This article examines stocktheft, cattle rustlers, and responses to stocktheft victimization within the broader context of overt and covert cattle manuevering among the Ila of Zambia. This article is concerned with setting the short-term parameters of individual and group decision-making which currently informs concepts of meritability (i.e., behavior meriting praise or esteem) or culpability (i.e., behavior meriting blame or condemnation) in cattle transactions with a historical framework of socioeconomic and legal change. The discussion is approached from the methodological perspectives of legal pluralism (Pound, 1906; Pospisil, 1967; Nader, 1969) and interactionist labeling theories of crime and deviance (Goffman, 1969; Becker, 1973). Both perspectives assert that within any polity there are a multiplicity of normative systems and legal levels which intersect and articulate variously in rule-making and rule-enforcing settings. In such settings, the authority to make decisions regarding the culpability or meritability of a behavior and the authority to sanction the culpable are typically matters of competition between individuals or groups of equal power, or conflict between individuals and groups of unequal power. There is, therefore, a political dimension latent in rule-making and rule-enforcement (Moore, 1978: 208). Moreover, there are often settings where the political dimension looms paramount.

In developing nations such as Zambia, which seek to use law and legal prohibitions to integrate culturally disparate populations such as the Ila within a homogeneous national polity (United National Independence Party), the question of what constitutes criminal culpability (substantive law) and what the proper procedures are for processing the criminally culpable (procedural law) has been subsumed within a lop-sided and conflictual dominant/subordinate power relationship. In this relationship, the state has retained sole jurisdiction in criminal matters while local jurisdiction encompasses only civil matters. At the same time, the state administers a criminal justice system largely predicated upon that of the former colonial justice framework.

This paper explores the political meaning of Ghanaian Highlife songs, which are generally regarded as pure entertainment. The paper is the result of a close cooperation between a Ghanaian insider (Asante-Darko) and a European outsider (Van der Geest). More than one hundred Highlife songs were collected, transcribed, and translated. All these texts are recorded songs. Nearly all Highlife songs examined in this paper are in the Twi (or Akan) language. (The Akan are a collection of culturally related societies with mutually intelligible languages. They number about four million people and live in the southern part of Ghana.) It should be made clear, however, that Highlife is also performed in other languages, within and outside of Ghana.

This brief paper does not discuss the methodological problems involved in the use of artistic expressions for anthropological purposes. This has been done elsewhere (Fabian, 1978; Asante-Darko and Van der Geest, 1981). Instead, it analyzes the meaning of songs and people's reactions to them. The first section of the paper provides background information about Highlife music in Ghana. The second section deals with the hidden meaning of art in general and, in particular, with the hidden political meaning of Ghanaian Highlife songs.

Highlife is a blend of traditional Akan rhythms and melodies with European musical elements, such as the use of European instruments and harmony. It encompasses a variety of artistic expressions: music, dancing, story-telling, and theater. Performances by Highlife bands are called concerts, even in the Twi language. They usually start with a comic or tragi-comic play filled with musical effects and intermezzos and end with a performance of Highlife songs (Richard, 1974; Collins, 1976a). Both the play and the songs can be about many different topics, rural or urban, modern or traditional, true events or stories. Generally, however, the songs deal with the problems of everyday life: poverty, marriage problems, hatred, gossip, shame, sickness, and death (Bame, 1974; Ricard, 1974). Apart from live performances, Highlife owes its popularity to recordings, which are produced in Ghana.

Since his long experience in prison (1967-69), a mystical strain has crept into the writings of the Nigerian poet, playwright, and novelist Wole Soyinka. The long exclusion of his mind from external space has turned his imagination inwards. The works conceived or partly written in prison– Madmen and Specialists (1971), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972a), and Season of Anomy (1973)–are introspective, visionary, and metaphysical. They are remarkable for their avoidance of sunlight, of open spaces, and the actions of Promethean deities such as Ogun and Shango. Here one looks in vain for the mountains and clouds of the epic poem Idanre (1967) and the grand gestures of its protagonists, the “Skymen of Void's regenerate Wastes.” The landscape of the works of Soyinka's dark phase is, instead, the mind's dark interior or its external correlatives such as caverns, the abyss, vaults, catacombs, and crypts. What prevails is a mood that is Orphic and metaphysical. Madmen and Specialists is a drama of essence rather than of action. The philosophy of As provides the play with its basic metaphysical concept. The actors in the drama are physical and spiritual cripples, beggars, and blindmen. The setting is subterranean in the second part. The prison poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, visualize Soyinka's prison landscape as an immense universe of void–the crypt–and the poet's mind, the only living essence within the abyss, is evoked as a shuttle. The novel Season of Anomy owes its mythic background to the legend of Orpheus and Euridyce. The leading characters in the novel, Ofeyi and Iriyise, are modern counterparts of Orpheus and Euridyce. Ofeyi's quest for Iriyise takes him through grottoes, caverns, and mortuaries. Ofeyi, the mythic voyager, is frequently lost in the throes of visionary reminiscences. If there is one word that best characterizes the mood behind these works, it is the term “animystic,” that is, quasi-mystical.

Idi Amin's brutal regime in Uganda presented a series of unique and complicated dilemmas for American policymakers. Despite its stated commitment to the cause of human rights, the administration of President Jimmy Carter opposed the imposition of economic sanctions against Uganda. Congress, however, determined that the levels of atrocity and repression which marked Amin's dictatorship warranted a new foreign policy approach. In addition, by providing another example of changing executive-legislative relations in foreign policy, the October 10, 1978, embargo of United States' trade with Uganda established new precedents in America's commitment to human rights.

Amin came to power in Uganda as a result of a 1971 coup against President Milton Obote. During his eight-year regime, over 100,000 people were murdered and thousands of others were expelled (U.S. Congress, House, Subcommittee on Africa [hereafter U.S. Congress, House], 1978: 5; International Commission of Jurists, 1977). A number of Amin's victims received worldwide press attention. Two Americans, Nicholas Stroh, a thirty-three year old journalist, and Robert Siedele, a forty-six year old lecturer, were brutally killed in 1971. The expulsion of the Asians from Uganda in 1972 attracted international attention. An El Al jetliner hijacked in July 4, 1976, again thrust Uganda into the headlines. In the aftermath of the daring Israeli raid to rescue the hostages at Entebbe airport in Kampala, the Ugandan authorities murdered Mrs. Dora Bloch, a seventy year old passenger who had been removed to a hospital. The 1977 murder of Ugandan Anglican Archbishop Janai Luwuum, together with two government officials, was condemned throughout the world. This event prompted Senator Clifford Case (R-NJ) to introduce Senate Resolution 175, expressing the sense of the Senate that the regime in Uganda should be condemned.

Although the presence of foreign capital has been quite evident in most sectors of the Nigerian economy, only a handful of studies have attempted to analyze some aspects of direct foreign investment in the country. Even then, these studies (Hakam, 1966; May, 1965; Edozien, 1968; Langley, 1968; Central Bank of Nigeria, 1964-79) have tended to be descriptive, especially with respect to analyzing trends, incentives, motivations, linkage aspects, and distribution of foreign investment.

Thus, there has been virtually no empirical work aimed at statistically evaluating the determinants of direct foreign investment in Nigeria. Consequently, this study has the object of going beyond intuitive and descriptive analysis by providing a comprehensive empirical estimate of determinants of direct foreign investment, using the least squares regression approach. In order to provide the theoretical framework, a number of direct investment hypotheses proposed or considered in the literature are first reviewed.

The analysis focuses on direct foreign investment in all industries combined. Apart from possible specification problems connected with separate models for different industries which a disaggregated approach entails, such an attempt is further complicated by the absence or the poor quality of data relating to the larger number of variables which would have to be considered. Taking cognizance of this kind of problem in a developing country such as Nigeria, the only disaggregation to be done is in respect to sources of foreign investment. In this direction, the study analyzes total direct investment as well as direct foreign investment from the United Kingdom and the United States of America. These two countries accounted for over 62 percent of direct foreign investment in Nigeria in 1974.

Students of government quite often argue that citizen participation leads to a more equal sharing of economic resources in society. Most empirical support for this proposition comes from analyses of western European societies. In the third world literature, scholars advance this thesis mostly with regard to a village or community context. They assert that participation in key decisions of social change is a critical if not sufficient condition for insuring that the local populace's resources are mobilized and its needs served (Charlick, 1980; Huntington and Nelson, 1976; International Labour Office, 1977; and Nelson, 1979). At the nation-state level, particularly in Africa, there has been little opportunity because of the one-party states and military regimes to establish the character of the relationship between participation and the distribution of economic resources. One prominent study of elections in Kenya's one-party state (Bienen, 1978: 90) concludes that competition for elected office has created a government “responsive to popular pressure” and able to “deliver goods and services which are highly valued.” This study, however, did not attempt to establish that the poorer segments of the public actually benefited. For participation to result in any substantial equalization of wealth those who are most disadvantaged should receive some benefit. This paper seeks to explore this issue: Does a liberal democratic electoral system at the national level induce politicians of an African state to improve the economic existence of the poorer segments of the population? The empirical data for this analysis comes from Botswana. Since most of the poor in Botswana live in the rural areas, the paper will concentrate on rural development.