The classical realist school exemplified by Morgenthau, Kennan, and Kissinger has long dominated the study of international politics. In conceptualizing national interest, this school thinks predominantly in geopolitical, military/strategic terms. Economic power constitutes a source of military capability, but it is a subsidiary variable in analyzing the balance of power, which stands as the central concept in this mode of analysis.

Africanists have increasingly questioned the utility of this approach for the analysis of African foreign policy. Economic power is not a subsidiary factor in the diplomacy of African states—on the contrary, it is a central but yet essentially negative variable. African states themselves lack economic power. In other words, they must function in a world system dominated by the economic power of others. Global economic structures, elaborated during the colonial era, greatly affect the options open to African states. In the context of an established international division of labor, there are enormous constraints on African choices. Foreign policy is shaped by, but is also potentially an instrument to shape, the external economic environment. In studying African foreign policy, scholars must take into consideration international economic structures. How are states in practice confronting or accommodating, the external economic environment? Case studies that seek to answer this question are now beginning to appear.

The physical appearance of Africa's marginal semi-arid lands shows evidence of eroding hillsides, denuded plains, large erosion shelves, and deep sheer-sided gulleys. These features manifest an imbalance between humans and the resources which support them or what some scholars have termed rural population pressure (Anzagi and Bernard, 1977; Steel, 1970). A decade ago, an International Labor Office mission to Kenya (1972: 405, hereafter ILO) noted that surface soil degradation and erosion in marginal semi-arid areas were chronic. Other symptoms of the physical destruction of the land included the drying up of streams, cultivating on river banks leading to silting of streams and dams, unchecked gullying of cultivated slopes, and sheet erosion following bad grazing practices. More recently, the World Bank (1980: 53) noted that increasing population growth in the drier areas of Kenya has led to a pressure exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, which in turn has led to lower income per capita, and even to famine.

In general Kenya's rangelands are densely populated relative to pastoral areas in other African countries (von Kaufmann, 1976: 255). The government itself (Kenya, 1979a: 211) notes the urgency of dealing with social problems related to the rapid population expansion in medium and low potential areas of the country where crop production is feasible but very risky.

The absurd, both as an element of satire and as a style in its own right, has always been manifest in African literature both oral and written. However, in an effort to redirect the focus of African literature and criticism from eurocentricism to a literature and criticism informed by African aesthetics, vocal African critics like Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike have persistently condemned the encouragement of modernist tendencies in African writing (1980: 239): “If African literature is not to become a transplanted fossil of European literature, it needs to burst out of the straightjacket of anglomodernist poetry and of the ‘well made novel’.” Their advice to African critics is that the latter must “liberate themselves from their mesmerization with Europe and its critical canons” (p. 302) and must stop encouraging “the manufacture of a still, pale, anemic, academic poetry, slavishly imitative of 20th-century European modernism, with its weak preciosity, ostentatious erudition, and dunghill piles of esoterica and obscure allusions, all totally cut off from the vital nourishment of our African traditions ” (p. 3).

The antagonism of these critics toward modernism appears to be based on a seemingly incontrovertible evidence (Chinweizu, 1973: 8):

There was a specific burden of tradition that Western modernism reacted against in its revolt. But however familiar we may be with all that; however familiar we may be with that tradition or with the various modernist against it (Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, etc.) they are not part of our history. They do not belong to our past….

William Foltz (1978) has argued that the vital economic and strategic interests of the United States are so limited in scope that the making of an American policy toward South Africa is freed from any serious constraints. As such, South Africa represents “in political terms, something of a ‘freeplay area’ for American political leaders,” and an area where the “most prudent and cost-effective policy to protect American economic and strategic interests would be to work with, rather than against, the indigenous African forces of change” (Foltz, 1978: 267–68). While Foltz's argument may indeed be empirically and objectively correct it has certainly been rejected by the Reagan administration. This rejection stems in large measure from the administration's ideological world view which has contributed to the development of the policy of “constructive engagement” toward South Africa.

Constructive engagement holds that U.S. interests are best served by developing stronger economic and cultural ties with white South Africa. The conviction is that such ties will contribute to the gradual liberalization and ultimately to the demise of apartheid. These ties, it is argued, will support and encourage the political ascendancy of a modernizing autocracy of enlightened white elites. The latter's commitment to change, so the argument goes, will transform South Africa into a multiracial democracy and consequently into an acceptable and trusted partner in the overall Western system of defense. This line of argument rests on a particular set of intellectual constructs derived from a general system of beliefs.

Rural-urban migration tends to play a central role in analyses of Zambian society. Zambia is, by African standards, a highly urbanized country and has experienced an explosive urbanization since independence. Migration from the rural areas is seen as a major cause for rural stagnation. Consequently it is a major policy goal of the Zambian government to reverse this trend towards more urbanization. The political and academic discussion about this policy is mostly in terms of large aggregates of people; rural versus urban, or peasants and capitalist penetration. For example migration from rural areas to urban centers is seen as a logical consequence of maximizing benefits in individual choices given the market situation (Fry and Maimbo, 1971; Bates, 1976). Another view sees this migration as logical in the interests of international capitalism. Rural-urban migration provides cheap labor of benefit to an export oriented enclave economy. The role of rural areas is limited to the reproduction of labor and this conflicts with a possible role of rural people as commodity producers (Cliffe, 1978).

The danger of such reasoning is that it casts rural people in a passive role, determined by the logic of rural-urban terms of trade or the workings of an all encompassing capitalist system. It implies a centralist view of development (Long, 1977) and overlooks the fact that diverse reactions of peasants are possible, given the influence of a Southern African capitalist system on their economies (Ranger, 1978). This is illuminated by this study of Mwase Lundazi, a chieftainship in Lundazi district, Eastern Province.

Education in post-colonial African nations has served as the apparatus for sustaining and accelerating overall development, for increasing political and social awareness, and for providing a cadre of highly trained indigenous manpower to implement, manage, and administer ambitious national development strategies. To understand the process and impact of an educational system, however, one must be cognizant of exogenous forces. From a structuralist frame of reference, Apple (1975) asserts that researchers must examine the power and control external to the educational system, thus making political and economic decisions an integral part of an educational investigation. Scribner (1970) argues that researchers cannot avoid the effects of political demands on the changes in the educational system.

The relationship among educational systems and variables in the social, economic, and political systems in which education exists have been well studied in the comparative education literature (Apple, 1975; Arrighi and Saul, 1973; Dasgupta, 1974; Jolly, 1969; Mazrui, 1978; Morrison, 1976; Simmons, 1974; Simmons and Alexander, 1975). However, the outcomes of the relationship between politics and higher education in post-colonial Africa have not been documented extensively. This paper helps to remedy this deficiency by examining the functional relationship between the national level of leadership in Tanzania and the nation's only university, the University of Dar es Salaam. Julius K. Nyerere, the President of Tanzania since its inception, and the ruling party have attempted to accomplish decolonization, restructure the educational system, and promote rural development

Many observers and analysts of the Zimbabwe nationalist movement have noted factionalism and suggested ethnicity as a dominant factor (Dumbuchena, 1975; Breytenbach, 1977; Nyangoni, 1978; Ranger, 1979). This author (Sithole, 1979; 1980) has made a similar argument elsewhere. Yet, others have observed the same factionalism but suggested a different explanation—the class factor.

The purpose of this paper is not to repeat nor repent from the ethnic factor argument but rather to examine and assess the class factor argument. The task for this paper is twofold. The first is to examine the frequent argument of Marxist colleagues engaged in the profession of analyzing society that factionalism and its ethnic manifestations are caused by “petty-bourgeois” politicians in the nationalist movement. The second task is to attempt to show that, to date, there is no clearly denned class basis for the factionalization in the Zimbabwe nationalist movement.

There has been a proliferation of factionalism in Zimbabwe politics from 1963 to the present. While some analysts have suggested ethnicity as the explaining factor, others sought to employ class analysis to explain the same phenomenon. Ostensibly, most of these analyses were the work of intellectuals and activists external to Zimbabwe but sympathetic to the cause of liberation. More recently, interest in this analytic tool seems to be gaining momentum among locals.