In a recent theoretical essay I tried to demonstrate, among other things, the crucial importance of politics in any effort to overcome the underdevelopment of our own historical period; and I hope I have also shown how different kinds of political systems may be assumed to interact with various kinds of development strategies.1 The most hopeful combination is where a dynamic political interaction is established between the developmental needs and aspirations of the masses, and a consciously applied strategy of challenge to the social, political, and economic status quo of underdevelopment. It is surely an important task of political science to attempt to define the conditions under which such a mobilising interaction may be established and sustained. They are probably minimal conditions of development for any Third-World nation in the predominantly capitalist international system.

There will undoubtedly be many interpretations of the Uganda coup. The purpose of this article is merely to suggest one and, on the basis of available, though admittedly incomplete evidence, to outline a case for its plausibility. The central argument is as follows. The Uganda army can be best understood as a kind of economic class, an élite stratum with a set of economic interests to protect. The coup of January 1971 was the army's political response to an increasingly socialist régime whose equalitarian domestic policies posed more and more of a threat to the military's economic privileges.

The traditional and basic economic philosophy of private investment is best expressed by Adam Smith: Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command…every individual…endeavours so [to employ his capital]…that its produce may be of the greatest possible value…He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.1

Tanzania is engaged in a struggle to become a democratic socialist and developed nation. The implications of socialist ideology for actual policy planning and implementation still have not been fully clarified. Certain questions concerning the economic base are especially important, in particular the desirable relationship of every citizen to the production processes of the country. The possibility of further alienation of the worker from the process of production in the context of nationalisation and state-controlled industrialisation has already been identified by several observers.1 The pervasive nature of the dual economy in the ‘development of under-development’ has also been analysed with respect to Tanzania.2 What is consistently disregarded, however, is the peculiar place of women in the midst of change and counter-change.

The only official United States contact with the liberation movements of Southern Africa has been the educational programmes administered by the African–American Institute under contract to the U.S. Government. In addition to providing education and scholarships to refugee students in Africa, the A.A.I. has since 1962 administered the Southern African Student Program (S.A.S.P.) for refugees in the United States at the college and graduate levels.

A full decade of African administration by Africans has gone by. It will soon be time to examine their achievements and to formulate and explore a number of new questions. What was Africanisation all about? Was it anything more than a localisation of personnel? Have Whitehall attitudes been replaced by Nigerian or Tanzanian, or even African attitudes? Has a newly shaped philosophy of public administration emerged?

The Institute of Development Studies organised an international conference on this topic at the University of Sussex, Brighton, from 12 to 16 September 1971. A background paper prepared by the convenors, Richard Jolly and Rita Cruise O'Brien, outlined the purpose as follows:

Urban unemployment in Africa is a theme on which much has been written in recent years but which is still ‘in fashion’ and of considerable importance to a broad range of scholars and policy makers…there is a great risk of dissipating one's efforts over that whole field. In planning this conference, we have tried therefore to be guided by three dominant principles: (a) to restrict the topics for discussion so as to focus on what seem to us important issues, on which further understanding could be generated by a bout of concentrated thought, analysis of data and discussion; (b) to invite a limited number of people engaged in current research or involved on the spot with investigation or policy-making; (c) to request authors of papers to start at what might be called the current conventional wisdom among specialists and to build their analysis from there… It will be assumed that persons attending the conference are generally in touch with recent literature on the subject.

Even now, in the last third of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century dual economy still exists, in effect if no longer in name, over much of the developing world. Although nationally independent — in Latin America for the past 100 years, and now in Africa and Asia — many of the developing nations are still economically dominated by their past colonial masters.

One of the most important issues of political development and nation building in Africa is national integration. One major political institution which the new nations have employed in the pursuit of this goal is the political party. Ironically and unfortunately, political parties stand for division and cleavages. Thus as Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan have noted, in Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignment: an introduction (Glencoe, 1967), ‘“Party” throughout the history of western government stood for division [my italics], conflict, opposition within a body polity. “Party” is etymologically derived from “part” and since it first appeared in political discourse in the late Middle Ages has always retained this reference to one set of elements in competition or in controversy with another set of elements within some unified whole’ (p. 3). These indeed have been the main characteristics of political parties in most parts of Africa. That is, most of them are fragmentary, and thus contribute to national disintegration rather than fostering national integration. In other words, many political parties in most African nations have not functioned efficiently for the good of their respective countries.

Did Dr Robert Tignor in this recent article on ‘Colonial Chiefs in Chiefless Societies’ in this Journal, IX, 3, October 1971, not overstate the contribution of certain African chiefs ‘in forcing the pace of social change’?

My aim is to answer this question briefly as far as Ibo chiefs are concerned. It has been argued that they helped with the introduction of taxation, especially since this was not traditional. But the historical records show that most of them were actually opposed to its introduction,1 and that they were not an effective factor in its collection until after the reorganisation of the Native Authority system in the South-Eastern Provinces in the 1930s.2

The racial cleavage has understandably dominated most studies of Rhodesian politics. Cohn Leys claimed in the late 1950s that the European community maintained ‘a type of one-party system’ that sustained itself by uniting on race against all foes, rather than splitting along class or social lines.1 The centrality of race has been challenged recently by Giovanni Arrighi, who argued that the policies of consecutive Rhodesian Governments could be explained by orthodox Marxism,2 and by David Murray, whose study of the 1923–53 period revealed a classically pluralist model of competing economic groups.3