The political ideas put forward by the leaders of the new states provide one of the most popular entrées to African politics, and they have now received a good deal of attention. This is understandable enough. Many African leaders are highly articulate, and their views, embodied in frequent speeches and writings by those who control the information media, are—unlike so much other information—easily accessible. The value and significance of these ideas may well have been exaggerated, but even so they cannot simply be ignored.

To try to summarise in a few pages the present situation in ‘Portuguese’ Africa is at best a difficult task. Briefly, the three ‘Overseas Provinces’ (since the Portuguese constitutional revision of 1951 they are no longer called ‘colonies’) are in rebellion against continued Portuguese rule. Or, rather, elements in these territories are in rebellion. Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau are the sites of increasingly violent conflict as African nationalists intensify their guerrilla campaigns against a hardening Portuguese military resistance.

In 1966 two military coups were executed in Nigeria, upsetting a tenuous political balance between ethnically different regions and unleashing bitter tribal antagonism. In the first coup, in January, politicians and soldiers primarily of Northern origin lost their lives, and Major-Gen. J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Ibo from the Eastern Region, acceded to power. In the second coup, in July, mainly Eastern officers and soldiers died, and Lt.-Col. (now Major-Gen.) Yakubu Gowon, a minority-tribe Northerner, became Head of State. Because the years before and after independence in 1960 had witnessed scarring interregional rivalries for dominion over Nigeria, the coups were regarded as a continuation of these struggles.1

This article has as its theme the organisation of an African urban revolt in South Africa from 1960 to 1965. Reference is made mainly to events in Port Elizabeth and its near neighbour, East London; it need hardly be added that there were similar developments in other parts of the country. The way in which the revolt was organised was little reported at the time, and the details emerged only in the verbatim court records of the trials of both leaders and followers. Press reports of these trials are scattered over a number of South African newspapers, whose reporting—while good—is not as detailed as the documents; and a few items appear in the overseas press. The importance of this revolt, which is still being waged from outside South Africa's borders, might justify an analysis of what took place in the country itself, even if the research on which it is based remains incomplete.

Traditional social structures in new African states have not withered away according to the plans of modernising African leaders or the projections of western social scientists. Leaders and social interests of long ancestry continue to count, and often determine the policies of so-called modern governments. Many chiefs and religious figures have succeeded in maintaining their relative positions of power vis-à-vis their former subjects.

The relationship between religious movements and political authorities in Africa has been a growing problem in political and social development. So long as these institutions of cultural life were less differentiated, and the head of the political unit was automatically the leader of organised religion, the difficulties appeared less acute. Because regal and sacerdotal roles were performed by a single person, conflicts of authority and allegiance hardly arose.1 Traditional African religion was also accommodating to foreign deities, a situation congruent with polytheism, and there was no assumption of religious exclusiveness.2 But, with the advent of different brands of Christianity and Islam, the relations between religious and political authorities changed; the former increasingly became church missionaries and the latter the agents of the colony, and eventually of the state. Perhaps the most extreme religious rejection of secular authority is found in the Watch Tower movement, whose early relations with the state of Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) are the main subject of this article.

There is a reluctance on the part of many historians to use theoretical models for research, especially for ethnohistorical work, which is both unfortunate and unjustified. Much of the recent work in social anthropology and political science has been of great historical value precisely because the use of theory has rendered studies with an otherwise narrow scope more general in application. It is the intention of this article to examine some techniques for historical research into the process of political change among certain West African kingdoms and chiefdoms in the nineteenth century. While examining some of these techniques and the problems associated with them, it is also my intention to suggest ways in which they might be combined for use in the field.

On 24 September 1969, three years after Botswana achieved independence, the President of the Republic, Sir Seretse Khama, addressed the 24th session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The following extracts from his speech may be of interest to readers:

… My country is … a comparative newcomer to the United Nations, and this my first opportunity to address this General Assembly. Botswana is a small country in terms of population if not in area. As a small and poor country we set a particularly high value on our membership of the United Nations and those of its specialised agencies which our budgetary restrictions have permitted us to join. I should like to emphasise the particular importance of the United Nations for states like Botswana which, because of development priorities, are obliged to restrict their conventional bilateral contacts and keep their overseas missions to a bare minimum. Here in New York we can make contacts which would otherwise be difficult to achieve… The United Nations enables us to keep in touch with international opinion, and to put our views before the world.

Over a year ago, ‘Africana’ included Dr D. J. Murray's detailed account of the ‘ The Reorganisation of Nigeria's Administration’, in each of the Regions, during 1967–68; see The Journal of Modern African Studies, VI, 4, December 1968. Against that background, a former Northern Nigerian civil servant, who has been involved in the process, highlights some of the practical problems of settling up six of Nigeria's 12 new states.

This seminar was intended for government servants, primarily from Eastern Africa, who wished to discuss some problems, concerning the establishment and functioning of institutions of regional economic co-operation, with which they were directly involved. The East African Community (E.A.C.) was a timely choice as the main subject for detailed study and discussion, having been established as recently as December 1967; it had for the first time introduced into existing co-operation the concept of a legally regulated common market as an integral part of the Community.

Organised and sponsored by U.N.E.S.C.O., this seminar brought together, perhaps for the first time, experts and others interested in family planning, sociology, and mass communication. Delegates at the seminar did not represent their countries; rather they represented fields of interest. Medical practitioners, family planning workers, mass media experts, and sociologists came from many countries—India, Japan, Chile, Argentina, Ghana, Pakistan, Korea, Algeria, Great Britain, Nigeria, France, and the U.S.A. There were also observers from the United Nations and a number of its agencies.

This two-day conference, sponsored by Stanford's Committee on African Studies, was possibly the first gathering of its kind outside Liberia since the American Colonisation Society ceased sending emigrants to the West African Republic at the turn of the century. It was organised by Dr Martin Lowenkopf, and was attended by over 40 social scientists, including six Liberians at present studying in the United States.

About one hundred members of the A.S.A., predominantly from British universities, assembled at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for a full day's discussion of some two dozen papers and notes concerning current research on Southern Africa. The papers came from Afrikaans and English-language universities of South Africa, as well as from those of the United Kingdom.

The eighth inter-African public administration seminar, sponsored jointly by the Government of Liberia and the Ford Foundation, was attended by 37 leading civil servants from English-speaking Africa, as well as by observers from I.D.E.P., C.A.F.R.A.D., and U.N. E.C.A.

President Tubman delivered the keynote address, in which he recognised the need for regional economic co-operation, urged the investigation of the problems and difficulties on the way, and stressed the essential role of civil servants in bringing about such co-operation. In the discussion that followed many participants expressed the view that goals and objectives must be denned as carefully and realistically as possible if both short- and long-term results are to be achieved. It would also be important to take into account the current level of development in African countries.

Few socio-economic problems in tropical Africa evoke greater concern than that of providing youth with training in skills and profitable opportunities for work. The increasing number of unemployed young people in towns and cities doesn't make sense, particularly when intensified development is being hoped and planned for. Everyone recognises the urgent need to look into this paradox, to diagnose the problem in its local variations, and to do something about it. Rising population and labour force, the impact of wide-spread primary education, heightened expectation, migration to cities, the low labour absorption of modern and semi-modern establishments, falling productivity in some rural areas—these are some of the elements involved.

For some time I have been trying to study the origins of the customary practice of dowry in East Africa. There are, as one can imagine, tremendous variations in the details of traditional procedures from one tribe to another. But in spite of these variants there is one common characteristic: the fact that money, goods, manual labour, or symbolic articles are provided by the bridegroom (or his family) and pass into the hands of the father of the bride. The purpose of my research has been to discover the factors which have motivated the transaction to take place in this particular way.