Leopold Senghor's poem expresses the paradox of the Sara in their encounter with the French. The French labeled them la belle race—the beautiful people. Yet more than any other ethnic group in West or Equatorial Africa, the Sara, after a protracted struggle to free themselves from Muslim slave raiders in Central Africa during the 1890s, were decimated by European introduced epidemics. They also fell victim to a systematic attempt on the part of the early French administrators of Chad to make them die first target for forced labor, railroad construction, porterage, and induction into the French African army to fight for France as far away as Indochina.

The weak political organization of the Sara, their apparent peacefulness and unusual stout physical appearance (in sharp contrast to that of their neighbors such as the Baguirmi and the Wadaians), made them the best prey for die administration. In the prefectures of Moyen-Chari and Logone such treatment resulted in demographic instability and the depopulation of many Sara districts due to deaths, emigration, and the constant sociopolitical dislocation which the administrators nonetheless chose to ignore. The prefecture of Moyen-Chari, for example, provided die government with an average of six hundred Sara troops every year between 1918 and 1931. Despite open and widespread Sara resistance to recruitment which often resulted in the assassination of several collaborating chiefs and guards, French administrators never abandoned their preference for this southern edinic group.

Africa's involvement in the changing world economy has been a long one, and its effects on the lives of Africans have been profound. Samir Amin and W. W. Rostow, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and Samora Machel, would hardly dispute such a statement. But the question of whether this involvement has led Africans along a road toward material and social progress or into a dead end is very much in dispute.

The title of this paper is the same as that of the introductory section of S. Herbert Frankel's classic study of 1938, Capital Investment in Africa. Becoming part of the world economy, for Frankel (1938: 1-3, 7), entailed the diffusion of Europe's capital, technology, ideas, and “civilized” form of government to closed, static, and undifferentiated economies. Now, writers such as André Gunder Frank (1967), Samir Amin (1974a, 1976), Walter Rodney (1972), and Immanuel Wallerstein (1979) stress instead the inexorable logic of a capitalist world system, whose effects on Africa are stifling instead of liberating. Both views share a unitary conception of the world economy, the first through a smug assumption that existing economic structures are part of civilization, and the second through an argument that sees change in Africa as a reflection of the growth of capitalism in Europe. The first conception of a world economy defined Africa's role as little more than holding back progress on a predetermined road; the second implied that Africa's influence on the world economy was not nearly so great.

In the 1960s, scholars of Africa reversed such biases for a time. Especially among historians, an Africanist perspective emphasized “African activity, African adaptations, African choice, African initiative” (Ranger, 1968: xxi).

In a recent essay reviewing the literature on modes of production and the transition to capitalism in underdeveloped countries, Aiden Foster-Carter (1978: 72) criticizes the growing volume of Marxist works on development for their lack of theoretical rigor and cohesion:

Separate small scale debates, moreover, are taking place on various topics, including the postcolonial state, the capitalist world system, the development of underdevelopment, the national bourgeoisie, and articulation of modes of production, without their respective protagonists taking note that “each of these mini-debates almost inevitably takes as ceteris paribus matters which are themselves variables at issue in the other debates” (Foster-Carter, 1978: 72). Foster-Carter concludes that there is a need for a broader theoretical synthesis that will help illuminate the processes of development and underdevelopment and, we might add, the various situations of dependency that exist in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The objectives of the present study are modest in view of Foster-Carter's challenge. It is our intention to draw from the contributions made to three mini-debates—underdevelopment and dependency, the articulation of modes of production, and the colonial state—in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the nature and meaning of underdevelopment in Ghana. By themselves, none is sufficient to illuminate the process of underdevelopment in Ghana.

A recurrent theme in most recent studies of the military regimes in developing countries has been that similarities rather than differences in performance constitute the main feature of comparison between civilian and military regimes (McKinlay and Cohan, 1975, 1976; Jackman, 1976). This paper will examine this theme in the Ghanaian context where civilian and military regimes have frequently alternated. Contrary to many current theories, it suggests that differences do occur between civilian and military regimes in the same country. Differences between civilian and military regimes become more apparent if one looks at the policy goals articulated by the different Ghanaian regimes instead of comparing the performance results of these same regimes.

Simply stated, the major hypothesis of this paper is that the articulated policies and goals of a civilian government in a developing nation will differ economically, socially, politically and in terms of leadership style from the articulated goals of a military government in the same country. Furthermore, clarification of these articulated differences is important for the understanding of how different regimes perceive diemselves and approach the process of governing.

Recent literature has overlooked regime differences because of the similarity in the performance results of both civilian and military regimes. This paper suggests that regime differences do affect policy decisions and that as regimes get stronger they may again begin to affect performance results as well. Ghana appeared to be a good testing ground for showing differences between military and civilian regimes because it had experienced two civilian and two military regimes between 1957 and 1975. At the same time, many conditions and variables remained constant.

Issues relating to household and community are of central importance in social scientific research on contemporary Africa and the experience of its peoples in the twentieth century. Early anthropological theory categorized African social organization, for comparative purposes, with that of indigenous America, New Guinea, and other classless and early state systems. Most of these other peoples are now minority populations in colonized states, politically and economically marginal. Only in Africa have advancing capitalism and non-peasant, relatively weakly stratified, highly flexible forms of social organization been forced into a long-term working relationship with one another over such a vast area and such a wide variety of conditions. Most recent scholarship—and the scholarship I will limit myself to in this paper—is not only concerned with substantive questions of what has happened as a result of this confrontation, but also with the methodological problems of describing and explaining it in a comparative framework.

Over the last twenty years, this has resulted in two major shifts of approach, which cut across all the divisions amongst the classic theoretical schools of thought. They are, first, a shift from explanation of local forms in terms of local social and ecological conditions to consideration of their position in regional, national, and international structures; and, second, a shift from classification of local forms in typological schema, either synchronic or evolutionary, to understanding in terms of processes of change which are to some degree indeterminate.

Taking the first issue, the increasing use of terms like “household” and “community” constitutes a relatively new departure. They are classic analytical concepts in the study of peasant societies and carry with them the implications of a local social structure and tradition of life within a wider stratified political and economic system under a state form of government.

The practice of borrowing money has always existed. Rarely do individuals, groups, communities, or even governments, have enough money to execute their needed programs or carry out their most urgent and important obligations. Financial difficulties, therefore, can and often do lead people to borrow money. Although facilities and sources for borrowing vary between developed and developing countries, it is universally accepted that both the borrower's and the lender's interests must be protected in the transaction. In most developed countries, the main sources of loans are financial institutions. Borrowers negotiate directly with these institutions with regard to both rates of interest and loan repayment. In the developing countries, however, financial institutions are very limited in their ability to provide lending services, especially to the rural people. Consequently, most developing countries have created other methods of borrowing. These methods vary from one country to another. As Herskovits observed (1965: 225-6), “The institution of credit is widely spread in non-literate societies, accompanies all types of exchanges, and is found in cultures of all degrees of economic complexity.”

One method developed over the years in the Cross River State of Nigeria and, in fact, in most parts of Nigeria, has been pledging. Pledging involves the institutional transfer of the use rights of a piece of property from one individual to another in return for a sum of money. The individual who advances the credit enjoys usage rights of the pledged property until he receives his money back. The practice of pledging oil palm trees is as old as the society itself and continues today in spite of the recently promulgated Land Decree (Nigerian Federal Ministry of Information, 1978).

This survey can only be one historian's view of a large and controversial matter. African states are contested objects of study on two grounds, the one particular to the changing preoccupations of Africanists, the other common to the humanities in general. European colonialism was a living denial of the ability of Africans to organize their own sovereignties. African studies emerged out of colonialism's decay, in part a sort of recantation, in part a dimension of informal empire. The analysis of past and present African states could not fail to act as a lightning conductor of warring emotions, ideologies, and theories, categories which have often not been very distinct. The first African histories after the colonial era tended to be, as the first studies in political science were necessarily, studies in state-formation as achievement. In more recent years, it has been objected that these were really chronicles of injury, not, as was thought, of pride; for states were and are engines of oppression, not civilization (for early protests, see Soyinka, 1967; Wrigley, 1971; Chanock, 1972b; and later, Markovitz, 1977: 25-55). Moreover, most Africans did not actually live in states until colonial rule fastened Leviathan's yoke upon them. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history could be said to have been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states.

The dispute was really over the evolutionist assumption that it is in some sense “better” to live in states, a premise so deeply rooted in most of us that it can seem almost an insult to explore analytically “the notion of statelessness, long abandoned by historians of Africa” (Uzoigwe, 1980: 115).

The underlying logic of the African struggle for independence from European rule and subsequently from neo-colonialism in all its manifestations was (and is) that the European intrusion into African life was inhumane and disruptive. European enslavement of Africans bespoke a denial of African humanity, and European colonization of the continent denied Africans the right to follow the developmental course charted by their past experiences as the most consistent with their values and aspirations; it pointed them instead along courses dictated by European self-interest. The same logic indicates that the successful struggle for African self-determination would lead to a resumption, as much as consistent with new realities, of the march halted by the European incursion, and that it would be supremely ironic if self-determination was followed by an acceptance of the new, European-imposed orientation (mental, social, or political) as unimpeachable.

The African claim to self-determination is not predicated on a supposed intrinsic superiority of African ways to European ways, but on the principle that for good or ill every people must be free to exercise ultimate control over its destiny. At the height of the campaign for independence, Nigerian politicians, for example, defiantly demanded from Britain “the right to govern or misgovern ourselves.” In that formulation was a denial of any right to any people to intrude into the private lives of any other people under any pretext and an affirmation of the rights of any people to freely conduct its own affairs and the requisite internal (even internecine) debates without the sort of outside interference that colonization represented.

This paper surveys the state of research on ideology and belief in Africa, a subject made up of two often separated notions but significant as a conjunction in current African history and in need of theoretical elaboration. Although there have been writings on this subject in numerous disciplines, this essay will concentrate on the anthropological perspective of the relationship of ideology and belief, as stimulated by anthropologists' confrontations with African developments

The paper presents three major arguments or themes. First, it contends that the distinction between ideology and belief is invidious and should be transcended. Second, it documents that the study of these phenomena in Africa, whether labeled cultural superstructure or labeled ideology and belief, has become increasingly a historical rather than a mythological science. This trend should be hastened. The argument applies to the study of belief principles similar to those that Professor Ajayi (1967:274) invoked in a well known essay for the study of history. It was time, Ajayi said, to replace the mythical Africa of colonial thought with knowledge of what real men did in real situations. The third theme of this essay is that although the models of society constructed by its members and the models constructed by outside observers are, as Lévi-Strauss says (1967:274), phenomena of the same order, the models belong to different cultures, meet different requirements, cannot be reconciled, and should not be confused, although they often have been in the past, in African studies in particular.

This study focuses on determinants of foreign news coverage different from those entertained by the debate about the New International Information Order (NIIO): national interests and media traditions. It is common knowledge that newspapers devote little space to foreign news; we know even less about what that small space contains. The NIIO discussions suggest that third world newspapers, dependent mostly upon western wire services, have little choice but to print what they get. A newspaper like the New York Times, by contrast, relies on its own foreign correspondents and much less on wire service copy; hence it can choose what it prints. Wire services do help determine published news since they constitute a finite basis from which editorial choices are made. It is far from clear, however, that these agencies are the only sources used by third world newspapers and, more important, that the way they structure the news is necessarily identical with that of the news as it is eventually published.

Although the NIIO debate has been going on for years, it is now reaching western audiences. Horton (1978), Rubin (1977), Sussman (1977), Rosenblum (1977, 1979), and Righter (1978, 1979), among others, have recently described the issues in some detail. Much of the criticism of the present “order” stresses that structural dependence upon western agencies results in imbalanced foreign coverage, at the expense of the third world. Righter (1979: 121) explains that “news is … heavily biased toward the industrialized countries.” Horton (1978: 49) agrees that “the news flow is too heavily weighted widi news about the industrialized countries.”

Interest in voluntary associations in Subsaharan Africa has risen as disillusionment has increased with massive aid programs for upgrading material standards of living. Increasingly it has become evident that programs planned and executed from the top down seldom result in significant change at the local level. When, however, people participate in the planning and creation of local level norms in voluntary associations, they take responsibility for inaugurating change. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the conditions necessary for establishment and the limits of usefulness of associations. Voluntary associations will be defined and followed by a brief analysis of the historical background of age sets, secret societies, and fraternities as precursors of modern self-help and cooperative movements.

There is a consensus that associations are essentially shared interest groups established independently of ascribed membership in kinship or territorially based groups (Anderson, 1971: 219; Bradfield, 1973: 492; Norbeck, 1967). Hoebel notes that such groups form an exclusive membership in the larger society, are formally structured, and produce a sense of cohesiveness among the members (1972: 468). Indeed, in his pioneer work on secret societies, Webster considered such groups as arising out of a “natural grouping together of men of the same age who have similar duties and interests in life” (1932: 130). Schurtz professed to find the origin of such groups in the antagonism between generations, leading to classification on the basis of age (Lowie, 1947: 298). Though evolutionary schemes such as Schurz's and Webster's have been heavily criticized, these two authors laid the descriptive groundwork for later anthropological studies of age sets, secret societies, and fraternal organizations.