Editors’ Introduction

We are pleased to present volume 59, number 2, of the African Studies Review. This issue begins with an article by Akosua Adomako Ampofo, professor of African and gender studies at the University of Ghana, based on her African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture delivered at the 2015 meeting of the African Studies Association. Titled “Re-viewing Studies on Africa, #Black Lives Matter, and Envisioning the Future of African Studies,” the article presents a focused summary of the state of African studies, in both the United States and Africa, in this era of increasing scholarship from the African continent and developments in the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. and Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) in South Africa.

Next we present an exciting “ASR Forum on Surveillance in Africa: Politics, Histories, Techniques,” edited by Kevin Donovan, Philippe M. Frowd, and Aaron Martin, with six articles discussing private security and government surveillance in Kenya, South Africa, Niger, South Sudan, Rwanda, and Senegal. We conclude with three research articles: an analysis of boundary disputes in postapartheid South Africa by Mazembo Mavungu Eddy, an article by Paul Stacey on traditional and statutory institutions in post-Nkrumah Ghana,” and a study by Peter Anton Zoettl on youth, violence, and the state in Cape Verde. The issue also includes twenty-eight book reviews, including three connected to the topic of surveillance in Africa, and seven film reviews.

In her ASR Distinguished Lecture (7–29), Adomako Ampofo asks what scholars of African studies need to do to “retain [our] disciplinary relevance for the next generation and in the larger context of the Black Lives movement globally.” Comparing African studies as a discipline in the United States and on the African continent, she asks: where have we come from in terms of race consciousness in our discipline? She argues that this is a particularly important moment, and compares the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movements on U.S. and South African University campuses and urges Africanists to pay more attention to the related issues of black lives, the African diaspora, and pan-Africanism.

In preparation for the lecture, Adomako Ampofo’s students reviewed all articles published in the ASR in the fifty-year period between 1965 and 2015 (1,226 articles), looking at the sex of the authors, their institutions, and their subjects, “to glean how many articles directly addressed issues pertinent to the broader question of what we might call Black Lives, the African diaspora or pan-Africanism” (15). While articles by women nearly tripled in this period, those from the African continent see-sawed between 13 percent and 22 percent, and those from Europe steadily increased from 1 percent in the 1960s to 24 percent in the last decade. However, only 1.3 percent of all articles discussed black lives, the diaspora, or pan-Africanism. While it is fitting that most articles in the journal focus on issues of the African continent, she argues that it is time to expand our scholarship and consider precisely those three issues that stretch the boundaries of “African studies.” The current student movements in the U.S. and South Africa, she argues, demand this focus as they have created new, global communities.

The forum on “Surveillance in Africa” begins with an introduction by the guest editors, Kevin Donovan, Philippe Frowd, and Aaron Martin (31–37). They argue that while the issue of surveillance commanded center stage in the post-9/11 global North, it has not been widely researched or discussed in the global South. Political power in Africa, they assert, has been considered in both the popular media and academic scholarship as “too local, too violent, or too symbolic” to necessitate much surveillance, while Africa has been seen as too “low tech” for sophisticated surveillance (32). Nevertheless, surveillance in Africa has increased, by state governments, by private corporations, and by international security agencies, which have become increasingly active in surveillance activities on the continent, particularly in the age of the so-called Global War on Terror.

Surveillance includes high-tech equipment coupled with on-the-ground observations. The editors write that...