The official dismantling of apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment in Febuary 1990, and especially the first multi-racial elections in April 1994 followed by the inauguration of the Government of National Unity (GNU), have marked this decade as the most fascinating in the history of South Africa.

In the first two years following the peace accord in Rome on 4 Ocotber 1992 between Mozambique's governing party, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), and the Resistência National Moçambicana (Renamo) guerrilla leadership, over one million refugees returned to the country while as many as three million moved back to the areas they were forced to flee during the war. With the post-accord commitment of the United Nations to monitor the ‘peace process’ as well as the political transition to a multi-party democratic régime, the international community invested itself strongly in supporting Mozambicans in their attempt to rebuild their war-torn country. The United Nations Operation in Mozambique (Unomoz) presented an acid test for the future of UN-sponsored ‘peacekeeping’ initiativesthe recent difficulties or failures in Angola, Somalia, and Bosnia having thrown into question the sensibility of such expensive operations with little probability of producing sustainable results. For the donor community, the end of the war signalled an opportunity to advance discussions and practical steps towards liberalising the Mozambican economy and decentralising state power — thereby offering a new laboratory for model testing.

Despite a competitive party system and regular free-and-fair elections, Botswana's polity has been characterised for almost 30 years by considerable authoritarianism focused on the extensive powers of the Presidency and based upon a hierarchical and highly inequitable society.1 But pressures have recently arisen within the country for more openness, participation, and equality, and their growing effects were clearly evident in the October 1994 elections and in the widespread disturbances soon after.

Upon taking power in August 1985, General Ibrahim Babangida promised a decisive course of economic and political change for Nigeria. Alongside a phased transition to democratic rule, the new President outlined far-reaching reforms intended to alleviate major distortions in the economy, to resolve a lingering impasse with external creditors, and to reduce a mounting burden of debt. Within a year, a comprehensive structural adjustment programme (SAP) was launched, incorporating key policies advocated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and yielding significant early results in stabilising the economy and arresting decline.

The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), and by extension the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the multi-ethnic coalition that it established and still dominates, is frequently considered to be a creation of, and beholden to, the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF). From this perspective the foreign loyalties of the TPLF made it an unsuitable, if not illegitimate, movement to lead the Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE) in 1991, and since 1995, the newly created Federal Democratic Republic. By way of contrast, this article attempts to demonstrate that the developing relationship between the TPLF and the EPLF during the course of their respective revolutionary struggles has been far more problematic and beset with tensions than critics are either aware of, or acknowledge, and that an understanding of their nature casts light on present and possible future differences between the respective regimes of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The Ethiopian transition, that began with the overthrow of military dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1991, formally ended with the swearing in of the newly elected Government of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia in August 1995. The intervening four years were a contentious time of clashes among rival political forces to determine the rules under which the transition would be conducted and hence which forces would be favoured. The first act of the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) after deposing Mengistu was to convene a National Conference and establish a Council of Representatives that initially included a wide array of political groups. The EPRDF led throughout this transitional period and capitalised on its commanding position to consolidate its power. The party dominated the political landscape by virtue of its military power, effective organisation and leadership, and control of the agenda and rules of competition. It structured the transition around new ethnically defined regions, a constitution that emphasised self-determination, and a series of largely uncontested elections.

The right to organise is of the greatest importance because of our need to come together in order to pursue common interests and goals. It goes hand in hand with the right to associate and to assemble freely, covers all sections of society, and its highest manifestation is normally the creation and continuing significance of political parties, trade unions, and other non-governmental organisations.

Global climate change is now firmly on the international agenda. Although the heady days of the 1992 Earth Summit have been replaced by an atmosphere of greater caution, events in 1995 have nevertheless revealed that climate change is set to be one of the key international issues during the coming decades. Indeed, it is inevitable that global climate change – as both a physical phenomenon and a social institution – will have a tremendous impact on every nation's future.

Ghanaian novelists are notorious for their long absences from fiction, and the 1990s have seen the long-awaited return of some major talents. Kofi Awoonor and Ama Ata Aidoo allowed, respectively, 21 and 14 years to pass between the publication of their first and second novels, while 17 years separated the fifth and sixth works of Ayi Kwei Armah, the best-established writer of the three. Meanwhile, each has been active in other genres during the long intervals — poetry, short stories, essays – and none of them have fallen silent. Awoonor indicated, shortly after his experimental poetic first novel, This Earth, My Brother (1971), that he was at work on another, from which a lengthy extract was actually published in a journal in 1975,1 and advance notices of the full version continued apace, even though it did not appear until 1992. Armah allowed it to be known in 1989, in a rare interview, that since The Healers (1978) he had completed three more novels which, for want of a suitable African publishing house, remained in manuscript form.2 In the foreword to her 1991 novel, Aidoo refers to an interview in 1967 in which she stated that she ‘could never write about lovers in Accra because surely in our environment there are more important things to write about’. The very vehemence of the protest suggested at the time, however, that the author's mind was already running along the lines of this subject, which might at some future date receive full fictional treatment.