These two authors, the first Namibians to have
obtained a Masters degree in history from the university, are at the front-line of
a new historiography; written by Namibian historians and researched from oral
sources.
Nampalas study examines the impact of Finnish missionaries on three
kingdoms in Northern Namibia in the century since their first arrival in 1870,
aiming to show how traditional ceremonies common to all three kingdoms were
challenged and transformed following the introduction of Christianity. In
doing so, Nampala sketches the contradictions at the heart of the civilizing
mission, locating tensions at the fault line between the missionary project to
convert Africans into Europeans and the reification of tradition by the
colonial state as the necessary means to upholding indirect rule.
Nampalas most original contribution, however, is his recovery of meaning
embodied within Aavawambo cultural practice, for so long misconstrued by the
Western gaze. Focusing in turn on marriage, rainmaking, circumcision, burial of
the deceased and the naming of infants, Nampala provides an authentic
anthropology. A second chapter, dedicated to Ovawambo religious belief, draws
parallels with Christianity, reclaiming a right to truth and avoiding the binary
distinctions between Europe and Africa; then and now; us and them.
Shigwedhas thesis develops Nampalas work by narrowing the analytical focus
to examine the contested cultural meaning of clothing. Like Nampala,
Shigwedhas initial intent is one of rebuttal; Africans were no less naked than
Europeans simply because they did not wear European clothes. By documenting
the social value of traditional clothing, Shigwedha offers insights into gender,
wealth, status and identity in the pre-colonial Aavawambo world before
examining how such social value was undermined, not only by the cultural
imperialism of the missionaries but also by the economic exigencies of the
colonial state. Finally, Shigwedha considers ways in which cultural change was
instrumentalised by Africans themselves. Opportunities to mimic European
styles offered increased social mobility for some, while providing new ways to
display old power for those most able to seize the white mans crown.
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At base, both Shigwedha and Nampala are dealing with tradition - that thorn in
the postcolonial side. In places, the word alludes to a pure African culture. But
there are dangers here; of essentialising the African past and positing a fixed and
coherent cultural world. Elsewhere, the authors talk of tradition as the vital link
between past and present and thus not only capable of change but meaningless
without it. In this regard, the book would have benefited from a clearer
conceptual statement of what tradition might be taken to mean. Nevertheless,
these two theses, as the first of their kind, do much to reclaim a Namibian past.
Will Jackson
University of Leeds

African Theatre: Youth. ed. Michael Etherton. James Currey, Oxford &
African Academic Press and Tsehai Publishers, Hollywood, CA, 2006. Pp. 272.
ISBN 10: 0-85255-590-3 (pb). 14.95.
The latest volume in the excellent African Theatre series is an invaluable
addition to the scholarship and research on current theatrical activity on that
continent. It bears witness to the variety, energy and commitment that marks out
the dramatic activity of young people, usually undertaken in the most adverse of
circumstances. Many of the contributions are marked out by the determination
of their authors to ensure that the voices of young people are heard with as little
mediation as possible. Among the fifteen essays and playscript there is a good
balance between female and male writers and an avoidance of over-dependence
upon European academics speaking for Africa. Coverage is also quite even
between the West, East, and South regions. The obvious gap is the absence of
any contributions from North Africa: unsurprising given the cultural, religious
and linguistic traditions of the area but further exacerbating the growing gulf
between English-speaking scholars and their Arab, Islamic counterparts.
Michael Ethertons claim that the contributions reflect the extraordinary range
of drama, theatre and performance by young people in Africa, therefore, needs
to be qualified by this understandable omission.
Ethertons introduction frames the volume effectively by drawing out the salient
functions of young peoples theatre advocacy and the building of new
constituencies located within models of Theatre/ Drama in Education and the
links with prevailing political processes that influence both the mainstream and
alternative activities. His own particular background as theatre academic and
NGO development worker comes to the fore in his timely assertion that the
message driven role plays formerly so favoured by development agencies not
only constitute bad theatre but also bad development. This bold statement is
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regularly endorsed in many of the contributions that follow where the

developmental significance of engaging in the theatrical process, almost
regardless of outcomes, is revealed. Much of this significance appears to be
linked to the creative spaces afforded by theatre projects where normally
marginalised and vulnerable young people can tell their own stories in situations
where they have to be listened to by those who do not usually hear them.
Inevitably with an eclectic collection of this nature there is considerable
unevenness in the standard of analysis with several essays content to limit
themselves to description or recapitulation of recent history; of some value in
itself, serving as a partial antidote to what Etherton calls the ephemeral nature
of unrecorded performance. By contrast Esiaba Irobi takes the whole continent
as the backdrop to his analysis of the function of the Theatre of Necessity in
confronting the realities presented by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He promotes
this particular branch of Theatre for Development (TfD) as a key element in the
survival of indigenous peoples and their cultures, though the notion that Western
academics are in cahoots with the G8 to suppress knowledge of the form is,
frankly, far-fetched. However, the notion of arts education drawing upon precolonial elements in local cultures to restore the identities of young people,
initially destroyed by colonialism and subsequently ravaged by globalisation is
one which surfaces in many of the essays; notably those of Luke Dixon and
Robert Kavanagh.
There is a paradox here. Though many of Africas social and economic
problems have been created or compounded by the neoliberal model of
globalisation, most of the cases cited in this volume show how fruitful
collaborations enabled by globalisation can be for young people who are offered
a creative space in which to remake global relationships on their own terms.
Models vary from intercontinental networks of young people in dialogue, to
effectively resourced collaborations between local arts organisations and
international NGOs. Such collaborations form the bedrock of sustainability
enabling the one-off project to develop into a longer term programme. For these
to be successful, however, material resources need to be combined with human
determination and the commitment to the long haul of cultural intervention for
social transformation. No African arts organisation illustrates this better than the
Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance which regularly harnesses the energies of its
core team to the resources of a university and national and international NGOs
to offer arts education provision that government, local or national, cannot or
will not supply.
There is no doubt that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has
provided a framework and impetus for many of the activities described and an
overtly rights-based approach informs the work (eg. Etherton, Kavanagh, Paul
90

Moclair and Phakama), combined with story-telling strategies that place the
young person at the centre of the theatre process.
Despite the typical contexts of poverty and violence, these case studies leave the
reader with a sense of the power of young peoples creativity and imagination:
To create a global movement of active young people in civil society we have to
start with a few seeds of change. Community by community and country by
country, young people could in time transform a continent. (Etherton p.98) Let
activist Fred Ouko, as chronicled by Phan Y Ly, have the last word: In one of
the largest slums in sub-Saharan Africa, Kibera, where the majority live below
the poverty datum line, everyone would expect to meet frowning faces with lots
of despair, this is not the case. There is a ray of hope coming from a group of
energetic and innovative youth who are ready to go an extra mile in serving their
community needs.
Tim Prentki
University of Winchester

State of Violence: Politics, Youth and Memory in Contemporary Africa.

eds. Edna G. Bay and Donald L. Donham. University of Virginia Press,
Charlotteswille and London, 2006. Pp 268. ISBN 978-0-8139-2569-1 (hb)
$49.50
This collection of essays is the published output of an interdisciplinary
conference on violence in African states, held at Emory University in the
autumn of 2003. The eight contributions contextualise and analyse violent
events that have occurred in six African states. The perspectives are from
anthropology, history, political science and sociology. All the events are postindependence, although the rebellion in Alexandra Township, South Africa, in
1984, happened under the Afrikaner apartheid regime. Through these essays,
which include also Edna Bays excellent Introduction and Donald Donhams
important theoretical exploration of the study of violence in Africa, a detailed
analysis of violence emerges, challenging preconceptions of both violence and
Africa. The research is thorough and the analysis important for a wide
readership. There is a shared determination among contributors to merge careful
representation of violence to its multiple causes. The studies try to show how
ordinary people in communities become complicit in violence; and how both
perpetrators and the victims who have survived unspeakable brutality deal with
the aftermath, and perceive its causes ex post facto.

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Three of the essays explore specific events, each a seemingly sudden convulsion
of violence. The essay by Longman and Butagengwa explores the memory of
the Rwanda genocide and massacres in 1994, with enormous loss of life. Joanna
Davidson details the driving out of the Fula from the community in Susana,
Guinee Bissau, in May 2000, with no direct fatality but resonating nationally.
Belinda Bozzoli analyses the Alexandra rebellion in 1984 and the accounts of
that event recorded in the immediate trials in apartheid South Africa and again
later at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Two of the studies are
specific to a group of people, whose experience of violence as victims and
perpetrators evolves over a period of time. One group is the Zipra fighters for
Zimbabwes war of independence and their subsequent violent history in
Mugabes state. This is a riveting account, based on research over a number of
years by the authors Jocelyn Alexander and Joann McGregor. The other group is
analysed in two essays, one by William Reno and the other by Martha Carey, on
Sierra Leones youth militias in the on-going civil war in that country. Finally,
two essays consider youth vigilantism: Dan Smiths study of the Igbo Bakassi
Boys in southern Nigeria and Elaine Salos extraordinary vivid account of
adolescent masculinity in youth gangs in Manenburg in the Cape.
There is a tripartite division of the book into states, youth and memory.
Donham, in his opening essay defines violence as the force that threatens
bodies and the bare life of bodies. He raises a number of contentious and
critical issues, rejecting the tendency to study violence outside of its social and
community context. That context is especially important in Africa because of the
nature of statehood and the number of failed states. He analyses the social
scientists motivation for studying violence and surveys the problems inherent in
a professionally-based engagement with ordinary people who have become
victims or perpetrators of violence, or both. Violent acts are limit events, both
for the social actors and for the cultural analysts, he concludes. They change
the ways in which we see ordinary everyday life.
I am familiar, over time, with four of the six countries depicted in this book. I
have followed all the events recounted, yet my understanding of the violent
situations in all the individual countries has been changed and enhanced by the
essays in this book. It is an important publication and should be widely read.
There are, and will be, further imbrication of the causes of violence in states: in
Africa and elsewhere, and particularly among dispossessed young men, globally.
Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse [Penguin, 2005], gives a convincing
Malthusian analysis of the Rwanda genocide as one of a number of causes.
Honwanas and De Boecks collection of essays, Makers and Breakers
[James Currey, 2005] on youth and violence in Africa offers important insights
into the globalised context of young Africans. Studies of Islamic fundamentalist
92

training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s that attracted thousands, if not tens
of thousands, of young Moslem men from around the world, are another strand
of masculine patriarchal violence. The question is how States of Violence, and
similar important research, can inform the activist in civil society, in NGOs, in
peace and reconciliation initiatives These social actors are concerned with the
same ordinary people and the same fractured communities who are struggling to
understand and reorder their lives. They need to access the deeper understanding
this book embodies.
Michael Etherton

Books Received and Short Reviews

(Fuller reviews may be published on our web site over the next few months.)
From James Currey Publishers, Oxford:
Ngugi wa Thiongo Speaks: Interviews with the Kenyan Writer. Eds.
Reinhard Sander and Bernth Lindfors, 2006, pp. 445, ISBN 0 85255 580 6,
19.95 (pb) .
A comprehensive collection of 43 interviews with Ngugi, from 1964 to 2003,
with extensive supporting bibliographical apparatus. An essential source book
and reference for this major African and international writer. MB
Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah. Basil
Davidson. 2007, pp. 225, ISBN 978 184701 010 0, 14.95 (pb).
The African Slave Trade. Basil Davidson. 2007, pp.304, ISBN 978 0 85255
798 3, 12.95 (pb).
These are new editions of two of Basil Davidsons outstanding studies, the first
published originally in 1973, and the second in 1961. The study of Nkrumah is
supported by a short but pertinent foreword from Emmanuel Kwaku
Akyeampong (Professor of History at Harvard), who comments that Nkrumah
comes alive in Black Starand the reader gains a new understanding of a great
man. The book is a fine example of Basil Davidsons humane scholarship, a
quality that is pre-eminently evident in his brilliant study of the African slave
trade. In 2007, when in Britain we mark the abolition of the slave trade, the reissue of this volume, in its comprehensiveness, detail and sensitivity, is greatly
to be welcomed. MB
From Bayreuth African Studies.
No.72. They Keep The Home Fires Burning: Conversations on food,
manners and hospitality in Africa. Ed. Georgina Beier. 2005, pp. 181, ISBN 3
927510 87 4, 14.95.
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No.75. Religion in the Context of African Migration. Eds. Afe Adogame and
Cordula Weisskoppel. 2005, pp. 366, ISBN 3 927510 89 0, 27.95.
No.77. Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and
Diaspora. Eds. Susan Arndt and Marek Spitczok von Brisinski. 2006, pp. 346,
ISBN 3 927510 93 9, 34.95.
No. 79. Die Macht des Wortes: Das journalistische Interview als
Rezeptionsform afrikanischer Literaturen. Manfred Loimeier. 2006, pp. 511,
ISBN 3 927510 94 7, 49.95.
No. 81. Subject, Context and the Contours of Nigerian Fiction. EzenwaOhaeto (ed. Eckhard Breitinger). 2007, pp.181, ISBN 978 3 939661 00 9, 9.95.
No. 82. Theatre, Performance and New Media in Africa. Eds. Susan Arndt,
Eckhard Breitinger and Marek Spitczok von Brisinski.. 2007, pp.222, ISBN 978
3 939661 01 6, 19.95.
No. 83. Change Aesthetics in Anglophone Cameroon Drama and Theatre.
Hilarious N.Ambe. 2007, pp.220, ISBN 978 3 939661 02 3, 24.95.
The extraordinary Africana publishing enterprise that is Bayreuth African
Studies, created by Eckhard Breitinger who is now joined as co-publisher by Pia
Thielmann, continues to produce a range of important studies, some of the more
recent of which are listed above. We hope to carry more detailed reviews of
individual volumes in future issues of the LUCAS Bulletin, and on our web site.
Meanwhile, some brief comments on four volumes amongst those listed above.
It is sad to report the death, in a road accident, of Hilarious N Ambe, but he has
left us an authoritative and important study of contemporary Cameroonian
Anglophone theatre (in which, inter alia, he chastises the present reviewer for
being ignorant of important anglophone theatre in material published in the
1970s and 90s). The posthumously published study of Nigerian fiction by the
Nigerian poet and critic Ezenwa-Ohaeto (who died at the age of 47) is
complemented by an edition of Matatu, (No. 33) Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The
Legacy of Ezenwa-Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing, eds. Christine Matzke, Aderemi
Raji-Oyelade and Geoffrey V Davis, Rodopi, Amsterdam & NY, 2006. The
writers under discussion in Die Macht des Wortes are Wole Soyinka and
Ousmane Sembne. Finally, a special word of delight and appreciation for
Georgina Beiers gathering of fourteen conversations about food, culture and
memory from a range of friends and colleagues in Africa. Its a mixture of
cookbook and cultural treasure chest! MB
Also received:
Ngoma: Approahes to Arts Education in Southern Africa. Ed. Robert
Mshengu Kavanagh (Consultant ed. Stephen Joel Chifunyise).
Chipawo/Zimbabwe Academy of Arts Education for Development, Harare,
2006, pp. 216. ISBN 87 7865 600 1, np.
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Based on material presented at a UNESCO funded international seminar on Arts

education in Harare in 2002, with contributions gathered from other related
seminars and conferences, this is a wide-reaching and stimulating commentary
on arts education initiatives in Africa. Major case studies from Ghana, South
Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are complemented by discussions of specific
projects and initiatives from other parts of the continent, and key issues relating
to the development of arts education in Africa are identified. We hope to carry a
full review of this important book in a later issue of the Bulletin. MB
African Theatres and Performances. Osita Okagbue, Routledge, London,
2007, Pp. 200. ISBN 0 415 30453-9 (hbk). 60.
This new and important study describes and analyses the performance of
Mmonwu - Igbo masquerade theatre, Bori - Hausa ritual theatre, Jaliya - the art
of Mandinka griots and griottes, and Koteba (kote-tlon) - comedy and satire of
the Bamana. Okagbue challenges the use of western critical approaches to
describe and appreciate traditional and ancient performance forms in Africa. MB
A Workman is Worthy of His Meat. Food and Colonialism in the Gabon
Estuary. Jeremy Rich. University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Pp. 220. ISBN
9780803210912. 25.
Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Julie Livingston. Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 2006. Pp. 336. ISBN 0 253 21785 7. $24.95
(pb.)

95