The last quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed the publication of a bevy of narratives of travel to India and to Southeast Asia. Many of these were very widely read, and they continued to be cited as authoritative source of knowledge throughout the entire eighteenth century. Very frequently, these narratives included accounts of the Cape of Good Hope, along with descriptions of the Khoi peoples, so-called "Hottentots," who lived there. These descriptions, while they have not entirely escaped the attention of scholars (especially South Africans), have largely been wrenched out of their original contexts. This paper will examine several French and English accounts — Tavernier's and Ovington's journeys to the Mughal court of India; Tachard's and La Loubère's missions to the king of Siam; and Dampier's voyage around the world — comparing the portrayal of Africans at the Cape to those of Asians described at greater length throughout these books. Such a comparison yields a more nuanced appreciation of European understanding (and misunderstanding) of non-Europeans, not only in terms of their "otherness" but also of their differences from one another. In fact, the terms of the contrast of Asians to Africans are highly ambivalent: order vs. anarchy, liberty vs. despotism, or industry vs. sloth, and also dissimulation vs. honesty. Such contrasts defined the parameters of much of the Enlightenment's characterizations of Asians as well as Africans, but also sets the tone for fundamental debates about Europe's own political values.

This article discusses the gender and women in North Korea. Not much is known about North Korea, let alone its gender relations. Based on published literature as well as on partial ethnographic data, the article looks into the status of women in the country, which is similar in many senses to that of women in the former Soviet-influenced socialist states, but is distinguished in an important area, that is, the relationship to the leader. The article suggests that whereas the category “mother” exists in North Korea, the category “women” is hardly recognized, thereby effacing the notion of gender altogether from the surface of the state politics.

This article argues that media are not merely conduits for the government, political parties or citizens in post-apartheid South Africa, but have emerged as autonomous power centres in competition with other power centres. The transformation of the South African media since the demise of apartheid has taken the form of significant changes in the media's environment. There is now freedom to criticise the government, unprecedented access to state-held information, and the state's monopoly over broadcasting and diversification of commercial print media has been broken. Yet these developments have not in themselves had very many positive effects on democratic participation, and the media have not engaged in an effective critique of the country's continuing high levels of social and economic inequality or the structural constraints on the democratisation of its political life. Jacob examines the nature of South Africa's political transition from white-domination and apartheid regime to negotiated and "mediated democracy" that has adopted neoliberal economic policies to ascertain the reasons for this seemingly contradictory outcome.

The development of money is an abstract of the history of civilization. Financial institutions encourage saving habit among the people by receiving deposits from the public in various forms. The Axumite kings were the first to mint coins in the African Continent. The aim of this paper is to explore the lessons learned from the different historical developments in the country and the region. The paper discusses the origin of banking system in Eritrea. It highlights the historical evolution and growth of money and banking in Eritrea during the Axumite, Italian, and the British, Ethiopian periods. It also provides the chronological development of money and banking from historical times to the post-independent Eritrea. It also deals with the existing banking institutions in the country. The paper makes an extensive use of related literature in enlightening the money and banking system in Eritrea during the historical period. It ends with summary and concluding remarks.

This paper explores the means by which social institutions located in African communities that are deeply and violently polarized along ethnic-related lines, navigate the institutional role and identity within such a local environment. Utilizing a case study of ethno-political conflict in the Ile-Ife and Modakeke communities of South Western Nigeria, the paper investigates how the local academy has sought to survive as a zone of diversities located in host cit(ies) with rigidly structured mythicohistories and conflicting geopolitical claims. Through this exploration of the paradox of the uneasy cohabitation of contested realities and the quest for postwar healing and rehabilitation, the paper unveils the unusual local interpretation, rejection and reconstruction of the concept of neutrality, and highlights the challenges, both philosophical and concrete, which confront the academy. The findings of the study suggest a need to cautiously, but decidedly, resituate the university as a civically engaged arena for the creative re-envisioning of diversity and cultural pluralism and ultimately for local and national conflict transformation in Nigeria.