The subject-matter of African politics has always presented a special challenge and a special problem to political scientists, namely to develop a theory which would make sense of a vast, inchoate, and unfamiliar body of material. This problem has become particularly acute in the last year or two. The rapid deterioration of African political parties, a series of military coups, recurrent crises of national unity, and heightened tendencies towards anomic and violent behaviour have not only cast doubt on previous assumptions as to the nature of African political life but have also led to a heightened mood of theoretical uncertainty among political scientists.

There has been an extended discussion in universities, governments, and international organisations throughout the post-war years of the potential and the means for increasing the flow of private long-term capital into the under-developed areas. This flow has been intended to ease the immediate constraints, principally those of capital and foreign exchange, upon development in these areas. Yet, in 1966, private foreign investment in the under-developed areas fell by 12 per cent, and by an absolute amount greater than the increase in official aid. This investment is, in any case, highly concentrated in a very few under-developed countries. Since 1964, income payments on earlier private investments have probably exceeded the total inflow of private capital which the developing areas have received.1 What prospects exist for gaining more private capital for the use of the under-developed world?

In foreign affairs, Kenya presents various faces to the international community. In global terms external policy has been markedly radical in nature and characterised by a strong sense of morality and idealism. Rarely does a major Kenyan foreign policy statement fail to contain some allusion to the inequalities of the present international order or some reassertion of both the desirability and the attainability of a peaceful and just international community of nations. In East African affairs, however, Kenya's policy has often been governed by rather more conservative and legitimist thinking, notably where any radical departure from the status quo is contemplated. It would appear that where foreign policy issues touch directly on primary Kenyan interests—say, national security, national development—the overt radicalism of Kenya's broad international policy is subject to considerable restraint. This ambivalence in Kenya's foreign relations can probably be best explained by examining separately the basically domestic pressures towards a broadly radical policy internationally and towards a more cautious conservatism within East Africa. One further aspect of Kenya's foreign relations is in the field of inter-African affairs, where tentatively one may suggest that Kenya has come to play the role of a prestigious neutral between two amorphous, but often distinct, groupings of what have been termed ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ states.1 Here, foreign policy is far less a product of domestic pressures, and contingencies of history and factors of personality reassert their importance in foreign policy analysis.

The emergence of the new states of Africa into world politics not only influenced the traditional balance of power in the international system, but also created a response among the older African states to restore the equilibrium of order maintained on the continent and fill the vacuum created by the departure of the colonial powers without clashing with the new nationalist movements. Henceforth, the search for influence had to take an ideological overtone. The activities of Egypt in Africa are a reflection of this. Since the mid-fifties, her African policy has aimed at creating a sense of community, cultural loyalty, and political integration. An attempt was made to reinforce the existing culture created by Islam and to transform it into what Pye and Verba call ‘political culture’.1 Thus, Egypt turned gradually toward the employment of religion on the African continent as an instrument of its foreign policy.

A major problem encountered by the builders of many of the new states in Africa has been that of defining a satisfactory position for the traditional tribal authorities in a more integrated and democratic political system. In Botswana a solution has been sought not only at the level of local government, where much of the Chiefs' power has been transferred to elected district councils, but also at the national level, where a House of Chiefs has been created to advise Government and Parliament. This body merits examination as a constructive effort to synthesise indigenous and imported institutions, and to accommodate the interests and demands of the hereditary rulers and their more conservative subjects, who remain deeply rooted in the tribal structure, in a manner which is acceptable to the new élite and their supporters, who are eager to modernise quickly.

How sensibly can one talk of industrial sociology in a non-industrial continent? Industrial sociology has been called the ‘special’ sociology whose task should be to carry through scientifically the analyses of the social relationships and interactions present within the industrial organisation in all its theoretical depth and breadth.1 Raif Dahrendorf, for instance, in Industrie und Betriebssoziologie (Berlin, 1962), whilst accepting industrial sociology as one of the ‘special’ sociologies, makes the reservation that it is concerned with the industrial society. But since the whole process of industrialisation was a historical one, the limitation of industrial sociology to any specific period must be an open question, especially since every kind of society requires the production of goods and services through industrial organisation. Elsewhere I have questioned the premises and validity of Dahrendorf's assertion;2 but it must be admitted that in its present form this special sociology has little or no meaning for the pre-industrial societies largely because they have not yet been exposed to it as a scientific tool. Nevertheless, sociological researches in pre-industrial societies can demonstrate the operational use of industrial sociological categories, such as performance efficiency and incentives, managerial techniques, industrial commitment, and the effect of industrial work on personality, as will be shown below by surveying the work of C. H. Northcott, W. Elkan, and Y. Glass in pre-industrial societies of Africa.

For many years very little attention was paid to scientific research in Madagascar. To be more precise, the public authorities considered that this problem should be left to private initiative, or at least to the initiative of certain key individuals concerned with research in their own special field. Another sign of the times was that it long appeared useless even to envisage any co-ordination.

The Research Institute for Tropical Agriculture and Food Crops was created in 1960 as an independent organisation for technical assistance and cooperation in the field of tropical agricultural research. It has its headquarters in Paris and some laboratories in Nogent, in the suburbs. There can be found not only its administrative staff, but also a group of agronomists specially prepared and trained for overseas work; they spend most of their time travelling to the different countries where I.R.A.T. has been asked to work by and for the governments concerned, giving advice to their fellow agronomists on problems in which they have specialised, or following for several months a particularly interesting study. But, of course, most agronomists are permanently assigned to the different stations where the assistance of I.R.A.T. has also been requested officially. Some of these are quite important centres—for instance, Bambey (Senegal), Ambatobé, near Tananative (Madagascar), and Boukoko (Central African Republic), with more than 20 scientists at work in each. But in several other countries, only two or three people are working in a station, and it is here that more help is needed from the central scientific team.

Despite the superb hospitality of the President of Sénégal and his Government, and of the rector and staff of Dakar University, the second meeting of the International Congress of Africanists in December 1967 must be accounted a disaster on such a scale as to endanger the whole future of the organisation. Intending participants were given wholly insufficient notice to produce papers worthy of such an occasion, and those who nevertheless complied with the invitation were cruelly disappointed to find on arrival that their contributions had not been translated or duplicated for circulation in advance of the sessions at which they were to be presented. Neither a programme nor even a provisional list of participants was available in advance of the meeting. Even so, there were persons billed as chairmen of sections and leading speakers who failed to put in an appearance. As a result, most of the discussions at most of the sessions had to be improvised. True, one of the admirable team of U.N.E.S.G.O. interpreters was heard to say ‘J’ai vu pire’, but when pressed he could think of only one worse example. No doubt individual participants could point to fresh contacts which made the occasion not wholly a waste of time, but there must be few who could conscientiously ask their employers to provide the expenses of attending another meeting without the assurance that it would be of a very different character from this one.

This year it was the turn of Dar es Salaam to act as host to the social scientists, now numbering nearly 200, from the three constituent colleges of the University of East Africa, together with visitors from the Universities of Malawi and Zambia, from Tanzanian government ministries, and places as widely separated as Kinshasa and Leeds. As at last year's conference (reported by Martin Lowenkopf in The Journal of Modern African Studies, IV, 4, 1966), the discussions were trans-disciplinary, even if the tight timetable of parallel disciplinary panels prevented delegates from taking full advantage of this. This reporter was unable to range far beyond the history meeting-room.

‘There is a tendency for laymen to talk of the problem of “illiteracy” in terms which suggest that this problem is simply one of teaching people to read and write and that once they know how to read and write, all will be well…The point…is that all of us are to some extent “higher illiterates”, and that all of us need to cultivate the habit of reflective thought in order that what is seen and read may lead us to a more accurate perception of the world and its peoples. For all of us, therefore, developing the habits and skills of reading means not merely deciphering words more quickly, or abstracting ideas more effectively, or recalling more fully what we have read, but also thinking more purposefully about what we can decipher, abstract and recall.’

The Africa Christian Press was established in January 1964 as a new publisher in Africa. The aim was to provide Christian books relevant to the African situation. The means of attaining this has been to find Africans with a genuine Christian faith, and to encourage them to put something of that faith into writing. English is the medium, enabling a book written in West Africa to be enjoyed in East Africa, and vice versa. Writers in 12 English-speaking countries are sharing in this work, and to date 14 small titles have been published.

In September 1967 a conference of 18 experts (geneticists, anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, historians, and jurists) from 16 countries—Belgium, Brazil, Cuba, France, India, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Poland, Senegal, Sudan, Trinidad and Tobago, the U.S.S.R., the U.K., the U.S.A., and Yugoslavia—met in Paris to discuss the biological, sociological, moral, and ethnic aspects of the race question, with special reference to the propositions adopted at a similar meeting called by UNESCO in Moscow in 1964. These in turn had brought up to date earlier statements made in 1950 and 1951. The Paris Conference agreed unanimously on the following statement, recently released for publication by UNESCO: