The publication of Michael Crowder's “Whose Dream Was It Anyway?” in January 1987 marked the opening of what promises to be a challenging era of revision and re-evaluation in African historiography. With the benefit of three decades of historical hindsight and armed with recently declassified colonial documentation, historians are beginning to grapple with the complexities of national struggle in late colonial society, beginning with Ghana's march to freedom in 1957. It is as a part of this process of revision and re-evaluation that the following examination of the Muslim Association Party [MAP] of the Gold Coast is offered. The MAP was a comparatively small organization which was and is easily overshadowed by the turbulence of mass nationalist politics in the years 1950 thru 1957. Yet its unique blend of religious, class, and ethnic appeals—appeals too often misunderstood or dismissed outright as vestiges of tribalism, traditionalism, or religious fanaticism—reveals much about the antinomies of nationalist struggle in the Gold Coast.

Political scientists concerned with the dynamic rise of Gold Coast nationalism in the decade after World War II (and those few historians who dared venture into the recent past) focused primarily on Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party [CPP], its early split from the United Gold Coast Convention [UGCC] and its ultimate domination of nationalist politics from 1951 to 1957 (Apter, 1955; Austin, 1964; Bourret, 1960; Bretton, 1966; Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1968).

Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept, “meaning that its very existence is bound up in disagreement about what it is, and that disagreement over its essence is itself part of that essence” (Strine, Long, and HopKins, 1989: 183). In other words, performance has no precisely agreed upon definition. Rather it varies in scope and import from one academic discipline to another and from one practitioner, or human agent, to another.

In the emerging field of performance studies, performance is open-ended, but it privileges process, the temporally or processually constructed nature of human realities, and the agency of knowledgeable performers who have embodied particular techniques and styles to accomplish it (M. Drewal, 1989b; Conquergood, 1989). In the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action. Performance is thus a fundamental dimension of culture as well as the production of knowledge about culture. It might include anything from individual agents' negotiations of everyday life, to the stories people tell each other, popular entertainments, political oratory, guerrilla warfare, to bounded events such as theater, ritual, festivals, parades, and more.

The concept of the city on the sub-Saharan continent presents a vast field of study whose limits we must define. Urbanization entails spatial, social, and temporal phenomena and thus almost by definition requires an interdisciplinary approach. Such an approach could certainly encompass history, geography, demographics, economics, political science, architecture and town planning, as well as anthropology and sociology. The interdisciplinary study of urbanization deserves emphasis because the research conducted in these different directions over the course of the past twenty-five years has been very uneven. We must not confuse the concepts of urbanization and modernization, although to distinguish the difference between the two can be a delicate matter. Since the colonial intrusion, the importance of making such a distinction is all the greater because the development of the former notion was subsumed by that of the latter.

Another remark: The author's personality, in writing this overview paper, is obviously present. As a piece of work written by an historian, this text takes into account the past of African cities and their evolutionary process, from their pristine origins to the eve of independence. This paper is mainly about the past, it touches only occasionally on the characteristics of modern African towns since independence and their likely future; in spite of social sciences constituting a whole, an individual cannot grasp everything. The analyses devoted to town planning and urban economics have been left to another specialist. In conformity with the author's education and interests, temporal dimensions will receive priority over transversal conceptual divisions; thus, the concept of time and change will tend to be neglected.

There is strong evidence that labor is highly mobile in many developing countries, especially in Africa. The history of the African continent is rich in accounts of various forms of movement across and within national boundaries—promoted by trade, warfare, pastoralism, slaving, natural disasters, and evangelization. Evidence, of fact and in myth and legend, indicates the occurrence of large-scale migrations in the past. The dispersion of Fulani-speaking peoples throughout the northern parts of West Africa is well documented. In addition to such movements, there are the age-old seasonal wanderings of herders seeking water and pasture for livestock. During the present century, the migration of labor to centers of mineral, oil, and industrial production has become one of the most important demographic features of West Africa and the continent as a whole (Adepoju, 1977, 1978; Zachariah and Conde, 1981; Addo, 1974; Little, 1974; Mabogunje, 1972, 1980). The migratory movement of population in Africa is very dynamic and complex; its general features are not well understood, and hence are rarely studied.

This paper is an attempt to understand the economic and sociocultural factors that have influenced the character of the international migratory flow of labor in West Africa. The hub of the investigation is to provide an understanding of the patterns of labor migration in West Africa and evaluate the models utilized in the explanation of international migratory trends in the region.

Max Yergan was one of the most controversial foreign-born leaders ever associated with modern South Africa. From 1921 to 1936 he was the only black representative of the North American branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) permitted to work in the South African field. Yergan's South African service radicalized the young missionary, culminating in his resignation from the YMCA in 1936. The next decade of Yergan's life was devoted to left-wing activism. In 1948 however, ostensibly disillusioned by the onset of the Cold War, Yergan abandoned leftist activism in favor of ultraconservativism.

South Africa loomed large in each of these transformations. This article is concerned with Yergan's shift from evangelical Protestantism to revolutionary socialism, highlighting the critical role that residence in South Africa played in his early political evolution. It also brings into focus the broader subject of Afro-American linkages with Black South Africans, making special reference to the advent and larger significance of Black American YMCA work among Africans.

Max Yergan was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1892, one of several sons of a literate black seamstress named Lizzie Yeargan. While much of his early life is obscure, he seems to have been influenced by the philosophical trends of African Redemption and Ethiopianism which swept many religious communities within the African Diaspora during the last quarter of the 19th century.

The Efik inhabit Calabar which is the capital of the Cross River State of Nigeria. They constitute a people of about 200,000 for whom well-documented archives and bibliographies exist mainly in Nigeria and in Great Britain (Ekpiken, 1970). The Ekpe Society (Bassey n.d.), a Leopard-Spirit group of initiates, is their regulatory institution which makes use of the ukara cloth and possesses an ideographic system of writing named nsibidi.

From 1979 to 1983, teaching structuralist-synchronic linguistics and semiotics at the University of Calabar in Nigeria created some degree of student hostility. In this paper it is attempted to reply to them. To do so, the so-called semiotic square had to be misused while still defining categorial terms. This square has been framed within the evolutionary process of a regional history (Aye, 1967). Then a transformational analysis of culture which needs to be tested elsewhere is proposed. It is hoped that this model may help to structure the amorphous field of interdisciplinary research in African studies. An attempt to describe Efik self-perception and how most of them see the development of their consciousness in time follows.

Two of the most obvious objectives were: 1) to understand how change in the course of Efik history affected an African people located at the crossroads of many cultures and what could constitute the real challenge to them of building a modern society in an environment which may be characterized today by two major criteria: “non-identity” and “non-alterity;” and 2) to examine how for the Efik themselves historical events persuaded them of having lost their past or even their recently adopted identity and why this nihilist ideology left them with no desire for what seemed to be an unpromising future.

Female prostitution in Africa has attracted a few interesting studies since the 1970s (Bujra, 1975, 1977; White, 1980; 1983, 1989; Van Onselen, 1982; Van Heyningin, 1983). Hitherto the subject received casual mention or was at best treated as a minor aspect of broader social categories in studies dealing with African urban conditions (for example, Southall and Gutkind, 1956; Cohen, 1969; Little, 1973). However, even these recent studies concentrate primarily on two cases—Kenya and South Africa. This paper is intended to make a small contribution to the as yet limited knowledge of African prostitution by examining the growth and consequences of prostitution and its relationship to accumulation in the Upper Cross River Basin of Nigeria during the period 1930 to 1950.

Explanations of prostitution vary widely. In many societies the traditional attitude toward the subject, defined by religion and custom, is basically moralistic. Prostitutes are thus seen as deviants, or even criminals, who are unable to exercise control over base instincts. This is a simplistic and unhelpful view which, in the present state of knowledge about the complex phenomenon that prostitution actually is, can hardly stand even elementary analytical scrutiny. What is more, such an attitude tends to put the blame for prostitution squarely on the women without regard to the role of the men who encourage it.

The sale of sexual services thrives because there is a ready market for it. Even Victorian society with all its presumed modesty and “civilized values” had a soft underbelly as far as sexuality was concerned.

Mozambique is a country that lends itself to metaphor—of high ideals, of challenge to the world system, and of unfulfilled aspirations. There, questions that elsewhere are raised in academic forums are articulated as matters of public policy: searching questions about the structures that perpetuate international inequality, the ability of a mass movement to erode the basis of worldwide domination, and aspirations for democracy amid pervasive poverty. In an extreme form, to be sure, Mozambique has gone the way of the continent—from lofty expectations to an increasingly marginal position in the international division of labor. This article is an attempt to discern the dynamics of marginalization in the world system. Informed by theoretical debates over the emerging international division of labor, this is an effort to rethink, and draw lessons from, one concrete historical experience: the global constraints and opportunities facing Mozambique.

Stated briefly, the core argument is that the concept of the international division of labor must be stretched to account fully for the regionalization of problems and solutions. While internationalization entails increasing integration into expanding financial markets and penetration by transnational corporations, Africa has not kept pace with the global manufacturing system and the related upsurge of export activities. Although industrialization is not a magic remedy for the problems of underdevelopment, upgrading the role of manufacturing is a key component of productive economic growth. However, efforts to promote manufacturing are constrained by market-based reforms insofar as they are anti-egalitarian and erode the basis of democracy at the very time when forces at home and abroad are pushing for democratization.

Even though reliable data are scarce, it appears that the continent of Africa has some of the highest mortality rates in the world. Estimates of crude death rates are of the order of seventeen per 1000 population, as compared to eleven for Asia and nine for Latin America (Kurian, 1984: 19). This study provides an analysis of the determinants of mortality in a part of Ethiopia, an area called Legeambo. While this area is small, it is similar in many important respects to other parts of rural Africa: the standard of living is low, access to sources of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing is difficult, and medical services are all but nonexistent. It is also similar to other areas in terms of its high rate of mortality. It differs from most other areas, however, in that a detailed survey of all households was undertaken recently. In consequence, a data base is available for this area, and it supports the analysis which follows, making possible a limited assessment of mortality experience. The first section describes the survey and the resultant data base. A multivariate analysis of the data is reported in the second section, and some concluding remarks and a comment on policy implications are provided in the third section.

The Fulbright Program, initiated in 1945, is one of the oldest U.S. overseas exchange programs. The overall goal of the program, since its inception, has been to increase mutual understanding among peoples through the living and working experiences of the scholars and students involved. In Africa the most important subsidiary goal is to strengthen African universities through provision of training and research opportunities for Africans and through the American Fulbright professors who work at those universities (Huff, 1986).

Of all the components of the program, the American Fulbright Senior Scholar, the key element in the program, has been an unstudied aspect. A mystique has surrounded the scholars selected for the program. It has been assumed that with purposeful selection of scholars and careful matching of overseas sites, program goals will be accomplished abroad and in the United States and that the appropriate motivational elements are in place to accomplish and sustain the changes made. Occasionally, the consequences abroad have been documented and evaluated, but little is known of the professional and personal effects of the Fulbright experience on the returned American Fulbrighter.

As an individual, the American Fulbrighter participates in an intensive experience, lengthy enough to produce potentially fundamental changes in the participant. Teaching and being involved in other academic duties overseas has generally been assumed to be a very positive experience. However, what evidence demonstrates the extent the goals of the program were accomplished with regard to the U.S. participant?