Conflict and change in precolonial African societies excite considerable scholarly interest, but historians have yet to produce a very useful theoretical framework for analyzing them. This is certainly true of the study of conflict in Asante, one of the best known kingdoms in precolonial Africa.

Beginning around 1700 as a small confederation of segmentary, matrilineal chiefdoms, Asante rapidly expanded in the eighteenth century along lines of economic, political, and strategic advantage. Through conquest and various processes of differential incorporation, it succeeded in establishing its control over all its neighbors. A smashing defeat of a British-led army of coastal Fante and allied states in 1824 crowned the long imperial enterprise. To Thomas Bowdich, a British commercial agent and visitor to Kumase in 1817, Asante was “indisputably the greatest and the rising power of western Africa” (1819: 341) By 1820 the asantehene's power and influence extended over an area perhaps one and a half times the size of modern Ghana, with a population of some three to four million.

Without any doubt, one of the most impressive aspects of Asante history is the systematic development of a national ideology and the elaboration of complex social and political institutions for the management of the society's affairs. Outstanding early rulers like Osei Tutu (ca. 1695-1717), Opoku Ware I (1717-1750), Osei Kwadwo (1764-1777), and Osei Bonsu (1801-1824) created an elaborate military organization and a sophisticated centralized bureaucracy to ensure order, stability, and effective administration in the huge empire.

On a continent where military coups, civil wars, and other forms of violent disorder have been commonplace, Kenya has appeared an anomaly. The regime of President Jomo Kenyatta has maintained uninterrupted and relatively peaceful civilian rule since the country's independence in 1963. Until recently, Kenya's postindependence body politic had shown few outward signs of social or political stress.

Kenya's era of stability may now be nearing an end, however. In early 1975 the country began experiencing a series of crises and disorders that constitute the worst violence since the 1950s nationalist revolt that brought Kenya's present elite to power. Some observers are beginning to question the Kenyatta regime's ability to contain a variety of mounting tensions and pressures (see Africa Report, 1975a: 29, 48-49; 1975b: 28; 1975c: 23-24).

In the pages that follow, I present an analysis that predicts a continually escalating state of social and political unrest in Kenya. In the first section, I argue the inherent long-term instability of the Kenyatta regime in terms of the regime's failure to adapt to the aspirations and demands of significant portions of Kenya's newly independent citizenry. In the second and third sections, I present, as a case study of the kinds of underlying social and political processes contributing to instability in Kenya, an examination of the mechanisms through which it appears that members of a growing body of unemployed school leavers are being inexorably drawn toward points of social and political rebellion.

The significance of the informal sector in the economy of developing countries is a recurring theme in the literature on urban and regional development planning in Africa south of the Sahara. This is of particular importance in Nigeria where it has been estimated that enterprises within this sector provide about seven times as much employment as those of the formal sector (Callaway, 1967: 163). Although economists such as Kilby (1963: 18) view small-scale enterprises in the informal sector merely as a “quasi-sponge for urban employment,” their persistent survival and expansion has led to recent investigations into the conditions which have made this survival possible (Lewis, 1972, 1973, 1974; Aluko, 1972; Bray, 1969).

In spite of the fact that the dualistic nature of the urban economy in many developing countries has been recognized by researchers for some years now, there is still some controversy about the most appropriate terminology which can be used to describe the pattern. McGee (1973: 138), for example, has suggested that most cities of the third world can be seen as “consisting of two juxtaposed systems of production—one derived from capitalist forms of production, the other from the peasant system of production.” On the other hand, Geertz (1963) described the two systems respectively as the “firm-centered economy” and the “bazaar-type economy.” These definitions emphasize the distinctive organization of production activities, whereas the usual “modern-traditional” dichotomy refers to the technology used. Hart's (1973) study in Accra introduced the concept of formal and informal income opportunities. He based the distinction between formal and informal urban economic activities on that between wage-earning and self-employment.

Since the passage in 1969 of congressional legislation intended to regulate the activities of tax free philanthropic foundations, a spate of works dealing with the role of foundations in American life has been published (Cuninggim, 1972; Heimann, 1973; Nielsen, 1972; Peterson, 1972). Most of these works have dealt in a general way with the responsibilities of philanthropic organizations in a period of rapid change. Several were commissioned by the larger foundations themselves, perhaps to indicate to a potentially hostile legislative branch the foundations' willingness to evaluate their performances to date and to establish socially “responsible” goals for themselves. None of these studies has analyzed specific policy issues in which the foundations have been involved or themselves have helped to create. The central role played by foundations in the growth of American institutional life has been seriously neglected by scholars, more specifically by political scientists, whom, one would think, would have an especial interest in studying these institutional pillars of American society. If the role of American foundations in the evolution of institutions at home has been neglected, the significant role of American foundations as institution builders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and as implementors of American foreign policy is hardly even known. It is with the role of American foundations overseas, particularly in Africa, that I am concerned at this juncture.

One major consequence of black African independence has been the redirection of the continent's historians. Since the 1960s, researchers have sought not only to rediscover but revise Africa's pre-colonial image. On one hand, efforts have been made to recover those aspects of history and tradition that had been suppressed or destroyed by colonial power. On the other, attempts continue to restore other areas which were merely distorted by European rule. Too often it was the European distortion rather than the African tradition that was passed on to the younger generations by colonial educators. As a result, youngsters throughout the continent were deprived of those portions of their heritage of which Europeans disapproved.

This is nowhere more true than in the sphere of the African supernatural. The entire network of relationships between the gods, ancestral spirits and the living, which formed so great a portion of the latters' daily lives, was initially greeted by colonial hostility and contempt. Trapped within their own religious framework, Europe's missionaries and administrators—with a few striking exceptions—were unwilling to examine what they saw. They placed every form of supernatural practitioner and practice under the labels of “witchcraft” and “witchdoctor,” while attempting to replace them with values of their own.

A few European and African scholars have opposed the general trend. Their works have probed deeply into supernatural tradition at a regional or tribal level. In West Africa, Bohannen, Debrunner, Basen and Field, in studies of Nigerian and Ghanaian societies, have investigated the relations between West African gods and their human servants.

Since the last published survey of scholarly research and general research conditions in Angola (Bwrmingham, 1974), much has changed. An independent government has begun to implement fresh policies bearing on scholarly research and on education. Numerous studies have appeared abroad, although historical works on the period before 1900 and ethnographies of Angola's rural areas—the subjects of this research note—have been less plentiful than analyses of the rapid and spectacular political changes that have taken place in the last three years. Research on the earlier periods of Angola's history have filled in several of the gaps that until recently limited our knowledge of the region anachronistically defined to include all the territories now within the independent nation, even though Portuguese “Angola” before 1900 comprised only a small area around the coastal towns of Luanda and Benguela.

Current research on Angolan history builds on bases laid down by several imaginative scholars of the 1950s and early 1960s, beginning with James Duffy's overview of Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique (1959, 1962). Numerous Portuguese-language surveys have also been available, as well as a variety of Portuguese and French-language studies of the Kongo kingdom in northwestern Angola. More immediately, Jan Vansina (1966) and David Birmingham (1966) initiated efforts to integrate the history of Africans in Angola into modern African historiography. Recent works also draw on Douglas Wheeler's studies of nineteenth century Portuguese policy in Angola and on the origins of the autonomous intellectual community of Luanda (1963, 1971, 1972, 1973), whose members founded the first improvement associations and semi-political movements that preceded the formation of the Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola (MPLA) and the present government of the independent nation of Angola.