Lioba Moshi

Since the end of the Cold War, Africa has witnessed a political rebirth and second liberation as decades of autocracy and dictatorship became gradually replaced by a new wave of democratization and plural political competition. This political rebirth has revived the Afro-optimism that accompanied the independence decade of the 1960s. This optimism, however, co-exists with protracted and deadly conflicts in many parts of the continent - from wars in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, to stalemate in democratic reform in Niger, Guinea and Cameroon, and democratic retraction in Uganda. Additionally, Africa faces many problems including wars, famine, refugees, internal displacement and a host of diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Similarly, despite the adoption of constitutions that guarantee the basic human rights and freedoms by many African states, human rights violations remain rampant throughout the continent's political landscape. Democracy and Culture: An African Perspective is an analysis of the democracy project in Africa. Basically the contributors seek answers to a number of fundamental questions: How is democracy to be defined in the African context? Is the Western style democracy which is being adopted in many parts of Africa culturally and environmentally neutral? Can it really be replicated in Africa? And what is the role of African culture in the current democracy project?

Democracy and Culture

Salikoko S. Mufwene

The 16 papers in this volume are revised versions of papers presented at the conference; they represent the state of the art in various subfields of African linguistics into which the book is organized: (1) morphosyntax, (2) semantics, (3) phonology, and (4) language contact. The last part covers topics such as code-switching and mixing, pidginization/creolization, and language planning.The papers in Part I: Morphosyntax focus particularly on the verb and verb phrase in a variety of Niger-Congo languages, discussing several aspects of the verb morphology. The specific languages discussed include Kinande, Kilega, Kinyarwanda (Larry Hyman), Kikongo-Kituba (M. Ngalasso), Duala (E. Bilao), Yoruba (S.A. Lawal), Ewe (A.S. Allen), and Gbaya 'Bodoe (P. Roulon-Doko). The papers in Part II: Semantics discuss foundational questions regarding the proper/common noun distinction in two geographically very distant African languages, Gborbo Krahn (Janet Bing) in the west and Luo (Ben G. Blount) in the east, which follow yet very similar principles. And, despite differences in the titles, the papers on Kivunjo (Lioba Moshi) and Emai (Schaefer and Egbokhare) address the question of the semantic basis for assigning property concepts to different lexical categories. There are two papers in Part III: Phonology, which are mostly on the prosodic features of Chiyao (Al Mtenje) and Manding (J. Tourville). In Part IV: Language Contact, Eyamba Bokamba's and C. Meyers-Scotton's papers discuss speech variation and mostly formal constraints associated with them, while Helma Pasch compares segmental features of Sango and Yakoma in the Central African Republic to determine whether the former is a creole. Edmun Richmond focuses on the choice of national official language in sub-Saharan Africa. Except for Pasch all of them cover several languages and geographical areas.

Lioba Moshi

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