Contemporary Africa's Triple Heritage of indigenous, Islamic, and Western legacies is just the modern culmination of a much older Triple Heritage —the heritage of indigenous, Semitic, and Greco-Roman influences on Africa. The ancient Semitic strand has now narrowed and focused more firmly on Arab and Islamic influences; the ancient Greco-Roman strand has now expanded to encompass wider European and American intrusions.

An Arab leadership within the Third World has been emerging since 1973. Since that year, major diplomatic initiatives on a wide range of issues relevant to the third World have in fact originated from the Arabs. Countries of the Third World are basically producers of raw materials and other primary commodities. The whole struggle for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) has to some extent been led by the Arabs. Some Third World causes have been championed by some Arab countries, and have been pushed by them into the main arenas of international diplomacy. Algeria virtually initiated the raw materials debate at the United Nations in 1974. This was followed by the special session of the General Assembly in 1975. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of a serious consideration of the issue of restructuring the world economy.

The role of Islam in West African politics goes back to the beginnings of the encounter between Islamic culture and traditional African political leadership in the medieval period. When Arabo-Berber culture arrived in the West Soudan, African rulers in Ghana, Soudan, and other smaller kingdoms of the time were very much influenced by their traditional African world view. According to this world view, rulers were thought to be a link between the living and the dead, on the one hand, and between the temporal and the spiritual on the other. Indeed, it is because of this fusion of politics and primordial religion in the old Africa that the well-known American student of African religions, James W. Fernandez, wrote in the early 1960s that the “African, it can be argued, inherited a traditional disposition to shift back and forth from a political to a religious mode of address.”

Ali Mazrui's “The Semitic Impact on Black Africa: Arab and Jewish Cultural Influences” is interesting reading. That is perhaps the only kind thing one can say about it. As sheer academic exercise, it is its own justification. However, its purpose is much more obscure, its pontifical pronouncements shaky, and its historical allusions as accurate as often as not. The theme of Africa as a “cultural bazaar” where “a wide variety of ideas and values, drawn from different civilizations compete for the attention of African buyers” has been labored to a nauseating degree. Its hidden premise is the existence of an African cultural vacuum, or near-vacuum, destined to be filled by “universalistic” civilizations such as Greco-Roman (Christian, European, Western, etc.) or Judaeo-Arabic (Semitic, Hebraic, Arabic, etc.), although Judaism has not historically exhibited a proselytizing strain, and insularity, on the contrary, appeared to characterize it.

On November 2, 1983, white voters in South Africa decided by a two-thirds majority in a nation-wide referendum to approve a new South African constitution. The new political dispensation still excludes the 70 percent African population from participation in central political decision making but includes symbolically the 10 percent so-called coloureds and 3 percent Indians in separate Parliaments. White control has been streamlined into a more technocratic, expanded executive state with greater powers for the ruling Nationalist Party and the office of the state president. The “coloureds” and Indians now play the minor role of educating whites in non-racialism.

Following the termination of South Africa's mandate over Namibia by resolution 2145 (XXI) of 27 October 1966, the General Assembly decided that the United Nations Council for Namibia, in its capacity as the legal Administering Authority for Namibia until independence, and in fulfillment of the mandate entrusted to it under General Assembly resolution 2248 (S-V) of 19 May 1967 and reaffirmed in subsequent resolutions of the Security Council and the Assembly, should consider the activities of foreign economic interests operating in Namibia.

In the past twenty years, scholars have spilled a great deal of ink debating the role of armed forces in political development. A variety of views have been expressed—and, not unexpectedly, the field lacks a scholarly paradigm. As this paper will indicate, Africa has received its share of studies of the military, notably since the eruption of coups d'etat in late 1965-early 1966 made clear that the presumably “nonpolitical” heritage of colonial armies was quickly being supplanted by direct, extensive political involvement on the part of officers. This essay attempts both to summarize the results of a score of years and several score of studies, and to indicate new directions for research in coming years.