This work argues that youth and student organizations in Senegal and Congo became the primary catalysts for mass social struggles that challenged new national governments between 1958 and 1974. From the mid-1950s, young activists in both countries (along with many trade union leaders) debated emerging African political leaders over what constituted “independence.” These debates sharpened after the control of political institutions was devolved from French to African authorities between 1958 and 1960. As I show, rather than celebrating formal independence, many youth, student, and trade union organizations claimed that new African state leaders were complicit in the ongoing foreign domination of politics, education, and their national economies. Young activists contrasted formal independence with their demands for “real independence,” which included criteria such as the expulsion of French troops, an end to French and missionary influence over the education system, and the nationalization of foreign-owned businesses. In the context of this conflict, a subset of activists in each country became known as “radicals” due to their demands for “real independence” and their call to reorganize the state along Marxist principles. This work is based on archival research in Senegal, Congo, and France, as well as fifty-six interviews with Senegalese and Congolese militants of the period. The new presidents of Senegal and Congo, Léopold Senghor and Fulbert Youlou, both moved to consolidate control of their respective states after 1958. They attempted to isolate rival political organizations and young critics through a combination of repression and cooptation. “Youth Radicalism” explores how student, youth, and trade union organizations defended their autonomy from the new regimes and became centers of political opposition. I show that these organizations sparked urban rebellions in the capital cities of Brazzaville and Dakar, most notably in 1963 and 1968, respectively. In Congo, the protests in 1963 overthrew the government of Fulbert Youlou and allowed radical youth and student activists to declare themselves the leaders of a “revolution.” By building mass youth organizations, they were able to assume positions of authority and to successfully push for elements of “real independence” and “scientific socialism.” In Senegal, the strike in 1968 did not overturn Senghor’s government, but prompted a myriad of labor, educational, and democratic reforms in the years that followed. This work ends by looking at how the independent youth and student organizations of the 1960s were eliminated in both countries in the early 1970s due to internal divisions and state repression. Considering Congo and Senegal in the same study illustrates that youth and student leaders’ political strategies intersected through shared connections within the Francophone world, as well as Third World and Communist networks. The demands raised by young radicals emerged in response to specific local and national political conflicts, but this work argues that they were also fundamentally shaped by their links abroad. Finally, “Youth Radicalism” assesses how young radicals’ ability to create lasting structural change in Senegal and Congo was affected by the common political frameworks that guided their actions.

This dissertation calls into question the critique that has depicted the Francophone literary movement known as Negritude as a sole vehicle of black essentialism. By looking at recently published anthologies, archival documents, and lesser-known texts from 1935 to 1966, I show that in addition to the discourse on a fixed ‘blackness’ engraved in the neologism ‘Negritude,’ there is another set of discourses that forces us to rethink the movement as a philosophy of becoming. In particular, this dissertation stages the year 1948, when Jean-Paul Sartre gave Negritude its fame with the publication of his influential essay “Black Orpheus,” as a pivot for the definition of the movement as well as its reception. Since 1948, most of the critical engagement with Negritude has happened either through a reading of Sartre’s essay or the limited corpus that was available at the time. I thus argue that, by reading a broader range of the poets of Negritude’s literary and cultural production, one gets a sense that their vindication of Blackness is not only an essentialized invocation of a romanticized past, it is also an imagined unity within an evolving postcoloniality. This dissertation covers three areas within which this constantly reimagined unity is staged, from the youthful local publications of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor from 1935 to 1948, to their mature global interactions as statesmen in Dakar, Fort-de-France, Paris and Rome from 1948 to 1966. First, it looks at language and analyzes the relation of the poets to French. While the choice to adopt the idiom of the former colonizer has been criticized by merely every reader of Negritude, I show that they used French as a tool enabling violation, negotiating their relation to the metropole as well as other colonies. Second, it interrogates the often overlooked concept of métissage as common element for colonized subjects. With particular attention to problems of translation, I analyze how the poets used métissage as a political and ethical concept in order to reach to the African diaspora without referring to Europe as the unavoidable mediator. Third, it focuses on the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966 as instrument for political practice. By investigating extensive documentation on the Festival’s organization, especially the influential role and presence of the United States, I show that art was used as a political tool to stage postcolonial unity in an otherwise global and competitive diversity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-331).

En esta tesis se han analizado las redes de relaciones sociales que enlazan a los emigrantes magrebíes entre sí, con las personas que permanecen en las localidades de origen y con la población asentada en el lugar donde emigran, y la circulación de la información entre unas y otras redes. El objetivo era averiguar cómo, a partir de su entorno social inmediato, se relacionan estos emigrantes con la generalidad de las instituciones, en sociedad, y la influencia de los medios de comunicación social en el proceso. Planteamos una hipótesis general:La formación y la naturaleza de las redes de comunicación que vinculan a quienes emigran entre sí y a éstos con las poblaciones asentadas en la región donde emigran es un factor determinante en el proceso migratorio y en el asentamiento. Las leyes, los medios de comunicación de masas, no consiguen detener los procesos migratorios, cortar las redes que traspasan sus circunscripciones, pero actúan generando fronteras sociales de marginación/integración.Exploramos la hipótesis mediante un método que combina fuentes documentales y fuentes orales. Se situaron estos movimientos de población en el contexto de las redes de relaciones informales y formales de los individuos que emigran, para ver cómo, a partir de ellas, se relacionan estas personas con las instituciones, contemplando también, en dicho marco, el papel de los medios de comunicación convencionales, en especial la prensa. La investigación se apoyó en la realización de historias de vida de mujeres y hombres marroquíes y argelinos que emigraron a Alicante entre 1985 y 1995. Las historias se vieron complementadas con entrevistas a líderes de la comunidad y otros agentes sociales y la explotación de fuentes variadas de información estadística y sociodemográfica. El trabajo incluye un análisis sobre la imagen de la inmigración y los emigrantes musulmanes durante el periodo estudiado en el diario local más difundido en Alicante. La investigación demostró cómo, aunque las redes de relaciones que construyen estas personas ejercen un papel fundamental en la emigración y el asentamiento, tropiezan con una serie de barreras jurídicas, laborales, sociales y culturales que dificultan la comunicación entre comunidades y la movilidad social de individuos y grupos, en un proceso de segregación que, en lugar de remitir, se fue acentuando entre 1985 y 1995 en el colectivo sujeto de estudio. Mientras las medidas legales y policiales delimitan las fronteras políticas, los medios de comunicación, como es el caso del periódico Información, colaboran a acentuar las fronteras sociales. Las redes de relaciones interpersonales que tejen los inmigrantes desde los países de origen hasta los lugares en los que encuentran medios de vida, aunque traspasan las fronteras estatales, tropiezan con esas otras, de carácter legal y social, que definen su posición en situaciones de marginación/integración social. Sin embargo, la vinculación de los emigrantes a las redes interpersonales que entrelazan sus itinerarios, desde sus lugares de procedencia hasta su ubicación y expectativas, favorece que, a pesar de su posición en situaciones de marginación, no se produzcan fracturas sociales profundas en las sociedades a las que se incorporan. / In this thesis, social relation networks connecting Maghreb emigrants among them, and with the people who stay in the origin towns and with the population settled in the place they emigrate to, and the dissemination of information among those networks are analysed. The aim was to find out how these emigrants establish relationships with the general institutions, in the society, starting from its immediate social environment, and the influence of social mass media in such a process. A general hypothesis was raised:The creation and the nature of communication networks connecting those people who emigrate, among themselves and also with the populations settled in the area they emigrate to is a determining factor in the migrating and settlement process. The regulations and mass media are not successful in stopping migrating processes, in cutting the networks going through its circumscriptions, but they create social borders of alienation/integration.We explored the hypothesis by means of a method combining documentary and oral sources. These population movements were located in the context of the informal and formal relationship networks of the emigrants in order to analyse how these people establish relationships with institutions starting form these networks, also paying attention to the role of conventional mass media, particularly the papers in this framework. The research was supported in the realization of life histories of Algerian and Maghreb women and men who emigrated to Alicante between 1985 and 1995.The histories were complemented by interviews to community leaders and other social agents and the use of varied sources of statistic and sociodemographic information. The paper entails an analysis of the immigration and Moslem emigrants image in the period under study in the local paper with the highest circulation in Alicante. The research showed that, though the relationship networks these people establish have an essential role in emigration and settlement, they encounter a series of legal, labour, social and cultural barriers. Such barriers make the communication among communities and the social mobility of individuals and groups more difficult in a segregation process, which instead of slackening, became more and more pronounced between 1985 and 1995 in the group under study. Whereas legal and police measures delimit political borders, mass media, such as the Información newspaper help to stress social borders. The interpersonal relationship networks created by immigrants from their origin countries to the places where they find means to live on, though they go through national borders, encounter these legal and social borders, which define their position in social alienation/integration situations. Nonetheless, the connection of emigrants to interpersonal networks linking their itineraries, from their origin locations to their situation and expectations, contributes to the fact that deep social divisions do not take place in the societies they are incorporated into, in spite of being in a alienation position.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-156). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-156). Also available on the Internet.

Africans forcibly brought to the Americas during slavery came from very diverse cultural groups, languages, and geographical regions. African-derived creole cultures that were subsequently created in the Americas resulted from the interaction of various traditional African forms of knowledge and ideology, combined with elements from various Indigenous and European cultural groups and materials. Creating within the context of slavery, these complex set of experiences and choices made by Africans in the Americas resulted in an equally diverse range of fluid and complex relationships between various African-descended groups. In a similar vein, Africans in Jamaica developed and exhibited a multiplicity of cultural identities and a complex set of relationships amongst themselves, reflective of their varied cultural, political, social, and physical origins (Brathwaite 1971; Joyner 1984). In the context of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Buff Bay, Jamaica, most Africans were enslaved by whites to serve as laborers on plantations. However, a smaller group of Africans emerged from enslavement on plantations to form their own autonomous Maroon communities, alongside the plantation context and within the system of slavery. These two groups, enslaved Africans and Maroons, had a very complex set of relationship and identities that were fluid and constantly negotiated within the Jamaican slave society that was in turn hostile to both groups. Using historical (archival), oral, and archaeological sources of data, this dissertation attempts to do two things: first, it examines the daily life conditions of enslaved Africans at a Jamaican coffee plantation, Orange Vale, in order to understand settlement patterns, house structures, access to goods, informal trade networks, and material culture in their village. With constraints on their freedom and general confinement to the plantation, how did enslavement affect the material world of the enslaved Africans at Orange Vale? What materials did they have access to, and how did they use them? Second, I examine their cultural, social, and political identities alongside their autonomously freed Maroon “kin,” the neighboring Charles Town Maroon community. Using a popular origin myth, I attempt to show how descendents of both groups explain the origin of their relationship, as well as use the myth to simultaneously create political bonds based on their blackness and differentiate themselves. I also examine how their various origin, experiences, and worldview were manifested late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century Buff Bay and its place in the revolutionary Atlantic world, on the eve of emancipation. / text

Motivation: Cardiovascular dysfunction and hypertension are some of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the African population. According to the World Health Organisation the increases in these diseases are escalating in developing countries. Apart from the contributory role of genetics towards the incidence of hypertension, evidence regarding lifestyle as a determinant or marker of cardiovascular diseases in this group is not well known. The interaction of psychological and physiological mechanisms can contribute towards a broader scope of behavioural physiology in the higher prevalence of hypertension in Africans. Objectives: The main objective of the research in this thesis was to compare specific coping mechanisms of Africans with regard to cardiovascular dysfunction. Methodology: Manuscripts presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 made use of the cross-sectional comparative epidemiological "Transition and Health during Urbanisation in South Africa" (THUSA) project. The subjects included apparently healthy African men and women, which were recruited as a convenience sample from the North West Province, South Africa. Anthropometric measurements were taken and demographic questionnaires completed. An adapted Setswana COPE questionnaire was used to classify men and women as predominantly active (AC) or passive (PC) in coping style. Subjects were further subdivided into rural and urban groups (Manuscript Two), as well as younger (≤ 40) and older (≥ 45) age groups (Manuscript Three). The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) was used to measure subjective perception of health in all three manuscripts. Blood pressure was recorded continuously before and during application of the handgrip test using the Finapres apparatus. Subjects were classified as normotensive and hypertensive after blood pressure measurement by the Finapres and the Riva-Rocci/Korotkoff method. The emphasis in this study was on the cardiovascular reactivity values. Fasting, resting serum renin activity, cortisol, prolactin, testosterone, high density lipoprotein, triglycerides, glucose and plasma fibrinogen values were correlated with cardiovascular and psychological variables. Significant differences between variables were determined by means of variance analyses (Manuscript One and Two adjusted for age; Manuscripts One, Two and Three adjusted for resting cardiovascular data). A logistic regression analysis was performed to determine the most significant determinants of urbanisation. All THUSA subjects and parents of under-aged adolescents gave informed consent and the study - was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. The reader is referred to the abstracts at the beginning of each separate manuscript in Chapters 3 - 5 for a description of the subjects, study design and analytical methods used in each paper. Results and conclusions of the individual manuscripts: Results from the THUSA study showed that PC men and women reported more symptoms typical of an abnormal psychological and physiological profile than AC men and women. The PC men, compared to AC men, exhibited a larger vascular reactivity response as well as larger plasma renin activity. In contrast, the AC women showed a larger non-significant vascular reactivity response than PC women. All subjects though reacted with increased vascular reactivity on the stressor. Men with a PC strategy showed enhanced vascular reactivity, a perception of poorer health and larger stressor plasma renin activity. PC women reported more depressive symptoms and younger PC women indicated a higher prevalence of hypertension than younger AC women. As a follow-up on the first manuscript, the aim was focused mainly on including the environmental effect, namely urbanisation, as possible explanatory factor for the atypical physiological AC women’s' coping style. The rural AC subjects indicated more typical active coping central cardiac responses than rural PC subjects whereas urbanised AC and PC subjects indicated greater peripheral responses and hypertension prevalence rates. In addition, the urbanised AC men and women and PC women as opposed to their rural counterparts indicated symptoms more of a distress situation with increased values of prolactin and decreased values of testosterone. This was also accompanied by a perception of poorer health in women. Results of the AC style suggests that the typical physiological AC stimulation pattern of urbanised subjects and especially the women is dissociated from the "normal" physiological AC reaction and is now exhibited as a typical PC physiological stimulation pattern. The greater vascular reactivity, hypertension prevalence, perception of poorer health and endocrine distressed profile are associated with a PC and dissociated physiological AC style in an urban context in African men and women. No differences with regard to resting blood pressure or endocrine values were obtained when the AC and PC urbanised groups were compared. Africans develop cardiovascular dysfunction/hypertension during chronic stress or urbanisation. This implies a dissociation/habituation of physiological systems of African men and women despite having an active coping strategy. Active coping is, therefore, not necessarily "successful". Results of the first two manuscripts direct further investigation concerning the effects of ageing and urbanisation on the development of cardiovascular dysfunction and metabolic syndrome indicators in gender groups. The second manuscript showed that all rural AC subjects exhibit a more typical active coping central cardiac response and that rural PC and all urbanised subjects (AC and PC) exhibit enhanced peripheral vascular responses on the - handgrip test. Where peripheral vascular responses were more expected from older individuals in Manuscript Three, the occurrence of this pattern is strengthened in the younger subjects. The greater fibrinogen values in all younger urbanised women (AC and PC) compared to rural women further strengthen the risk for the development of cardiovascular disease. Increased vascular reactivity, abdominal obesity and increased levels of triglycerides as well as perception of poorer health were apparent in the urbanised AC women, PC men and women in comparison to their rural counterparts. The typical physiological AC stimulation pattern of urbanised women is dissociated from the "normal" physiological AC responses and is now exhibited as a typical PC physiological stimulation pattern. A typical PC style in older urbanised subjects is implicated in the greater hypertension prevalence. To conclude, it seems as if young urbanised Africans, and especially women, exhibit an AC style behaviourally with a dissociated physiological AC reaction pattern. Physiologically these women resemble a typical PC physiological cardiovascular and endocrine profile. This typical PC cardiovascular stimulation pattern is strengthened by a distressed endocrine profile, significant metabolic syndrome indicators and a 'perception of poorer health. Older PC style subjects also presented a greater hypertension prevalence. In this study it seems that cardiovascular changes that appear at a younger age might be influenced by other factors including urbanisation as a lifestyle factor as well as specific coping styles. Finally, a careful suggestion is made that specific coping mechanisms could be seen as a possible risk marker in the development of the metabolic syndrome. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Physiology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.D.)- University of Natal, Durban, 1987.

This study focuses on the lives and livelihoods of foreign African academics at UKZN. The study attempts to unpack the driving forces behind their decision to migrate and why South Africa has become a preferred destination for these migrants. It explores the kind of networks that inform them of employment opportunities that are available in institutions of higher learning in South Africa. It also sets out to explore the kind of skills possessed by these migrants that are needed for the development of skills in the institution. Research findings reveal a combination of micro and macro factors as reasons surrounding foreign African professional migrancy in South Africa. Macro factors are subsumed under general and structural reasons which include high unemployment rates, corruption, nepotism, and other forms of political oppressions and infrastructural problems. Over and above the relative viability of South African institutions with modern technological facilities and well organised curricular and material structures serve as major attractions to foreign African professional migrancy into the country. The factors of cultural affinity and geographical proximity are also among the reasons that foreign African academics at UKZN cited for their migration into South Africa. The individual in this study constitutes the basic unit in providing a more nuanced understanding of why this group of foreigners migrated to South Africa. In this regard personal reasons such as family pressure and change of geographical space form an integral part of reasons surrounding their migrancy in South Africa. Following the professional convenience that UKZN offers, this research showcases the desire expressed by various migrants under this study to pursue and establish a scholarship that would promote and legitimise Africa as an intellectual space of knowledge production. Being a “Premier University of African Scholarship”, professional migrants from the rest of the continent have indicated their willingness to dedicate their services within their different capacities to develop a curriculum that meets the needs of South Africa and Africa. The study shows some contributions that foreign academic are making in the development of the institution. From a social perspective the study highlights how professional African migrants have reconstructed gender roles and household constitution. Transnational migration as shown by this study reveals changing patterns in gender as African women just like the men are engaged in transnational activities for economic and career advancement. African women with educational skills whether married or unmarried have independently undertaken the decision to migrate for economic and social upliftment. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.