AUTHORITARIAN leaders and single-party régimes of all shades increasingly came under great pressures between 1990 and 1993 to liberalise and permit more participation in the political process. This transformation, which was part of what Samuel Huntington described as ‘the third wave of democratisation’,1 stemmed from sustained efforts by domestic political forces in African states, albeit assisted by a variety of demanded requirements from international financial institutions and industrialised countries, as well as by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. According to the US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, the ‘new resolve to establish new attitudes, arrangements and structures’ came directly out of the exhaustion of the cold war.2 In other words, the promotion of democracy in Africa was part of the so-called peace dividend.3 Expectations for political evolution throughout the world were so high that some analysts predicted the emergence of ‘an international democratic order’.4 As Keith Somerville has observed: ‘Africa entered the 1990S in a mood of hope and expectation’.5

By the mid-1990s, it had become almost a truism in certain circles that the democratic system of government, with its accompanying protections of individual rights and its facilitation of private economic activity and political pluralism, was in the ascendancy in many areas of the world hitherto not thought of as amenable to that model. But although various achievements and setbacks in democratisation have been extensively and even painstakingly documented in all continents, one intriguing experiment in Africa has gone nearly unnoticed.

With attention turning towards Kenya's second multi-party elections, due to be held before the end of 1997, it is imperative to look back to the flaws in the system which helped deliver President Daniel arap Moi and the Kenya African National Union (KANU) their victories in 1992. At present there is no sign of these defects being eradicated and the creation of new districts since then has demonstrated the Government's intention of enhancing an already biased structure. The underlying distribution of tribes and ethnic groups has had a fundamental impact on the electoral geography of Kenya, since they have controlled the delimitation of both the parliamentary constituencies and the administrative machinery of the whole country.1

While scholarly cautions are needed as regards both simplistic dichotomies and the subtle rhetoric that converts ‘civil society’ into a new sacred depository for ‘a wide range of emancipatory aspirations’,1 frequently pitted against that ‘predatory species’ we call the state,2 the view from Yaoundé suggests that questions about social classes are likely to be helpful in any analysis of the complex relationship between state and society in contemporary Africa.

In April 1974, 74 Malawian migrant labourers returning from work in South Africa died in a plane crash in Francistown, Botswana. Immediately, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the then [Life] President of Malawi, banned all labour recruiting activities in his country. Miners on holiday were not allowed to go back to their jobs, and those under contract with the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), known as Wenela, were to be repatriated — a decision that cost the South African mining industry some R7 million during the next two years. Thereafter, Dr Banda frequently boasted that ‘I have killed Wenela’, as for example on two public occasions in 1983: I have killed two recruiting agencies, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, Wenela, in short, and the Rhodesian Native Labour Bureau, or Mthandii… They no longer recruit in Malawi. They have surrendered all their buildings to the government…, because the majority of the people have responded to my appeal to stay here and work in their gardens or on the estates.

The years that Gandhi spent in South Africa have been admirably described by several scholars. This articles traces the development of a philosophy which became uniquely identified with Gandhi, and then looks at his legacy in South Africa, especially his influence in the social, religious, and political spheres. How is it possible that the shadow of so apparently frail a figure was cast so widely over events during most of this century?

The growth of business classes in Africa has attracted much interest since the 1980s when, in the context of severe economic malaise, the impact of the state on development was subjected to critical reappraisal.1 Out of this emerged a consensus that the abysmal economic record of the 1960s and 1970s could, to a large degree, be ascribed to the debilitating effect of an overstretched and swollen state. Official development thinking took this argument the furthest: at the core of the problem, it was asserted, was the expansion of the state's rôle from the preferred minimalist function of providing the legal and macro-economic regulatory framework for capital accumulation, to a more profound intervention in the productive process. As a remedy, the state would have to be restrained from usurping the primary rôle which the market's invisible hand ought to be playing.2

Africa has had more than its share of catastrophes. While the causes of its contemporary dilemmas are debated at many fora, its people continue to suffer at an ever-accelerating rate. To make matters worse, the dismal decline in so many aspects of African life over the past decade has led to numbness and cynicism within and without the continent, causing people to lump separable problems and their solutions into the all-embracing notion of ‘disaster’.

On 11 November 1965, the Government of Rhodesia, firm in its resolve to maintain minority racial rule by persons of European descent, abrogated the colonial constitution then in effect and declared its independence of Great Britain. The works under review in this essay examine the dilemmas of Zambian leaders, on the one hand, and loyalist members of the Rhodesian judiciary as well as the loyalist governor of Rhodesia, on the other.