The second Kenya debate has prompted a close examination of the role of an ethnic business community – Indians/Asians – in the country's industrial development. While this community does own up to three-quarters of the country's medium and large-scale manufacturing firms, a narrow focus on manufacturing understates the contribution which Africans have made to the economy. A progressive rural business class is more likely to re-invest in profitable farming activities and to branch out into agro-processing, transport and trading than to undertake risky investments in urban manufacturing. As a result, historical ethnic-sectoral cleavages will tend to be reinforced. The article provides new calculations on the extent of African involvement in manufacturing, and reviews an ancillary literature which uses institutional and socio-economic analysis to understand differences in Kenya's business communities.

Primarily aiming to highlight and exemplify how a technology can be socially and culturally appropriated, this article draws attention to the role of mobile phone communication in straining relations between married couples on the basis of material from Ethiopia. The findings show that mobile phone-mediated interactions between spouses are filled with monitoring and controlling activities, expressed in such forms as checking call logs, text messages, making casual calls, and switching-off phones, leading to highly strained relations that may result in the marital relation as a whole falling apart. These findings show how a technology can actively shape or influence interactions, and reveal interactions that might otherwise be concealed.

Why would rural Malian women express interest in political participation? Mali implemented a gender quota during the 2016 local elections. In a rural village where I conducted immersive research, the majority of women I interviewed following the 2016 poll expressed interest in running for local office in the future. Scholars of women's political participation theorise that quotas bring women to elected office and increase women's political participation. These theoretical perspectives cannot fully explain why women in rural Mali would express enthusiastic interest in political participation. These women participate extensively in savings and credit associations. Drawing on data generated through engagement with women in their daily lives, I explore how economic advancement can shape women's participatory aspirations. Examining longer-term changes in the local political economy of this rural village provides a deeper understanding of why women responded positively to a new institutional opening for political participation.

The term ‘labour aristocracy’ first appeared in the literature on African economic development in 1968,1 although African wage labour had previously been described as a privileged elite on many occasions. I wish to question the accuracy and relevance of the type of calculation upon which these descriptions are based, and to present the situation which prevails today in Northern Nigeria, using detailed survey data on the earnings of rural farmers, urban workers, and those employed in small-scale enterprises.

Those with an interest in developing a predictive theory of social revolution cannot afford to ignore the numerous corpses in what I shall call the Graveyard of Marxist Executives. For many this is a cemetery of aspirations, while in a small number of instances counter-revolutionary terror has occasioned a veritable bloodbath. What makes this study worth-while is that in all cases the right to a decent life for future generations has been aborted. And given the diffusion of nuclear weapons capabilities to many Third-World régimes that cannot cope with the obstacles to development, it is not farfetched to suggest that many of our children's lives too may be forfeited eventually to nuclear pollution or worse! During the interim, increasing numbers of desperate Third-World régimes will endeavour to buy time by challenging the price structure of raw materials. Even if they fail for the most part, the quality of the international human and physical environment will almost certainly deteriorate.

Guinea and the Ivory Coast are neighbouring, former French colonies in West Africa. Both gained their independence about the same time – Guinea in 1958 and the Ivory Coast in 1960. The contrast in the subsequent economic performance of these two countries with closely corresponding resource endowments is remarkable. The Ivory Coast's gross domestic product has grown at an annual rate of about 8 per cent in real terms. The Guinean economy has stagnated. A review of the economic record of both since independence suggests that three factors were mainly responsible for their strikingly unequal performance: (1) differences in governmental philosophies of mobilisation and organisation of resources; (2) differences in the extent to which foreign markets shaped domestic economic expansion; and (3) differences in the role of foreign entrepreneurs in the national development effort.

The subject of this article is the unfolding pattern of economic events in Ghana in recent years. No attempt is made either to blame or to excuse those who were responsible for the conduct of national economic affairs. The purpose is merely to reach an understanding of why and how things happened as they did. There does not appear to be much that is peculiarly Ghanaian, or even peculiarly West African, about the pattern of events. Indeed, the argument of this article owes much to the model of stages of economic development propounded by Dudley Seers with mainly Latin American experience in mind.

This short article is based on the rather unusual research methodology of enforced participant observation. The participatory element was not simply a device to facilitate observation, but was enforced by the need to get petrol.1 The analysis presented here of Nigerian petrol queues has obvious parallels with earlier works by such writers as Max Gluckman and J. Clyde Mitchell.2 There are, however, some important differences, in terms of both the type of ‘situation’ analysed and the scope of the projections thereafter.3

This article suggests that a ‘politics of security’ characterised white South Africa from 1961 to at least the time of the death of Prime Minister H. F. Verwoerd in 1966. It is still too early to know whether under Dr Verwoerd's successor, B. J. Vorster, South African politics will assume another character, although at the end of the article I will suggest that change is unlikely. I wish to argue, however, that over the last five years of the Verwoerd premiership politics in South Africa was qualitatively different from that which existed before the creation of the Republic in 1961.

Afrikaner nationalism has been analysed from broadly-speaking two perspectives. In the main, the literature has focused on the evolution of a movement rooted in a common history, language, and religion,1 and has traced the roots of a nation-in-the-making back 300 years in South African history,2 before the inevitable flowering of Afrikanerdom in the twentieth century. In contrast to the growth of European nationalism which is linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie, studies of Afrikaner nationalism have tended to neglect the class dimension by emphasising ideology as a unifying force and organising principle. An alternative approach has been attempted by Dan O'Meara who locates Afrikaner nationalism within the dynamic of capitalist development in South Africa, explaining its ideology in terms of its class character, and although his study often lacks subtlety, it stresses factors that have been neglected by the more usual idealist accounts.3

This article tests the theory of advocates who celebrate the potential of civil society to promote and deepen democracy in Africa, by examining whether the human rights ministry of a Catholic parish in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya was able to consolidate democracy through a civic education programme during 2002–5. It concludes, from an analysis of the social, economic and political environment in Kibera, that parishioners who participated in the programme demonstrated an observable improvement in their democratic values and behaviour at a localised level within their own parish groups. However, civic education did not stimulate most participants to increase their involvement in advocacy and lobbying efforts to hold government officials to account for their abuse of power in Kibera. Parishioners were inhibited from promoting their rights primarily due to fears of violent retaliation by local government officials and politically sponsored youth wingers. Other factors such as apathy, ethnic divisions, limited resources and restrictive church protocols further curtailed parishioners' actions.

The last two decades have witnessed a surge in studies of youth culture and social practice. In Africa, as elsewhere, this body of youth-centred research and writing has devoted considerable attention to specific groups within a given country's young population, while largely neglecting others seen to lack either culturally innovative or politically subversive traits. Youths in large cities and young combatants involved in insurgency or counter-insurgency have shared centre stage in studies of youthful Africa. This article argues for broadening the research agenda of African youth studies, calling for increased attention to the interpretive work performed by provincial youths as they try to understand and hopefully alter the future prospects of their communities in the new century. It shows how ideas about the meanings of globalisation and ‘the millennium’, intertwined with experiences of a recent refugee ‘crisis’, are shaping Guinean youths' socio-political reflections and yearnings. In doing so, it stresses just how complicated and cosmopolitan ‘provincial’ life, particularly for young people, has become in Guinea's forest region, as well as the variety and sophistication of the historical ‘materials’ and interpretive schemes through which these youths depict and judge possible local futures.

In October 1988, Algeria began a process of transition from authoritarianism. Political reforms were introduced, on the surface, to facilitate the process of transition, but in reality to ensure the survival of the incumbent regime. The reform of the electoral system played a significant part in this survival strategy. Between 1989 and 1997, Algeria witnessed the adoption of three distinct electoral systems as the authorities sought ways to give a façade of democratisation while manipulating the rules to suit their purposes. This paper looks at the Algerian transition, asks why the Algerian authorities switched from one system to another, and assesses the impact of the three different electoral systems that the country has experienced.

The majority of southern Africa's inhabitants are economically marginalised. Robert W. Cox's macro-theory of change suggests that the marginalised are a social force that could bring about political economic transformation from below. Other contemporary analysts also stress the importance of focusing on the marginalised as a source of social instability. The paper uses empirical data from the Afrobarometer (Round 1, 1999–2000) to investigate whether this expectation for the marginalised to act as a catalyst for change in seven southern African states is substantiated. The analysis shows that the political protest potential of the marginalised is lower than that of the economically integrated, that they are more tolerant of authoritarian political alternatives, and that they are not significantly more economically dissatisfied than other groups. They are also inclined to accord somewhat more legitimacy to the state than are the integrated. Societies where large parts of the population are poor and marginalised are thus not necessarily more prone to political instability in the form of protest actions (violent or non-violent). Those who are justly concerned about equity and greater inclusiveness must take cognisance of the need to access the profile of the marginalised.

It is widely believed that old soldiers are a problem. At least since the beginning of this century, western governments have been concerned with the issue of ‘helping’ veterans to readjust to civilian life upon their return from campaigning. It is assumed that these men would, if left to their own devices, find it difficult or impossible to ‘pick up from where they had left off’, and might, therefore, become a subversive element in the general population. Hence, one of the largest bureaucracies in the United States is the Veterans Administration which is charged with fitting ex-soldiers back into society. To a certain extent the concerns over whether they would be satisfied after their demobilisation have proved to be justified. The dislocations experienced by returned American servicemen after World War II were illustrated by popular films like ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’. More recently, the American press paid considerable attention to the rôle of the black veterans of Vietnam in the violence which destroyed much of Newark, Detroit, and Watts in the late 1960s.

The situation of African states as they enter the 1990s is generally considered to be desperate. Extreme weakness in a number of forms characterises their politics, while their economies are either stagnant or deteriorating. It is not clear what resources are relevant to solving these problems, nor how they will be acquired, although increased external assistance obviously will be needed.

The urban explosion is one of Africa's outstanding characteristics. Its many facets provoke a multitude of problems in such diverse yet interrelated fields as administrative efficiency, health control, land values and engineering, juvenile and other crime, prostitution, the provision of housing and educational facilities, efficient traffic flow, and much more.

It is the hypothesis of this article if the Provisional Military Administrative Committee, which took power in Ethiopia on 12 September 1974, is really intent on uprooting the feudal social system that has flourished for so long, then a revolution by violent means is necessary. As Frantz Fanon says, ‘if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists’.

In the early 1960s pan-Africanism was thought by many scholars and leaders of government to be the force which would bring political harmony coupled with rapid economic development. During the last decade a number of regional and sub-regional organisations were developed as first steps towards greater African unity. In English- speaking Africa the East African Community formed by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda exemplified, with all its frustrations and aspirations, this type of grouping. In French-speaking Africa the limited success of the Union douanière et économique de l'Afrique central, its successor the Union des états d'Afrique centrale, and the Union douanière de l'Afrique occidentale has raised serious questions of whether these organisations, at this point in history, can attain their goals of regional economic integration and development.

A striking commentary on Tanzania: two respected scholars, having studied the same country, having relied largely on the same data, reach opposing conclusions. There is not only disagreement here, but confusion on the nature of change in Tanzania. There is also misunderstanding of the processes of change in the Third World more generally. The first task in the analysis of the recent Tanzanian experience, therefore, is to free ourselves of encumbrances. To make sense of what has happened we must first sort through some of the major confusions and distractions that unfortunately permeate the literature.