The listing of the African elephant in Appendix I to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in late 1989 provided a dramatic indicator of the overwhelming pressures threatening the natural heritage of a number of states in Africa. While both their leaders and international organisations express concern about the longterm environmental stability of many areas, the more immediate economic difficulties in producing enough food and obtaining sufficient foreign exchange to finance essential imports and service debts mean that effective conservation measures have been largely neglected.

The story of the blind men and the elephant is universally known. Each…concluded that the elephant had the appearance of the part he had touched. Hence, the blind man who felt the animal's trunk concluded that an elephant must be tall and slender…Others of course reached different conclusions. The total result was that no man arrived at a very accurate description of the elephant. Yet, each man had gained enough evidence from his own experience to disbelieve his fellows and to maintain a lively debate about the nature of the beast.

This is an account of the early life of a widely regarded hero of resistance in South Africa who constantly betrayed the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the staggering human frailty of the modern leader. In later years Potlako Kitchener Leballo also gained renown as a mesmerising orator who lived to dramatise, to command the centre of attention, to captivate listeners with impassioned stories. Having grown up in a world of oral culture it is not surprising that he expressed himself best in the spoken rather than the written word. Leballo's autobiographical sketches, which have been recorded piecemeal by numerous authors, are festooned with exaggerations, illusions, and ambiguities. However, he was an intelligent fabricator of information, with a talent for fitting a story into its appropriate context. This alone makes him an exciting subject for a biography, since the reconstruction of his life and its links to the social structure provide stiff tests for the sleuthing and analytical skills of the researcher.

Cameroon like most formerly colonised countries in African has, since independence and re-unification, grappled with a Danaidean task in attempting to develop a modern legal system that takes account of its heritage and present conditions, as well as its socio-economic and political needs. If the history of African legal systems reflects the difficulties encountered in framing national laws derived from customary and foreign laws introduced during the colonial era, these are even more serious in Cameroon where, because of its complicated colonial past, two potentially divergent foreign legal systems have struggled for supremacy in determining the nature and content of its new uniformised laws. Now in its third decade of independence, and with the two former British and French parts united politically, the goal of legal unity seems to be regarded as a logical sequitur.

At a time when most African countries are characterised as ‘strong societies and weak states’, the tendency to afford the state ‘ontological primacy’ in explaining the nature of African political economy is being challenged. One manifestation of this has been a shift in scholarly attention to those intermediary and autonomous organisations which function and sometimes flourish in the space that exists between the state and the household – namely, the various groups which comprise ‘civil society’.

Concern for democratisation, central in the study of comparative poiltics over recent years, has tended to shift attention away from the African continent. North Africa, in particular, has been neglected in this literature, though it has witnessed important liberalising political changes – most notably with the removal from office of Tunisia's President-for-Life Habib Bourguiba, and the dramatic decline of the Frot de libération nationale (F.L.N.) in Algeria following political violence in October 1988.

Since its founding in May 1988, Africa Watch has documented and reported on human rights abuses in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These findings are available in eight book-length reports and more than 70 newsletters, with new evidence available all the time on such topics as, for example, the suppression of information in the Sudan, violations of laws of war in Liberia, the devastating impact of the 15-year armed conflict in Angola, slavery in Mauritania, and interference with academic freedom in Zimbabwe.

Genocide is easily defined: ‘the deliberate extermination of a people’. It appears to occur in human history primarily in association with the emergence of the state, or in the effort of an established régime to maintain or expand its domination, and is virtually unrecorded for ‘traditional’ or pre-state societies. Although the concept of ‘development’ is by contrast exceedingly ambiguous (other than as an ideal process or social form in an evolutionary typology), the meaning conveyed would be antithetical to the definition of genocide, being some form of material or moral improvement in social existence, rather than a means towards the rapid extinction of a cultural tradition.

While a Research Associate attached to the Ministry of Community Development and Women's Affairs, Zimbabwe, in 1984, I studied the relation between gender and class in six Resettlement Areas (R.A.s) during an eight-month period in there north-eastern Provinces: Central and East Mashonaland, and Manicaland. The country is divided into five agro-ecological ‘Natural Regions’, numbered I to V, indicating decreasing rainfall and soil fertility, and the R.A.s studied were all in II or III, albeit in a year of drought.

Now recognised as the leading woman novelist of francophone Africa, Aminata Sow Fall first achieved literary attention with the publication of Le Revenant (Dakar, 1976). After a rather long stay in France, where she studied at the Sorbonne and became agrégée de lettres, Sow Fall decided to distance herself from other African writters by ensuring that ‘The Ghost’ contained few if any traces of her experiences in the West. As explained several years later, what really surprised her was that novels published by blacks always referenced themselves to the West, whereas she felt the need ‘to present our literature to others so that they see and understand us’: