In the early 1990s, democratization dominated discourse on African politics. However fraught with contradictions, processes of political liberalization held out hope for more responsive, accountable government—and some African countries achieved impressive gains. But in many parts of the continent the outlook at the beginning of the twenty-first century is decidedly more somber. An increase in violence and war has had devastating consequences for people and their communities. This presidential address examines several approaches to confronting these conflicts and highlights three lessons that emerge. In some situations international involvement is essential to end a war, and doing this successfully requires enormous resources. But external assistance cannot follow a single template; it must be adapted to different local dynamics and coordinated with efforts of peace-builders within. Finally, greater support is needed for efforts to alleviate the conditions that spawn wars and violence.

Most rural–urban migrants maintain significant ties with their communities of origin in Africa south of the Sahara. Contrary to “modernist” assumptions that these ties would fade away, they often continue to be strong. This urban–rural connection has important consequences for rural–urban migration, for urban–rural return migration, for the rural economy, and for the political process. To understand the processes underpinning the urban–rural connection we need to distinguish different migration strategies and to deconstruct the notion of “rural.” Depending on their migration strategies, urban residents connect with a range of actors at the rural end: more or less closely related kin, kinship groups, non-kin groups, villages, larger political entities. These connections play out differently for men and women.

In many parts of Africa, university systems are in crisis; squalid conditions, student strife, and increasing state violence have turned many campuses into battlegrounds. Through an in-depth look at the Kenyan case, this paper examines some of the deep political dynamics of the current desperate situation. We demonstrate how in Kenya, state–university links involve attempts by higher-level government officials to control campuses through patronage, surveillance, and violence and how institutional configurations facilitate this. As the burden of repression falls on student activists who challenge current power configurations, we examine the current crisis through a student lens. By presenting and analyzing the historical narrative of student activism on campus, we show the inadequacy of overly structural, economic approaches to the crisis favored by the World Bank and some of its critics. Instead, we show the critical importance of understanding how the university crisis is organically linked to wider political processes, including local struggle over democratization of the state and economy.

Elite, top-down models of democratic transition commonly miss key popular challenges and opportunities for institutionalizing stable, representative regimes. Civil society theorists often mistakenly assume that civil society organizations will support the creation and strengthening of a democratic regime. This article argues that in order to understand the process of regime change, we must look at both macro- and micro-level institutions and practices, as well as at the practical and ideological struggles over democracy that will define the regime. In South Africa, this struggle is seen most clearly in the interactions between popular organizations, such as the civics, and the African National Congress (ANC). How popular organizations make demands and how these demands are met will determine not only the form of the new regime, but also the stability of the most basic rights associated with democracy.

For political scientists, and particularly scholars and students of Africa, Crawford Young needs litde introduction. However, as he has now achieved an emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it is time to present his intimate understanding of African politics in the last forty years.

Born in Philadelphia in November 1931, Young received his B.A, from the University of Michigan in 1953. He studied at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London from 1955 to 1956 and at die Institut d'Etudes Politiques, University of Paris, from 1956 to 1957. He dien entered graduate school at Harvard University, completing his doctorate degree in political science in 1964. In 1963 Young was offered an assistant professor position by the Department of Political Science at die University of Wisconsin–Madison. He remained tiiere for his entire career, retiring in January 2001. He has held visiting professorships at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda (1965–66), and at the University of Dakar in Senegal (1987–88). He also served as dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Université Nationale du Zaire from 1973 to 1975. Among his publications are twelve monographs, over one hundred articles, and chapters in numerous books. Several of Young's works have been translated into different languages.

Young's professional career includes extended field research in Congo-Kinshasa, Senegal, and Uganda. He has received many prestigious awards such as the Herskovits Prize (African Studies Association) and the Ralph Bunche Award (American Political Science Association) for The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Wisconsin, 1976), and the Gregory Luebbert Prize (APSA) for The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale, 1994).

L'ouvrage récemment paru de Jan Vansina, “Le Rwanda ancien. Le royaume nyiginya”, m'a donné l'occasion de me replonger dans l'histoire de la royauté nyiginya en quittant les sentiers battus. Cet ouvrage est, en effet, le produit d'un travail minutieux de dépouillement de textes trop négligés et auxquels l'auteur applique les méthodes rigoureuses de la critique historique. Il nous conduit à une vision plus complète et plus nuancée de la royauté nyiginya que ne l'à fait aucun ouvrage antérieur pour la période pré-coloniale. Certaines hypothèses, souvent très plausibles, font irruption dans l'histoire telle que l'a produite le courant majoritaire de l'époque coloniale, la bousculent et la remettent en mouvement. Elles redonnent vie et humanisent ces rois et leur entourage. Ils quittent le carcan de l'idéologie dominante du moment, cessent d'endosser les costumes propres à satisfaire la contemplation fascinée des élites, tant locales qu'européennes. Les rois, incarnés et faillibles sous la plume de l'historien, restent cependant au centre de son ouvrage et l'interrogation demeure: qu' était le peuple des rois? Partant de l'autre point de vue, demandons-nous à quel point et de quelle façon les rois étaient présents dans la vie des populations? Peut-on faire l'histoire de ces populations? Et enfin, pourquoi est-il important de “repeupler” le pays et de faire parvenir le royaume—et ses séquelles gouvernementales—à la periode actuelle?

Comme Vansina l'écrit, l'histoire officielle rwandaise laissait de côté la population. A vrai dire, le but principal de cette histoire était de donner une légitimité à la dynastie.

In the wake of the genocide, it has been argued many times that the history of Rwanda needs to be rewritten, that past understandings of the history of this society contributed to the atrocities of 1994. Indeed, our understanding of history influences the present by lending justification to our actions today. But such a relationship of past and present works both ways. As the very demand for a new history suggests, our vision—and therefore our presentation—of history is also influenced by our contemporary view of historical process. In a sense, history is always an attempt to make sense of political and social issues for which we have no answers in the present. Therefore, at one level, historical inquiry is always an attempt to understand the present, and a history that ignores the important questions of the day becomes simply antiquarianism.

But such a reality evokes some fundamental methodological and conceptual questions. To what degree—and in what way—do present concerns influence the ways in which we proceed to construct history? At what point does history become simply propaganda? To what degree do our current preoccupations shape our questions of history, and to what degree do they mold the content of our histories? Do we base our analyses on the known empirical record, critically analyzed, in as complete and comprehensive a fashion as is feasible? Or do we simply fashion our conclusions to meet present concerns? Concern over content—not questions—leads often to a selective presentation of the record, a simplified version of history, with the selection determined by the desired outcome.

Jan Vansina's history of the Nyiginya kingdom joins the long list of works, both essays and novels, that have proliferated since the Rwanda Patriotic Front gained power in 1994. The rigorous application of historical criticism distinguishes this from other works that give voice primarily to passions and speculations. Vansina's work is remarkable for the author's ability to bridge past and present by placing himself downstream rather than upstream in the flow of history. This important emphasis on ancient Rwanda contributes to the understanding of today's events. Vansina was ahead of those whose project it was to reread the history of Rwanda, which began in Butare in December 1998. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that it is up to Rwandan historians themselves to compile, on the basis of the facts accepted by everyone, a history that is as impartial as possible and that might offer some guidelines for the future.

In 1962, when Vansina was writing L'évolution du royaume rwanda des origines à 1900 (The Evolution of the Rwandan Kingdom from Its Origins to 1900), his work was already marked by a rigorous exploration of historical facts. In Le Rwanda ancien (Ancient Rwanda), he proposes a new chronology of the Nyiginya kingdom, whose foundation he places around the middle of the seventeenth century. In so doing, Vansina definitively separates himself from Alexis Kagame—who situates its beginnings six centuries earlier—and thereby puts to rest the argument of historians and anthropologists, and challenges those politicians who, in the pursuit of legitimacy, have based their ideologies of the Rwandan reconquest and territorial revindication on the writings of Kagame.