The use of mercenaries in Africa has been almost universally condemned. Africans in particular loathe foreign mercenaries. Small wonder, with the memory and reality of the Congo experience still fresh. So pejorative has the label ‘mercenary’ become in Africa that at one point in August 1962, when United Nations troops had been occupying a none-too-quiescent Katanga, the Katangan Minister of the Interior passed a U.N. road-block manned by Indian troops and cursed them by shouting across the barrier, ‘Mercenaries, mercenaries!’1 And this came from a member of the very Government that had hired the first contingent of mercenaries in the independent Congo.

Agriculture is the mainstay of the African economy. The well-being and even the lives of hundreds of millions of peasants, farmers, and farm- workers depend on the state of agricultural production. Exports of farm products are the principal source of foreign exchange for African countries.

Writing in a previous issue of this Journal, A. F. Ewing has stated that ‘it is fortunately no longer necessary to argue in favour of industrialisation in opposition to another approach to economic development’, although ‘the doctrine that industry is the key to economic development is of comparatively recent origin’. The article is entitled ‘Industrialisation and the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa’.1

Few of the new nations of Africa lack, as part of their colonial heritage, their potential Biafras—hence the reluctance of most African states to recognise the secessionist Eastern Region of Nigeria. This article is concerned with one of them, the Barotse Province of Zambia, and attempts to illuminate the historical background of the situation, the motives of the Lozi ruling class in demanding secession, and the methods by which successive colonial and independent governments have met this challenge.

The sombre picture of the economic situation in most developing countries, and not least in Africa, has become increasingly familiar in the last two or three years. Foreign aid is at best not increasing and the terms on which it is offered are hardening. There has been little or no relaxation of the obstacles to increased trade between the developed and the under-developed world. The growth of many poor countries has been limited; and, indeed, within the developing world, the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom is growing, as is that between the developed and the under-developed world as a whole.

Amílcar Cabral, a little-known revolutionary intellectual and head of the major nationalist movement fighting the Portuguese in their territories of Portuguese Guiné and the Cape Verde Islands, has experienced considerable success as leader of an African independence struggle. His political thought has guided the African response to Portuguese rule for more than a decade. It has developed through the successive phases of his career, as a student in Lisbon (1946–1950), as an agronomist who surveyed agricultural resources for the Portuguese Government (1950–1956), and as a nationalist leader and a revolutionary (1956 to the present).

A recent trio of books by Professor Ali Mazrui deals largely with the phenomenon and impact of Africa's emergence into independence. The Anglo-African Commonwealth (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1967) argues the fertilising influence of English and English liberal ideas on the growth of African nationalism, and explores the changing character and role of the Commonwealth due to its progressive ‘Africanisation’ over the past decade. On Heroes and Uhuru-Worship (London, Longmans, 1967) is a collection of papers on ‘the politics of African independence’.

In connection with the reform of higher education in the D.D.R. [East Germany], the Afrika-Institut and certain other regional institutes concerned with developing countries were recently incorporated under common control, when a Section for Asian and African Studies was established in 1966 at Karl Marx University, Leipzig. This increased the scope of interdisciplinary and interregional academic co-operation.

The need for systematic research into African problems was, in the Netherlands as elsewhere, increasingly felt after World War II, when the non- industrial world began to grow in importance. As a result, the interdisciplinary Africa Study Centre was founded in Leiden in 1947; it became a national foundation in 1958. The aims of the Study Centre are: (a) to promote the study of Africa, especially in the field of the humanities; (b) to promote the co-operation of all Dutch institutions engaged in the study of Africa; and (c) to promote the spread of academic knowledge about Africa.

The construction of educational buildings has been given special attention by the general conference of U.N.E.S.C.O. at several sessions. Resolution 1. 221, passed at the 13th session, reads as follows: ‘Member States are invited to develop educational building programmes to meet their needs as part of their overall economic and social development, and in particular to establish, where appropriate, national educational building centres, and to ensure close co-operation between national and appropriate regional centres in matters relating to the development of techniques and procedures concerning educational buildings.’

This conference was attended by the Presidents of Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Upper Volta, and Senegal, the Prime Minister of the Gambia, the representative of the Chairman of the National Liberation Council of Ghana, and the representative of the Head of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria.

The initiative had been taken by the Heads of the Senegal River Basin States (Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal) following meetings held by them at Nouakchott in November 1965, and at Bamako two years later. They proposed that such a conference should be held at Monrovia in order to create a West African regional group, and requested President Tubman of Liberia to play host. The conference was organised in two stages: a ministerial preparatory meeting, from 17 to 21 April, and the session of the Heads of State and Government, from 22 to 24 April 1968.

Experts in the problems of community development and animation rurale from Africa, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States were brought together in this seminar sponsored by the Institut de recherche d'application des méthodes de développement (I.R.A.M., Paris) and the Geneva–Africa Institute to discuss, in the quiet, academic setting of the Institute, the differences in methods, techniques, and trends between ‘community development’—largely an outgrowth of British and American techniques—and ‘animation rurale’—developed mainly in the French-speaking world.

The O.C.A.M. Charter was signed on 27 June 1966 in Tananarive by the Heads of State of the following 14 countries: the Federal Republic of Cameroun, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo–Brazzayule, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Gabon, Upper Volta, Madagascar, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Chad, and Togo.

Political speeches by African leaders are seldom fully reported outside the country concerned; and it is especially difficult for English-speaking research workers to track down the ephemeral political documents of Francophone Africa. It therefore seems appropriate to publish the following extracts from an important speech delivered by President Boumediène to senior officials— les cadres de la nation—meeting at the Palais des Nations, Algiers, on 19 June 1968.

…Dear brothers, officials of the nation, it is useful today to examine the progress and achievements accomplished during the last three years and to review the various aspects of the Revolution during this period…

Certain ill-disposed persons have tried to spread doubt and confusion by means of a hostile propaganda campaign intended to convince public opinion in the country and throughout the world that on 19 June [1965] we took a step backward and not a leap forward. People acting out of selfinterest, others motivated by private material interests who regarded all revolutionary progress as a threat to their privileges, as well as agents in the pay of foreign countries, have deliberately tried to create and maintain this atmosphere of doubt and confusion…