After gaining their independence, African countries followed various industrialization policies. Kenya and Tanzania, up to the Arusha Declaration in February 1967, pursued industrialization via private enterprises. Uganda and Nigeria followed a mixed pattern, that is, investments by both private and public enterprises; Ghana, since 1961 and up to the coup in February 1966 by the National Liberation Council (NLC) that ousted Nkrumah, relied primarily on public-enterprise investment (see also Grayson 1970, 1971ab, 1972).

Ghana started out along the Kenya and pre-Arusha Tanzania pattern, both before independence, with Nkrumah already in power, and after independence (in 1957) up till 1961. During that period Nkrumah set out to create an investment climate favorable to both private foreign and local capital. It was only after 1961 that Nkrumah embarked on large-scale public investments in manufacturing. (For an account of the political climate in the early 1960's, see Genoud 1969.) Aside from ideological leanings and a desire for prestige, the main economic considerations motivating Nkrumah were (1) his judgment that Ghanaian entrepreneurs were unable or unwilling to enter the modern manufacturing sector and (2) to break the economic power of the large foreign firms operating in Ghana.

Lagos, at present the political capital of Nigeria and the nerve centre of the country's economy, has been the meeting point for the commercial talent of Yorubaland since the opening of the port to trade with Western Europe. From the start, that trade had inspired and depended upon the activities of a large number of middlemen who linked the expatriate merchant firms in the principal coastal market towns with the young but promising Nigerian market in the hinterland. These indigenous traders, the first generation to take advantage of the, new economic opportunities, came from all the main Yoruba subcultural groups. But, as several historical accounts have shown (see among others Johnson 1921, Forde 1951, Bauer 1954), the Ijebu have turned out more prominently in the process and have distinguished themselves as commercial entrepreneurs above other Yoruba subcultural groups.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to study and discuss statistics on Ethiopia as related to commission of offenses, treatment of offenses at court, and status of the convicted at prisons; (2) to attempt selective comparisons with American data; and (3) to discuss analytical interpretations of the findings resulting from the foregoing data. However, emphasis here will be upon the Ethiopian aspects studied. At the outset it must be recognized that data on offenses committed as well as on some aspects of prison practices, such as executions, in Ethiopia have been in short supply.

While sparsity of data existed and still exists, commendations are due the Ethiopian National Police for the positive step of gathering and arranging such statistics systematically. It is my understanding this was begun in 1967. That there may be some deficiencies in accuracy of figures may be laid to relative recency of concern over them on a wide-scale basis. The reader should be aware also that problems of accuracy were not limited to Ethiopia. Perusal of almost any American text on crime and/or delinquency reveals this fact (for example, see Haskell and Yablonsky 1970, pp. 38, 47-50; Cavan 1962, pp. 20-22). I wish to extend my appreciation to the Ethiopian National Police for releasing to me these statistics for use, for, to my knowledge, very little has appeared in Western literature on this phase of Ethiopian culture.

Contemporary critics of Portugal's presence in Africa charge that economic exploitation is the basis of Portuguese colonialism. They often emphasize, to the exclusion of other factors, economic reasons for Portugal's past and present stake in the tropics. These arguments contrast the actual and potential mineral wealth, agricultural produce, and abundant sources of hydroelectric power in Angola and Mozambique with the lack of them in Portugal. The Portuguese goal is often characterized as making the African dominions yield a profit on investments, furnish raw materials, and provide protected markets for metropolitan industries (Hance 1967, p. 23). In a recent issue of Africa Today, Jennifer Davis concluded that “the prospects for profit are exciting. Small wonder that the Portuguese want to keep their colonies now” (1970, p. 6). John Gellner, in a special to the Toronto Globe and Mail (1971), wrote: “Thus the strategic aim of the Portuguese is to hold what is worth holding.…Angola is a very rich country.”

African revolutionaries and their sympathizers reiterate these economic explanations of Portuguese behavior in a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and leaflets. Marxist in outlook, the authors couch their analysis of Portugal's colonial motives almost exclusively in economic terms. With the exception of revolutionary leaders such as Amilcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, who identified other reasons for Portugal's retention of African colonies, many of those favorable to African liberation emphasize the economic rationale for Portuguese colonialism. (For representative accounts, see Chaliand 1969, pp. 5-12; Dependency…, pp. 3-6; Davidson 1969, pp. 25-28.)

Seemingly oblivious to outside pressure and censure, the present-day Nationalist government of South Africa remains firmly wedded to a policy of separate development, known as apartheid, for its white and nonwhite populations. Criticism from abroad is inevitably parried with the assertion that South Africa has its own means of dealing with questions of race, based on more than 300 years of historical experience. Traditionally this attitude has been upheld and shared by South African historians, particularly by those of Dutch extraction, who comb South Africa's past in search of material to justify the prejudices and policies of today. “History,” writes a contemporary South African historian, “has become a tool to perpetuate the laager mentality of a minority group embattled forever against British imperialists, missionaries, Kaffirs, Communists, liberals, and the world in general” (Patterson 1957, p. 37).

More specifically, South Africa's current inflexible position on apartheid may be related to events that took place in the early part of the nineteenth century. During this period, British efforts to bring about the “equalization” of the native peoples led to the “first clash of significance” between the British and the Afrikaners (Van Jaarsveld 1964, p. 8), as the descendants of the Dutch Boers call themselves; and because the agents of the London Missionary Society at the Cape and in England agitated for many of the reforms introduced by the home government in its South African colony, the Afrikaners have held them responsible for setting in motion the events leading to the Great Trek of 1836.

Fifty or more years ago much of Nigeria and other African countries still lacked the rudiments of a lively business in the modern sense of the word. This was mainly because there were much less goods and services to dispose of, much less purchasing power, much less serviceable means of transport for handling the meagre surpluses than are available today. However, there existed centres of aboriginal economic organization which also, even in a rudimentary way, achieved the circulation of goods. For instance, relevant information is available which indicates that even where barter prevailed, extrafamilial and intertribal exchanges were to be found, while what might be termed protomarkets, where particular kinds of goods were bartered at particular times, existed.

From the point of view of the functional common denominator, exchange, therefore, proofs abound which falsify the concept that separates different levels of “the market” or of “marketing” and concentrates attention only on the “modern” aspect. This is to say that what existed in Africa in this regard was, and to some extent is, the first end of a continuum whose other end is the modern market. In many cases, a movement toward the middle of this continuum and even to the modern end is today observable in nearly every country in Africa. Thus, in truth, the difference is not in kind but rather in degree.

What I am trying to emphasize is that the trading instinct is strong in many Africans.