In this article an attempt is made to achieve three separate but complementary tasks. First, to make a contribution to the ethnography of the rural Hausa of northern Nigeria. Although considerable attention has been paid to the historical development of the centralized emirate systems which provide the overarching framework for the organization of Hausa society (see for example Smith: 1960), comparatively little attention has been paid to the lower levels of Hausa political organization especially in the rural areas where 90 percent of the Hausa live. A notable exception to this neglect of the rural Hausa is the outstanding contribution made by Polly Hill (1972 and 1977), who in her introduction (1972: xiv) states her insistence that “rural (Nigerian) Hausaland is … the great under-explored region of West Africa.” Hill, however, concentrates her effort mainly on economic life and the more directly political aspects receive relatively little attention.

Secondly, this article seeks to examine critically the relationship between the political structure existing in the village and the various, seemingly contradictory, ways in which the inhabitants describe it. It shall be suggested that at several critical points the structure is ambivalent and exhibits a variety of tensions which pull it in different directions. It shall be further suggested that the divergent descriptions of the structure given by informants are, in fact, an ideological representation of these (empirical) tensions. As such they are individually partial, both in the sense of being incomplete and in the sense of representing particular configurations of interest.

Thirdly, to suggest some explanations for the tenacity of these traditional institutions and the continuance of the traditional leadership patterns as the major political force in Hausa village life. In doing this it shall be argued that to attempt an explanation in terms of autochthonous village equilibrium dynamics cannot really answer the problem. Rather, it is only by placing this microcosm in the context of the Nigerian political and social systems as a whole that the basic lack of major change can be fully understood.

Zambia, like all African countries, is experiencing significant political, economic, and social change. The Zambian government and ruling party seek to control change and channel it in certain directions, but many aspects of change are not initiated by them and a substantial proportion of these are not to their liking. Politically initiated changes and government reactions to other changes have inevitably affected the legitimacy of the Zambian political system and its major components in the eyes of a wide variety of Zambians. In his contribution to the Social Science Research Council's volume on the crises of political development, Sidney Verba indicates that all such “crises of development” or problems associated with change “would seem always to involve problems of legitimacy as well as one of the other problem areas” (Verba, 1971: 306). Thus it is important to study the effects of change on legitimacy since they will be crucial in determining whether the Zambian government and ruling party will be successful in directing change into the paths they desire.

Political legitimacy can be defined as a generalized appraisal of the political system as a whole, its various components, and the policy outputs they produce, which indicates that these objects are appropriate in terms of accepted values and norms. To define legitimacy as a generalized appraisal of appropriateness is to differentiate it from specific appraisals of political structures and policies made in terms of perceived interests. These two types of appraisals are empirically interdependent in the long run, but they can be independent of one another in the short run (Easton, 1965: 267-77). They tend, however, to be very closely related in most new political systems, where most diffuse bases of legitimacy have not had time to develop (Binder et. al., 1971: 90-91, 158, 194, 315-16). A complete description of legitimacy in a political system must indicate who grants what degree of legitimacy to what political objects on the basis of which values and norms.

Long-distance radio broadcasting might have become a very important and successful tool of colonial administration had it been invented thirty years before its time. As it was, international short wave broadcasting began only a few years before the onset of the immediate forces that led to dissolution of empire. Ad hoc solutions to problems of colonial broadcasting were thus just beginning to give way to conscious policy when the end of the era came. The subject of this paper, therefore, is limited to the years between 1927 and about 1957, that is from the start of the British Broadcasting Corporation's experiments that led to establishing its Empire Service to the onset of postwar colonial devolution.

The very year that the British Broadcasting Corporation was organized it began experiments with short wave transmissions to the colonies. Such long-distance short wave broadcasts involved an untried technology, new concepts of programming, and innovative financial arrangements. The BBC experimented for five years before it was ready to inaugurate the Empire Service formally in 1932.

During that 1927-1932 gestation period of the Empire Service, the Colonial Office had explored the acceptability in the dominions and the colonies of such broadcasts from home. At the 1930 Colonial Conference, the secretary of state for the colonies spoke of “the possibility of creating a new and intimate bond of connection between the different British communities … and also possibly its utilization for the purposes of the natives” (Great Britain, 1930:9. Emphasis added). The priorities were thus clearly set forth. The Empire Service had as its primary role the maintenance of home ties with British expatriates overseas and with the dominions.

The growth of Johannesburg is synonymous with that of South Africa's gold mining industry and the expansion of the metropolitan area from a ramshackle collection of huts to one of the continent's major urban concentrations attests to the impact of visions quickly accumulated wealth on patterns of human movement. This is particularly true of the city's early white community, the prospectors and later the purveyors of capital and mining technology, to whom the imminent possibility of riches compensated for the rigors of existence on the geographically featureless Witwatersrand. Yet similar imaginings of affluence also partially explain the historic drift of blacks to “N'goli” (the city of gold) where today they constitute the overwhelming majority of its population. The opening of the gold reefs in 1884 brought unprecedented wealth to white South Africa (if not to the legions of black labor responsible for the precious metal's extraction). At the same time the discovery of gold set in motion the process of black urbanization of which Johannesburg is the epitome. By 1896 approximately half of the fledgling town's population were blacks seeking refuge in mine wage labor from growing poverty in the country areas and by 1913, with rural dispossesion aggravated by the Natives Land Act, an irreversible momentum was set in motion. Twelve years after the striking of the first successful claims Johannesburg's population of 102,000 was roughly divided between black and white (Lewis, 1966: 3). A mere 80 years later, despite the barriers to black urban influx institutionalized by successive white governments, the racial distribution of population was of the order of 3 to 1 with blacks the predominant element of the ratio.

In at least one respect the mid and late 1970s have been similar to the mid and late 1960s, namely in the amount of attention devoted to the problem of world hunger. From a variety of popular and professional media the message is broadcast clearly that millions of people are starving and malnourished and that the future will be even more bleak than the present unless population growth is slowed, food production increased, and wealth redistributed. Africa, in particular, has become a source of much concern. The recent highly publicized famines in the Sahel and Ethiopia, and recurrent food shortages in such places as Senegal, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, and Botswana have given the impression of widespread precarious food-population balances. Additionally, it is stated that numerous deficiency diseases are virtually endemic, especially among young children.

The exact dimensions of food deprivation in Africa are not well know, however. This is because most food related investigations traditionally have focused on production rather than consumption, and when they have been concerned with consumption they have dealt either with selected, localized populations, or with highly aggregated data, usually at the national scale. The many volumes by Jacques May (1965, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971) on the ecology of malnutrition provide examples of both of these approaches. Generally missing are middle range comparative analyses that attempt to delineate and explain patterns of similarities and differences from place to place and culture to culture. Yet as Whitehead (1977) has noted, there is considerable variability with regard to who is malnourished and why, and thus it is precisely these investigations that are needed in order to avoid the “blanket approaches” to remedial policies which he rightly condemns.

In this paper three interrelated topics are examined: First, the conflicts and strains prevalent in a matrilineal society are described. It is argued that these conflicts are the result of a central structural contradiction inherent in matriliny, namely, that between relations of production, which are individualistic in nature, and distribution processes, which involve social relationships that are communalistic in character. The contradiction results primarily from matrilineal inheritance practices which ensure that all wealth accrues to the matrilineage. Since spouses belong to different lineages and since the fruit of their labor cannot be inherited by affines, nuclear and bilateral extended family members do not cooperate nor invest in family or larger cooperative enterprises. As a result, Luapulans have become individual producers.

Second, the impact of the industrial-market system on the preexisting tensions is described. Specifically, it is argued that the contradiction in matriliny fosters a rural class structure and a capitalist route to rural development. The wealthy, who find the matrilineal distributive justice (Poewe, 1978) in conflict with their desire to accumulate capital for purposes of reinvestment, have disengaged from matriliny and adopted Protestant ideologies to justify and further their business interests. By contrast, the poor, who find that matrilineal inheritance holds out the hope of receiving initial endowments, continue to support matriliny because they see in it the means to propel them along the path of private enterprise.

The recent demand by underdeveloped nations for improvements in quantitative and qualitative presentation of their images abroad reflects their dissastisfaction with existing patterns and content of world news flow (Africa Currents, 1977: 19-21). This demand is based on allegations that the news media of the developed nations disseminate distorted images about them. To investigate this allegation, this study analyzes Canadian newspaper treatment of one underdeveloped region, Africa.

The first section of the paper concerns aspects of Canadian African relations, indicating that the region could be of some news value to Canadians. Section two argues against the proposition that increasing functional proximity between nations would be the answer to poor treatment of underdeveloped nations abroad. The third section concerns the role of foreign correspondents and African newsmen in the service of the world news agencies. After a content analysis of presentation of Africa in certain Canadian newspapers, the paper concludes with suggestions for improving coverage of Africa.

Questions like, “why are we in Africa at all?” and “what do we get out of it?” indicate how restless Canadians have become about Canada's involvement with Africa (MacEachen, 1975: 1, 4). These questions smack of disapproval especially of the rationale for Canada's involvement in the region which is late Lester Pearson's dictum “it is only right for those who have to share with those who have not” (ibid.:1).

On 6 June 1975, 46 countries, 37 African, 6 Caribbean, and 3 Pacific signed the Georgetown Agreement establishing the African Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP). This agreement represents the culmination of months of cooperation and coordination among these countries in their negotiations to establish a new model of economic cooperation between themselves and the European Economic Community (EEC). Whatever the merits or demerits of the Lome Convention in specific economic, political, and institutional terms, there is general agreement that the protracted negotiations provided an opportunity for the 46 countries to forge links that have had and will continue to have far reaching implications for the efforts at mutual cooperation and effective action between Third World countries, particularly between those in Africa and the Caribbean, on the international scene. Isebill V. Gruhn (1976: 241) has suggested that:

To the extent that the emergence of the ACP is regarded as one of the most important outcomes of the Lome negotiations, the available evidence tends to support that interpretation.

The ACP marks a significant milestone in the years of endeavor to establish an institutional framework for Afro/Caribbean collaboration in international relations. It has long been accepted that on several of the major issues confronting the international community such as imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, apartheid, and the restructuring of the international system, Africa and Caribbean have had similar interests. While these interests have been articulated by the various states at different international meetings, they have lacked an institutional arrangement for their harmonization and joint orchestration.