When we speak of ‘the state’ in Tropical Africa today, we are apt to create an illusion. Ordinarily the term denotes an independent political structure of sufficient authority and power to govern a defined territory and its population: empirical statehood. This is the prevailing notion of the state in modern political, legal, and social theory1, and it is a fairly close approximation to historical fact in many parts of the world – not only in Europe and North America, where modern states first developed and are deeply rooted, but also in some countries of South America, the Middle East, and Asia, where they have more recently emerged. The state is an inescapable reality. The military credibility of Argentina during the Falklands war, when it was by no means certain that Britain would prevail against its air force, is an indication of the reality of the state in some parts of the Third World today.

By any standard, no other third-world leader in recent times has earned as much notoriety for foreign adventurist policies as Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. The Libyan President has on different occasions embarked on a militant course of confrontation with the United States in defence of his controversial definition of territorial air space over the Gulf of Sidra. Gulf of Sidra. During the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina, Qaddafi shipped more than $100 million worth of weapons, including 120 Soviet-made SAM-7 missiles, to Buenos Aires.1 His name has since been linked with bombing and shooting incidents in Britain, which eventually led the Government there to sever Anglo-Libyan diplomatic links in April 1984;2 with arms supplies to Nicaragua, the Irish Republican Army, and several secessionist movements in Africa; with coup plots in a number of countries, including Pakistan;3 and he has openly assaulted some of his neighbours, notably the Sudan and Chad.4 Then, in December 1985, the Libyan President was linked to the daring attacks by P.L.O. gunmen on the Israeli Airline's check-in counters at the Vienna and Rome airports, in which at least 16 people lost their lives and 120 were injured.5

The rich empirical and historical evidence available on the various popular movements that arose in the Gold Coast, especially since the turn of the nineteenth century, mainly in order to demand political and economic reforms,1 as well as the implications of the post-colonial cycle of military coups d'état and counter-coups in Africa, is critically re-analysed and reinterpreted to advance the following related theses:

The establishment of independent commissions in Nigeria since 1931 to review wage structures, gradings, and relativities in the public sector would seem to suggest either a continuing belief in their efficacy for determining remuneration and job classification, or else that this method has become ‘inevitable’ for reasons that remain to be discovered.

Some recent studies indicate increased interest in the origin and evolution of food markets in West Africa, a development clearly related to the current concern with the food crisis and a desire to understand the impact of past economic processes and administrative measures on today's food distribution and production. Jane I. Guyer, for example, explores the implications of colonial policy for the direction of indigenous change in the economy of central Cameroun.1 Richard Roberts traces the expansion of the Bamako grain market to the demands of the colonial state and the employers of wage-work.2 The present article is conceived in the same vein. Its purpose is to describe the growth of a similar market in Burkina Faso, from its remote colonial origins to the developments of the last 20 years which shaped its present form, and thus to contribute to the understanding of the food sector in West Africa.

In many respects the subject of industrial decentralisation is both a mirror and focal point of issues that predominate in South African Society at large. From its origins in the early 1960s, the state's strategy in this field has been an implement apartheird. Despite a conthinunously changing institutional and spatial framework,2 the policy remains grounded in the attempt to maintain the geographic separation of blacks and whites, by reinforcing control over the influx of the former into the metropolitan areas, and by bolstering the economic political structures of the Homelands.

Managers are increasingly seen as having a critically important rôle to play in development and nation-building,1 and doubts concerning the appropriateness of transferring western ideas and practices to third-world countries are assuming urgent significance. Questions are posed about the impact of social and cultural factors on the management of organisations, and about relationships, between managerial thinking and behaviour and the national stage of economic growth. For example, A. Gladstone asserts that management is a key determinant in development in Africa's new nations, and notes that there has been little research and analysis concerning the evolving state of the managerial art in Africa, both in terms of what exists and what is needed … while management training for Africans has developed considerably, is this training the most appropriate? To what extent should traditional African management be discarded… are the various modern Western approaches relevant and effective in the setting up of African enterprises?2

Knowledge of what actually transpires in African economies is soft. This is particularly true of the vitally important agricultural sector, where statistics are especially weak. Given the paucity and unreliability of the data, analysts often make inferences on the basis of surrogate figures, a process which multiplies the probability of mistakes. This note shows that such an error has been made in the interpretation of African food-import data, and that its correction casts doubt on a widely accepted nation concering African food Production.

As numerous review articles attest, approaches to the study of military interventions in African politics have varied widely in their methodology and foci of concern.1 Over the last decade, a good deal of runing has been made by quantitatively-inclined political scientists, such as Alan Wells, Roberta McKown, Ruth Collier, and especially Robert Jackman, whose particular path towards the understanding of military interventions has Iain through aggregate-data analysis of structural fratures of African states.2 This line of approach has recently been brought to a high level of sophistication in two major articles: Thomas H. Johnson, Robert O. Slater, and Pat McGowan, ‘Explaining African Military Coups d'Etat, 1960–1982’, in The American Political Science Review (Washington, D.C.), 78, 3, September 1984, pp. 622–40, and Pat McGowan and Thomas H. Johnson, ‘African Military Coups d'Etat and Underdevelopment: a quantitative historical analysis’, in this Journal, 22, 4, December 1984, pp. 633–66. The A.P.S.R. article is described by the authors as ‘only the latest and not the last word on these matters’ (p. 637), and it has already fulfilled this implicit prophecy by generating debate among those who have adopted a similar methodology.3