Institutional Diversity and Performance in African Cotton Sectors

This article analyses the performance of cotton sectors across East, Southern, and West Africa, paying particular attention to the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that they now exhibit. It finds strong support for earlier contentions regarding trade‐offs between competition and coordination, and between the roles of public and private sectors. New insights provide concrete and context‐specific guidance to policy‐makers and stakeholders regarding the key challenges they will face and the risks they will need to manage as they work to improve productivity and ensure an equitable division of benefits within cotton sectors.     

Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

ABSTRACT

Drawing on social histories of rumour, this article challenges notions of white and Afrikaner homogeneity which persist in the scholarship on late and post-apartheid South Africa. In so doing, it demonstrates the revisionist potential of rumour as a historical source, while reinserting class in a scholarship which privileges race as salient historical feature. The article focuses on Arrie Paulus, apartheid South Africa’s most prominent white trade unionist, infamous as the personification of working-class racism. Yet this defender of race-based privilege and staunch Afrikaner nationalist was haunted by a rumour: Paulus, it was whispered, was not actually white. The rumour circulated in reform-era South Africa and persists in the post-apartheid present. By examining the rumour surrounding Paulus’s racial and ethnic origins in terms of the functions it fulfilled within the particular contexts in which it appeared, this article exposes longstanding tensions around the politics of class characterizing Afrikaner society since the 1970s.     

Age at first marriage in Malawi: a Bayesian multilevel analysis using a discrete time-to-event model

Summary.  The paper presents a hierarchical discrete time survival model for the analysis of the 2000 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey data to assess the determinants of transition to marriage among women in Malawi. The model explicitly accounts for the unobserved heterogeneity by using family and community random effects with cross-level correlation structure. A nonparametric technique is used to model the base-line discrete hazard dynamically. Parameters of the model are computed by using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The results show that rising age at marriage is a combination of birth cohort and education effects, depends considerably on the family and to some extent on the community in which a woman resides and the correlation between family and community random effects is negative. These results confirm a downward trend in teenage marriage and that raising women's education levels in sub-Saharan Africa has the beneficial effect of increasing age at marriage, and by implication reducing total fertility rates. The negative correlation between family and community random effects has policy implications in that targeting communities with an intervention to increase age at first marriage may not necessarily yield reduced fertility levels in individual families. A campaign that is geared towards individual families would achieve the desired goals. Overall, the findings point to the need for the Government in Malawi to enact public policies which are geared at vastly improving women's education at higher levels. The variation in marriage rates over families poses problems in delivering the policy, since particular policies must be devised for specific groups of families to accomplish the required social and health objectives.     

口头法与非洲传统法律文化

非洲大陆由于长期存在的非文字文化的影响,习惯法的生成途径大多离不开口耳相传。“口头非洲法”(O ral A frican Law)的创制方式依创制的主体不同,可以分为个体创制和群体创制两种形式,并且因口头法创制的主体不同,其程序和权威也有异。在无文字或不注重文字的口头文化背景下,口头法在表现形式上重口头程序,强调外在仪式,流传“誓言”与“神判”。口头非洲法是非洲传统社会极为重要的元素,它的存续是非洲法律文化得以长期存在的重要原因,非洲法律文化正是因其浓郁的口头性而具有顽强的生命力。     

黑非洲民族主义文学思潮的地缘特征

黑非洲地区封闭而自成一体的地理结构和独特的历史遭遇。导致黑非洲的民族主义文学具有鲜明的地缘特征，具体表现为对抗性、泛非性或泛黑人主义和混合性。运用本民族语言还是运用欧洲语言进行创作，黑非洲的民族主义作家们普遍陷入了语言选择的文化困境。     

土地改革、地权的安全性、土地登记：来自西方的视角

文章对现行发展中国家（主要是非洲、拉美、亚洲和东欧部分地区）土地改革政策进行分析。土地改革在这些国家主要由两个部分组成：针对土地过度集中问题而实施的重新分配和土地权利的确权及登记。土地登记是西方捐助国、国际金融机构、非政府组织、学术界所推崇的土地改革方法。文章对土地登记和确权的三个核心概念——地权的安全性、赋权和习惯法进行深入研究，希望对国内相关研究有所裨益。     

他者之域：和解的希望——《耻》的后殖民解读

民族、身份认同以及主体与他者的关系问题是后殖民理论中所探讨的重要课题。从后殖民的角度解读了南非作家J.M.库切的小说《耻》。分析了后殖民时期南非白人主体地位衰落以及被边缘化、客体化,丧失身份认同感的状况;阐释了强暴所隐喻的深刻意蕴,即作为抵抗话语的强暴只是殖民压迫的复制,是殖民权力的颠倒;探讨了作品所揭示的后殖民时期非殖民化进程中宽容、和解、和谐共存的理念及其深远意义。     

Household Structure and Living Conditions in Nigeria

Data on 7,632 households from the 1999 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey are used to examine household structure and living conditions in Nigeria. The study finds significant disadvantage in living conditions of single‐adult, female‐ and single‐adult, male‐headed households relative to two‐parent households. Extended households show no significant advantage in living conditions over two‐parent households if headed by women but are consistently advantaged if headed by men. Although extended households do not entirely wipe out the disadvantage of female headship on household living conditions, they show a significant mitigating potential. Efforts to understand and alleviate poverty in Nigeria may need to address simultaneously gender imbalances in access to livelihood opportunities and factors that foster nucleation of family structure into single‐adult households.