African Studies

                        English abstract
Africa is a strategic area in the world since centuries. It is a hub, a crossroad of political and economic forces of the contemporary world. But being abandoned, exposed to illness since the end of Cold War in favor of other matters of the powerful States of international relations. Africa seems in this last decade to become again a major center of interest. The states are present there for various reasons. The NGO, the multinational firms, The United Nations, the different Bretton Woods’ institutions, namely the IMF and World Bank are directly interested in Africa. Is Africa a stake in the contemporary international relations? We’ll answer positively given the fact that is a hub of relations between those different actors we named previously. First of all, we can state that about international security concern, it represents an area of uncertainties that challenges the great organisms of peace making and maintaining. On the one hand, the United Nations supplies a lot of effort for security in Africa with the support of regional organizations like A.U. and ECOWAS, on the other hand the powerful military states like U.S.A which is present in the horn of Africa and France which intervenes in the Malian crisis, regard Africa as a den of threats. This motivates them to take into account threats from Africa in the implementation of their national defense policies. Lastly, Africa is a rich economical source. It holds natural resources such as oil, gold and diamond which have a strategic value and which are also very expensive in the international trade. Of course, the population of consumers estimated at one thousand million of individuals must be noticed. In this way, Africa is a privileged destination for international economic operators, either to have market share or to obtain raw materials.
                    Résumé en Français
L’Afrique est une zone stratégique du monde depuis des siècles. Elle est un carrefour, un  champ de rencontre des forces politiques et économiques du monde contemporain. Seulement étant délaissée, vouée aux gémonies depuis la fin de la guerre froide pour d’autres préoccupations des grandes puissances des relations internationales, elle semble cette dernière décennie redevenir un centre d’intérêt majeur. Les États y sont individuellement présents pour des raisons diverses. Les Organisations Non Gouvernementales, les firmes multinationales, les Nations Unies, les différentes institutions de Bretton Woods, en l’occurrence le FMI et la Banque Mondiale, s’intéressent directement à l’Afrique. L’Afrique est-elle un enjeu dans les relations internationales contemporaines ? Nous répondrons par l’affirmative dans la mesure où elle est devenue le carrefour des relations entre ces différents acteurs qu’on vient de nommer. En premier, on peut dire que du point de vue de la sécurité internationale elle représente une zone d’incertitudes sécuritaires qui pose des défis aux grands organismes de maintien de la paix. D’une part, l’Organisation des Nations Unies concentre beaucoup d’effort sur la sécurité en Afrique avec l’aide d’organismes régionaux ou sous-régionaux comme l’Union Africaine ou la CEDEAO, d’autre part, les  grandes puissances militaires telles que les États-Unis d’Amérique présents dans la corne de l’Afrique et la France, qui a intervenu durant la crise malienne, voient en l’Afrique un repère de menaces éventuelles. Ce qui les pousse à prendre en compte des menaces d’origine africaine dans l’élaboration de leurs politiques de défense nationale. Enfin, l’Afrique est un terreau économique fécond. Elle regorge de ressources naturelles telles que le pétrole, l’uranium, l’or, le diamant, qui ont une valeur stratégique et une valeur marchande très forte dans le marché commercial international. Bien sûr, sans oublier la masse de consommateurs estimée à un milliard d’individus. Dès lors l’Afrique est prisée par les acteurs économiques internationaux pour se tailler une part de marché, pour servir de pourvoyeur de matières premières. Ce qui fait penser que l’Afrique est un enjeu des relations internationales contemporaines car du point de vue de la sécurité et du point de vue de l’économie, elle semble incontournable.

As Nigeria moves closer to its 2015 elections, there are concerns that the elections, like the previous ones, will be marred by violence. This article examines why elections are usually volatile in Nigeria, the main sources of apprehensions regarding the 2015 elections, the key
issues that might define the elections, factors that might mitigate the outbreak of violence, and the national and regional fallout that can be expected.

In less than seven years after attaining independence from Great Britain, Nigeria experienced a Civil War which lasted for thirty months beginning in July, 1967 and ending in January, 1970. It was a failed secessionist attempt by the Igbo, a major ethnic group in the Eastern Region of Nigeria, led by Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu against the Federal Military Government (FMG) headed by General Yakubu Gowon. Based on the casualty of the war and in comparison with a population of 7, 497,000 persons in the Eastern Region of Nigeria according to the reportedly disputed national census of 1962, describing acute violence, or what Damien de Walque termed ‘excess mortality’, in Biafra as a ‘genocide’ is apparently defensible. However, unlike the notorious Rwandan genocide or other cases where the term ‘genocide’ has been applied elsewhere in Africa, its attribution to the Biafran War is somewhat problematic. One common trend in cases of genocide is the idea of a ‘weak’ group targeted for partial or total annihilation by a ‘stronger’ group for recognisable ‘reasons’.  How did this play out in Biafra since the course of the war revealed that there were offensives and counter-offensives on both sides?  Also, if indeed there were mass killings, was it an extermination of a group of homogeneous destitute and harmless civilians as some influential sources claim?  What was the role of the media in painting an image of ‘genocide’ in the Nigerian Civil War?

In every society, development depends on investment in institutions and individuals. Wickliffe Rose, an early leader in the Rockefeller Foundation, called this “backing brains.” But developing human capital is a risky proposition. This intriguing history explores the challenges and triumphs in the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to invest in the people of Africa over the course of a century.

Yorùbá religion has changed across time and space. In Yorùbáland it refers to a range of local and wide complex cults brought together in consequence of British colonization and Lagosian Cultural Renaissance. However, the religion is now universal and we can find practitioners all over the world.

THE UMUNRI-ENUGWU UKWU ANCESTRAL CONNECTION: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE By WILLIAMS OBIOZOR, EdD.
(from the Obiozor-Nwigbo Dynasty, Enu Avomimi, Enugwu Ukwu).....Salutaions!
HRM Eze Enugwu-Ukwu and Igwe Umunri, Sir Ralph Obumneme Ekpeh - the Okpalanakana Ukabia Nri IV, members of the Royal cabinet, Ndi Ichie, Nze na Ozo, ECDU PG, My Lord Justice Nkemdilim Izuako of the UN International Court, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen present.
I greet you.
I am standing here to present this paper not because I know it all but because the onus fell on me by sheer luck. Yes, I said ‘luck’ because I know that Enugwu-Ukwu has men and women with great intellect in ethnography, archaeology, anthropology and history who may even do better than me but here I am. My late father Offorkansi Okoye Obiozor-Igbo will be smiling down on me now as I speak, remembering how I used to quiz him about my hometown – Enugwu-Ukwu.
Please do not consider me a historian but an adult educator which I have always been. I methodically researched and documented the data I got on UmuNri and Enugwu Ukwu, used the opportunity to interview many people although some chickened out because they do not want to be quoted in any form of controversy. I do not consider this presentation as controversial piece but just sharing with everyone what I gathered in the field as an academic and researcher. So, it is left for you to decide and choose what you want to believe.

Premières lignes
Les premiers témoignages de la Shoah auraient été recueillis à l’initiative d’un survivant, Moshe Feigenbaum, avec l’aide du journaliste Israel Kaplan. Dès 1945, tous deux récoltèrent plus de 2 500 dépositions, photos, extraits d’archives des camps. Ces premiers recueils de témoignages ont été déposés à Yad Vashem en 1948. Les témoignages de la Shoah sont à présent innombrables et « inscrits sur des...

Plan de l'article

    Les obstacles à la parole
    Prise de parole
    Le paradoxe de la langue d’écriture
    Témoignage à voix multiples
    On n’achève pas un témoignage

Since the NWICO debate in the late 1970s, Western media coverage of Africa has been criticized for being excessively negative and decontextualized, and for reproducing a number of colonial stereotypes and narratives (Hawk, 1992). The concept of Afro-pessimism is now commonly summoned to describe this phenomenon (De B’Béri & Louw, 2011). The debate on Africa’s media image, however, seems to have reached a certain “taken for grantedness” as it has become common currency to criticize international media coverage of Africa. Paradoxically, only few recent studies look in a rigorous way at the nature of this coverage. And the few that do actually found that coverage may not be as “negative, marginalized or trivial” as it is assumed to be (Scott, 2009).

This paper contributes to this effort to clarify the debate on Western journalistic ways to write about Africa. It looks at the French and British coverage of the 50th anniversaries of independence celebrated in various sub-Saharan countries between 2007 and 2013. Based on a corpus of 272 items from 8 daily broadsheet newspapers (4 in each country), the study assesses the nature of the coverage and the language used to talk about these celebrations by combining content and discourse analysis. I start by identifying the most covered stories to understand how these celebrations were dominantly framed. I then look at a number of features of the articles: geographical focus; dominant lexical fields; sources quoted and quoting verbs used; amount of conflation (generalization from one country to “Africa” as a whole); use of metaphors to interpret the past and the future.

Ultimately, the paper argues that the way Western journalists write about Africa is more complex than first meets the eye; and that only by grasping with this complexity can we understand how sub-Saharan Africa as a region becomes a construct imagined through the ideological prism of Afro-pessimism.

With his bizarre speech, purported miracles, and antinomian behavior, the majnun, or “mad saint of Islam,” has proved an enigma to Islamic medicine and Western positivist traditions. 
Variously understood by Galenic physicians as a madman suffering an organic illness (Dols), by anthropologists as one possessed by spirits (Crapanzano), and by scholars of Sufism as a radical ascetic (Karamustafa), the majnun has been treated as a mental patient, a prisoner, a fraud, or a religious penitent, but never a healer. 
    In this essay, we consider the majnun as a public healer, one who brings healing to human beings and to society through the restoration of God’s law.  Saints heal by actualizing the human body as the meeting-place of divinity and materiality, an isthmus (barzakh) between the “oceans of God and the cosmos.”  Using the nineteenth-century hagiographical compendium of Moroccan scholar Muhammad ibn Ja’far al-Kattani, interviews in Fez (2000), and the corporeal phenomenology of Sufi Muhya ad-Din ibn ‘Arabi, we recover the majnun as healer.  Both French and Islamic positivists rejected the majnun; for French sociologues and doctors, the majnun was a primitive “homme-fétiche” who absorbed the tribe’s maladies into his own body through a magical ritual of transference; for Moroccan Islamic nationalists, he was an anti-modern embarrassment.
Forthcoming in Henk de Smaele, Tineke Osselaer, and Kaat Wils-Verhaegen (eds.), Sign or Symptom?  Exceptional Corporeal Phenomena in Medicine and Religion

Faute de faire prévaloir une légitimité, le régime marocain utilise les méthodes les plus basses pour maintenir son occupation illégale au Sahara occidental. Les médias français sont d’une discrétion à toute épreuve sur le hacker dénommé « Chris Coleman24 ». Pas question de lui accorder l’audience médiatique d’Edward Snowden, pourtant ses révélations, preuves à l’appui, sont terriblement graves et permettent de comprendre pourquoi le conflit du Sahara occidental ne se règle pas, alors qu’il est bel et bien un problème de décolonisation, que l’ONU a déjà adopte plus de 100 résolutions appelant au droit du peuple sahraoui a l’autodétermination et a l’Independence, que l’Union Africaine a clairement tranché sur la question depuis les années 80 quand elle a reconnu la République Arabe Sahraouie Démocratique comme membre et plus tard comme membre fondateur de l’UA, et que le cessez-le-feu entre les forces d’invasion marocaine et les force armée de libération sahraouie date de 1991 en vue d’organiser un referendum onusien d’autodétermination. L’article qui suit parle de quelque révélation sur les méthodes de corruption et d’espionnage adopté par le Maroc au sein d’institutions internationales pour dénigrer la lutte du peuple sahraoui et faire obstacle à la résolution de ce conflit.

Early research on child development in Africa was dominated by expatriates and was primarily addressed to the topics of testing the cross-cultural validity of theories developed “in the West,” and the search for universals. After a brief review of the outcome of that research, we propose two additional types of motivation that seem to us important as African researchers begin to take the lead in articulating research agendas for the study of child development in Africa: articulating the contextual relevance and practical usefulness of developmental psychology in Africa; and making developmental psychology intelligible to local audiences. We highlight two major challenges for African societies in this era that call for attention by the emerging field of African child development research: linguistic hegemony and its effects on research and schooling; and the process of indigenization. We end with a preview of chapters in the rest of the volume.

This paper presents a review of the past and present upper echelons research with the intention of drawing attention to the need for a change of direction from causal descriptive studies to causal explanatory studies. Review of the extant literature indicates that many of the organizational researchers have shown greater interest in studying relationships between top management characteristics (in the form of demographics) and organizational outcomes. This has continued despite the effort by Priem, Douglas and Gregory to draw attention to the limitations of demographic proxies of psychographic variables of top management teams and the caution that the role of the entire top management team in strategy development may be over-exaggerated. Since many of the studies failed to show empirically how or why top management demographics related to organizational outcomes, implications for theory and research are discussed.

(Proceedings in French to be posted on Academia.org)
This transcultural conference was organized at the University of Limoges by Jean-Marie Grassin on the occasion of the second Festival of Francophone theater.  The program called for the study of the theatricality pertaining to very different forms of artistic oral performances in the world.
In this instance, « Francophonie » was defined as an instrument allowing cultures whose traditional language is not necessarily French to communicate through a common language, and to gain from exchanges  with other visions of the world. Francophonie thus constitutes a wide "language space" extending over all continents, favouring cultural interactions and giving access to various cultures
As a good number of participants came from Africa, the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean, the conference was an experiment at decentering the theory and history of world literature away from the eurocentrism that characterized most works of reference.

This article looks at the combined work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo and of “global Igbo” author Chris Abani in the volume Nollywood (2009). In their creative work both artists usually strive to see beyond established aesthetic and ethical paradigms and to bypass conventional modes of representation, in order to zoom in on adventurous and often shocking areas of existence in both life and art in Africa. In his collection of photographs known as the Nollywood series, Hugo engages with the Nigerian video film industry in collaboration with local actors and make-up artists in order to recreate the workings and general atmosphere of Nollywood films. Their cooperation produces a series of violently surreal, hallucinating tableaux. The volume features an introduction by Chris Abani which aptly evokes Nollywood’s history and production, and provides a key to reading Hugo’s creative rendition of the phenomenon. Marked by an incessant effort to move beyond the limits of both literary and cultural representation, Abani’s work is a highly appropriate contribution to the artistic experimentation in the collection. This article argues that the visual and textual works of Hugo and Abani both revisit and remove – through sometimes disquietingly violent aesthetical intervention – the borders that are kept in place by societal control on culture and the arts.