Evolutionary relationships among hares from North Africa (Lepus sp. or Lepus spp.), cape hares (L. capensis) from South Africa, and brown hares (L. europaeus), as inferred from mtDNA PCR-RFLP and allozyme data

Systematics and taxonomy of hares of the genus Lepus (Lagomorpha) are under contentious debate, and phylogenetic relationships among many taxa are not well understood. Here we study genetic differentiation and evolutionary relationships among North African hares, currently considered subspecies of Lepus capensis , cape hares ( L. capensis ) from the Cape province in South Africa, and brown hares ( L. europeaus ) from Europe and Anatolia, using maternally (mtDNA) and biparentally (allozymes) inherited markers. A polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) analysis of a c. 1.8 kb long segment of the mitochondrial control region using eight hexanucleotide-recognizing restriction endonucleases yielded 28 haplotypes, and horizontal starch gel electrophoresis of proteins encoded by 25 structural gene loci revealed 52 alleles at 18 polymorphic loci. Diverse phylogenetic analyses (neighbor joining dendrogram, median joining network, multidimensional scaling of pairwise distances, AMOVA, F -statistics, hierarchical F -statistics) of genetic variants revealed marked substructuring of mtDNA into three phylogeographic groups, namely an African, a central European, and an Anatolian, but a somewhat less pronounced overall differentiation of the nuclear genome, despite a relatively high number of population-specific (private) alleles. However, all our results are not incongruent with Petter's (1959: Mammalia 23 , 41; 1961: Z. f. Säugetierkunde 26 , 30; 1972 : Société Des Sciences Naturelles et Physiques du Maroc 52 , 122) hypothesis that North African hares generally belong to L. capensis and that brown hares should be included in this species as well.     

Ikenna Nzimiro, Anthropologist, Sociologist and Iconoclast: On the Intellectual Legacies of a Radical Nationalist

Ikenna Nzimiro was politically and intellectually active from 1948 through the next 50 years in the most momentous phase of the African emergence, and from the mid 1960s on to the last burst of intellectual output in his declining years, very much engaged. Nzimiro’s three-phase series of works will come to be seen as a contribution to the intellectual history of post-colonial Africa from a non-Marxist standpoint. Along with Coser’s ‘Men of Ideas’, African radical Leftists in that peasant environment, were more like the ‘French Ideologues’ of the pre-Napoleonic (post-Voltaire) era, than the ?scientific Marxist-Leninists’ many knew they had to be, to claim the then self-avowed path. Interestingly was Nzimiro’s attack on the ‘Eurocentric notion of class’ – in the process blurring the distinction between class and status. He was much more than a distinguished analyst, taking his calling as a radical public sociologist and Marxist advocate seriously. Yet, shielded by his historic role as an anti colonialist freedom fighter, the power elite considered him, in ironic contradiction, as one of their own. In the end, he was a genuine nationalist in search of a radical, even if less than textbook-revolutionary, revamping of the moribund postcolonial nation his peers ran, and to which he was on principle, very much opposed.