Authors:Eric Mutisya Kioko Abstract: In the wake of widespread interethnic "clashes" and al-Shabaab terrorist attacks in Kenya over the last few years, the state has embarked on the devolution of capacities for ensuring security and peace to the local level. The state gave the rights to handle specific local conflicts and crime prevention to local peace committees in an attempt to standardise an aspect of customary law, and to Nyumba Kumi committees in a strategy of anchoring community policing at the household level. These changes were conditioned and framed by ideas of decentralisation and the delegation of responsibilities from the state to the community level. In this paper, the following questions are raised: Are hybrid governance arrangements effective and appropriate? To what extent do peace committees and Nyumba Kumi provide institutional support for peaceful conflict management and crime prevention in Kenya? What guarantees and what constrains their success? The author draws on ethnographic data from the Maasai–Kikuyu borderlands near Lake Naivasha, a former hotspot of interethnic clashes. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Frankline A. Ndi, Simon Batterbury Abstract: Large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) by foreign interests is a major driver of agrarian change in the productive regions of Africa. Rural communities across Southwest Cameroon are experiencing a range of political conflicts resulting from LSLA, in which commercial interests are threatening local land-use practices and access to land. This paper shows that the struggle to maintain or redefine livelihoods generates tension between inward competition for and outward contestation of claims to land. In Nguti Subdivision, the scene of protests against a particular agribusiness company, there is continued debate over ideas about, interests in, and perceptions of land and tenure. The authors show how topdown land acquisition marginalises land users, leading to conflicts within communities and with the companies involved, and conclude that for an agro-project to succeed and avoid major conflicts, dominance by elite interests must give way to a more inclusive process. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Seign-goura Yorbana Abstract: This article presents representations of oil in Chad which have been drawn from ethnographic interviews with a variety of actors, most notably with local oil workers and inhabitants from the oil-producing areas of the country. It reveals that a decade of oil exploitation in Chad was sufficient enough time for a collective imaginary to emerge regarding the implicit and explicit effects of oil. Expectations about the impact of the extractive industry on local development have not been met, which has led communities to develop sometimes paradoxical feelings towards, beliefs about, and representations of oil. What began as a belief that oil is a gift from god to help to alleviate poverty has given way to a disappointed sense that oil is in fact a curse. This has seen people use metaphors involving fire, the devil, disease, animals, and cursed money to express the harsh realities of Chad’s mining industries. These myths, representations, and discussions about oil embody and explicate the resource curse theory. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Christof Hartmann Abstract: Following the disputed December 2016 presidential elections in The Gambia, ECOWAS managed to "restore democracy" in the country by using the threat of force, but without any use of direct physical violence. Both the African Union and the United Nations Security Council backed ECOWAS, which also gave ECOWAS legitimacy, for what was essentially ECOWAS's policy, and indeed an African solution to African problems. Only when the scenario of military invasion became credible did the Gambian regime accept the defeat. Four main factors explain the behaviour of ECOWAS and its success: ECOWAS had a clear legal mandate to threaten the use of force in order to protect democracy in one of its member states; there was consensus that ECOWAS forces could have coped with the relatively small Gambian army; the Gambian president could not rely on friends among his regional peers or some powerful ally from outside Africa; and regional leaders such as Nigeria and Senegal made a credible commitment to the regional intervention. While the intervention was a victory for pro-democratic activist regionalism, the specific West African conditions make a diffusion of the model to other parts of Africa unlikely. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Aghogho Akpome Abstract: This article examines the depiction of three impoverished Lagosian slums in the controversial British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary, Welcome to Lagos , which highlights the negative impacts of globalised capitalism on urban culture in Nigeria's commercial centre and biggest city. In recent times scholarship on postcolonial urbanisation has been marked by an important shift in focus from economic concerns to interest in the peculiar cultural dimensions of life in postcolonial cities. As this article argues, however, dominant depictions of postcolonial cities continue to highlight ways in which cultural responses to the harsh effects of late capitalism in such cities reflect economic strategies of what Mike Davis calls "informal survivalism." PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Ulf Engel Abstract: Review of the Monograph: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life , New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2016, ISBN 9781785331183 (hardcover), xxii + 162 pp. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Heinrich Bergstresser Abstract: Review of the monograph: Roman Loimeier, Islamic Reform in Twentieth-Century Africa , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, ISBN 9780748695430 (hardback), 549 pp. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Roger Southall Abstract: Review of the monograph: Dale McKinley, South Africa's Corporatised Liberation: A Critical Analysis of the ANC in Power , Auckland Park: Jacana, 2017, ISBN 9781928232322, 198 pp. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
Authors:Beatrice Schlee Abstract: Review of the monograph: Rita Kesselring, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa , Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016, ISBN 9780804798488 (cloth), 256 pp. PubDate: 2017-04-13 Issue No:Vol. 52 (2017)
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