Agricultural marketing boards in tropical Africa are heirlooms of the Great Depression and World War II, when colonial governments found their principal sources of revenue severely reduced and both European and African populations financially distressed. Marketing boards are of British origin, but similar efforts were made in French and Belgian Africa. The rationale for intervention is clouded; some of the principal reasons have faded into the past or were never openly expressed.1

The International Monetary Fund has established itself as the most important economic actor among the many international agencies of our day. Indeed, the most powerful market-economy governments and banks now look to it for leadership in assessing and resolving the key difficulties of world finance. But the I.M.F. has yet to resolve the major problem that it faces as an institution and that its most influential members refuse to recognise as they try to fashion a world economic order: dominated politically, legally, and institutionally by the market élite, the Fund has yet to make the cultural and political leap necessary to understand and work with, rather than against, the majority of its members who are in the Third World. Until the I.M.F. does so, it will continue to be harshly criticised and distrusted by the less-developed countries (L.D.C.s), and it will never achieve either its economic and political potential as a major international agency, or its supposed goal of ordered world economic prosperity.

The Government of Socialist Ethiopia has decided to move all rural inhabitants into newly established villages as part of its strategy for promoting economic growth through agrarian socialism. Known as ‘villagisation’, this programme started in 1978 in parts of Bale Region and continued in Hararghe Region in 1984. Based on this experience, as well as on lessons learned while resettling those evicted to make way for state farms in the Wabe Shebelli valley, the Government began a nationwide campaign in late 1985 designed to move some 33 million rural people into consolidated settlements by 1995.1

Political analysts often tend to focus upon periods of high-level diplomatic tension or ‘crises’ when examining and attempting to draw conclusions about foreign policy. Since these critical and highly visible episodes generally bring to the foreground the underlying combinations of geo-political, strategic, economic, ideological, and bureaucratic elements, as well as individual styles of leadership which affect interstate relations, this attraction to political drama is understandable. But in adopting a ‘crisis’ approach for determining when and what events merit serious exploration, consequential changes may be overlooked, or recognised belatedly, which have subtly crept into a particular government-to-government relationship during relatively uneventful times. The need for scholars to look to the past with more discerning eyes, as well as for foreign policy decision-makers to keep abreast with the day-to-day non-crisis international affairs of state, can be illustrated by the long-term impact of fundamental changes which occurred in the policy of the United States towards the Horn of Africa during the relative calm of the mid-1960s.

ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of ‘the breakdown of democracy’ in Africa, so often associated with primordialism, tribalism, and class conflict in plural societies, seldom grasp experiences of the breakdown itself.1 From the external perspectives of national integration and voting behaviour, popular violence involving mobs and crowds is characterised as affective, ‘irrational’ action, in contrast to the ‘rational’ norms of institutionalised democracy.2

The nine member-states of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (S.A.D.C.C.) – Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Tanzania, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland – are notable for their collective weakness relative to South Africa, and their very wide economic and political heterogeneity.1 Only four, or at most five, have economies whose annual G.D.P. exceeds $2,000 million: two of these, Angola and Mozambique, are under more or less constant attack from South Africa or its surrogate forces, while Tanzania is actually the most remote, physically and economically. At the same time, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho – who are not in the so-called ‘Frontline’, unlike the other six – have rather close political relations with Pretoria, Malawi most substantively since as early as 1966 and Swaziland since 1982.2 Botswana is more independent politically, with a modest G.D.P. and very small population.