The Journal of Modern African Studies deeply regrets to announce the death of the Book Reviews Editor, Dr John Wiseman, on 5 March 2000.

John Wiseman, Senior Lecturer in African Politics at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, died of cancer on 5 March 2000, at the tragically early age of 54. John was always proud to have been a product of the Department of Government at Manchester, where he took both his undergraduate degree and his Ph.D. with Bill Tordoff and Dennis Austin between 1968 and 1974, completing his Ph.D. under Bill's supervision on ‘The Organisation of Political Conflict in Botswana’. He then taught for three years at Ahmadu Bello University, before taking up what proved to be his lifetime post at Newcastle in 1977.

Sceptical of theory, and moved by a deep love of Africa, John always saw African politics as deriving from the needs, aspirations and struggles of individual Africans, rather than from grand global narratives. This was an approach that encouraged the empathetic and fieldwork-based study of individual African states, first in Botswana, but also in his second African home, The Gambia, while at the time of his death he was working on Malawi. It also led to an interest in leadership, expressed in his Political Leaders in Black Africa (1991), and to an abiding conviction that Africans were every bit as capable as anyone else in the world, given half a chance, of managing effective multi-party democracies. This conviction was expressed in his two major books, Democracy in Black Africa: Survival and Revival (1990), and The New Struggle for Democracy in Africa (1996), as well as an edited volume, Democracy and Political Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (1995). Fittingly, the last publication before his death was ‘The Continuing Case for Demo-Optimism in Africa’, Democratization (1999).

A lifetime enthusiast, John made an enormous contribution to the study of Africa, as teacher, colleague and friend. His final-year undergraduate course on African politics at Newcastle regularly attracted more than seventy students a year. He was an active member of ASAUK, especially in organising conference panels and serving on its Executive Committee, and was Book Review Editor first of The Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, and from 1997 of The Journal of Modern African Studies. He will be deeply missed, both amongst the Africanist community in the United Kingdom, and in those parts of the continent that he knew and loved. A memorial fund has been established, and will be donated to projects in those parts of Africa with which John was most closely associated. Cheques should be made payable to the ‘University of Newcastle’, and sent to Mrs Joan Davison, Department of Politics, University of Newcastle, Newcastle- upon-Tyne, NE1 7RU.

Pending the appointment of a new Book Reviews Editor, all reviews and correspondence should be sent to the Editor, Christopher Clapham, at the University of Lancaster.

The massacre of refugees during the 1996–7 war in Congo illustrates the gap between existing legal standards and their application, as the principle of sovereignty rationalises states' behaviour against helpless people. This paper assesses available information on the scale of the massacre, concluding that about 232,000 refugees were killed. It argues that firmness in demanding justice and protecting human rights does not require ignoring the objectives of stability and prosperity for any country, but rather that it is the best way of promoting those goals and strengthening state sovereignty within the international community. To implement international law related to refugees will require making states and non-state players responsible for their actions to the international community, since any outflow of refugees creates negative externalities or costs that are unequally borne by this community.

Privatisation has both an economic and a political face. In South Africa, this Janus-faced character is revealed by the juxtaposition of economic and political arguments for and against the process of privatisation initiated by the National Party, during the transition to majority rule. This paper argues that the NP set out to fundamentally reorganise the structure of South Africa's political economy as an exit strategy. Although it justified privatisation by employing economic arguments, this ostensible depoliticisation masked political motives. Ironically, the weak economic case reveals the political face of privatisation in South Africa. The timing and context of South Africa's privatisation process is difficult to defend on economic grounds, but it did make political sense.

This paper analyses how macro-economic and agricultural policies, market fluctuations and demographic changes affected forests in the Humid Forest Zone of Cameroon in four periods between 1967 and 1997. For each period it examines how these variables influenced cocoa, coffee, food, and agroindustrial crop production and area, and logging. It concludes that government policies, market fluctuations and demographic changes all had a strong impact on forests. Pressure on forests increased after structural adjustment policies were initiated in the mid-1980s. Malthusian reasoning alone cannot explain the level of deforestation and forest degradation in Cameroon.

This article examines an aspect of Ghana's political economy in the 1990s, covering its transition to democracy from military dictatorship, and how this change process impacted on its attempt to implement a value added tax (VAT). It assesses the claim that political transition from autocracy to democracy improves policy-making and policy outcomes. Ghana's experience of implementing VAT typifies an inherent problem in African governance, that of lack of adequate capacity for improved policy-making and for the institutionalisation of inclusive politics and public accountability. The VAT case served in the end to impose a previously absent level of public accountability on the Ghanaian government.

This article is based on the observation that the large debate on the nature and consequences of so-called indigenous land tenure systems does not sufficiently take into account the perceptions and interpretations of peasants themselves. Consequently, its aims are to provide people with a voice and to analyse their assessment of different forms of access to land, of the modifications undergone in recent times, and their adjustments to this change. The results of this qualitative approach are compared with some statistical information gathered by the authors in the study region – three villages in central Burkina Faso – as well as country-wide. As a result, one may conclude that peasants in this area do not feel insecure about their land tenure situation, and this assessment of their own position is confirmed by empirical data.

Investment in medium and large-scale manufacturing enterprises by Nigerian entrepreneurs has continued to grow; but little is known about their organisation and management in general, or the nature of working conditions and employee commitment in particular. This study examines the relationship between working conditions and employee commitment in twenty indigenously owned private manufacturing firms in Igbo states of southeastern Nigeria. The findings show that these firms have the potential to contribute to the industrial future of the country. However, a substantial number of their workers were dissatisfied with the extrinsic and equity factors of their work, which are stronger predictors of employee commitment than the intrinsic/responsibility component. To build a viable workforce for enterprise success and industrial development, entrepreneurs should invest in the long-term goals of their workers, and learn to balance their own interests with those of their employees.