Africanus, Vol 32 (1) 2002

This edition of Africanus reflects the journal's concern with issues relating to development and poverty. Contributors come from the ranks of emerging scholars, established academics, commentators and researchers. The mix of articles ranges from the theoretical analysis of constructs of gender and nationalism, to the grassroots-based survival strategies of female heads of households and a comment on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

Papers include:

• Nationalism in the Third World - a gender perspective, by Yudith Oppenheimer
  The author concludes that gender, class and ethnicity as well as other social differences have crucially affected people's positioning within their nationalist discourse. A feminist imaginary of the nation is still inadequate and scattered. In many cases, women's struggles remain local, temporal, and bound by physical and domestic constraints. However, in various Third World societies, women are increasingly making demands on the political sphere.
• Rotating credit associations: their formation and use by poverty-stricken African women in Rhini, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, by Gina Buijs
  The paper concludes that rotating credit agencies provide an important means for poor women, and especially woman heads of households, to save money. At the same time they function as networking organisations where these women are able to make contacts who can assist them in joining business organisations.
• The new partnership for African's Development: last chance for Africa? By Richard Cornwell
  The paper concludes that Africa is not going to receive massive debt relief, nor attract investment of a significant volume if it does not, collectively, put its governance house in order. To succeed, even moderately, NEPAD is going to demand the commitment of political leaders here and elsewhere to policies that may cause them considerable discomfort in the short to medium term.
• Economic globalisation, industrial restructuring and development in the Eastern Cape Province: an examination of selected issues, by Richard J Haines and Peter Cunningham
  The paper concludes that engagement with the forces of globalisation is more complex, uneven and mediated than is often assumed. Industrial participation projects from the large defence procurement package, will not benefit the Eastern Cape much in structural terms, indeed the incentives create further contradictions and undermine local capitalism, as well as alternative and more sustainable macro development options for the province.
• Truth, reconciliation and resolution in South Africa by Gavin Bradshaw
  The paper concludes that the main impulse of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees (TRC) was to glean as much information about the atrocities of the apartheid past, to expose the abuses and to help the victims to come to terms with them. Nagging questions remain however, regarding the trauma that TRCs placed on victims, and about how the truth was received and by whom, and whether or not attitudes had been transformed.