Editors’ Introduction

We are pleased to introduce Volume 59, Number 1, of the African Studies Review of 2016. In this issue we continue our commemoration of ASR’s long engagement with African women’s and gender studies with the second part of the Forum on Women and Gender in Africa, guest edited by Judith Van Allen and Kathleen Sheldon. The first installment of the forum was featured in the December issue (Volume 58, Number 3), and focused on women in southern Africa. This group of essays includes articles on women in Uganda, Ghana, and Senegal, plus a featured commentary on a new graphic history of women’s political resistance in Crossroads, South Africa. But we start with five individual articles that broaden the disciplinary and topical scope of this issue.

In “Misguided and Misdiagnosed: The Failure of Decentralization Reforms in the DR Congo” (5–32) Pierre Englebert and Emmanuel Kasongo Mungongo analyze the sweeping political reforms initiated in 2006 that attempted to move power out of the political center as an example of similar reform efforts elsewhere on the continent. Paradoxically, in the D.R. Congo reform measures have in fact perpetuated some of the old political problems and spawned new ones: specifically, predatory extraction and a lack of political accountability have continued, while power has become centralized at the provincial level, thus perpetuating the worst aspects of top-down governance. The authors draw on significant empirical data to suggest that the reforms, while intended to promote accountability and the broadening of local access to government programs and officials, were ultimately based on a faulty understanding of the issues that contributed to corruption and lack of transparency in governance prior to 2006. They conclude: “Congo’s decentralization problems illustrate the frequent disconnect in Africa between governance reforms and deeper politics” (27).

Scott Ross’s “Encouraging Rebel Demobilization by Radio in Uganda and the D.R. Congo: The Case of ‘Come Home’ Messaging” (33–55) investigates the efficacy of radio messages in persuading members of the Lord’s Resistance Army to leave the rebel group and surrender to authorities. While the elusive leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony, has shifted his base of operations from Uganda to the D.R. Congo, more international actors have become involved in the messaging process and have experimented with new forms of messages. The results of these “Come Home” messages have created new ways of understanding how communications media may have complemented traditional counterinsurgency measures in the Great Lakes region of Africa.

Andrew Hernann investigates the culture of joking among internally displaced persons and refugees in Mali in his article, “Joking Through Hardship: Humor and Truth-Telling among Displaced Timbuktians” (57–76). Drawing on interviews and observations among refugees from Timbuktu in 2010, Hernann places joke-telling at the heart of many social interactions. He notes that jokes help to build social networks and ease tensions among people who find themselves newly rootless after fleeing the Islamic extremist takeover of Timbuktu. But beyond these functions, Hernann argues, jokes also allow both the joke-tellers and their audiences to make sense of wider political events, and jokes allow them to voice their anxieties and resentments as they rebuild their lives in a context that many find culturally and ethnically alien. Hernann concludes that by taking joking seriously, we can “enrich our understandings of how refugees and IDPs experience, conceptualize, and navigate the hardships of crisis and displacement” (72).

Turning to the historical trajectory of development projects in Tanzania, Robert Ahearne, in his article “Development and Progress as Historical Phenomena in Tanzania: ‘Maendeleo? We Had That in the Past’” (77–96), develops a finely grained analysis of how individual people and villages remember and talk about past and present development projects. He suggests that older people in particular have nostalgic feelings about development projects of the past, even ones, like the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, that are commonly discussed in the scholarly literature as abject failures. Ahearne ties this nostalgia to some of the broader social and cultural meanings that his informants have infused into the concept of “development”: a sense of progress, of not being marginalized, and of...