I wish first to thank the National Panels Committee and the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association for extending this kind invitation to me.

Allow me to pay homage to the man after whom this series of lectures was named. Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola has been in detention for 134 days, that is more than four months, since June 24, 1994. I had the opportunity and honor to meet him about two years ago, when I headed the Department of Culture and Communications in Benin and was in charge of a project known as “The Slave Route Project,” which was similar to Bashorun Abiola's campaign for reparations. Mr. Abiola visited Benin and had long talks with President Soglo.

Without interfering with the domestic affairs of any particular country, but also without seeking to pour oil on the fire, let me mention that it is a shame for Africa and for human civilization at the end of the twentieth century that a man should be arrested for winning elections. Every additional day Bashorun Abiola spends in detention makes the crisis more serious and more intolerable.

Whatever difficulties they face, however complex the national situation, present rulers in Chief Abiola's country should realize that they are making a martyr at their own expense and that their interest is to release, as early as possible, a man whose innocence is evident to all. What in the eyes of non-Nigerians still makes Nigeria a great country and a model to all Africa is certainly not a reign of sheer force but the tenacity and courage of Nigerian democrats in their continuing struggle for human rights and the rule of law.

Of course [after graduation from high school] some things go, whistles, lights-out, uniform, parades, prefects,…and yet all the central ideas go on. There will still be chores to be done, and done well, without grumbles; there will still be the need to discipline, for men who can obey and can therefore—when called upon—rule…(Francis 1957, 2).

What we are practicing at Makere, day in and out,…is the subversion… of the African mind; the breaking down of mental tissues; their reconstruction in the Western mode; the reordering of thoughts, feelings, habits, responses, of every aspect of the mind and personality. This is what we are doing, and cannot avoid doing—this is the core of our activity (Murray Carlin in Stanley 1960, 11).

In 1957 a solemn third-former at Alliance High School wrote in the school magazine: “Superstition used to play an important role in Kikuyu society…It was the chief reason why the older order changed more slowly than many people desired” (Ngugi 1957, 21). Unequivocally rejecting “rigid” traditional society, the writer declares approvingly that with the advance of Christianity—“without doubt the greatest civilising influence”—many Gikuyu have come to regard “superstition and witchcraft…with derision.” After a well told anecdote tinged with humorous self-mockery, the essayist ends with sermonizing gratitude for “a most valuable lesson” (22).

This parrot-like bagatelle in The AHS Magazine—signed “J. T. Ngugi, Form 3A,” and his first published work—echoes the high moral tone of the missionary headmaster of Alliance High School, E. Carey Francis (Greaves 1969; Kipkorir 1980; Sicherman 1990, 389-92). The motto of the school, “Strong to Serve,” implied the kinds of “chores” that boys thus educated would have to do in Kenya when they became—in Ngugi's later caustic paraphrase of his headmaster's goal–“efficient machines for running a colonial system” (Sicherman 1990, 20).

Aesthetics is certainly not an easy concept to define or explain. The numerous problems often associated with identifying the aesthetic in terms of the properties of its particular objects, arts and culture, largely account for this difficulty. And so relative, open-ended and complex is aesthetics that philosophers, scholars and aestheticians, since Plato's time, are still far from reaching a definitive consensus about its properties, application and meaning. In its general application to the arts, the inherent criterial problems of aesthetics appear to be heightened and made even more complex by the fact that some works of art, like sculpture, consist of physical objects; others, like poetry and music, consist of verbal and gestural behavior and imagined and non-physical objects, even though poetry and music can at times consist of physical objects; and others still, like dance and drama, consist of kinesis and a variable combination of some or all of the other properties.

Generally, it should be correct to say that aesthetics is an articulated value concept, a relative and qualitative experience that is diffused throughout nature and the arts, and throughout human experience and behavior, even though the congeries of its qualities and coordinates are often irreducible in language and analysis. Aesthetics can, therefore, apply to the “theories about the nature of art as well as about the criteria of aesthetic judgement” (Wolff 1983, 27). This argument by Janet Wolff is based on the inherent relationship between an art concept and its corresponding aesthetic theory on the one hand, and on the relationship between a preferred or “adopted” aesthetic theory and the corresponding criteria for its application and analysis:

A corpus on transition to democracy in Africa has been developed. This body of work has different constitutive elements: conceptualization, institutional arrangements, conditions for consolidation and the reasons for its reemergence in the 1980s as an agenda for political change (Ake 1994; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Gibbon, Bangura, and Ofstad 1992). Nigeria's experience of the transition to democracy has received more attention than that of any other country in the continent (Ihonvbere 1994; Campbell 1994; Reno 1993; Agbese 1991; Diamond 1991). However, the current preoccupations and dominant discourses have largely concealed the agencies in the struggle for democracy, even though civil society has received some attention. Likewise, there are very few empirical works. Similarly, the discursive community on transition has also privileged a particular form of democracy, liberalism, without questioning its gender bias. While there is an emerging literature on African women in political transition (Tripp 1994; Abdullah 1993; Campbell 1993; Nzomo 1993; Pepera 1993; Seidman 1993; Beall, Hassim, and Todes, 1989), compared with the dominant literature on the subject, it is inconsequential. Further, much of the literature on African women in political transition has treated women in isolation from the gendered structures of power and society. Moreover, in most of this literature as well as the dominant literature on transition, there is silence on the relationship between political and economic processes despite the similarity in their basic doctrine, liberalism and the linkage of these two issues in the donor community and by African governments (Beckman 1992; Bangura 1992).

This article hopes to fill in some of the gaps noted by including Nigerian women's conceptual challenge to democracy; the traditions from which women draw their discourses; the male-bias of the state; women's participation in democratic struggles both at the level of politics and economics; and the limitations of the women's movement.