In 1856, as two young girls in the eastern Cape stood guarding their fields from the birds, they were approached by two strangers who entrusted them with a prophetic message:

Such millennial visions in Africa have varied over time and space. While some prophets predicted that great winds would arise, driving Europeans into the sea, others promised that wealthy black brethren would arrive by airplane from America to right the ills of white domination. In either case, the cataclysmic event would usher in a time of harmony, peace and prosperity. As the current millennium approaches, many scholars of Africa are voicing a comparable sense of crisis, a feeling that our understanding of the continent must be reimagined, reconfigured and reconstructed. Unlike Africans of earlier generations, however, we no longer predict a harmonious world emerging from the ashes of the old.

Let me first thank the organizers for inviting me to deliver the keynote address at this important gathering. It is indeed a great honor to me personally but I also take it as recognition of the endeavors of African social scientists to promote social science research in Africa. One such African social scientist was a colleague and friend, the late Professor Claude Ake who did so much to institutionalize social science research in Africa. I would like to use this occasion to pay him tribute.

Whatever the origins of the name of the series, it is today a salute to the many who struggle for democracy in Africa and a grim reminder that the scourge of militarism still haunts our continent and that those who would rule by the sword are either in power or lurk behind the corridors of power ready at any time to ambush the democratic process.

The title I gave to the lecture must already suggest how unwieldy the subject is. I obviously cannot deal adequately with all the constricting and enabling contingencies within which social science is practiced in Africa. Time and space demand that I be highly selective in my presentation. If I seem to emphasize problem areas in the social sciences in Africa and in the relationship between Africans and their non-African counterparts it will not be because I do not recognize the real gains made in the search for solutions. I should also state at the outset that I am aware of some of the travails of students of Africa in North America and it is not my intention to add more to them. If this is any consolation, let me assure you that your woes are nothing compared to ours.

One of the important factors that influences the successful implementation of decentralization is the support of, and commitment to, decentralization by the bureaucracy (Cheema and Rondinelli 1983; Rondinelli 1981). In other words, decentralization may be undermined if the bureaucracy opposes arrangements that threaten its power and control. In the Ghanaian case, for instance, the bureaucracy (made up of line Ministries in Accra and their deconcentrated offices in 10 regions and 110 districts) had been blamed by the government of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) that ruled the country from 31 December 1981 to 6 January 1993, as the main stumbling block to the implementation of the government's decentralization program launched in 1987. In the words of the Minister of Local Government:

By deconcentration, the Minister was referring to the delegation authority for the discharge of specified functions to the staff of a central government ministry or department at the local level to make administrative decisions on behalf of the central government or authority. In such a case, the delegated power continues to be subject to the central authority's supervision.

Depending on who you listen to, structural adjustment has led to either rapid economic growth or a decline in living standards within Africa. And while in different places both circumstances are probably true, neither scenario describes what I have seen in rural Tanzanian villages since 1984. Despite the predictions about the effects of structural adjustment, my impression is that life goes on with only marginal changes in the daily economic activity of villagers. Economically, things are a little better on some fronts: the clothing is nicer, there are a few more bicycles, etc., but the changes are not dramatic; the daily economic activity is still hoe-based agriculture. It is also unclear whether such incremental improvements would not have occurred given any other macro-economic policy.

Indeed in such villages, past macro-economic policies including Ujamaa socialism, market capitalism or even mercantile colonialism can also be correlated with one economic improvement or the other. But as with these past cases, unraveling the relationship between correlation and causation is a tricky business. This paper does this for structural adjustment policies in a single village. This is done by comparing economic activity and relationships in 1985, before structural adjustment policies were adopted, and in 1995-6, well after the policies had had a chance to take effect.

From 7 April, 1994, onwards, a well planned and massively executed genocide began in Rwanda, which led to the brutal slaughter of up to one million defenseless children, women and men. This genocide was the culmination of a four year period during which civil war and extremist violence cost the lives of tens of thousands of persons. Both these processes took place against the background of the never-resolved consequences of previous instances of violence, in Rwanda and in Burundi, including a massive festering refugee problem. They heralded the beginning of further violence in Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, which has lasted until now.

This article attempts to understand the socio-psychological causes of the dramatic and profoundly disturbing events that took place in Rwanda in 1994. Its starting questions are: how do situations come about in which people massively participate in brutal violence against their neighbors who have not harmed them? What kind of social and political processes have taken place that can bring people to lose the values, restraints and ethics that under normal circumstances make these actions impossible, and abhorrent to contemplate?

From at least 1900 on, Africans in Southern Rhodesia, its successor Rhodesia and today's Zimbabwe, have demanded schools and education, leaving behind evidence of their demands in a wide variety of sources: mission records, government reports and the recollections of former students. Even more than demands for land, higher producer prices or higher wages, demands for education were explicit attempts to negotiate not just economic issues, but also a place within Southern Rhodesia's increasingly segregated culture and society. But what, exactly, did students, parents and would-be students want, and were these demands being met? Fathers petitioned for schools for their sons, sons and daughters actively sought or avoided schooling and missions and the administration offered schools as answers to diverse political, social and economic difficulties. This paper will use a close examination of the life of a single ephemeral school at Umchingwe, in the Insiza district of Southern Rhodesia, to explore how senior men sought a school in an effort to rebuild strained ties with young men and restructure their community in Depression-era Southern Rhodesia, and why they failed.

Studies of education in Southern Africa have generally acknowledged that missions, with the help of state grants-in-aid, built and operated schools not merely from humanitarian impulses but because schools were one of the most powerful ways to attract Africans to a mission station and convince them to become Christians. The government helped fund mission schools and built two flagship institutions of its own as part of an effort to use schools to cultivate a useful, disciplined and controllable class of African workers and leaders. Schools were not merely imposed on a resisting African population, though. From the early years of the twentieth century, with increasing volume, Africans requested schools from missions, and from the government. Yet much of what we know about the development and expansion of the schooling in the region has focused less on what that education meant to students and their parents than on how the state, the white population and the Native Administration, worked to channel and modify Africans' educational demands through schools which were designed to produce useful subjects and workers for a settler state (Summers 1994a; Challiss 1982; Vambe 1972).

Perhaps as a result of the persistent developmental difficulties African economies have faced, a substantial amount has been written on the nature of African capitalism (Berman and Leys 1994; Iliffe 1983; Kennedy 1988; Sandbrook 1985; 1993). While this literature spans the ideological spectrum from advocacy of the free market to Marxian socialism, there seems to be a consensus on two points: first, that some form of capitalism has emerged in most African countries, and second, that this capitalism is flawed in fundamental ways that render its ability to promote growth problematic. One of the questions suggested by this literature is whether the social forces exist to support a more productive economic system. In other words, is there evidence of a social movement for African capitalism?

To date most analyses of the advance and/or stagnation of African capitalism have employed a structural and/or systemic framework, emphasizing factors such as class relations, role in the world economy, degree of proletarianization/peasantization and the emergence of a capitalist state. In this paper, we use a social movements approach to examine aspects of the development, consolidation and reform of capitalism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Kano, Nigeria. We hope to illustrate that the business communities in both these cities can be viewed as coalitions of class, ethnic and sectoral interest groups with a shared common goal to facilitate political and economic reforms conducive to the advancement of a capitalist system. As opposed to structural approaches, a social movements framework highlights the role of ideas and human agency.

Fertility rates in Malawi continue to be among the highest in the world, while mortality rates have declined significantly from 35 deaths per 1,000 population in 1965 to a low of 20 deaths per 1,000 people in 1995. This study will use crude birth rates and total fertility rates in examining the spatial context of fertility in Malawi. These are the most widely used measures for current fertility. The total fertility rate (TFR) stands for the average number of children in a family and is easy to calculate from age-specific birth rates. The TFR is a synthetic rate in that it does not measure the fertility of any real group of women but rather the fertility of an imaginary group of women who pass through their fictitious reproductive lives subject to the rates of child bearing experienced by real women in a given year. The crude birth rate, on the other hand, is calculated from the number of babies born in a given year (or any other time period) divided by the mid-year population, and is expressed as the number of births per 1000 population (Haupt and Kane 1991; McFalls 1991). The TFR for Malawi was estimated to be 7.6 in 1987 and the crude birth rate was 41 during the same year (National Statistical Office 1987a). Recent data from the Demographic and Health Survey indicate that the total fertility rate has declined slightly to a current level of 6.73 (National Statistical Office 1992).