Are human rights a western invention? Is their very conception, and the accompanying notion of a legal process that sets definite limits on the exercise of political power, an invention of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, and an ideological product of the French and the American Revolutions? And thus, is any talk of human rights in Africa tantamount to a mechanical importation of a western bourgeois ideological conception without the struggles and the relations that gave rise to it in the first place?

In 1985 the Zimbabwean national election presented voters with a drama of pretence. The Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front), known as Z.A.N.U. (P.F.), the party in power, issued a manifesto for ‘unity of the working people in the advance of a just Socialist Society’; meanwhile its candidates routinely cast aspersions on (working) people who supported the major rival party, the Patriotic Front–Zimbabwe African People's Union (P.F.-Z.A.P.U.). The latter defensively called for a unified effort to ensure that multi-party liberalism would prevail in Zimbabwe; it then implicitly endorsed most of the principles of social balance through growth with equity which its alleged ‘Marxist–Leninist’ opponents had instituted.

The security services of every state are determined by two overlapping imperatives: a functional one flowing from actual or perceived threats to the country's safety, and a societal one stemming from the dominant ideologies, structures, and institutions prevailing within the state. Thus defence policy is not produced in a vacuum but in the context of a set of circumstances – historical and contemporary, external and domestic – which influence the policy-makers and their advisers. Decisions regarding the appropriate levels, patterns, and time-frame of security spending are not purely political, since they are also about the allocation of resources and about competing claims on public expenditure.

Much has been written and said concerning the implications for Soviet policy towards Southern African of President Gorbachev's novoye myshlenie or ‘new thinking’, and its repercussions throughout Eastern Europe. On the other hand, comparatively little attention has been paid to the governmental and societal responses to these developments within Southern Africa. In part, this neglect reflects the fact that, until recently, the reaction has been rather muted, especially in comparison with the eruptionsin francophone Africa, notably in Algeria, Benin, and Gabon, but also Côte d'Ivoire, Madagascar, and even Zaïre. The reluctance to recognise the relevance for the region of the astonishing changes in Eastern Europe can largely be explained by an understandable preoccupation with more pressing domestic problems.

Eritrea is the site of Africa's longest war, the 29-year struggle for self-determination and liberation from Ethiopian occupation. Its people have the lowest income per capita in the world; but under conditions of great privation, they have built up a society that could prove to be a model for development. Almost all visitors to the areas under the control of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) – land freed from Ethiopian rule for varying periods since 1970 – have commented on the egalitarian, fraternal, and sometimes libertarian nature of Eritrean society.

The novels of an area tell a tale: Obi Okonkwo's career as a civil servant in Lagos, Kamara's political life in Sierra Leone, and Baako's return to a changed Ghana. But they also say more in that they depict much of the reality of the countries and their peoples, their ideas and goals, and the historical and contemporary forces which influence them. In this way, therefore, the literature contains both fictive and factual essences.

Whilst the so-called ‘new right’ shrilly proclaims victory for capitalism and liberal democracy in the cold war, quieter voices see in the death agonies of European Stalinism the seeds of socialism more as it was meant to be. I refer not any triumphal Trotskyist depiction of the popular overthrow of bureaucratised ruling classes, but rather to wide-spread searchings throughout Eastern Europe for ‘a third – and better – way’. From this perspective, however much the electoral thaw may give rise to stridently anti-communist, anti-central planning, pro free-market parties, the dynamics of the new situation will virtually require pursuit of a mixed economy featuring selective state intervention.

It was in 1960, the year of independence and therefore a time of celebration and festivities in Nigeria, that Wole Soyinka, after just over five years in Britain (three at the University of Leeds and two at the Royal Court Theatre, London), returned to his native land. This was moreover, according to some sources, a period in which he undertook empirical research into festivities of a different kind, which subsequently supplied a specific input into the ritualism of his early plays.

For a long time, women's work has not been valued very highly, mainly because of the belief in many cultures that whatever is undertaken in the house is a natural duty and/or act of love for the husband and the family. Indeed, in many parts of subsistence Africa, the heavy duties performed by women in preparing, planting, weeding, and harvesting crops are regarded as ‘domestic’ commitments and hence not serious labour. This situation can hardly be said to be characteristic of only ‘non-developed’ societies, in which patriarchal attitudes are still dominant, since according to a 1985 study, although women make up more than half of the world's population and do two-thirds of the world's working hours, they receive only one-hundredth of the worl'ds property. This state of affairs, however, is now changing, because as women everywhere unite in order to achieve legal, social, and economic equality, the value attached to their work naturally increases.

Alfredo Fierro was probably going too far when he characterised modern political theology as ‘operating under the sign of Marx’. Nevertheless, ever since Gustavo Gutierrez dropped the bombshell of ‘Liberation Theology’ on the playground of western theologians, it is clear that Marxism cannot be ignored in any relevant twentieth-century explication of the Christian faith. Gutierrez focused in particular upon two aspects of Marx's thought: the action of man in human history, and the transformation of the world in the interests of the oppressed. These are perhaps also the most important aspects of Marxism for an understanding of recent developments in South African theology today.

During the last four decades, few attempts to establish democracy have succeeded. Many new states in the 1950s and 1960s adopted democratic structures as they decolonised but soon shifted to civilian or military dictatorships. As the decade of the 1990s begins, there is a world-wide demand for democracy because of the poor record of all forms of authoritarian régimes.