Christianity and
Social Change
in Africa
Essays in Honor of J.D.Y. Peel
Christianity and
Social Change
in Africa
Essays in Honor of J.D.Y. Peel
edited by
Toyin Falola
Carolina Academic Press
Durham, North Carolina
Copyright © 2005
Toyin Falola
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christianity and social change in Africa : essays in honor of J.D.Y. Peel /
edited by Toyin Falola.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59460-135-6
1. Church and social problems—Nigeria. 2. Church and social problems—Africa, West. 3. Social change—Nigeria. 4. Social change—Africa,
West. 5. Nigeria—Social conditions—1960– 6. Africa, West—Social conditions—1960– I. Peel, J. D. Y. (John David Yeadon), 1941– II. Falola,
Toyin. III. Title.
HN39.N55C48 2005
306.6'76608—dc22
2005007640
Carolina Academic Press
700 Kent St.
Durham, NC 27701
Telephone (919) 489-7486
Fax (919) 493-5668
www.cap-press.com
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
List of Figures
Contributors
Part A
Context and Personality
Chapter 1
Introduction
Toyin Falola
3
Chapter 2
John Peel
T.C. McCaskie
27
Part B
Yoruba World
Chapter 3
The Cultural Work of Yoruba Globalization
Stephan Palmié
41
Chapter 4
Confusion and Empiricism: Several Connected Thoughts
Jane I. Guyer
83
Chapter 5
Between the Yoruba and the Deep Blue Sea:
The Gradual Integration of Ewe Fishermen on
the Lagos-Badagry Seabeach
Axel Klein
Chapter 6 “In the Olden Days”: Histories of Misbehaving Women
in Ado-Odo, Southwestern Nigeria
Andrea Cornwall
Chapter 7 “Let your garments always be white...”
Expressions of Past and Present in Yoruba
Religious Textiles
Elisha P. Renne
Chapter 8
Shrine Sanctuary and Mission Sanctuary in West Africa
Sandra T. Barnes
v
99
117
139
165
vi
contents
Part C
Media, Politics, and Nationalism
Chapter 9
Translation, Publics, and the Vernacular Press
in 1920s Lagos
Karin Barber
185
Chapter 10 Cultural Politics and Nationalist History:
A Background to Wole Soyinka’s Isara
Insa Nolte
209
Chapter 11 Religion, Public Space, and the Press in
Contemporary Nigeria
Matthews A. Ojo
233
Part D
Aladura and Pentecostalism
Chapter 12 “Those Who Trade with God Never Lose”:
The Economics of Pentecostal Activism in Nigeria
Asonzeh F-K. Ukah
251
Chapter 13 Mediating Tradition: Pentecostal Pastors, African Priests,
and Chiefs in Ghanaian Popular Films
275
Birgit Meyer
Chapter 14 Continuity or Change? Aladura and Born-Again
Yoruba Christianity in London
Hermione Harris
307
Chapter 15 “Ndi Afe Ocha”: The Early Aladura of Igboland,
1925–1975
Ogbu U. Kalu
335
Chapter 16 Afro-Brazilian Religion, Progressive Catholicism,
and Pentecostalism in Northeast Brazil:
Notes on Confluence
Miriam Cristina M. Rabelo
361
Part E
Christianity and Knowledge Without Borders
Chapter 17 Managing Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa
Matthew Hassan Kukah
389
Chapter 18 Conversion, Conquest, and the Qua Iboe Mission
David Pratten
413
contents
Chapter 19 Christianity, Colonial Rule, and Ethnicity:
The Mission of the White Fathers among the Dagara
(Ghana /Burkina Faso)
Carola Lentz
Chapter 20 A “Religious Encounter” in Amedzofe: Women and
Change Through the Twentieth Century
Lynne Brydon
Chapter 21 Anglicanism and Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh
T.C. McCaskie
Chapter 22 Chiefdoms, Cantons, and Contentious Land:
Mapping out a Mission Field in Twentieth-Century
Colonial Cameroon
Guy Thomas
Chapter 23 Religion and Healing in Hausaland
Murray Last
vii
441
471
489
517
549
Chapter 24 “Listen While I Read”: Patriotic Christianity Among
the Young Gikuyu
John Lonsdale
563
Chapter 25 The Holy Trinity, or the Reduced Marx, Weber,
Durkheim
Gavin Williams
595
Chapter 26 At the Baraza: Socializing and Intellectual Practice
at the Swahili Coast
Kai Kresse
613
Index
633
List of Figures
Figure 1.1
Sculpture of two Africans carrying a European in a hammock.
10
Figure 1.2
Livingstone, the missionary, in an African village close to Luabala village.
11
Figure 1.3
African sculpture of a colonial officer and school teacher.
Figure 1.4
Dr. Diedre Badejo (left) and Iyalorisa Oloma Aina (right). Photo
by Ramona LaRoche.
22
Figure 2.1
J.D.Y. Peel (photo by Sophie Baker).
28
Figure 3.1
Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther.
72
Figure 4.1
European missionaries at a Yoruba village, 19th century.
88
Figure 5.1
Map of Yorubaland.
100
Figure 6.1
Yoruba Dowry (bridewealth) Container.
121
Figure 7.1
Altar draped with white cloth, with portrait of Moses Orimolade,
Ogu Oluwa New Jerusalem Church, Eternal Sacred Order of the
Cherubim and Seraphim, Mount Zion, Maryland, Lagos, 26
March 2003 (photo by E.P. Renne).
140
Figure 7.2
The three trunks of the large ose (baobab) tree near the Elekole’s
palace are regularly wrapped with white cloth, in part to insure
the peaceful unity of the town. Ikole-Ekiti, 29 July 2002 (photo
by E.P. Renne).
144
Figure 7.3
Olori Omode, of the Imole Olua cult, Itapa-Ekiti, wearing an unsewn, white cloth wrapper, with two apo yata bags with aso
adodo [red cloth] straps, knotted aso oke waistband, holding uru
with beaded handles, coral necklace, and otun.
147
Figure 7.4
Prophetess Ekuno.la Smart, wearing white dress and 4-cornered
woli cap, Ondo, 24 February 2003 (photo by E.P. Renne). 149
ix
13
x
list of figures
Figure 7.5
Prayer warriors with special caps with a red band (some are embroidered, “prayer warrior”) and white dresses with a red sash,
St. Saviour’s United Church of Cherubim and Seraphim Cathedral, Owo, 28 March 2003.
151
Figure 7.6
Almanac printed by the Christ for All Nations organization showing Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke wearing a shirt made from locally
woven aso oke cloth at the CfaN Gospel Campaign, Ogbomosho.
156
Figure 7.7
Cover from the video, Funfun L’Oluwa (Boye Ventures, Lagos,
2003).
160
Figure 10.1 Wole Soyinka.
210
Figure 10.2 Map of Isara in Nigeria.
212
Figure 12.1 Banner for a Pentecostal preacher in Lagos.
254
Figure 12.2 Billboards advertising Pentecostal preachers.
256
Figure 13.1 Scene from Stolen Bible.
285
Figure 13.2 Scene from Stolen Bible.
288
Figure 13.3 Scene from Time.
289
Figure 13.4 Video depiction of tradition.
296
Figure 13.5 Video representation of a chief.
299
Figure 15.1 Aladura document.
338
Figure 18.1 A lady missionary in late nineteenth century Africa.
424
Figure 18.2 Church in Qua Iboe.
435
Figure 19.1 Territoire Dagari, after Paternot 1949.
452
Figure 21.1 Agyeman Prempeh in exile at Elmina.
491
Figure 22.1 Heinrich Karl Dorsch. Copyright Basel Mission Archive; ref. QS30.001.174.01).
521
Figure 22.2 Returning from Bali, 1907. BMCA E-30.25.013: Gottlieb Freidrich Spellenberg. Copyright Basel Mission Archive; ref. QS30.001.1174.01.
523
Figure 22.3 Dorsch map of Cameroon, 1908. “Karte des südwestlichen Teils
von Kamerun (enthaltend das Basler Missionsgebiet) auf Grund
von Original-Aufnahmen von Missionaren der Basler Mission
sowie von Offizieren und Beamten unter Anlehnung an M. Moi-
list of figures
xi
sel gezeichnet von Heinrich Dorsch.” Basel: Verlag der Basler Missionsbuchhandlung in Basel, 1908. (Copyright Basel Mission
Archive).
524
Figure 22.4 Detail, Dorsch map of Cameroon, 1908. “Karte des südwestlichen Teils von Kamerun (enthaltend das Basler Missionsgebiet)
auf Grund von Original-Aufnahmen von Missionaren der Basler
Mission sowie von Offizieren und Beamten unter Anlehnung an
M. Moisel gezeichnet von Heinrich Dorsch.” Basel: Verlag der
Basler Missionsbuchhandlung in Basel, 1908. (Copyright Basel
Mission Archive).
526
Figure 22.5 Neue Aufnahmen von Gustav Conrau im Norden und Nordwesten des Kamerun-Gebirges aus den Jahren 1986 und 1897.
Redigiert und gezeichnet von Max Moisel. Mittheilungen aus den
deutschen Schutzgebieten, Bd. XI, 1898. (Copyright Basel Mission Archive).
527
Figure 22.6 G. Conrau's Wegeaufnahmen im Lande der Banyang, Bangwa,
Kabo, Basosi und Bafo. Redigirt (sic) und gezeichnet von Max
Moisel. Mittheilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten, Bd. XI,
1898. (Copyright Basel Mission Archive).
528
Figure 22.7 Hinterland des Manenguba-Gebirges, in: Der Evangelische Heidenbote, December 1906(12), 93.
529
Figure 22.8 Copy (16 October 1905) of the original plan of the Basel Mission
plot affixed to BMCA E-31.9,6, CI Bali, 2. Teil, Schenkungsurkunde, Bali, 31 January 1905.
541
Figure 22.6 BMCA E-31.9,6, CI Bali, 1. Teil, Certified plan of the Basel Mission plot signed by A. C. Kemavor, Government Surveyor, 21.1.
1938.
545
Figure 23.1 Caliph entering Sokoto, 19th Century.
557
Figure 25.1 Karl Marx.
597
Contributors
Karen Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the Centre of
West African Studies, University of Birmingham. She specializes in Yoruba
culture, and also does comparative work on oral literature and popular culture across Africa. Her most recent book is, The Generation of Plays: Yoruba
Popular Life in Theatre (2000).
Sandra T. Barnes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Founding Director of its African Studies Center, and in 2004–05 a fellow at the Stanford University Humanities Center. She is the editor of Africa’s
Ogun: Old World and New, an interdisciplinary collection of recently expanded
and revised essays that focus on West African religious culture and its continuing vitality in the diaspora. Her book, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos (1986), won the Amaury Talbot Prize
for the best book on Africa. She is President of the African Studies Association, and sits on the Boards of Directors of the American Council of Learned
Societies and the Foundation for the Advancement of International Medical
Education and Research. She has been a visiting faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Ibadan (Nigeria). Her current research
focuses on West Africa: pre-colonial social and cultural life along the Guinea
Coast and post-colonial popular culture.
Lynne Brydon is Senior Lecturer in the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham (UK). Among her publications are Women in the Third
World (with Sylvia Chant) and Adjusting Society: The World Bank, the IMF and
Ghana (with Karen Legge). She co-edits Ghana Studies Review (with Takyiwaa Manuh), and is a member of the Editorial Collective of the Review of
African Political Economy.
Andrea Cornwall is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the
University of Sussex, where she works on the politics of participation, gender,
and governance, and sexual and reproductive rights. Her publications include
Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (edited, with Nancy Lindisfarne, 1994), Realizing Rights: Transforming Approaches to Sexual and Reproxiii
xiv
contributors
ductive Wellbeing (co-edited, with Alice Welbourn, 2002), Readings in Gender
in Africa (James Currey, 2004), “Spending power: love, money and the reconfiguration of gender relations in Ado-Odo, southwestern Nigeria” (American Ethnologist, 29:4, 2002), and “ ‘To be a man is more than a day’s work’:
Shifting ideals of manliness in Ado-Odo, southwestern Nigeria” (in Lisa Lindsay and Stephan Miescher eds., Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa,
Heinemann, 2003).
Jane I. Guyer is Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.
Her research has focused on social and economic change in West and Central
Africa over the past century. An African Niche Economy. Farming to Feed
Ibadan 1968–88 (1997) studies a Yoruba town in the Ibadan hinterland, and
Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004) re-analyzes
ethnographic and historical evidence from several areas, including Southern
Nigeria. A co-edited book (with LaRay Denzer and Adigun Agbaje), Money
Struggles and City Life: Devaluation in Ibadan and Other Urban Centers in
Southern Nigeria, 1986–1996 (2002; 2003, Ibadan) addresses some aspects of
the “confusion” of her topic for this volume.
Hermione Harris is a consultant researcher with the Information Centre about
Asylum and Refugees (ICAR) at King’s College, London. Her publications include The Somali Community in the UK (2004). She has carried out extensive
research on Yoruba churches in London, the subject of her doctoral thesis The
Cherubim and Seraphim: the Concept and Practice of Empowerment in an
African Church in London (2002).
Ogbu U. Kalu, formerly of the University of Nigeria, is the Henry Winters Luce
Professor of World Christianity and Mission, McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, and Associate Director of Chicago Center for Global Ministries.
His book, Embattled Gods: Christianization of Igboland, 1841–1991 was first
published in 1996, and has been republished by Africa World Press. The University of South Africa Press is publishing his collection of essays, Clio in a Sacred Garb: Essays on Christian Presence and African Responses, 1900–2000. He
is the editor of African Christianity: an African Story that is forthcoming under
the Perspective Series, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Axel Klein is the Head of the International Unit at the UK-based NGO Drug
Scope, working on a range of issues including drug policy, prison reform, and
civil society capacity building. He has published on drug policy and the informal sector in Nigeria, and is currently editing a volume on illicit drugs in
Africa with Isidore Obot. Previous publications include Caribbean Drugs: from
Criminalisation to Harm rReduction, edited with Anthony Harriott and Mar-
contributors
xv
cus Day, and Fragile Peace: State Failure, Violence and Development in Crisis
Regions, co-edited with Tobias Debiel.
Kai Kresse is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. His publications include Sagacious Reasoning: H. Odera Oruka in Memoriam (Frankfurt/New York Peter Lang. 1997), co-edited with Anke Graness
(reprinted in an Africa-edition by East African Educational Publishers,
Nairobi, 1999); Symbolisches Flanieren: Kulturphilosophische Streifzuege. (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag. 2001), co-edited with Roger Behrens & Ronnie Peplow; and, as editor, Reading Mudimbe, to appear as a special issue of Journal
of African Cultural Studies (in press). He is currently finalizing a book manuscript on Swahili philosophical discourse, dealing with poets, thinkers, and
intellectual practice in Mombasa. Recent articles in the Journal of Religion in
Africa (2003), and edited collections, e.g. Scott Reese (ed), The Transmission
of Learning in Islamic Africa. (Leiden: Brill. 2004). He was awarded the EvansPritchard Lectureship at All Souls College, Oxford, for the academic year
2005 – 6. He is also part of the editorial team of the online journal Polylog:
Forum for Intercultural Philosophy. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the
University of Hamburg, where he also studied Swahili, and an MSc and a
Ph.D. in Anthropology and African Studies from the University of London.
Matthew H. Kukah is a Catholic priest, Vicar General, Archdiocese of Kaduna,
Nigeria. He studied philosophy and theology at St Augustine’s Seminary, Jos,
and received his MA in Peace Studies at Bradford University, and his Ph.D. at
the School of African and Oriental Studies, London. He has served as the Secretary General, Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria; Member, Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission; Senior Rhodes Scholar, St Antony’s College, Oxford; and the Edward Mason Fellow, Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University.
Murray Last is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He specializes in both the pre-colonial history of Muslim northern Nigeria and the ethnography of illness and healing. He has been
working in and on northern Nigeria since 1961, researching a wide variety of
subjects with colleagues in Bayero University and elsewhere; he visits Nigeria
every year. In 1967 he published The Sokoto Caliphate (London: Longmans
Green), and edited (with G.L. Chavunduka), The Professionalisation of African
Medicine in 1986 (Manchester: Manchester University Press for International
African Institute); in addition he has over seventy publications on history and
on anthropology. He edited the International African Institute’s journal
AFRICA for fifteen years (1986–2001).
xvi
contributors
Carola Lentz is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg
University of Mainz, Germany, and was a fellow of the Netherland’s Institute
for Advanced Studies in 2000–2001. Following her doctoral research on labor
migration and ethnicity in Ecuador, she has conducted research on ethnicity,
elite formation, and history in North-Western Ghana. She is author of Ethnic
Unity and Local Patriotism: The Production of History in North-Western Ghana,
1870–1990 (forthcoming), as well many related articles, and co-editor of Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention (2000). Further publications include
the edited volumes Les Dagara et leurs voisins: Histoire de peuplement et relations interethniques au sud-ouest du Burkina Faso (2001), and Histoire du peuplement et relations interethnique au Burkina Faso (2003). Her current research focuses on mobility, land rights, and the politics of belonging in
North-Western Ghana and South-Western Burkina Faso.
John M. Lonsdale is Emeritus Professor of Modern African History at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His published work includes Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (1992, with
Bruce Berman), and Mau Mau and Nationhood (edited, with Atieno Odhiambo, 2003). He is a past general editor of the Cambridge University Press
African Studies Series, past chairman of the African Studies Centre at Cambridge and past president of the African Studies Association of the United
Kingdom. He is currently working on the intellectual life of Jomo Kenyatta,
the British decolonization of Kenya, and the historical relationship between
religion and politics in Kenya.
T. C. McCaskie is Professor of Asante History, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, U.K. He is author of State and Society in PreColonial Asante (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850–1950 (Indiana and Edinburgh
University Presses, 2000), as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles on Asante history and culture. Most recently, he was co-editor with A.
Adu Boahen, E. Akyeampong, N. Lawler, and I. Wilks of The History of
Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself, and Other Writings by Otumfuo,
Nana Agyeman Prempeh I (Oxford University Press for the British Academy).
He is presently writing a book on contemporary Asante.
Birgit Meyer is professor of Religion and Society in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and professor of the
anthropology of religion at the Free University, Amsterdam. Her publications
include Translating the Devil. Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana
(1999), Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (1999, edited
contributors
xvii
with Peter Geschiere). Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (edited with Peter Pels), and Religion, Media and the Public Sphere
(in press, edited with Annelies Moors). Her current research focuses on the
interface of religion and media in Ghana.
Insa Nolte is a lecturer at the Centre of West African Studies at the University
of Birmingham, UK. Her publications include “Identity and Violence: The
Politics of Youth in Ijebu-Remo, Nigeria” (2004, JMAS 42/1), and “Chieftaincy
and the State in Abacha’s Nigeria: Kingship, Political Rivalry and Competing
Histories in Abeokuta During the 1990s” (2002, Africa 72/3). She is presently
writing a monograph on power, politics and Obafemi Awolowo in IjebuRemo.
Matthews A. Ojo completed his doctoral studies in theology at the University
of London (School of Oriental and African Studies, and King’s College, London) in 1987. His research interest is African Christianity with particular reference to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. He has published extensively in this field, and recently in the area of religion and politics in
Nigeria. In 1999, he was involved in a British Academy-funded research on
religion and media in Nigeria. In 2002, he was a Visiting Professor at Harvard
University Divinity School and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of
World Religions, Harvard University. He is presently a Professor and Head of
Department of Religious Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria.
Stephan Palmié is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Chicago. His publications include Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), an edited volume on
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (1995), and a co-edition of the original manuscript of C.G.A. Oldendorp’s History of the Mission of the Moravian
Brethren in the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John
(1767–77) in four volumes (2000, 2002).
David Pratten is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sussex. His
forthcoming publications include The Man-Leopard Murder Mysteries: History
and Society in Colonial Nigeria, and various articles on youth, violence and
vigilantism in southern Nigeria.
Miriam Rabelo teaches at the Department of Sociology and Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences of the Universidade Federal da Bahia (Brazil). She has
carried out research in the field of anthropology of religion and health in
Brazil, with a special focus on religious healing. Among her publications are:
Experiéncia de Doença e Narrativa with Paulo César Alves and Iara Souza (Ed-
xviii
contributors
itora Fiocruz, 1999), and Antropologia da Saúde: traçando identidades e explorando fronteiras with Paulo César Alves (Editora Fiocruz, 1998).
Elisha P. Renne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology
and the Center for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Michigan. Her research focuses on fertility and reproductive health, gender relations, religion, and social change, and the anthropology of cloth, specifically
in Nigeria. Publications include Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town (Edinburgh and Michigan, 2003), Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations (with E. van de Walle; Chicago, 2001), and Cloth That Does Not
Die: The Meaning of Cloth in Bunu Social Life (Washington, 1995). She is
presently co-editing a volume (with B. Agbaje-Williams), Yoruba Religious Textiles, which will be published early in 2005.
Guy Thomas is Director of the Archives and Library of Mission 21 and Lecturer in African history at the University of Basel. While heading the project
to set up the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon Central Archives and Library
(PCCCAL), he was among the founding members of the Association of
Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon (AFAAC). He is a core member of the Centre for African Studies in Basel and is on the Advisory Board of
the journal Le Fait Missionaire. He has published several articles, and is about
to produce his first book on the mediation, appropriation, and domestication
of Christianity in twentieth-century anglophone Cameroon. Ongoing research
covers a wide range of themes linked to the social history of Christian missions, primarily in West and West-Central Africa.
Asonzeh F.-K. Ukah is a Research Fellow at the Centre of African Studies
(CAS), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
His publications include, “Pentecostalism, Religious Expansion and the City:
Lesson from the Nigerian Bible Belt,” in: Peter Probst & Gerd Spittler (eds),
Resistance and Expansion: Explorations of Local Vitality in Africa, Lit Münster
(2004); “Advertising God: Nigerian Christian Video-Films and the Power of
Consumer Culture”, JRA, (2003); “Reklame für Gott: Religiöse Werbung in
Nigeria,” in Tobias Wendl (ed.), Afrikanische Reklamekunst (2002); “The Local
and the Global in the Media and Material Culture of Nigerian Pentecostalism”
(forthcoming); “Mobilities, Migration and Multiplication: The Expansion of
the Religious Field of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria” (forthcoming). His current research interests focus on the economics of
Pentecostal popular culture in Africa, African Pentecostal Video films; and
African Diasporan Religions.
contributors
xix
Gavin Williams is Fellow and Tutor in Politics at St Peter’s College, Oxford,
where he teaches comparative politics, political and social theories, and politics in Africa. He studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Oxford. He
has published articles and edited books on politics and political economy and
on land and agricultural policies in Africa, particularly Nigeria, and more recently South Africa, and on the discourses and practices of development and
of the World Bank. He is writing a history of the South African wine industry.