Peasants are an ambiguous social category. They are difficult to define and their political behavior defies most generalizations. Nevertheless, social scientists, many working outside of Africa, have produced a voluminous literature debating both the critical characteristics and the analytical utility of the term peasant.

Some take the view that peasants have been defined so broadly and contradictorily as to render the concept virtually useless and that the notion should either be discarded or referred to only by negation (Dalton, 1972; Hill, 1963; Moore, 1972; Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe, 1977; Friedmann, 1980). Other scholars obviously disagree, having advanced definitions of the essence of peasants and varieties of agrarian change. Culturalists such as Kroeber (1948) and Redfield (1956) highlighted the peasants' folk version of a higher culture. Chayanov (1966) emphasized the demographic cycle of the peasant household, exhibiting a natural pattern of growth and change. Wolf (1966) and Godelier (1973) shifted the focus to the historically derived relationships of domination in which peasants were subsumed. Shanin defined peasants “as a kind of arrangement of humanity” (1973: 76) in which their partial involvement in the market and their partial subordination to the state or appropriating class were their most salient characteristics.

These debates were reproduced within African Studies. Those skeptical that the concept had any analytical value initially prevailed. This position was defended most vigorously in a theoretical essay by Fallers (1961) and in Hill's (1963) masterful work on agrarian change in southern Ghana. As late as 1972, Post noted that “most writers either evade this issue or display analytical uncertainty or forthrightly reject the term [peasant]” (1972: 223).

The Republic of Kenya is a land of stark contrasts. Its precapitalist policies have long attracted multinational investment and international loans. External capital is apparent to Western tourists in the capital city of Nairobi, an urban area with luxurious hotels, modern corporate and government offices, expensive automobiles, large sports stadiums, and numerous stores. But the modern features of Nairobi do not represent the real Kenya, the Kenya known to the vast majority of those in the country. The average Kenyan is not wealthy and does not possess Western-style amenities. Most Kenyans work in agriculture-related activities which range from subsistence farming to wage labor on large estates or plantations. In fact, recent statistics show that the agricultural sector employs over 81 percent of the labor force, contributes 65 percent to the value of total exports, and accounts for 31 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (World Bank, 1986a).

In addition to an appreciable disparity in income between urban elites and agricultural laborers, there is also an uneven distribution of resources within the agricultural sector. The present structure of agriculture is closely linked to the colonial period, when Europeans controlled large-scale farms in areas with fertile land. Although few Europeans farm in Kenya today, the agricultural system is still inequitable and biased toward Africans with large farms. Inequality is evident in the distribution of farm land, the flow of capital in and out of agriculture, and the class structure that perpetuates this situation. The Kenyan state remains closely aligned with elite interests in both rural and urban areas, thereby maintaining an unproductive agricultural system that contributes to underdevelopment.

Addis Ababa, founded a century ago, has exerted influence over its periphery like no other Ethiopian town before it. From a straggling, disjunctive village in the 1880s, Addis Ababa (New Flower) developed into one of the largest urban centers in Africa. By the end of World War II, it was a city of over a half million people and home to the Organization of African Unity and several other international bodies. The growth of this metropolis was phenomenal, particularly since it emerged within an economy that was 90 percent agricultural and largely feudal.

After serving initially as Shewa's provincial center, Addis Ababa became the imperial capital in 1889 with Menilek's accession to the Ethiopian throne. Addis Ababa also became the geographic center of an Ethiopia that in the 1880s was in the process of constituting itself both physically and culturally. The twentieth century provided Addis Ababa and its imperial resident with the technological and economic means with which to dominate and defend a state that was larger than that of any previous Abyssinian ruler. Modern firearms permitted the conquest of areas never before subject to the Abyssinian monarch; improved communications in the form of roads, transport vehicles, telegraph, and telephone gave the center the means with which to supervise a distant periphery; new export crops and improved access to international markets insured the financing of these modern innovations. Addis Ababa was at the heart of these changes. Its own evolution and development reflected the efforts of both Menilek II (r. 1889-1913) and Haile Sillassie I (regent 1917-1930; emperor 1930-1974) to modernize and centralize the feudal state.

The choice of a policy perspective in writing this paper is justifiable for at least two reasons: discussion will be oriented toward policy decisions; and analysis could draw from a whole array of policy sciences.

Literacy today has indeed come center stage. It has come to be accepted as a fundamental human right, as liberator of the mind from the bondage of dependence, as the portal to most knowledge, and thus as a tool for both the modernization and the democratization of societies. Of course, not everyone accepts all this. While few are against literacy any more, not everyone is fully and totally committed. The centrality of the role of literacy in development is not always understood and literacy sometimes waits while more urgent needs are fulfilled first! It is not realized that there are no first's and second's in social change, that literacy and development have a mutually beneficial relationship, and that without literacy, development indeed limps on one leg (Bhola, 1984, 1990).

Happily, literacy policy influentials have been able to make important gains and to set important goals. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution no. 42/104 of 1987, by declaring 1990 the International Literacy Year (ILY), put a seal of approval on the ideological and theoretical justifications for the role of literacy in development. UNESCO has been named the lead agency to mobilize the world community for universal literacy by the year 2000 (UNESCO, 1987). At the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA), jointly sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank, in Jomtien, Thailand, 5-9 March 1990, the nations of the world adopted the following planning targets for the year 2000:

Rapid urbanization has been perhaps the most dramatic of the social phenomena that marked the end of the colonial era in Africa. From a situation in 1950 in which the total urban population was no more than 28 million, the figure had by 1984 jumped to well over 125 million, representing a sharply increasing proportion of the total population (World Bank, 1986a). Yet, after an initial period when urbanization was welcomed as a positive tendency in the modernization of the continent (Friedmann, 1961) there is today some ambivalence as to the contributions of urban centers to the overall development of the continent. There are those (Santos, 1971; Bardinet, 1977) who argue that urban centers have failed to serve as a major force in the economic transformation of African countries but have, instead, highlighted their economic dependency and the negative social consequences that go with this. Others (Collier and Lai, 1980; Mabogunje, 1983) argue that much of the limited development that has been achieved in these countries has been due in no small measure to non-farm activities of these urban centers. Cities and towns are therefore apprehended not as the cause but only as the scene of social and economic problems, their role being to draw attention to endemic poverty and social degradation which otherwise remain buried and unobtrusive in the rural areas. When it comes to the role of urban planning and policies in resolving these problems, the pervading impression is of the failure of governments in most African countries to make any appreciable impact on the situation, a fact which has in turn provoked serious debates as to the nature of the post-colonial state in Africa (Hyden, 1983).

This paper addresses the issue of the state of education today in French-speaking Africa, with specific reference to literacy, post-literacy, and their perspectives for the year 2000. While a very pessimistic overall picture is presented in the literature, both by educational researchers and development and funding agencies, new approaches to the matter are emerging. First, from the previous linear relationship of education to other economic, social, and environmental factors, more and more authors now perceive education as an interdependent variable which mutually reinforces other economic, social, and cultural development factors. Education, it is realized, should not be restricted to the achievement of objectives such as employability and isolated from the global evolution of economic sectors (Hugon, 1988; Dave, Ouane, and Sutton, 1989). Hence, a new sort of applied economics of education is needed (Easton, 1989: 440). Linked to this notion, and no less important, is the perception that education should be constructed as a global system which offers combinations of approaches of equal potential value—formal, nonformal and even informal.

Second, the notion of development itself is questioned as well as its impact on education. The call is for humanization of development. The concept of development has long departed from narrow economic growth to include both a more equitable distribution of the wealth generated by and access to the supporting political structures. The failure of development policies in developing countries, and specifically in Africa, has aroused new interest in culture as an essential dimension for social change if not as the central dimension of development (Amin, 1989; Thompson, 1981, UNESCO, 1982).

“I was fed up with my wife, I was not happy at all, because in the four years since I had married her she was not pregnant” (Tutuola, 1981: 21). Thus does the narrator of Amos Tutuola's The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town express his distress at his wife's barrenness. The problem so pained him that he undertook a six-year quest in search of a cure, because to remain childless would be untenable. The issue of fertility and the need to perpetuate the family into future generations inspired Tutuola, whose story examines the singularly important issue of fertility as a social, cultural, and medical concern among the Yoruba of Nigeria and, by extrapolation, the peoples in transition in West Africa.

Amos Tutuola, a clerk in the Nigerian department of labor, has written several quest novels, all of which reflect various aspects of Yoruba culture. A native of Abeokuta in western Nigeria, Tutuola received the equivalent of a Western sixth-grade education. Raised as a Christian, he infuses his works with religious morality coupled with traditional perspectives.

Tutuola's writing career began as a relief from the boredom of his everyday job. He wrote his first novel in a two-day spurt of activity and sent it to what he thought was a publishing house, but which turned out to be a Methodist missionary group. The group forwarded the manuscript to the London publishers Faber and Faber and The Palm-Wine Drinhard was published in 1952 with little revision. Written in a distinct style of nonstandard English, the strange, fantastic story received praise from Western readers and critics, but derision from their African counterparts.

For decades in many African countries, pragmatism and politics have dictated that the choice of language for literacy and primary education should be the colonial languages—French, English or Portuguese. In some settings, certain African languages of wider communication have been selected, including Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, and Hausa in Nigeria. However, for the vast majority of African languages, educational materials have never been developed. Millions of African children find their first days at school bewildering as they adjust to not only the strange environment of school but also to a teacher who cannot speak their language.

In August 1989, a UNESCO seminar was convened in Lagos, Nigeria, focusing on the role of languages of minority groups as languages of instruction. This was followed by a consultation on the related challenge to provide grassroots teacher training for mothertongue education. Representatives came from approximately fifteen countries and five continents, with the majority being from within Africa. The stated purpose of the seminar, according to the prospectus, was:

Although over the last decade there has been a considerable growth in African theater research, the majority of such work has confined itself to the analysis of traditional theater practices or to that of contemporary literary theater. While acknowledging the functional dimensions of African theater, this research has focused on the aesthetics of African performance. When the social dimensions of theater have been evoked, they have been asserted mainly in terms of the propositional value of theatrical content. Playscripts have been analyzed for propositional claims and thematic concerns, and social critiques have then been constructed on such analyses.

This essay presents an analysis distinct from that critical trend. It examines neither traditional theatrical practices nor contemporary literary theater but rather an ambiguous theatrical practice that can be labeled popular theater. The first section of the paper discusses the concept of the popular and suggests that it is best understood as a functional discourse which can legitimate or subvert the existing power structures of society. The second section focuses on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian adult educator whose work provides the theoretical basis for most popular theater projects in Africa. The essay then analyzes the discursive construction of popular theater in various African contexts including Botswana, Zambia, and Nigeria. Through the history of popular theater in Africa, the paper shows the growth of popular theater theory. The last section, on the Kamiriithu production of Ngaahika Ndeenda, illustrates some of these theoretical claims.

Contemporary scholarship on Africa by Japanese anthropologists is vital, diverse, and expanding. This brief review surveys the development of anthropological research on Africa by Japanese scholars and is followed by a compilation of Japanese publications on Africa in English and French. Although some observations about Japanese anthropological research in Africa will be offered, the goal is primarily to inform American Africanists of this Japanese scholarship and the contexts within which it has developed rather than to attempt a critical appraisal.

It is not commonly known among western scholars that anthropology was formally established in Japan over one hundred years ago. The Anthropological Society of Tokyo (now the Anthropological Society of Japan) was established in 1884 by Shogoro Tsuboi, and two years later its journal Zinruigaku Zassi was first published. In 1893 Tsuboi was appointed the first professor of anthropology at the University of Tokyo. The Linguistic Society of Japan was formed in 1896 (although linguistics had been taught at the University of Tokyo for a decade), the same year that the Archaeology Society of Japan was established. As Takao Sofue notes, because anthropology at the University of Tokyo developed primarily as physical anthropology, ethnology (only termed cultural anthropology after World War II) emerged later and with the influence of Japanese folklorists (1962: 173-75; see also Yamaguchi and Nagashima, 1987). An informal group of scholars began meeting in 1928. Their name, the APE Circle (standing for Anthropology, Prehistory, and Ethnology), represented their desire to pursue a broader study of humans. In 1934 they formally created the Japanese Society of Ethnology and their journal Minzokugaku kenkyu appeared in the following year. The Folklore Society of Japan also was established in 1935.

The question, “Which language for literacy?” is often asked in contexts where a number of languages are used in a given community or state (Bhola, 1983; Carron and Bordia, 1985; Fordham, 1985). Although pragmatic reasons for the choice of language—availability of materials and of teachers, and economic considerations—are sometimes adduced, it is generally agreed that the question is above all a political one.

The problem of language choice is acute in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, where a nation-state may be comprised of a large number of linguistically heterogeneous groups (Nigeria, for example, has 413. See Grimes 1988: 295). While the merits and demerits of developing and using such small languages are ardently debated (Fasold, 1984; Pattanayak, 1985; Skuttnabb-Kangas, 1981), it is rare to find studies of particular situations where attempts have been made to develop and use such languages for the purpose of rural development. This paper will present such a study.

Cameroon is a country of 10.5 million people where 238 languages are spoken (Dieu and Renaud, 1983). The bulk of the population (80 percent) live in rural areas where they are engaged in subsistence and cash crop farming (Biya, 1986). National development policy has emphasized the rural areas under the official banner of the “revitalization of village communities”; this policy has been adopted partly to seek to stem the rural exodus to the towns, and partly because of a recognition that Cameroon's main resource in the long term is agriculture.

Addressing the issue of the extent to which the government of a country poor in economic and human resources for development can put into practice pluralist language policies for education. The discussion is limited to policy and practice in post-revolution Ethiopia, drawing on data collected in the mid-1980s (McNab, 1989). It is also limited to the literacy campaigns which, carried out in fifteen languages, have become a regular feature of the education system since their inauguration in 1979. The term literacy campaign as used in this paper includes the initial, remedial, and post-literacy classes which in Ethiopia are the basis of an integrated approach to literacy education.

The People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE) is a developing country of socialist orientation. The population of Ethiopia is about 45 million. It is one of the poorest countries in the world; in 1984, the estimated GNP per capita was around $110 (World Bank, 1987). The population is predominantly (89 percent) rural, with agriculture accounting for about 50 percent of GDP, 90 percent of exports and 85 percent of employment (World Bank, 1987). Agriculture is the country's main potential resource for development but development is hindered by cycles of drought and famine and by the fighting in Northern Ethiopia and previously also in the Ogaden. Trading is well established, and a small modern sector has developed in the urban areas. There are, however, vast distances, rugged terrain, and wide variations in topography which make internal transport and communications difficult and thereby pose major obstacles to administration and economic development.

The history of literacy learning in Mozambique proceeds through a number of sharply contrasting phases, and is particularly interesting in the way that it reveals its dependence on the political and economic strategy being practiced by the government. In each phase, the motivations of the providers and the seekers of access to literacy differ, as do the literacy results, in line with the prevailing relations of power, mode of production, and political situation.

Underlying this paper are two basic understandings about the provision and use of access to adult literacy:

—adult participation in literacy teaching-learning programs is first and foremost a question of motivation; and

—large-scale successes in literacy programs are dependent on factors that raise and sustain that motivation, and therefore, principally on the power, legitimacy, and encouragement of the state (Lind and Johnston, 1986).

The effects of literacy on society seem reasonably clear; at least, it is clear that societies with a high level of literacy are materially better off than those with a low level, and that the presence of widespread literacy skills in a society substantially affects its culture, relationships, power structure, and economy. To an extent this has given rise to the idea that education has the value of material capital and that economic development will take place if (and maybe only if) enough effort is invested in education. A careful look soon shows, however, that one is rather faced with a typical chicken and egg issue. Consequently, heavy investment in the promotion of literacy skills in a society does not automatically guarantee economic development. Nor is it necessarily satisfactory to begin by defining development as synonymous with economic growth.