1994 has witnessed the demise of apartheid in South Africa, thus signaling the end of an era in the history of Africa—the long night of European colonial rule. This momentous event, and the challenging process of transformation that it has set in motion, vividly illustrate the power of the rubric chosen for this year's annual meeting, Africa Reconfigured. But the reconfiguration of Africa is certainly not something new. So on this occasion I propose to look back selectively at some aspects of that reconfiguration as it relates to the European mapping and consequent representation of Africa; the political configuration of Africa; and, finally, the future of Africa and African Studies.

“Where is Africa?” asks Ali Mazrui in a characteristically provocative dissection of European ethnocentric projections about the mapping and perception of Africa (Mazrui 1986, 23-4). To which we might add, “And what do we know about it from maps?” For as Peter Barber emphasizes in his discussion of the European discovery of Africa, “it should always be borne in mind that maps show only what their makers wished to show and not necessarily all that they actually knew” (Barber 1987, 37). Indeed, the history of mapping Africa reflects virtually all of the problems one is likely to face in examining the representation of Africa. Ancient knowledge of the continent was limited to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, as well as the Nile Valley. Bound up with the acquisition of commercial information about the products of Africa, and then with the staking out of colonial claims from as early as the first Portuguese explorations down the Atlantic coast of the continent in the fourteenth century, Africa was arguably more thoroughly misrepresented than it was accurately mapped during the first millennium and a half of the Christian era.

I am man of the transition [because] of my age and my ideas.… I have one foot in with the elders because I have learned from them, and the other with the young.…The massive entry of young people [into the party] symbolizes the success of continuity.

Laurent Dona Fologo, Fraternité Matin, 19 April 1991

The theme of the Ninth Congress of the PDCI, which opened 1 October 1990 in the president's village of Yamoussoukro, was “renovation and continuity” (Fraternité Hebdo, 4 October 1990). With three thousand activists taking part, it was the most widely attended congress ever held. Earlier that year, the leader of the Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire, President Félix Houphouët-Boigny (deceased 7 December 1994), had announced an end to one-party rule. The goal of the congress, then, was to revamp the PDCI so that it could compete effectively against the electoral challenge it would now face from opposition parties. Ten commissions were organized to restructure the PDCI and formulate a platform to deal with the political and economic problems plaguing the nation. When the delegates emerged, five days later, the party had been reorganized. Among other things, it now included a broader representation of generations, professions and interest groups in each of the party organs and committees.

Not surprisingly, differences of opinion have emerged within PDCI ranks as to how an open, efficient, “new and improved” party should function. Far from entering this new era of Ivoirian politics as a monolithic entity, as victorious election figures might suggest, the PDCI came rife with tensions between loyal members.

Scholars of Africa have long expressed dissatisfaction with theoretical models that attempt to explain the political, economic and social dynamics of the continent. According to Chazan, Mortimer, Ravenhill and Rothchild (1988, 13), this situation means that “social scientists have had little alternative but to undertake a search for new conceptual frameworks that would afford a fuller insight into the dynamic processes unfolding on the continent.” Others, such as Hyden (1983, 193), argue directly that “Africa needs a new paradigm, or set of paradigms” to explain the continent's development processes. Although there often is a call to combine or integrate various paradigms, it seldom is accompanied by specific suggestions or guidelines about how to create a new theoretical approach for the study of Africa. Moreover, theoretical discussions are not normally accompanied by a call to use appropriate and innovative methodological strategies. Failure to utilize such strategies severely limits theoretical advancement, however. We introduce a relatively new strategy in social-science methodology that is ideally suited for advancing new theoretical approaches for the study of Africa.

Before introducing this strategy, we argue that current theoretical approaches to the continent are plagued by a fundamental problem. Specifically, most previous research has failed to examine how events are shaped by the interaction between phenomena at the global, national and local levels. The majority of studies focus on one or perhaps two levels, ignoring the fact that development processes are complex and depend on interaction between factors at different levels. This situation is further complicated by the fact that each level of analysis also contains a number of different categories or sub-levels.

Broadly defined, civil society is the “private sphere of material, cultural and political activities resisting the incursions of the state” (Fatton 1992, 4-5). While such a broad definition is incomplete and in-deed simplistic, and will acquire more specificity as the analysis proceeds, it will suffice for our immediate purposes. In this general and provisional configuration, civil society represents a counterweight to state power and can thus serve as a critical agent of democratization. Civil society is thus a constant thorn in the monopolizing political claims of the state. This is not to imply that there is an unbridgeable chasm and an unmitigated opposition between state and civil society. In fact, there is a dialectical interaction between state and civil society. The state is transformed by a changing civil society; civil society is transformed by a changing state. Thus, state and civil society form a fabric of tightly interwoven threads, even if they have their own in-dependent patterns.

The state penetrates civil society through its multiple economic interventions, its disciplinary regulations of private behavior and its ideological “interpellations.” The state aspires to become totalitarian because ruling classes are predators bent on maximizing their supremacy; they seek therefore a complete appropriation of civil society. Civil society, in turn, penetrates the state through the erection of protective trenches against coercive abuse, material extraction and political compliance. Civil society aspires to negate the state, and subaltern classes, who are the state's principal victims, are determined to minimize their losses by abolishing it.

The contradiction between state and civil society is, however, not that simple.

In April 1994, South Africans of all racial and cultural groups abandoned the dehumanizing experiment in physical, economic and political separation of races, apartheid, by conferring political power and authority on their new democratically elected government. The constitutional, institutional and legal changes to the South African state which brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power constitute the most extensive and closely watched example of the many efforts at democratic reform in Africa in the 1990s. While South Africa's new legal structure and peaceful transition of power via a popular election may encourage many to simply eagerly pronounce South Africa a “democracy,” much Africanist literature encourages caution before such a judgment. Africa's and Latin America's attempts at democratization are replete with abandoned constitutions, resurrected careers of corrupt discredited politicians, political parties which grow authoritarian and chop off their popular roots, military leaders who overthrow civilian regimes and reformist governments which quickly repeat the sins of their predecessors. Consequently, many scholars look skeptically on constitutional reforms (Decalo 1992) and mere “cracks in the edifice of autocracy” (Bratton and van de Walle 1992, 421) to suggest that the institutionalization of legitimate and accountable political leadership requires a vehicle through which citizens can participate in policy-making debates—a vibrant civil society.

This article probes one vital feature of South Africa's civil society—the relationship between the ANC and the Civic Association Movement, which was one social movement central to the insurrectionary liberation struggle carried out within South Africa. The ANC owes its current political power, in large part, to the sacrifices and dedicated efforts of members of the Civic Association Movement who mobilized black township residents to demand political reform and rectification of the misdeeds perpetrated against them by the white administration.