Codesria Bulletin

Archie Mafeje was an independent Pan-Africanist and cosmopolitan individual who sought to understand the world at a global level in order to locate Africa within that tapestry. In many ways, Archie Mafeje was one of the African intellectual pathfi nders. He contributed immensely to the African people's search for self-understanding, self-determination and political emancipation as they struggled against alienation and misrepresentation. In recognising the academic and intellectual contribution of Archie Mafeje, this monograph also refl ects on the African people's journey for emancipation in the search for African identity, self-control and self-understanding.

Power, Politics, and the African Condition is the third volume of The Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui, which will provide readers with a broad spectrum of Ali. A. Mazrui's scholarly writings. The third volume is centered on issues of power and politics at the nexus of Africa's domestic affairs and its international concepts about the disequilibrium of power in the international system and the problems that Africa has confronted globally because of it. Mazrui focuses the reader's attention on the impact that the colonial legacy and African tradition had on state formation, leadership, Africa's political economy, violence and conflict resolution while presenting some of his most interesting and even controversial ideas for building "Pax Africana." Spanning nearly forty years, Mazrui's essays are classic and contemporary statements on the diagnosis and treatment of what he called "The African Condition."

Consists of 650 annotated entries covering Mazrui's books, dissertations, edited works about him, major essays in books, academic journals and conference papers. This work contains essays, including pamphlets, magazine and newspaper articles, and audio-visual recordings.

This volume reports on the state of crisis in Africa in the early twenty-first century. Africa, on the eve of the ‘independence revolution’, was the continent of hope and high expectations. By the third decade of independence, optimism had been replaced by dismality. African states had been beset by ethno-political squabbles, military rule, civil wars, Islamic and insurgent movements, extreme poverty and disease. With the ascent of redemocratization in the 1990s and of ‘new’ pan-Africanism derived from the formation of the African Union, Africa appeared set to claim its vaunted destiny. This book asks, with hindsight to the first decade of the twenty-first century: how real was the renaissance in African life? If the dismal African condition is a phase in the historical development of Africa, this volume does not see any golden age in the past to which Africa aspires to return. There is clearly a continuation and persistence of crisis, with an absence of good governance, personalisation of state power, widespread disease, and policy failure in education, economy and infrastructural development. Although endowed with abundant human and natural resources, Africa remains the least developed and most indebted continent. Whither then the African Renaissance? The methodologies that underpin the contributions in this book are as diverse as the specialisations of the contributors. The collection questions ideologically protected assumptions and presumptions, presenting Africa as it is, because it is only by knowing where Africa truly stands that a proper direction can be charted for it.

This volume explores contemporary political developments in various parts of Africa in the age of democracy, constitutionalism, the securitization of development, and global terrorism. The contributions by leading observers of constitutionalism and African politics in the context of a global political and economic system provide a nuanced understanding of important themes in contemporary African politics: constitutionalism, democratic politics and governance, women’s rights, the African Union, securitization of development, civil society, and debates concerning global terrorism and the war on terror. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars, civil society organizations, and public policy makers interested in contemporary African politics.

This innovative book is a forward-looking reflection on mental decolonisation and the postcolonial turn in Africanist scholarship. As a whole, it provides five decennia-long lucid and empathetic research involvements by seasoned scholars who came to live, in local peoples own ways, significant daily events experienced by communities, professional networks and local experts in various African contexts. The book covers materials drawn from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Themes include the Whelan Research Academy, rap musicians, political leaders, wise men and women, healers, Sacred Spirit churches, diviners, bards and weavers who are deemed proficient in the classical African geometrical knowledge. As a tribute to late Archie Mafeje who showed real commitment to decolonise social sciences from western-centred modernist development theories, commentators of his work pinpoint how these theories sought to dismiss the active role played by African people in their quest for self-emancipation. One of the central questions addressed by the book concerns the role of an anthropologist and this issue is debated against the background of the academic lecture delivered by Ren Devisch when receiving an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Kinshasa. The lecture triggered critical but constructive comments from such seasoned experts as Valentin Mudimbe and Wim van Binsbergen. They excoriate anthropological knowledge on account that the anthropologist, notwithstanding his or her social and cognitive empathy and intense communication with the host community, too often fails to also question her own world and intellectual habitus from the standpoint of her hosts. Leading anthropologists carry further into great depth the bifocal anthropological endeavour focussing on local peoples re-imagining and re-connecting the local and global. The book is of interest to a wide readership in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy and the history of the African continent and its relation with the North.