African Indigenous Institutions And Societies

George Ayittey’s Indigenous African Institutions presents a detailed and convincing picture of pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa - its cultures, traditions, and indigenous institutions, including participatory democracy.

African societies have their own traditional institutions for democratic administration. It would be quite reasonable to argue that Africans, at least like any other people elsewhere, certainly have for long time developed their own unique system of governance. As part of their strong and viable system, they had also and still have effective and practically workable conflict resolution mechanisms unlike some Westerner centric arguments which consider African people as savage and uncivilized. It has been assumed that the Western techniques of conflict resolution would also apply to African societies where the context is quite different. Unlike the Western techniques, the African traditional principles of conflict resolution are targeted at bringing about sustainable peace among the disputants; thereby the prevalence of enmity and hatred within as well as across communities could permanently be vanished. Indeed, this is also possible for the Irob society to do it away customarily at the grass-root level through the use of Melat-agle, one of their cultural institutions.

This volume emphasizes Africa's indigenous institutions as a vital part of the people's past, a source of order and security, and crucial ingredients to an effective administrative system. It reassesses the vital roles these institutions played over the years to anchor nation building efforts.

Historians who tried to write some history of some parts of Africa before the last quarter of the 20th century had many handicaps. Many of them were foreigners who neither understood the language nor appreciated the life values of the African people about whom they tried to write. Some were Africans or African Diaspora who were products of foreign scholars and too tied to their teachers to be different at that time. There was another academic handicap confronting writers who attempted to write about African Civilization, culture, or history at that time. Mainly two schools of thought concerning the development or lack of it in the African race handicapped them. The first group of the theorists maintained that Africans made no development worthy of classification as historical achievement or history before the arrival of Europeans in Africa. This group agreed that every development in Africa started after the European contacts were made and because of the contacts. The second group of theorists on African development held the view that African people made some insignificant developments before Europeans arrived in Africa. They also maintained that the European contact brought about total devastation of the minor developments made leaving the people to start all over again. They also agreed that every development made thereafter were reactions to the European impacts and therefore direct results of European presence and contacts in Africa. In summary, both schools of thought held that every notable development of Africa, especially south of the Sahara desert, was a result of the impact of the European contact with Africa. According to the first school of thought, all developments were results of the European contacts making the Africans to start thinking and producing meaningfully thereafter. The second school of thought agreed that after the total devastation of African developments caused by the European contacts, every African significant development was a result of some type of reconstruction caused by the European activities. Both schools of thought agreed that nothing significant in the African development or civilization was indigenous. The impact of these unfounded theories was that historians in particular and writers in general who wrote about African developments tried very hard to find traces of European actions in every major African development. Finding European or foreign impacts on African community development became a major concern of a successful African historian or writer on any cultural matter. It is not surprising therefore; that African indigenous institutions large or small were not the main concern of these writers. However, the above-unfounded theories on African history and development have been discarded. African developments have recently been treated as usual human developments passing through historical evolution as other peoples of the world. Just as it is with other peoples of other parts of the world, contacts with foreigners produce some impacts on both the peoples and the foreigners. The effects of such contacts are never the same. Likewise, early European contacts with African people had varying effects on the developments of the African peoples. Recently the spread of the television has impacts on the way other peoples who have never been to Africa see African peoples. The scenes of wars, disorder, diseases and misery in some parts of Africa shown on the television all over the world for one reason or the other do not completely represent life in Africa. The scenes seem to present an incomplete picture of the African peoples and their total community life. It is only through a thorough study of the African community life that a complete picture of the African development and civilization can be seen. This book, THE AFRICAN COMMUNITY LIFE Indigenous Concepts on Society, Government and Development: The Abiriba Community Case Study, presents Africans

Explores and challenges existing conventions of inequality in Africa while offering new insights to explain persistent poverty across the continent.

This handbook explores the evolution of African education in historical perspectives as well as the development within its three systems–Indigenous, Islamic, and Western education models—and how African societies have maintained and changed their approaches to education within and across these systems. African education continues to find itself at once preserving its knowledge, while integrating Islamic and Western aspects in order to compete within this global reality. Contributors take up issues and themes of the positioning, resistance, accommodation, and transformations of indigenous education in relationship to the introduction of Islamic and later Western education. Issues and themes raised acknowledge the contemporary development and positioning of indigenous education within African societies and provide understanding of how indigenous education works within individual societies and national frameworks as an essential part of African contemporary society.

Most African economies range from moderately advanced capitalist systems with modern banks and stock markets to peasant and pastoral subsistent systems. Most African countries are also characterized by parallel institutions of governance – one is the state sanctioned (formal) system and the other is the traditional system, which is adhered to, primarily but not exclusively, by the segments of the population in the subsistence peasant and pastoral economic systems. Traditional Institutions in Contemporary African Governance examines critical issues that are largely neglected in the literature, including why traditional institutions have remained entrenched, what the socioeconomic implications of fragmented institutional systems are, and whether they facilitate or impede democratization. The contributors investigate the organizational structure of traditional leadership, the level of adherence of the traditional systems, how dispute resolution, decision-making, and resource allocation are conducted in the traditional system, gender relations in the traditional system, and how the traditional institutions interact with the formal institutions. Filling a conspicuous gap in the literature on African governance, this book will be of great interest to policy makers as well as students and scholars of African politics, political economy and democratization.

With a Foreword by Prof. Asbjørn Eide, a former Chairman of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Chairman of the UN Working Group on Minorities, President of the Advisory Committee on National Minorities of the Council of Europe Following the internationalization of the indigenous rights movement, a growing number of African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and other communities have channelled their claims for special legal protection through the global indigenous rights movement. Their claims as the indigenous peoples of Africa are backed by many (international) actors such as indigenous rights activists, donors and some academia. However, indigenous identification is contested by many African governments, some members of non-claimant communities and a number of anthropologists who have extensively interacted with claimant indigenous groups. This book explores the sources as well as the legal and political implications of indigenous identification in Africa. By highlighting the quasi-inexistence of systematic and discursive – rather than activist – studies on the subject-matter, the analysis questions the appropriateness of this framework in efforts aimed at empowering claimant communities in inherently multiethnic African countries. The book navigates between various disciplines in trying to better capture the phenomenon of indigenous rights advocacy in Africa. The book is valuable reading for academics in law and all (other) social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, history, political science, as well as for economists. It is also a useful tool for policy-makers, legal practitioners, indigenous rights activists, and a wide range of NGOs. Dr. Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda is Associate Professor at the International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), Tilburg University, The Netherlands.