Research student panels (97A, 97B, 98, 99A, 99B) have been organised for Aegis and non-Aegis post-graduate students through the Interlink Programme coordinated by Prof. Alessandro Triulzi (Università L’Orientale, Naples) . The students involved are undertaking archival or field research, or are in the process of writing up dissertations, or have just completed their dissertations. Aegis is encouraging student exchanges through European Union mobility programmes (such as Erasmus/Socrates), joint training in Summer Schools where research students discuss their work with senior researchers (the last one was held in Cortona, Italy, in September 2004), and student-geared seminars and conferences. Papers have been grouped under broad themes and discussion will be chaired by research students themselves in the hope of encouraging broad student participation in the European Conference of African Studies.
This is one of the student panels (see also 97B, 98, 99A, 99B) organised for post-graduate reseach students through the Interlink Programme supported by Aegis African Studies Centres. Panel 97A explores the weight of local politics and community struggles in both colonial and post colonial times in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and in South Africa under apartheid.
The overwhelming weight of literature on African nationalism pertains to national level politicking, leaving numerous local political arenas unexplored. This paper sets out to examine local politics within two districts in what was colonial Uganda’s eastern province in the years before independence.
Nationalism is inextricable from the issue of political identity, most commonly articulated as the railing of African liberation against colonial control. There is little doubt that colonialism was in essence a force worth challenging, and it is not the intention of this paper to challenge that sentiment. What is commonly neglected however, are matters of internal division, especially at the local level, between African elites in competition with each other, and between those elites and the mass of people whom they claimed to represent.
By charting the political history of two districts in eastern Uganda this paper exposes how district elites were internally divided, broadly speaking, between those who benefited and those who lost out under colonial rule. The lot of the general populace, on whose backs the costs of colonial development were carried, was never necessarily the primary issue for those elites. Lacking cohesion and leadership, grassroots discontent was unable to express itself in any way beyond sporadic acts of ineffective resistance. The only occasions during which such latent disaffection became a political force, were those when one section of a local elite, in pursuit of their own interests, sought to pin their own grievances alongside those of the people in general.
Besides begging the question of what Ugandan independence actually meant for the people of Bukedi and Teso districts, this phenomenon also concurs with a pattern in the interaction of socio-political forces in general. The seeming obscurity of 15 years of political history in two districts within a country in East Africa in the immediate post-War years does not seem as undistinguished when the cogs and wheels at work are remarkably similar to those of any number of more commonly known historical dramas, in Africa and elsewhere.
In the context of Ujamaa’s collapse and a still more liberal political environment Tanzania has witnessed increasing disruptive tendencies between Christians and Muslims. In Tanzania today society has been ‘brought back in’, this as the state withdraws and civil society institutions thrive. Among the latter we find numerous religious institutions, mainly Christian and Muslim, which are growing with a speed that drastically challenges the habitual and otherwise relatively stable and state-controlled power-structures in religio-political relations. Over the last 20 years has become evermore striking the extent to which politics are interpreted from a religious perspective, and vice versa. Thus, it is apparent that the importance of Christian and Muslim identities is increasing at the expense of the otherwise celebrated Tanzanian nationhood.
The paper analyses the background, contents and implications of present contestations between Muslims and others in Tanzania. It is based on fieldwork carried out in Dar es Salaam from August to December 2002, where particular emphasis was placed on capturing present socio-political developments among Tanzanian Muslims through qualitative interviews with different Muslim leadership. An identification of the central areas through which Muslims argue an asserted deprivation is made, and the paper discusses the broader societal background through which religion-politics relations develop presently in Tanzania. Emphasis is placed on the interrelations between democratisation and the growing civil institutional pluralism within the religious field. Also, attention is drawn to the increasing local-global links within both politics and religious institutionalisations.
The proposed paper deals with the relationship between two recent phenomena in Nigeria: the drive for economic liberalisation, reduced state intervention and integration into 'global governance' on one side, and the salience and acceleration of local, often violent, struggles over political power, social rights and economic positions – so called community conflicts –, with focus on the Niger Delta, on the other. On a theoretical level, the explanational force of approaches practicing a “methodological nationalism” and state-centrism is called into question considering the empirical evidence of fractured authority, splitted sovereignty and subnational loyalities in the Delta. Hence, the paper wants to contribute to a yet-to-draw topography of politics beyond the state including new metaphors and models for social domination and counter-hegemonic action.
In the Niger Delta, 'marginal zones of globalisation' confront the powerhouses of global capitalism in the form of Multinational Oil Companies (MNOCs) in close spatial proximity. The first part of the presentation will discuss if oil-producing communities can adequately be described to be under the tutelage of 'private indirect governance' in which MNOCs fill the position of a private sovereign which organises social and security interventions indirectly. In a second part the essence of neo-liberal reform in Nigeria is analysed from a historical perspective. In conclusion, the transformation of local power structures will be related to economic policies on national and international level as well as “global governance” as discourse and practice.
This paper looks at the experience of Cape Town’s coloured communities during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It focuses upon the way in which the civic associations, which played a central role in the struggle throughout South Africa, operated in the specific situations of Cape Town’s coloured communities. It pays special attention to the way anti-apartheid activists sought to use the civic associations and grievances against local conditions, such as rents and rates, to mobilise populations with a history of political apathy into the broader anti-apartheid movement. It charts the rise and fall of these organisations, and the strategies they used to draw people into the anti-apartheid struggle. It then concludes by considering the reasons why these organisations and their strategies encountered limited success; finding that the diversity of Cape Town’s coloured populations placed severe limitations upon the viability of a strategy based upon mobilising people through their common interests as members of coherent communities. It then locates these findings within broader understandings of the anti-apartheid struggle throughout South Africa.