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  • Editors’ Introduction
  • Sean Redding and Elliot Fratkin, Editors

We are pleased to introduce Volume 58, Number 2, of the African Studies Review of 2015. This issue features the 2014 African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture delivered by Léonce Ndikumana at last year’s Annual Meetings of the African Studies Association, as well as an “ASR Focus on Volunteer Labor in East Africa” consisting of four articles plus an introductory essay. Rounding out the issue, several articles engage with diverse topics ranging from authoritarian regimes to intimate relationships and investigating the impact of global economics, development policies, and culture on state policies and individual choices.

The issue begins with Léonce Ndikumana’s, “Integrated Yet Marginalized: Implications of Globalization for African Development.” This lecture stimulated some heated discussion at the meetings of the ASA, and we hope that readers will find the article equally provocative. Drawing on his experiences as a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as the former Director of Research and Operational Policy at the African Development Bank, Ndikumana explores the causes of many of the economic challenges that African countries face, while also exploding some of the myths. Some of the challenges have emerged from the history of Africa’s incorporation into the global economy in the context of coercive and exploitative colonial relationships, and Ndikumana sees the persistence of these problems as a function of ongoing political marginalization, growing international income inequality, and the increasing environmental problems faced by many African countries. He notes that a number of policy changes may be required at the international level to alter existing patterns of globalization that have entrenched the relative powerlessness of most African countries.

The next five articles compose the special “ASR Focus on Volunteer Labor in East Africa.” The articles look primarily at Kenya and Tanzania, and mostly at the Africans who provide voluntary labor either as part of a larger social commitment or (as in the global North) as a way to gain entry to career opportunities. The burgeoning popularity of volunteerism in the global North tends to obscure the long history of volunteering in Africa as [End Page 1] a means of achieving various political and social goals. The introductory article for this section, written by the guest editors Hannah Brown and Ruth Prince, charts the recent literature on volunteerism and notes that the distinction between paid labor and volunteering is historically and socially contingent, particularly in the current era when highly educated volunteers often provide professional-level labor and services for no pay. The introduction then discusses the multiple meanings and inherent tensions in the humanitarian economies driven by volunteer labor in Africa, and highlights a number of the insights provided by the subsequent Focus articles.

The next article within the Focus section is Emma Hunter’s “Voluntarism, Virtuous Citizenship, and Nation-Building in Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial Tanzania.” Hunter traces the use of Africans as volunteer laborers during the colonial period to the modification of certain types of precolonial labor by a colonial administration that wanted to promote particular forms of labor as altruistic community service but that also did not want to pay for that labor. She notes the complex legacy that colonial volunteerism left for the postcolonial state: the twinned aspects of service and parsimony that informed many of the self-help policies initiated by Nyerere’s administration. Many scholars have seen the government’s adoption of these policies as essentially a way for the state to extend its power over the population, but Hunter goes beyond that analysis by scrutinizing the extensive debates among Tanzanians in the early 1960s about kazi ya kujitolea, or “voluntary work in nation building,” as represented in the local press. Letters from readers published in the press, as Hunter discovered, “bring to light divisions in society that many would have preferred to keep hidden” (43).

The second Focus article, “At the Service of Community Development: The Professionalization of Volunteer Work in Kenya and Tanzania,” by Hannah Brown and Maia Green, explores some of the contemporary tensions inherent in volunteer work in Tanzania and Kenya, particularly in civil society organizations and health care. In the context of high unemployment...

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