What is Africa doing wrong? Africans as well as others are increasingly asking this question. We are, in effect, invited to consider that there are, perhaps, negative as well as positive aspects to the nation-building process in post-colonial Africa. To the layman, indeed, the image of Africa has tended to accentuate the negative. The strife in the Congo during the early 1960s, the civil war in Nigeria, numerous military coups d'etat and political assassinations, bureaucratic corruption, disappointing progress in the economic field, and more recently famine and drought, all could lead to the conclusion that efforts at nationbuilding have been less than successful.

The modern, albeit fragmentary, elements of a social security structure exist in each independent nation of the tropical African sub-region, and largely constitute a legacy from a departed metropolitan power. The legacy has become expensive, expansive, complex, even controversial; it is an administratively burdensome method to alleviate human suffering arising out of the realisation of selected risks to economic security. Thus, social security, since its introduction in three stages in Bismarkian Germany between 1883 and 1889, has spread throughout the world, but its continued growth in tropical Africa – even before the pre-conditions of industrialisation have obtained – is meeting many obstacles: financial, political, philosophical, administrative, and otherwise.

The contemporary involvement of the armed forces in African politics seems to prove Mosca's maxim: ‘the class that bears the lance or holds the musket regularly forces its rule upon the class that handles the spade or pushes the shuttle’.1 Explanations for coups d'etat are myriad. The eruption of social conflicts into the armed services; personal and corporate greed; abridgement of military institutional prerogatives; weaknesses of the political system as a whole; increased emphasis on coercion: all figure among the reasons for intervention.

A notable imbalance exists in the literature on the rôle of soldiers in politics – far less attention is given to their rule than to their intervention. This is particularly true for the African continent, where scant effort has been made to relate patterns of military rule to patterns of demilitarisation. The policy objectives of officers are often dealt with as two opposing ideal types: broadly ideological, leaning towards ‘anticommunism’, ‘modernisation’, or ‘Arab socialism’; or fundamentally apolitical and unable to formulate reasonable policy objectives because of their narrow corporate perspectives. The logic of these two ideal positions leads to the alleged dichotomy that juntas with broad political ambitions will tend to stay in power indefinitely, while those with limited corporate interests will find it easy to turn power over to civilians who will ‘grant autonomy to the armed forces’.1

Over the past ten years, African governments have wrestled with the problems of designing and implementing comprehensive rural development policies. In an overwhelmingly rural continent with, for most areas, only a recent history of urbanisation, such an emphasis is understandable. But if African cities are for the most part young, and small by world standards, they are also growing faster than cities in any other major world region. This rapid growth, superimposed on a meagre resource base, will put increasing pressure on planners to devise solutions for the adequate and equitable distribution of urban services. The solutions that emerge, however, will be heavily conditioned by two sets of factors: the immediate demands of urban growth, and the wider political/administrative and social context within which policy-making takes place.

To think of the planting of Christianity in Africa and the work of missions and churches is to think of schools, of these agencies ‘throwing across tropical Africa their gigantic fishing net of primary and secondary schools’. And to think of the African peoples themselves over the past century is to recall the swelling demand for education above almost everything else. Back in 1902 this was well expressed in the exhortation of King Lewanika to his Lozi council: ‘Marotse, leave your shades, abandon our paganism. Send your children to school so that we also can become a nation.’ The school has undoubtedly been the most universally appreciated Christian contribution to black Africa over the past century and more.

Local and district councils as institutions of democratic representative government have enjoyed a brief and fragile life in Commonwealth Africa. Furthermore, throughout the period of their existence they have never been a priority concern for either colonial rulers, African leaders, or social scientists, and their very existence has been recently challenged. In a number of countries, particularly those which have experienced military take-overs, the councils have been abolished; where they remain in existence they have been transformed with few exceptions into bodies with even more limited powers and autonomy. Nevertheless, their activities, even if greatly curtailed, still offer a focal point for the study of certain questions of representation and administration in the context of political change in independent black Africa.