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ABSTRACT
Climate changes are disproportionately affecting Africa. In this outstanding book, employing a political economy analysis, Jonathan Neale shows how the global crisis might be averted. A forensic examination of the way that fossil fuels are implicated, and how use of them could be diminished in favour of investing in renewable energy, is allied to a consideration of the political forces which might be marshalled against the energy corporates which profit from potential tragedy.

A critical consideration of the way social class is defined in studies of HIV/ AIDS in Africa exposes the inadequacies of 'indexical' accounts in which class is reduced to a statistical category (the predominant mode of analysis in epidemiological research). It compares this to relational accounts which view class as a set of dynamic interactions between groups struggling to assert or defend social positions relating to livelihoods. Arguing that class relations frame both the transmission and the response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, it looks at the evidence which can be drawn from both indexical and relational accounts of the particular significance of class in this situation, noting its crucial intersection with gender relations and taking Tanzania as its key case.
This paper was originally presented to the African Studies Association Biennial conference: Goldsmiths College, University of London: 13-15 September 2004.

Using the conceptual framework of social reproduction as a way of reassessing the AIDS crisis in Africa, this paper finds contradictory tendencies: a devastating impact on agricultural modes of livelihood which sustain the majority and which enable workers to present themselves as cheap labour, but also a crisis for the reproduction of capital as its supply of such labour is depleted. The impact on and response to the epidemic by the state is explored as well as its reflection of marked gender and class inequalities. Conversely the impetus to certain fractions of capital which benefit from AIDS and the confrontation of the state and pharmaceutical companies by an emergent populist movement demanding the right to treatment, exposes the extent to which transformation rather than simple reproduction is in evidence.

What Women do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (1988), edited by M. Turshen and M. Twagiramariya, is reviewed.

TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism: 1955-1965 by Susan Geiger is reviewed.