This dissertation examines the explicit and implicit currency of indigenous religious thought on political, moral, and social formations from precolonial through colonial to postcolonial Ghana. It advances new answers to debates in Ghana about the role, if any, indigenous religion has to play in a modern Christian-dominated public sphere that simultaneously defines itself as secular by situating these debates in the history of the suppression and appropriation of so-called “undesirable customs” and their agents by both British and Ghanaian government officials. Based on archival research (colonial reports, government records, legal documents, newspapers, diaries, etc.,) and a dozen oral interviews (with former and current politicians, indigenous religious priests, chiefs, and elders), (Un)Desirable Customs argues that despite its “unpopularity” and decline, indigenous religion critically shaped the construction of the colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian state. I highlight the inherent paradox in how the state morally and culturally stigmatized indigenous religious beliefs and practices, in an attempt to perform certain conceptions of secular modernity and Christian morality, yet, at the same time, appropriated indigenous religious rituals and symbols. These contradictory measures, I argue, are better understood as strategies of purifications that the state has enacted and continues to perform on itself in its attempt to define itself as “modern.” My study fundamentally shifts the attention from Christianity and Islam in relation to politico-moral formations to a focus on indigenous religion. This historical project complicates current scholarship on secularism in both the West and non-West. It challenges us to examine the political, ethical, and conceptual limits of secularism and religious tolerance in the modern period. My research makes clear that the debate about the place of indigenous religion was, and continues to be, couched as an issue of public morality and wellbeing. This approach to the study of indigenous religion also calls into question the longstanding perception about its irrelevance, showing how various elements of indigenous religious beliefs and practices have left their imprint on the political, moral, and social fabric of society. I also attend to how Africans, particularly traditionalists, responded to their marginalization, the appropriation of their symbols, and the changing religious landscape. This work responds to the necessity to complicate the triumphant narrative of the implacable dominance of Christianity and Islam in the African political and public sphere. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

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Cette recherche porte sur la cohérence intra, inter et extra des quatre réformes universitaires décidées au Congo-Zaïre en 1971, 1981, 1989 et 2003. L'analyse de la cohérence intra a cherché à savoir dans quelle mesure, pour chacun des 16 objets habituels des réformes académiques, chaque politique de ces quatre réformes se tient en elle-même. L'analyse de la cohérence inter a chérché à savoir dans quelle mesure chaque nouvelle réforme constituait, pour chacun des 16 objets, une amélioration des ratés et des insuffisances de la réforme précédente, et dans quelle mesure il y a eu une amélioration des politiques depuis la première jusqu'à la quatrième réforme. L'analyse de cohérence extra a cherché à savoir dans quelle mesure ces réformes ont été rigoureusement ancrées vis-à-vis de la trajectoire des besoins de développement de la société nationale. Pour y arriver, conformément à la méthode historique positive, nous avons procédé à une analyse de contenu des documents d'archives collectes au Congo Kinshasa. Mais face à la carence d'études et de modèles conceptuels sur l'analyse des cohérences intra, inter et extra des politiques d'Enseignement tertiaire, nous avons dû modifier et adapter des modèles conceptuels élaborés pour d'autres fins. Ces modèles, plus adaptés, sont : le modèle des 16 objets d'une réforme académique, le modèle de consistance et adéquation (cohérence intra), le modèle cyclique des politiques (cohérence inter), les modèles d'environnement scientifico-économique, social, politique, et culturel de l'Université (cohérence extra). Les résultats sur la cohérence intra montrent qu'à quelques exceptions près, les politiques alignent des stratégies inadéquates notamment quant à la prévision des ressources financières et humaines, et quant aux attitudes des agents de la mise en oeuvre. L'analyse de cohérence inter révèle entre les politiques analogues des réformes consécutives : l'abandon de problèmes non résolus, le non-suivi de résultats désastreux, et la réiteration d'inadéquations de stratégies. L'analyse de cohérence extra montre une absence de concordance entre l'évolution de la société en ses secteurs principaux et l'évolution de l'Enseignement tertiaire régie par les réformes. Par ricochet, l'étude révèle aussi la validité des modèles conceptuels employés dans l'analyse. La présente recherche est une réponse à une double pénurie : pénurie de recherche sur la cohésion, l'amélioration et l'insertion sociétale des politiques académiques du Congo-Zaïre; pénurie de recherche sur l'analyse de cohérence des politiques d'Enseignement tertiaire, et inexistence d'une tradition méthodologique relativement à ce champ des Sciences de l'éducation.

This dissertation examines the circumstances created by colonial encroachments in the American Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Eastern Cape. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth and lasting well into the mid-nineteenth century, American Indians and Africans in the two areas faced increasing intrusions by people of European origin. Colonialism, the encounter between alien cultures, infringements on homelands, violence, dispossession, decimation, cultural invasion, removal, accommodation, revitalization, and survival led to rapidly changing worlds for local populations and white colonizers. My comparative study highlights the similarities and differences between historical developments in the two regions, with a particular focus on the creations of colonial racial orders in the United States and South Africa. Comparative history is a valuable method for examining phenomena of cross-cultural significance while subverting any notions about an area's historical uniqueness. It is an especially helpful approach in understanding the significant roles that the institutionalization of colonial expansion, racism and racial domination played in the United States and South Africa. The Upper Ohio Valley and the Eastern Cape functioned in many ways as testing grounds for American and British expansion. Developments in each place contributed to the making of colonial racial systems in the larger United States and greater southern Africa. While the scenarios in the Upper Ohio Valley and the Eastern Cape did not repeat themselves identically in other locations, comparable patterns would emerge in later years as the United States expanded westward and Britain expanded into southern and eastern Africa. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century in the Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Cape, systems of racial exclusiveness became entrenched through increasingly close ties between settlers and the state. In both places, settlers, indigenous groups, missionaries and humanitarians attempted to influence the emerging colonial racial orders with varying success. Yet ultimately, it was the power of the state with its ability to defeat indigenous groups militarily, to dispossess and move, and to legislate, which shaped the two regions' colonial racial orders.

This dissertation seeks to argue that the vast majority of Black South African writers were no neutral sitters on the fence under apartheid rule. Each generation of Black writers assiduously and consciously deployed different genres and techniques in recording the plight of their people during years and years of subjugation under Nationalist rule. However, for each generation of committed Black South African writers the objectives were essentially consistent: to inspire, record and aid revolt against an unjust system which had been universally condemned as a crime against humanity. This dissertation is a story about the engagement of Black South African writing with its political context. It is also a journey back of sorts, because the Black writers who are at its core take us back to different phases and seasons of our shameful past as a fractured society. They take us through the consequences of the Land Act of 1913, which is universally regarded as one of the world's infamous acts of social engineering; they take us back to the notorious Bantu Education Act and its tragic consequences. In the early years of consolidating democracy in South Africa, there must be a galvanizing and self-critical vision of the goals of our society. Such a vision in turn requires a clear-sighted grasp of what was wrong in the past. It is indeed a blind progeny that acts without indebtedness to the past. The composition and orientation of Black writers who constitute this dissertation are eclectic. The dissertation draws heavily on the writings of world-renowned luminaries such as Es'kia Mphahlele, Wally Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane and Njabulo Ndebele. This dissertation falls squarely under the Citizenship Studies rubric and seeks to argue further that the Nationalists' vision of citizenship was seriously flawed because it was exclusive, violent, sectional and rooted in bigotry and racism. The task of reconstructing the post-apartheid society is going to involve massive acts of interpretation in which the historical memory will be a crucial factor.

Born in Philadelphia on June 9, 1877, Meta Warrick Fuller was one of America's first studio sculptors of African descent. She was one of those persons of ability and genius whom, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, "the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal wave of chance."* Fuller was born into a black elite family in a city whose black community was socially and intellectually active. She was among the fortunate few selected from the Philadelphia public schools to attend J. Liberty Tadd's art school. From 1895 to 1899, she studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School of the Industrial Arts, where her gift for sculpture emerged. Unwilling to limit herself to tradi-tionally "feminine" themes, she occasionally adopted the gruesome imagery of fin de siecle Symbolist literature and painting--a choice that represented a rare act of independence on the part of a woman artist. Fuller's work grew stronger in Paris, where she studied from 1899 to 1902. Influenced by the conceptual realism of Auguste Rodin, she became so adept at depicting sensitively the spirituality of human suffering that the French press named her "the delicate sculptor of horrors." In 1902, Fuller became the protege of Rodin. Samuel Bing, patron of such innovators as Aubrey Beardsley, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, also recognized her abilities by spon-soring a one-woman exhibition at L'Art Nouveau Bing in 1902. An artist whose career spanned over seventy years, Fuller was versatile and productive. A woman of deep religious faith who believed her artistic gifts to be God-given, she created at least one piece of religious art a year in thanks. At various times, she was a literary sculptor, at others a creator of portrait art (which she studied under Charles Grafley at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Although she declared that she could not specialize in African- American types, Fuller became one of the most effective chroniclers of the black experience within the context of the American experience. *Crisis, XXXII, 6(October, 1926), 246.

In 1904, a wealthy black lawyer described Boston as “the paradise of the Negro”. With the state legislature having enacted and reinforced civil rights laws several times after the Civil War, African Americans in Massachusetts (over a third of whom lived in Boston in 1900) could enjoy the same political, civil, and social rights as whites by the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the economic conditions of most black Bay Staters did not change much. They were confined as ever to menial jobs, and, unlike European immigrants, had little possibility for upward mobility. As one black porter in Boston said, blacks “are given…the work that white folks don't want”. Owing to the civil rights acts, they could “go most anywhere with the white man…and spend [their] dollar”, but they could not “go anywhere with the white man and earn it”. This study attempts to elucidate how African-American leaders in post-bellum Boston defined racial “equality”. It examines class-consciousness of black “elites” and points out their tendency to distance themselves from the masses. Having sincere faith in the doctrine of equal opportunity and laissez-faire, “elite” black Bostonians believed that the “fittest”, regardless of color, should survive in the world of competition. And in the process of uplifting themselves and identifying with the white elite and its values, these college-educated, light-skinned “aristocrats of color” came to view the lower classes of their own race as different and inferior. Proud of acquiring their present status by themselves, they only advocated equality before the law and did almost nothing else but urge the masses to work hard enough to uplift themselves just like they had done, dismissing those who could not as either idle or without ambition. The dissertation concludes that although intended as a weapon against racism color-blind meritocracy advocated by the black “elites” turned into an ideology for the status-quo. By demanding equal opportunity alone in an overtly discriminatory society, “elite” leaders not only failed to ease but in fact unwittingly fostered the ever-increasing oppression against African Americans in Boston after the Civil War.

This dissertation examines the American Colonization Society’s “scheme” which sought to deport black Americans to Liberia during the period of slavery. It also explains why a significant number of free African Americans in the North struggled to undermine the colonization movement. The questions that drive this study are: How did African American leaders utilize antislavery networks in the Atlantic world to challenge racial oppression and the colonization movement? How did black political discourse imbibe and reconfigure western concepts like nationalism? In what ways did African Americans foster transnational relationships with European reformers to undermine the colonization movement, the Atlantic slave trade, and the moral and religious implications of human bondage? While historians continue to study African Americans who left America, and settled in Liberia, few studies have been dedicated to examining the overwhelming opposition to black expatriation. My dissertation will attempt to fill this void, and to explore the origins of the colonization movement, and the various ways free African Americans in the North protested against it. This study also places anti-colonization ideology, rhetoric, and activism within the broader Abolition Movement by clarifying how black opposition to colonization set the groundwork for the “Immediatism” phase of antislavery agitation. Through protesting the colonization movement, black leaders sought to demonstrate that African Americans, and their kin in the diaspora, were afforded the same intellectual acumen, moral worth, and human faculties as their European American peers. Furthermore, they employed diverse strategies to challenge racial inequality, affirm their American identity, and critique American democracy. Black American critics of racial prejudice, slavery, and all manifestations of white supremacy, expressed a sense of African pride, while rooting their struggle against the Colonization Society within the belief that America would one day accept them as equal citizens. While the history of the American Colonization Society, and black resistance to their African colonization initiative, fits squarely within antebellum United States history, the topic crosses temporal and spatial boundaries, thus provoking researchers to consider the implications of Africa American agency and formation of a Pan-African worldview during the nineteenth century. Through black resistance to colonization, one can glean an important analytical framework for examining black nationalism and African diasporic identity.