When I went to live and learn among the Alur for the very first time in 1947, the great linguist Archie Tucker described them to me mysteriously as “very wild and woolly.” What anthropologist could resist? Indeed, although part of the colonial state, no one in Southern Uganda really knew who they were. The refined BaGanda referred to them in lilting labials as Balulu, uncouth northerners, who came to do the unskilled work, and grow cotton on the Ganda landowners' estates. The Alur reciprocated by not really considering themselves in Uganda, despite the legal facts. When they crossed the Nile to go “down country” they spoke of going across to Uganda.

In the then Belgian Congo, where many Alur also lived, they were very differently regarded. The Belgian District Commissioner of Mahagi wrote of them as “civilizers of the hordes” (Quix, 1940). In the vast ethnic wilderness of eastern Zaire, the white administrators saw the Alur as a ray of hope, an intelligent and progressive people with the capacity to rule over others and bring them to order—the fundamental requirement of development then (as now) when “Toe the line!” was the requirement of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Agency for Development (AID), Overseas Development Agency (ODA), and so on, however deceptively camouflaged.

For some centuries the Nilotic Lwo immigrants had been establishing themselves and incorporating more and more people from the surrounding ethnic groups into their evolving system, thus creating a new entity: Alur society. When I tried to find out how and why it was that the Alur were able to exercise this domination and why the other peoples submitted to it—since it did not seem to be a simple matter of military conquest—the symbolic answer always was “we brought them rain.”

In the early 1960s when the South African Government outlawed the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the South African trade union movement was an almost unnoticed casualty. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), affiliated with the ANC in the Congress Alliance since 1955, had become the leading trade union movement based on non-racial principles in direct competition with the racialist Trade Union Congress of South Africa (TUCSA). Although not completely outlawed, SACTU's leadership was driven into exile or underground and a decade after its founding SACTU was moribund and union organizing within the country was at a virtual standstill (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980; Feit, 1975).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, what little international support was generated for the South African working class was funneled through the exiled SACTU organization and its ANC ally. This was a small but important part of the general campaign against Apartheid South Africa, which like the campaign against apartheid sport, sought the total isolation of the regime and all apartheid institutions. As with the sports movement, statements of support by international bodies and the exclusion of internal Soulh African bodies from international forums was the key to the SACTU/ANC policy on South African labor (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980: 470-91).

In the early 1970s, a spontaneous revival of trade union activity within South Africa challenged the racialist principles of TUCSA and the authority of the South African state. The independent black trade union movement which dates from the Durban strikes of 1973 represented a new phenomenon among South African workers (Macshane et al., 1984).

Liberation is not necessarily at hand in South Africa. The government still has the means to, and to all appearances still intends to, enforce apartheid. Yet, the process of change has become so great that many have begun to consider questions related to the nature of the post-apartheid state. The purpose of this paper, then, is to capture at a point in time the two primary competing images of what shape that state will be.

First, there are those who support a federal state and capitalism. This position is represented, in one form or another, by the so-called left wing of the Nationalist Party (NP), the opposition Progressive Federal Party (PFP), and the country's major business interests. Various so-called homeland leaders, most respectably Phatudi (who recently died) of Lebowa and Buthelezi of Kwazulu, have also spoken in support of federalism. But one is inclined to believe that their opinion will prove of little account. In order to portray the capitalist and federalist image there is reference to Lijphart (1985); the views of the PFP which both represent those of the country's major business interests and often precede policy shifts of the NP: and a recent federal blueprint suggested by members of the left wing of the NP, Lombard and Du Pisanie (1985).

Next, there are those who support a unitary state and economic arrangements which range from a mixed economy to socialism. While one might include here the Azanian People's Organization and the Azanian Congress of Trade Unions, they are generally held to be eclipsed by the African National Congress (ANC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

The debate concerning whether the West should impose sanctions against the Republic of South Africa has been mostly political in nature. Moreover, much of the discussion has concerned the morality of sanctions; less, especially by advocates of sanctions, has dealt with the effectiveness of proposed measures. The economics literature has been particularly sparse, and most detailed analyses are inaccessible other than to professional economists.

This paper attempts to fill the gap. The discussion is non-mathematical, although the propositions put forth can be derived from formal models. The arguments are generally straightforward and intuitive, though, so that the absence of technical details obscures little. In particular, this paper will seek to outline which sorts of sanctions will be most effective in achieving the dismantling of the economic (and possibly political) aspects of apartheid, and which are likely to harm southern Africa's black population least.

The analysis suggests two central points. First, effective sanctions may exist that do not greatly hurt poor South African blacks. Second, effective sanctions must be accompanied by a generous policy of infrastructural aid to South Africa's neighbors if these countries are to remain stable.

The next section briefly describes current sanctions, while the following section outlines salient features of the southern African economies. The paper then discusses the impact of specific trade and investment sanctions. The final section summarizes desirable sanction strategies, considers the apartheid government's ability to shift the consequences of such measures, and presents a positive strategy for developing the rest of southern Africa that will be useful even in the absence of effective sanctions.

A dialectic running through the literature on agricultural development in Africa is between coercion and incentives, between the necessity of compelling peasants to produce certain crops or employ particular technology and the possibility of motivating peasants to opt for specific production strategies through rewards. Coercion presumes peasants lack the capacity and or will to develop agriculture and must be forced. Incentives assume peasants will choose development if given the opportunity. Recent examples of coercionist approaches include Hyden (both 1980 and 1983), La-Anyane (1985), and Hart (1982:156-157). Recent examples of incentive-based approaches include Bates(1981), World Bank (1981), Brown and Wolf (1985), and Lele (1984).

Both sides of this debate are seriously flawed. Policies based on them are unlikely to break the pattern of underdevelopment in African agriculture. In fact, past policies of coercion and incentives have contributed to present conditions. Current frameworks lack an appreciation of the ways in which African agriculture has already been transformed. They therefore underestimate the structural impediments to progress.

This article calls for greater attention to the conditions and relations of production in African agriculture. Specifically, we must examine three factors. The first is the degree to which subsistence production has been undermined. This includes considering how dependent producers are on the market, to what extent out-migration has taken place and how far landlessness has spread. Second, we must look at the degree of control farmers have over production decisions. They may be restricted by such factors as competition for land with commercial growers, sharecropping and other land-tenure relations, lack of resources to provide inputs to agriculture, regulations of development projects or cooperatives, and/or by pressure to allocate resources to off-farm strategies (such as wage-labor) to meet household needs.

Land and land shortage lie at the center of Kenyan political history throughout the colonial period and beyond. Land alienation created a keen sense of loss among Africans and attempts by the colonial government to assuage this, such as the Kenya Land Commission of the 1930s, did little to meet the problem of growing African land shortage. The land problem was most strongly felt and expressed by many Kikuyu, especially in the south.

There were many issues relating to land alienation and resulting shortage: legal definitions, questions of occupancy, political constraints, and moral concerns. The origins of the Kikuyu land problem need further investigation, however, for they lie not simply in a blatant and bloody land grab, nor in the possession of vacant land by settlers and the colonial state. Rather, there was a complex mesh of haphazard appropriation, bureaucratic chaos, fitful economic growth (by settlers and Africans), economic co-operation and conflict, and frontier readjustment. This paper examines the dynamics of land alienation, land use and mounting land shortage in the Kiambu District of Kenya during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule.

Kiambu was, and is, an area of transition (Figure 1). In an environmental sense it lies between the cool, fertile, densely populated and, formerly, thickly forested Kikuyu Uplands and the lower, warmer grassland of the south and east. Before 1900, the area also marked a fluid boundary between the pastoral Maasai and the predominantly agriculturalist Kikuyu. There was no firm frontier: trade in stock, grain and brides was important to both and their spheres of settlement and economic activity not only met but overlapped.

This essay examines the roles that Ogun, Yoruba god of iron and war, plays in communication and in the construction of boundaries in the systems in which he is worshipped in an attempt to gain some additional understanding about the nature of Yoruba religion.

The idea of Ogun, both in symbolic and practical expressions, is indigeneous to the Yoruba, most of whom live in the southwestern part of Nigeria. In the New World as well as Benin (Dahomey) where Ogun is also worshipped, the practice is associated with people of Yoruba descent. The god has taken, within syncretic formations, a new name in the Americas (Herskovits, 1971; Lewis, 1978; Gordon, 1979). It is St. George in Rio de Janeiro and St. Anthony in Bahia, Brazil. For those in Trinidad it is St. Michael. The Yoruba themselves have seven variants of the god (Idowu, 1962; Ibigbami, 1977). The elevation of one variant above others raises the issue of religious identity: whereas Ogun is not immune from the variety of conflicting traditions in the Old and New Worlds, it is clear that, even in the New World, Ogun's affiliation to any community is expressed in action—in the common performance of the prescribed practice and the adoption of a way of life. World writers have emphasized the syncretic adaptations of the African indigeneous cultural forms in line with Catholic dogmas and symbols the African slaves met or interacted with in their new settings (Herskovits, 1937, 1971; Mischel, 1967; Hamilton, 1970; Gordon, 1979). Their theoretical orientation is informed by a search for African retentions or survivals.