Elizabeth Schmidt

Negotiated spaces and contested terrain: men, women, and the law in colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1939

During the early years of European occupation in Southern Rhodesia, people on the margins of African society took advantage of the erosion of indigenous authority structures. Women, in particular, challenged male control over their mobility, sexuality, and productive and reproductive capacities. Initially, a degree of female ‘emancipation’ was encouraged by European missionaries and the colonial state, who considered such customs as child‐pledging, forced marriage, and polygamy to be ‘repugnant’ to European concepts of morality. During the first three decades of colonial rule, legislation was enacted that outlawed child marriages, set limitations on bridewealth, and prohibited the marriage of women without their consent. The resulting crisis of authority in the rural areas, foreshadowing the possibility of a total breakdown in law and order, forced state officials to reconsider their earlier policies. By the 1920s, a backlash against female emancipation was well under way, intensifying under the pressures...

Anticolonial nationalism in French West Africa: what made Guinea unique?

Abstract: In a 1958 constitutional referendum, Guinea was the only French territory to reject continued colonial subordination in favor of immediate independence. Why did Guinea alone reject the constitution that laid the foundations for Frances Fifth Republic? What factors stimulated political parties in other territories to accept the prolongation of French tutelage, even as activists elsewhere on the continent were agitating for independence? Focusing on the eight territories of French West Africa, this article argues that the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which led the campaign for the “no” vote, differed from other dominant parties in French West Africa in several important ways. These differences, along with the relative power of the colonial chieftaincy, contributed to Guineas unique stance in the 1958 referendum.

COLD WAR IN GUINEA: THE RASSEMBLEMENT DÉMOCRATIQUE AFRICAIN AND THE STRUGGLE OVER COMMUNISM, 1950–1958

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the metropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified - both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the partys womens and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guineas independence instead. Guineas vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the partys territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

Development in Africa: What is the Cutting Edge in Thinking and Policy?

In September 1958, the US African Studies Association (ASA) held its first annual meeting in Evanston, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Fifty years later, when the ASA reconvened in Chicago to celebrate this anniversary, Mayor Richard M. Daley proclaimed 9–16 November 2008 ‘African Week in Chicago’. He recognised the city’s ‘long history of involvement with Africa [and its] many African immigrant communities and influential centres of African Studies’. Chicago’s ties to Africa had received even greater attention one week earlier, when as many as 1 million people assembled in Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s historic election to the US presidency.

Lindsay Lisa A. and Miescher Stephan F., eds. Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa . Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003. xiv + 265 pp. Map. Photographs. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

with great wit, although in general they preferred injectable contraceptives because they required only a monthly visit to a clinic. A husband might facilitate divorce by allowing his family to find his wifes birth control pills; an anxious mother might give her adolescent daughter birth control pills rather than be confronted with a pregnancy; a sister-in-law might use contraception herself and yet be outraged when her brothers wife does the same. Kalers interviews make it clear that women in Zimbabwe have a range of overlapping social identities and competing social strategies: they use contraception in careful and calculated ways as they struggle with being good wives, good mothers, and good sisters. Sadly, the weak historiography means that Kaler cannot do as much with this material as she should be able to, and she is unable to use her magnificent interview material to refract with, and comment upon, the overlapping histories of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Luise White University of Florida Gainesville, Florida