On behalf of the new editorial team of the African Studies Review, it is my great pleasure to introduce Volume 61, Issue 1, of 2018. As the new Editor-in-Chief of the flagship journal of the African Studies Association (USA), I would like to begin this, my first editorial essay, by thanking the outgoing leadership of Sean Redding and Elliot Fratkin, joint editors over the past decade. Sean’s and Elliot’s conscientious stewardship of the ASR and their deft editorial hand have raised the journal’s stature and left an indelible mark on the intellectual fabric of African studies in North America and beyond. Important gauges of a journal’s significance and scholarly standing—its readership, its impact factor, and the submission volume—have all risen during their tenure, and I am pleased to be editing a journal with a preeminent academic profile and a very promising future. Over the past six months, and working closely with the departing Managing Editor, Ella Kusnetz, Sean and Elliot have generously guided the incoming editorial team through the mechanics of editing and producing a scholarly journal. Sean has graciously agreed to remain an active member of the Editorial Review Board, and while Elliot has elected to embrace the full fervor of retirement travels, we welcome him as the first of a new class of distinguished Emeritus Editors and look forward to his continued involvement. On behalf of the new team and the ASA membership, I would like to thank all three for their outstanding service to the ASR and to wish Sean, Elliot, and Ella every success in their future endeavors.
These are exciting times for the ASR and indeed for the entire membership of the ASA, as our distinguished journal, now in its sixty-first year, adopts new practices to accommodate the growing diversity and vitality of interdisciplinary African studies research in the U.S. and beyond. With the full support of the ASA Board of Directors, from January 2018 a new editorial collective takes the helm, comprising an Editor-in-Chief and eight Editors, a new Managing Editor (relocated from the Five Colleges, Inc. Consortium to the office of the African Studies Association at Rutgers University), an expanded Editorial Review Board (ERB), and the addition of the aforementioned new class of Emeritus Editors. This new expanded journal administration and management is envisioned as a way to ensure that the primary editorial role—the linchpin of a successful journal—remains a manageable and desirable position in the eyes of researchers and teachers. It also reflects an effort to recalibrate the volume of scholarly labor to something more commensurate with the standard service expectations of an average tenure-track faculty workload, or at least that is our hope; it is an experiment that will be periodically evaluated and adjusted as necessary. This shift to a larger and more diverse pool of editors, including editors based on the African continent, also takes into account the dramatic uptick in submissions to the journal in the past several years, the growth of African studies in African universities, and the increasing service demands placed on our vast cadre of peer reviewers, a primary source of editorial guidance and input.
As an editorial collective, we are committed to promoting transparency and accountability as part of the candid scholarly exchange accompanying the article submission and peer review processes. During the transition period, the incoming editors adopted a number of new policies and tools to aid the smoothness and timeliness of peer review and to promote the wider dissemination and accessibility of Africanist knowledge, in response to suggestions from members and contributors. This issue is the first to be published under the new journal masthead. In terms of editorial management, while all editors may review and comment on all submissions and revisions, weekly editorial meetings will involve several of the editors on a rotating basis. In collaboration with our publisher, Cambridge University Press, we have fully operationalized the online submission portal, ScholarOne, the utility of which streamlines and expedites the submission process. All new review assignments are now funneled through ScholarOne, and all new materials for consideration for review arrive at the ASA headquarters. The expanded ERB is designed to account for our diverse academic, thematic, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary interests and to facilitate the decolonization of Africanist knowledge; it will meet yearly at the annual meeting of the ASA and steer decision-making and aid implementation via a series of subcommittees. Our new Managing Editor, Kathryn Salucka, has begun a process for increasing the reviewer database, and has already added more than 1500 new names and profiles of potential reviewers, many of whom are based on the continent. But as we depend on you as members to keep this information as detailed and as up-to-date as possible, we invite you to visit your membership portal and update your listing: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/africanstudiesreview.
The new position of Editor-in-Chief reflects a recognition on the part of the ASA Board of Directors that the ASR can play an expanded role in the mentoring of emerging scholars, as well as in the development and dissemination of new knowledge, both promoting the growth of African studies in the U.S. and on the African continent. This new leadership role attends to the shifting contours of Africanist research and responds to the requests of our membership for skill development opportunities, innovative publishing venues, and new scholarly articulations. One of our first initiatives has been the creation of writing workshops, the Pipeline for Emerging African Studies Scholars (PEASS) https://africanstudies.org/peass-workshops/. The broader goals of PEASS are to increase the volume and quality of submissions from emerging scholars by providing a personalized form of pre-peer review from leading scholars. Our first workshops—in Accra in October 2017 and Chicago in November 2017, featuring over two dozen Africanists from twenty-five countries in Africa, Europe, and North America—also highlighted the value of participating actively as peer reviewers for the improvement of scholarly writing. Our next workshops will take place in Johannesburg in May 2018 and Atlanta in November 2018; keep an eye out for the Call for Papers. We are also implementing what we hope will be a second and equally important initiative to improve access to the ASR for scholars on the African continent. In collaboration with Cambridge University Press, we will shortly be trialing a new incentive to participate in the peer-review process directed at Africa-based scholars, enabling access to the corpus of Africanist journals in Cambridge Core.
As an editorial collective, we are committed to making the ASR accessible to all African studies scholars, irrespective of means, locality, or facility. Several strides toward greater inclusivity were made at the first annual meeting of the newly reshaped editorial collective. We voted unanimously to publish trilingual abstracts for all scholarly articles, adding Portuguese to English and French. We also voted to form subcommittees to explore the possibility of becoming a fully bilingual journal, receiving, reviewing, and publishing in English and French, and to develop guidance for interdisciplinary scholarship. Both subcommittees will report their findings and recommendations at the November meeting in Atlanta. Furthermore, we discussed how to ensure that the journal meets the diverse interests of our readership and the ASA membership, covering a broad range of issues and topics, including, but not limited to, the new quarterly structure beginning in 2019; the development of a new digital platform to attract marginalized disciplines and interdisciplinary work, such as art, art history, architecture, communication, journalism, and media; the purview of the journal vis-à-vis the African Diaspora, North Africa, and the Maghreb; and a possible collaboration with the African Studies Association of Africa and CODESRIA in the launching of a new journal. A new strategic plan is now under development, and it will review these and other proposals as part of a broader reflection on our overall mission and how to best serve the interests of the ASA membership, our primary constituency. We welcome your comments and input by email. And we hope you are as excited as we are, as we look toward the future and imagine the expansion and enrichening of the interdisciplinary Africanist scholarly endeavor.
The articles in this issue encompass a broad spectrum of disciplines and interdisciplinary sites of research, ranging from geography, anthropology, conservation, and development studies, to education, medicine, political science, and history. Our contributors explore case studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, as well as the broader African continent and beyond, to Europe, North America, and elsewhere.
The focus of the first pair of articles is on conservation and animal welfare issues. Richard Schroeder opens the lid on the world of “canned” hunting, so-called “hunts” that take place on private game reserves and ranches, as part of the burgeoning smorgasbord of à la carte tourism proliferating in South Africa and beyond. The discussion of the hunting and killing of lions, along with other nominally wild species, in “Moving Targets: The ‘Canned’ Hunting of Captive-Bred Lions in South Africa,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.94] raises important ethical questions about the manipulation of nature and the legacy of apartheid-era land use restrictions. The canned hunting industry is the site of dynamic and divisive public debates about animal welfare, but it also operates as a conduit for sustainable tourism and captive-breeding conservation strategies.
Jennifer Bond’s and Kennedy Mkutu’s article, entitled “Exploring the Hidden Costs of Human–Wildlife Conflict in Northern Kenya,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.134] investigates the hidden cost of human-wildlife conflict in northern Kenya, the extent of which is often camouflaged by conservation strategies. Wildlife conservation often employs a celebratory rhetoric in Kenya, and wildlife is routinely privileged as more valuable or more important than individual human life and/or in the greater interest of the country. Their research underscores how environmental success stories obfuscate a number of real human impacts, such as the loss of livelihood, the dispossession of land, and decreased access to resources.
The next group of three articles centers on development politics in varied settings and contexts. Takaaki Masaki’s article, “The Political Economy of Aid Allocation in Africa: Evidence from Zambia,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.97] employs new data about the geographical distribution of development projects in Zambia to examine the possible impact of electoral incentives in aid allocation, revealing how little is known about on-the-ground aid distribution. Masaki argues that when political elites have limited information to target distributive goods specifically to swing voters, they often allocate more donor projects to districts where opposition to the incumbent is stronger. His analysis reveals that more projects are allocated to districts where there is greater opposition support, while fewer projects are allocated to districts where the incumbents enjoy greater popularity.
In “The Rise of the Migration-Development Nexus in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1960–2010,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.95] Jean-Philippe Dedieu tackles the complex relationship between migration and development in Francophone Africa since the 1960s, a historical and contemporary debate with important implications for the present migration crisis as outlined by Beth Elise Whitaker in our September 2017 issue [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.49]. Dedieu explores French government policy that first linked migration to development in the late 60s and early 70s, and then pivots to decipher the relationship between migrant repatriation and remittances from the 1980s. From the late 80s, what he calls the “migration-development nexus” was envisioned as a mechanism to control migrant labor flows within wider neoliberal economic reforms.
Jed Stevenson and Lucie Buffavand take us to the Omo River valley in Ethiopia, where they find a complex and unstable food insecurity situation unfolding in the wake of a massive dam development program. Their essay, entitled “‘Do Our Bodies Know Their Ways?’ Villagization, Food Insecurity, and Ill-Being in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.100] reveals how increasingly common development-forced displacements on the African continent exacerbate food insecurity. In Ethiopia’s Omo valley, food scarcity appears to be gradually rising in the wake of a project designed to counter a long history of malnutrition and deprivation with a program of forced villagization. Even more striking, however, is how different methodological approaches have generated vastly different data on the effect of the dam, the new, smaller land allocations, and the influx of ethnic newcomers into the region.
The penultimate pair of articles examine youth and urban life in Kenya and Ethiopia. Elisabeth King’s article, “What Kenyan Youth Want and Why It Matters for Peace,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.98] turns to education policies in Kenya and the role of educational opportunities in peacebuilding and youth participation in antiviolence programs. Education and employment are dominant discourses in youth violence deterrence. With careful attention to disaggregation, King finds that youth in Nairobi, Kenya, however, resist these dominant economic discourses, foregrounding instead issues of identity and social cohesion. Kenyan youth yearn for a future and demonstrate aspirations far beyond the constraints of predominant discourse, including environmental and religious realms.
In “The Lives of Street Women and Children in Hawassa, Ethiopia,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.135] Martha Nathan and Elliot Fratkin explore the rise in homelessness, particularly among women and children, despite gains in national income. Their study involved interviews with several dozen adult women and children living on the streets of urban Hawassa set against the Productive Safety Net Program which is aimed at increasing food security in rural locales, such as the Omo Valley discussed by Jed Stevenson and Lucie Buffavand in this issue. When asked about why they lived on the streets, nearly all explained they were driven to the streets by poverty, compounded by abuse and violence and/or loss of supporting family members, illness, and lack of social supports. The Ethiopian government offers a food-for-work program, but this is an inadequate social safety net. While the government recognizes the scale of the problem, tackling homelessness requires the provision of long-term shelters, food assistances, school supplies, legal and economic assistance, and affordable medical care.
The final pair of fascinating articles explores African political life, and in particular the composition of and profiles of African political classes in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria. Amanda Edgell’s article “Vying for a Man Seat: Constituency Magnitude and Mainstream Female Candidature in Uganda and Kenya” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.136]—the recipient of the 2017 award for the best paper delivered by a graduate student at the ASA Annual Meeting—explores electoral quotas for women. Quota policies, aimed at ensuring a certain percentage of representation by women, are, at their core, well-intentioned efforts to combat widespread biases against women in politics. But as is often the case, policy prescriptions can produce unintended consequences. Using Kenya and Uganda as case studies, Edgell analyzes how female representation is organized and how those structures hamper women’s efforts to “mainstream” their political position. Quotas appear to help guarantee women a place at the political table, but they also relegate them to a separate and gender-segregated political realm.
Alexander Thurston’s essay, entitled, “The Politics of Technocracy in Fourth Republic Nigeria,” [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.99] explores the function of the supposedly apolitical technocrat in Nigerian politics, and finds it to be a decidedly political role. Technocrats are often offered up by developmental theorists and neoliberal ideologues as a solution to the divisive and politicizing realm of government reform and anti-corruption programs. But Thurston finds that technocrats are deeply implicated in power relationships, land their appointments often because of their political contacts, and remain ensconced in political debates and trapped in webs of political intrigue.
It must be observed that, with the important exception of Amanda Edgell’s distinguished contribution, the articles herein were germinated under the editorial leadership of Sean and Elliot. In some respects, the incoming editorial team were mere bystanders, albeit willingly and gladly. Indeed, the next two issues will also be largely composed of scholarship developed and revised under Sean’s and Elliot’s direction. This issue concludes with three scholarly review essays that we hope will be of interest to our readership. Meghan Ference reviews recent literature on transportation [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.141]. Veronica Ehrenreich explores the Congolese animator, Jean-Michel Kibushi Ndjate Wooto [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.148]. Alison MacAulay gives an analysis of Piotr Cieplak’s documentary and scholarly reflections on the visual record of the Rwandan genocide [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.5]. We also feature thirteen book reviews and three film reviews. As the volume of books and films for review rises every year, we are consciously strategizing to develop new and more equitable mechanisms to decide what to review and whom to invite as reviewers. We have resuscitated the Short Notices as a vehicle with which to increase the number of titles reviewed, particularly those with obvious pedagogical value. But, and at the risk of repetition, please keep in mind that we depend on the generosity of spirit of our membership for reviewing expertise, and again, we invite you all to login to the Cambridge Core web portal and to update your membership listing.
The editorial team and I are excited about the changes and new directions being instituted at the ASR. We hope these articles and reviews, which reflect and confirm these new parameters, will be of interest and use to our readership, and we look forward to your feedback.
