The main thesis of this paper is that the apparent failures of bureaucracies in the new and developing states of Africa, far from being concomitants of dismaying negligence and outright incompetence, are, in fact, glaring manifestations of the dilemma of premature bureaucratization.

It is impossible to speak of bureaucratization in African states without reference to those gradual, often times painful, but sustained and systematic separations of administrative processes from the Royal Households and personal loyalties of the nineteenth century Western Europe consequent upon tremendous societal changes that were occurring at the time. It was a process of injecting rationality and efficiency into administrative activities (Bendix, 1968: 208). This process was accentuated with the advent of the Scientific Management School of Organizational Theory, which appeared early in the twentieth century.

From then onward, the prescriptions for modern administrative organizations have been oriented toward a classical conception of rationality. The scientific management school, led by Frederick W. Taylor (1911), was concerned among other things with the motivations of workers, whereas the administrative management school, led by Luther Gulick and L. Urwick (1937), made organization structure their central theme. Following the examples of these two schools of organizational theory, the literature on organization management has tended to emphasize a high degree of control and efficiency, achieved by means of an elaborate network of impersonal rules and order. Organization men are seen as possessing high instrumental capabilities for goal attainment. In other words, the organization men possess all the relevant information and knowledge as regards causes and effects. This element of perfect knowledge discounts possibilities of errors and uncertainties resulting from the indeterminate environment of the organization. Organizational rules, orders, and structures are both necessary and sufficient conditions for organizational efficiency.

In The Age of Uncertainty, John Kenneth Galbraith, the noted Harvard economist, expressed some simple but profound thoughts on power, ideas, vested interests, and the politics of leadership. Galbraith's ideas have significant bearing on the concerns of this essay. First he argued (1977: 11) that “people have an enduring tendency to protect what they have, justify what they want to have. And their tendency is to see as right the ideas that serve such purpose. Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.” Second, he (ibid.: 13) observed that there is a unique relationship between power and income: Power flows unidirectionally from top down. Income (salary or wealth in Nigerian parlance) flows unidirectionally from bottom up. “As power flowed down, income extracted thereby flowed up. It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.” That is, power and influence are the means of making money, of securing favorable allocations of public resources to one's side, to one's group, and for protecting one's vested interests including socioeconomic class interests in any society.

Third, Galbraith (ibid.: 330) sees the essence of leadership as “the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time.” Since leadership inevitably involves the power and authority to decide for others, it becomes necessary for leaders to be “equipped with knowledge, self-confidence and self-esteem” (ibid.: 338), in order to make the right and equitably just decisions for the people, all the people. Thus, the problems of public policy, the problems of allocating resources, tax burdens, sacrifices during austere conditions, and in general, the problems of the authoritative allocation of values in an environment of scarcity always involve questions of power, self-interest, and leadership.

In 1939 Nigeria was divided into three Regions for purely administrative reasons. These regions, to all intents and purposes, did not constitute separate governments. In fact, between 1939 and 1945, these regions had no legislatures of their own. Even under the Richards' Constitution, when they had separate legislatures they had no independent powers. In practice the state legislatures under the Richards' Constitution (1946-1951) were no more than agents of the governor and the central legislature. Between 1951 and 1954, however, glimpses of a federal division of powers began to appear because the regional legislatures had powers to make laws over issues within the boundaries of their regions. More specifically, the regional legislatures exercised such powers in electoral matters. For example, in 1951, the Electoral Regulations for election into the central and regional legislatures were in two parts. The first part was the General Regulations under which the elections were conducted while the second part was the Specific Regulations which laid down the procedure for elections in each region of the country. To a large extent, although the Macpherson Constitution of 1951 was not federal, the Electoral Regulations under that Constitution paid due respect to the varieties in the nation following the tripartite administrative division of 1939. It was not until 1954 that a federal constitution with a clear division of powers and recognized spheres of influence finally came into operation.

The supply of high level manpower, particularly the products of institutions of higher learning, has been concentrated in certain parts of Nigeria due partly to the highly uneven pace of educational development. Due to lack of data on the distribution of the products on Nigerian universities on a state by state basis, the distribution of university students can be used to indicate the disparity in the supply of university graduates. In 1970-71, the distribution of the 14,468 students enrolled in Nigerian universities by state of origin ranged from only 221 or 1.5 percent for the former North-Western State to a high of 5,218 or 36.1 percent for the former Western State. In 1973-74, only 2.7 percent of the 23,228 students enrolled came from the North-Western State, while 29.8 percent came from the Western State (National Universities Commission, 1970-71, 1973-74).

Where there is unfettered labor mobility such uneven supply of manpower would engender geographical mobility with people moving to wherever there are employment opportunities. This, however, has never been so in the Nigerian situation. In the 1950s, there were mass dismissals of workers on the ground that they were not indigenes of the regions where they were working (Yesufu, 1962: 145). All the former regional governments were guilty of extreme regionalism as strict regionalizaton of their respective civil services became a religion to be worshipped with all devotion. Unfortunately, this practice of regional consciousness also spread to the private sector where employers fell in line with government discriminatory employment policies. As Yesufu (1962: 145) aptly summarized, “private employers, particularly the large expatriate firms, have largely adopted this regionalist approach in labor recruitment, in deference to the susceptibilities of the Regional Government who might otherwise withhold important economic concessions.”

In their study of the process of individual modernity in six less developed countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Inkeles and Smith (1974) reported that urbanization was of little or no consequence as a predictor variable. McClelland (1976: 161) has described this finding as “a shock to some sociologists … who have argued that it is the city above all which makes men modern.” Lerner (1965) and Hoselitz (1962) were among such sociologists who assigned a preeminent position to urbanization among factors accounting for modernization in the less developed countries. Lerner (1965), in particular, argued that in a system of causal indicators, the developmental sequence was from urbanization to literacy to communication and thence to political participation. Support for this conception of the national development process has been reported by McCrone and Cnudde (1967), Akler (1966), Smith (1969), and Sigelman (1971), among others.

Several other researchers have, however, reported, as did Inkeles and Smith (1974), that urbanization no longer holds such an important position in the national development process, if in fact it ever did hold such a position in the past (Schramm and Ruggels, 1967; Golding, 1974; Edeani, 1977) and Lerner (1976) himself has conceded that these empirical challenges to his once influential findings may well be valid. Schramm and Ruggels (1967) argue that the spread of transistor radios, roads, and rapid transportation have eroded any influences which urbanization might have had on the growth of literacy and the mass media as Lerner contended, since the data which formed the basis of Lerner's conclusions were collected as far back as September 1950 when these media and transportation developments in the Third World had not become so important. Golding (1974) states that Lerner's research and others like it disregarded the influences of colonialism, international news and media organizations, and the relationship between traditional communication channels and the new media on the development of the Third World. Also, Edeani (1977) reports that, contrary to Lerner's stand, urbanization is a function of economic development and mass communication development.

Traditional social theory holds that modernization leads to an improvement in the status of women. Until recently, specialists on Africa did not challenge this view (Southall, 1961: 653; Cotran, 1969: 22). This was so because the status of women was not considered a significantly important topic for research. As part of the growing interest in women, the position of women in African society has become a focus of serious study (Paulme, 1963; Little, 1973; Iglitzin and Ross, 1976; Hafkin and Bay, 1976; Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1972). The results of this research, mostly carried out by women, challenge the conventional wisdom that the status of women improves with modernization (Van Allen, 1976; Callaway, 1976; Mbilinyi, 1972; Boserup, 1970). These investigators also indicate that with modernization the position of women has declined both absolutely and relatively in comparison with the improved position of men.

Divorce law and practice is an important barometer of the social status of women in a society. The research upon which this paper is based focused on divorce law and practice in Bobodioulasso, Upper Volta. Its conclusions support the findings of others, such as those noted above, about the negative effect of modernization on women.

Bobodioulasso is the second largest city in Upper Volta. A recent estimate put its population at 118,000 (Rapport Politique, 1975: 9). Like many other African cities, the population is growing rapidly, primarily because of rural-urban migration (Gregory, 1971; Boserup, 1972: 207). This migration in part accounts for the tremendous ethnic diversity of Bobodioulasso, one of the reasons it was selected as the site for this study. The latest available statistics show no fewer than twenty-four different groups represented in the urban area, eleven of these having more than 1,500 members (Rapport Politique, 1975: 9). Although Bobodioulasso is within the predominantly Muslim part of the Sahel, it is not primarily a Muslim area and not, therefore, totally dominated by Muslim attitudes to women. However, Muslims, as well as Christians, are well represented in the city. The area around Bobodioulasso has also retained pre-Muslim and pre-Christian religions and those practising animism still account for the largest percentage of the city's population. They ensure its religious diversity.

English and French attitudes toward Africans in the Senegambia developed and became well-defined during the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century. These attitudes were influenced by three main factors: European ethnocentrism, the commercial relations which governed European-African intercourse, and the growth of the slave trade. During this period, Europeans expressed increasingly negative characterizations of Africans and their way of life. An ideology of African inferiority served, in part, to validate the Atlantic slave trade. It was easier to justify the enslavement of people who were considered less civilized or even a lower form of humanity. The formation of this ideology was facilitated by ethnocentric perceptions which led to a bias in favor of more westernized peoples. One important parameter by which Senegambians came to be judged inferior to their European counterparts was in the area of religious beliefs and practices.

In the Senegambia, French and English observers gradually established a sliding scale with Christians at the top, Muslims somewhere in the middle, and followers of local African religions at the bottom. The fact that Senegambians were not Christians eventually came to be cited as evidence of their cultural, intellectual, and moral inferiority. By the late eighteenth century, this approach would lead to the development of pseudo-scientific attitudes about European racial superiority.

The Senegambia is of particular interest to the study of the growth of ethnocentric attitudes. It was the region of earliest established seaborne contact between Europe and West Africa, as well as an early locus of French and English participation in the slave trade. In addition, the various ethnic groups in the region included both Muslims and non-Muslims. European responses to the different religions are well documented in the letters and narratives of traders and explorers, a fact which facilitates the study of comparative images of the different groups.