The constitutional tug-of-war between Great Britain and Rhodesia has been tentatively settled, primarily on Rhodesian terms. When Rhodesia unilaterally declared its independence in November 1965, the British initially assumed that Ian Smith's regime would collapse within a few weeks from internal pressure. This has proved to be incorrect. The British imposed stiffer economic sanctions to raise the costs of secession and thus encourage white dissatisfaction with government policy. These penalties evoked very little electoral dissatisfaction and may have strengthened the hand of Prime Minister Smith. After six years of sanctions, it was Great Britain that made the concessions.

The ability of Rhodesia to survive economic sanctions and get Britain to accept constitutional terms virtually guaranteeing permanent white rule was due mainly to the overwhelming support of the Smith regime by white Rhodesians. The government's ability to get around many sanctions moderated some discontent, but this circumvention could not have been accomplished without the active cooperation of major segments of the population, particularly the business community, a group which traditionally had aligned itself with the opposition party. If there had been disaffection toward the government, then the British sanctions could have created serious public morale and support problems.

The purpose of this paper is to put on the scale of history the recommendations of what is commonly, though unofficially, referred to as the Ashby Commission and to weigh the importance of the Commission in the light of educational developments in Nigeria since September 1960 when the Commission submitted its report to the Nigerian Government. The end of 1971 made proposals in the report more than ten years old; and it is perhaps time for the historian to hazard an evaluation.

An initial problem is how to ascertain the specific role which the Commission's recommendations have played or failed to play in the developments which have taken place in Nigeria's educational scene within the last decade. Obviously it cannot be argued that the Commission's recommendations were the only determinants for the features of Nigeria's educational growth since the past ten years even when such features bear resemblances to the recommendations. The very fact that the report of the Commission was accepted and acted upon by the Nigerian Government is evidence enough that ideas contained in it were shared in Nigeria at that time by a larger number of people than the nine members on the Commission. That a considerable number of the proposals in the report have been adopted as part of the basis for educational planning in the country, in my thinking, owes more to this popularity than to any assumption of extraordinary wisdom on the part of the Ashby Commissioners, whose recommendations have in certain respects been anticipated by actual developments.

The notion of a subordinate African international system is widely posited and accepted. Political scientists have debated the means to, requirements for, and amount of political development in African states but have left largely unstudied the question of whether or not the African international system is developing--by which we mean developing a capacity to cope, by adapting to internal and external challenges. Our purpose in this essay is to study the development of the African system by examining the Organization of African Unity (OAU), with particular reference to its early years.

The focus on the OAU is easily justified. As the sole continental body to which each black African state belongs, its own development is a necessary, and almost sufficient, precondition of the system's development, if this system is also to be construed as subordinate in world politics. The possibility that an African system could develop through the creation of some other body seems remote, although it is not logically precluded. One could, of course, argue that an African system would be developing, were the states to continue the present trend of advancing their interests through more or less cohesive subregional or subpolitical groupings, such as the East African community or OCAM; but it would not be an African international system that was developing.

Independent tropical African regimes face essentially the same dilemma that increasingly occupied the European colonial governments during their last years: to achieve rapid and widespread techno-economic development by using as a principal instrument the subsistence farmer. African elites, to a far greater extent than their colonial predecessors, are also subject to the immediate demands of political legitimacy. The occupational survival of bureaucrats, technocrats, and politicians depends significantly upon their ability to produce expanding social and economic benefits for the mass of their clienteles at costs in human effort and other deprivations which the majority of local minorities does not consider prohibitive. An eloquent expression is given to this dual challenge by the Tanzanian statesman and intellectual, Amir Jamal (1965, p. 5):

The relationship between the leaders and the

masses requires to be recast fundamentally so

that the dialogue between them becomes continuous

as well as politically and economically

productive. Once the sanctions.… in support

of colonial rule are withdrawn, a government

can only govern…if it…undertakes immediately

the critical task, of building up an almost

monolithic dialogue with the masses. This is

a task of a real magnitude, demanding as it

does a two-way communication between the technological,

social and administrative sophistication

of the executive at the centre on the one

hand and the realities of the amorphous or

tribally conditioned eager and aspiring masses

in the country still contending with age-old

environment and equipment, on the other hand.…

This…in effect means the bridging of the gap

on a day-to-day basis, not between technology

and subsistence economy but between those

leaders who become compulsively aware of

their total dependence on technology which

would take some generations' efforts to

become home-based and the masses who inevitably

simplify brutally by asking in

constant refrain--why can't we have the

hospitals, the schools, and roads and the tractors today!

To the casual observer, social communication across linguistic boundaries in Nigeria appears impossible as an indisputable consequence of the country's linguistic diversity. But this bird's-eye view of the language situation could be misleading. A more realistic picture emerges when this multilingual situation is studied in relation to the interaction among people within and across linguistic or administrative boundaries. As William Mackey has adequately put it,

In view of the importance of historical and administrative factors in the Nigerian social situation, language function will be discussed in terms of interaction within and across administrative units. Consequently, the problem of linguistic diversity and language function will be dealt with at the following levels of social interaction: (1) the district level, (2) the divisional level, (3) the provincial level, (4) the state level, (5) the regional level, and (6) the national level.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to delineate the correlates of the interregional shifts of population in Nigeria between 1952 and 1963. The population of Nigeria, according to the census of 1963, was placed at 55 million people. While the annual growth rate for Nigeria as a whole is placed at 2.7 per cent, the rate of urban growth has been slightly over 6.0 per cent per year (U.N. 1970, p. 57). Of this 6 per cent growth rate in the urban population, only 2 per cent can be attributed to natural growth processes (that is, to the excess of births over deaths). The observation made by the Conference on National Reconstruction and Development in Nigeria (1969) seems instructive.

Serious consideration of ideology and economic progress is singularly appropriate at this stage in East Africa's history, in relation to the Uganda coup and the current difficulties between Tanzania and Uganda. Both events have a crucial ideological dimension and have already had deep repercussions on the economy of the two countries and of the East African Community as a whole. That the subject is appropriate, however, does not render it any easier to deal with adequately. At the outset, I encountered four basic problems.

First, the very definition of “economic performance” is itself an ideological decision, in that ultimately it requires a value-judgment on the relative importance of various possible indices of achievement. Whether rapid expansion in per capita income is more significant than the creation of a slower-growing but more regionally and sectorally balanced economy; what division is appropriate between current consumption and investment for future consumption; what economic value is attached to a certain pattern of ownership of the means of production, or to a particular policy of distribution of the economic surplus--all of these basic questions about the economic objectives of a society can only be answered ultimately by reference to ideological values. This interdependence between the terms of the topic is an index of its complexity.

The now nearly unanimous acceptance of the importance of the study of local politics in understanding the processes of political development, modernization, and change in Africa poses a challenge to contemporary Africanists which is at once both perplexing and stimulating. A central focus of this study is on the fusing of the old and new at the local level and the concomitant necessity of analyzing the nature and impact of the surviving residue from traditional societies on the roles and institutions of more recent constitutional government. One of the most perplexing aspects of this challenge is the plethora of tools, models, vocabularies, and methodologies with which we have to work. In attempting to construct a useful and informative, not to mention reasonably accurate, research model, one often finds that his initial inquiry into which framework to use is the most formidible task. One writer has likened this effort to that of knights errant seeking the Holy Grail.

The Holy Ghost Fathers have been in Kastern Nigeria for about eighty-five years. Not until after the recent Nigeria-Biafra War has their influence been somewhat minimized. Arriving originally from France in 1885, the Roman Catholic missionaries, as we shall see later in this essay, exerted a considerable influence far out of proportion to their number. But despite that they had become a factor to be reckoned with ever since, their missionary activity has scarcely been studied systematically. One principal reason for this has been the reluctance of the Roman Catholic authorities to permit scholars to use their private archives in Paris.

In the last few years, however, the Roman Catholic authorities seem to have relaxed their one-hundred-year rule which has often been invoked to deny bone fide researchers access to the archival source materials. I am not sure, however, that this is yet an official policy, but I was permitted in 1968 and again in 1970 to use the archives. It is perhaps important to point out that the archival materials are still jealously guarded. During my research, for example, I was not permitted to examine certain dossiers perceived by the Archivist as “sensitive” and “not proper for public use.” The study that follows is partly based on the materials collected from the archives and partly from other sources, especially from the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in London.

On January 25th, 1971, after approximately eight hours of continuous nondescript music which accompanied the stacatto of rifle, machine gun, and anti-tank fire that even seemed to threaten us in our Makerere University preserve, the voice of Warrant Officer Sam Wilfred Aswa was heard on Radio Uganda announcing that elements of the Army had deposed President Apolo Milton Obote. Aswa listed eighteen grievances which had led the Army to take this action. The eighteen points included a number which related directly to Obote's economic ideology and policies (Uganda Argus and The People, January 26, 1971). Beginning in October 1969 Obote, a friend and disciple of Nkrumah and Nyerere, a man whose personal dedication to socialism was widely accepted in Africa, began to define a strategy which would move Uganda to the left. Whether or not a causal relationship can be shown to exist between the Obote government's attempt to embark on a socialist program and the January 1971 coup, it is instructive to examine this program. This may serve to reveal pitfalls to be avoided if a viable socialist system is to be constructed in Africa.

In relating ideology to economic performance, it might be noted that an official statement that sets forth the ideology to be followed in developing and directing a given society can have a significant impact on economic performance, or it may simply be another example of bureaucratic rhetoric. The content, the degree to which specific policy proposals are enunciated as well as the ability and dedication on the part of those charged with translating documents into action programs will determine the significance of the ideological statement.

The examination of the role of local government in agricultural development in Africa, the subject of this paper, requires inputs from economics and agricultural economics, the technical aspects of agriculture, political science and politics, and administrative and bureaucratic studies. To begin with, should one survey the literature of economists and of agricultural economists, one finds few, if any, examinations of the functional and operational relationships between these subjects and local government. At best, there are rather negative references to the local politics, politicians, and bureaucrats. To many an economist and agricultural economist, particularly those conducting farm-level and project research and those involved in the planning and implementation of agricultural projects, the local political and administrative scene is normally viewed as disruptive, and indeed even “irrational.” Book after book, article after article, report after report written by this group fail to identify these relationships in any meaningful way.

Then turn to the literature of agronomists, veterinarians, forestry and water-development experts, and so on. How frequently do such development professionals recognize the economic, political, and administrative parameters of their research and their policy proposals, particularly at the local level? Their policies and procedures, based on technical considerations, are often matters of should be this way, should happen, should be done, should be desirable. Yet historically the technical men have been in charge of rural development, particularly agronomists and veterinarians. Their almost exclusively technical orientation has rather consistently in so many ways and places led to results far less favourable than would otherwise have been the case had the political, economic, and administrative dimensions been identified and incorporated.

The term “social history” has not generally been used by historians of Africa. We all read anthropology, but until recently most anthropologists working in Africa have eschewed the time dimension, while historians have often avoided social questions. If we believe with Benedetto Croce that all history is contemporary history (Theory and History of Historiography), that it is concerned with explaining the world we live in, then the social questions are too important to be consigned to another discipline. In discussing African social history, I am not trying to create a new subfield, nor do I expect to review all of the disparate work that can be labelled social history. Instead, I hope simply to comment on certain questions which have been studied or can be studied more fruitfully.

Social history can be defined as the study of changes in the ways people relate to each other and perceive those relations. It is frequently closely related to economic history because social groups can often be best defined in economic terms. The social historian differs from most sociologists in that he approaches social phenomena by studying how they evolved and in that he starts with the study of the particular event or community. He is usually more concerned with general statements than are his fellow historians--he might well talk about comparative history, and he is usually more conscious of the uniqueness of every historical event than the sociologist.

Tanzania has been experimenting with numerous changes in its political administration since it gained independence in 1961 (see Dryden 1968, Tordoff 1967). One of these changes is the introduction of the cell system in 1965 (Bienen 1967). This paper focuses on the people elected as cell leaders, who they are and what they do, and on the way in which the behavior of the present incumbents shapes the role of cell leader. Data were collected during an eighteen-month period in 1967-1968 as part of a comparative study of micropolitics in Pare District. While the findings apply specifically to cell leaders in two wards of Pare District, they have general implications for the cell system throughout Tanzania.

The paper proceeds as follows. The first section explains the place of cells in Tanzania's political system, introduces the two communities under scrutiny and gives a profile of the cell-leader sample. The next three sections discuss in detail the following set of propositions about the activities of cell leaders: (1) Although cell leaders actively participate in many aspects of local politics, many incumbents are not innovative in fulfilling their envisioned role. (2) Cell leaders are most effective when dealing with issues which can be resolved within the cell. When they interact with the larger political infrastructure, cell leaders tend to transmit information downward from the hierarchy more effectively than they represent their constituents to other levels.

In Africa, as in other parts of the world, most people have traditionally acquired their skills, knowledge, and attitudes from institutions other than formal schools. Even where formal school systems have been established (a relatively recent phenomenon), it is still difficult to separate the impact of schooling from that of one's family, community, cultural and social institutions, and training on the job. But it has increasingly become apparent in all countries that learning acquired in a. life-long process, both before and after school, is of far greater importance than the more specific knowledge transmitted in schools.

The modernization process, however, has continued to place a heavy emphasis on formal school systems, by defining for them a set of demanding tasks. These educational systems are expected to create useful citizens, to teach literacy, and to prepare young people for the lives they must lead in adult societies by providing them with basic minimum skills. Demands by parents for publicly-supported schooling as the principal means of escape from poverty have led to dramatic increases in the provision of educational opportunity throughout the world. These demands are reinforced, and the growth of schooling accelerated, by the recognition on the part of governments and private industry of a pressing need for higher levels of trained manpower. Economists often disagree as to whether education is a prerequisite for development, or vice-versa. Yet the close relationship between education and human resource development leaves little doubt that one cannot proceed very far without the other. (For a useful treatment of these issues, see Anderson and Bowman 1965. See also Harbison and Myers 1964.)

We are less prone today than we were a few years ago to designate education as the prime mover in development--be the latter political, economic, or “social.” We are finding it both possible and more imperative to explore just how and when education becomes linked into development. No longer does it suffice to conclude that education is “necessary but not sufficient” to generate development and then supply anecdotes about correspondence between general plans and educational plans in this or that set of countries. We have perhaps become even overly cautious in assuming manpower plans to be useful guides for policies to turn out “high-level manpower.” While we may be little more capable than a decade ago to quantify the contribution of education to one or more aspects of development, we see more clearly how education is drawn into many conflicts that are aroused by the drive by national leaders for “modernization.” We observe also the reluctance of local groups or tribes to subordinate passively their own ideas of how to get ahead to some remote official's notions of which peasants must sacrifice how much in order that “the national plan” will be fulfilled. National officials are finding it less easy, however, to praise their local plans in international forums while rejecting the complaints of local citizens whose activities are the substance of development.

Dividing my discussion into a half-dozen sections, I will treat education as the topic of central-local relationships and conflicts, as an influence upon the balance of central and local weight in policy decisions, and as an element in many sorts of activities that bring forth latent central-local parallel as well as opposed interests.

Historical writing about Africa in the last decade has undergone a quantitative, if not always qualitative, boom. This is particularly true in the realm of political and, to a lesser extent, economic history. But little work has been completed in the area of African intellectual history, surely one of the most fascinating and ultimately rewarding fields into which history can be divided.

One obvious reason for this dearth of work is the elusiveness of intellectual history in general--the immense difficulty involved in researching and writing about it well. Intellectual history, according to its broadest definition, deals with the history of thought. But thought, unlike so-called “hard,” verifiable evidence used by social scientists--such as statistics, carbon dating, chronologies--is a nebulous phenomenon to isolate and define. Thought can be nonverbal as well as verbal. It can be symbolic or “unmethodical,” as in poetry, fiction, art, or music, or quite definite and “methodical,” as in science and philosophy.

Ideally, an intellectual historian would study all of these types of thought, not for their accuracy or logical consistency (as would a, scientist or mathematician), not for their value or aesthetic satisfaction (as would a critic or philosopher), but for their relation to each other in time, how and why they appear and spread at a particular time, and their effect on concrete historical situations. In other words, it is the intellectual historian's job to delineate or describe thought in a given historical epoch and to explain the changes which this thought undergoes from epoch to epoch.

At least three articles concerning anthropological and other research interests in Africa have appeared in recent years in the African Studies Bulletin: McCall's (1967) on the history of anthropological concerns and McKay's and Kopytoff's (both 1968) on “the research climate” in Eastern and francophone West Africa, respectively. In this paper I shall discuss some specific problems which the field anthropologist may face during the course of his research-problems the nature of which may not be foreseen in the preparatory stages, which may have few or no precedents in previous field-work situations, and which, in any case, receive little discussion in the literature on anthropological field methods. The problems to be discussed were encountered, or felt, by me in a specific location, and with specific research goals, but I think they reflect more than possible inadequacies in my own research methods and have potentially far wider application than merely to my particular field situation. Indeed, they could have important implications for the future of anthropological and other field research, both in Africa and elsewhere.

Research was conducted in Numan Division, Adamawa Province, North-East State, Nigeria, from September 1969 to April 1971. I had debated whether to mention specific names in this paper, but I have decided to do so, since “Village A” and “Chief B” and other such substitutions would be confusing, and especially since the situations to which I will refer are readily acknowledged and openly discussed by the people of the area. I will, however, avoid referring to particular persons by their given names.

One of the main purposes of much recent work in subnational politics in Africa has teen to find levels and categories of action that are both meaningful and persistent. The study of politics at the local level may avoid some analytical difficulties associated with earlier macro-level studies (for a critique of earlier work, see Zolberg 1966), hut the problem of nonreproducibility begins where macro-analysis leaves off. One result of this dilemma is that few of the increasing number of local studies in African politics either build on previous research or relate theoretically to other work. While this random quality in the literature may be partially overcome as more local research is undertaken, for the moment one of the safest generalizations we can make about local politics in Africa is that there is great variety in social formation and political process in local political arenas.

This suggests that the problem of focus in the study of contemporary African politics cannot easily be resolved merely by shifting the research effort from the national to the subnational level. Both macro- and micro-level studies present their own challenges of validity and interpretation. What both approaches have tended to share, however, is an almost exclusive orientation to politics as the influences on, and the processes of authoritative decision-making. In fact, this orientation largely characterizes political science as a discipline; it is not confined to the study of African politics. But it is equally as important for political scientists to develop categories to analyze the substantive performance of African political systems as it is for them to analyze how the systems operate. Such categories will certainly involve the notion of public policy, to which we now turn our attention.