The African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa, having made compromises in the transition of 1994, has been accused of resorting to undemocratic ways in dealing with the frustrations of government. The instability of political leadership at the provincial level appears to confirm pessimism. The central organs of the ANC have tried to bring wayward provinces into line, most recently (May 2000) by dissolving the local party executives in two provinces. But there have been successes in provincial leadership and the party has resolved a number of disputes flexibly and arguably effectively. Conventions of political management are solidifying and may help to pattern ideological conflict in democratic ways in the future.

During 1999–2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it repeatedly; re-orient its legislative processes; explicitly oppose virtually all of the Executive Branch's fuel price hikes; and reject key anti-labour provisions in a government bill. Yet the movement did not always succeed in its efforts to influence the National Assembly. This article maps, discusses, contextualises and analyses these generally remarkable developments. It also argues that while many factors combined to facilitate or militate against the movement's impact on legislative reasoning, process and action during the relevant period, this movement's ‘mass social movement’ character was the pivotal factor that afforded it the necessary leverage to exert considerable, if limited, influence on the National Assembly.

The new nations of the world hold many expectations for their education systems. They expect that schools will produce the labour force for their manpower requirements, the leadership for their bureaucracies, and the citizenry for an enlightened social order. In pluralistic countries, governments expect also that schools will assist in integrating sub-populations fragmented by religious, linguistic, or ethnic differences. This article will examine the theme, ‘education and national integration’, in Nigeria, whose federal form of government was erected in recognition of profound cultural disparities.

Reform and the transformation of authoritarian régimes in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Horn of Africa have been associated with rampant nationalism, secession of component units, and ultimately, demands for the return of lost territories. By contrast, within supposedly ‘tribal’ Southern Africa, the African National Congress (A.N.C.) and its Africanist opponents are agreed that any settlement must apply to the whole of the Republic of South Africa, including the so-called ‘independent Homelands’.

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’.

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.

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.

In the 1950s the South African Government developed a broad strategy aimed at maintaining the supply of forced labour, named apartheid or ‘separate development’. Much more than a system of segregation, the programme involved moving large numbers of Africans from the urban centres into the underdeveloped Reserves, comprising 14 per cent of the least arable land in South Africa. Industry would then be shifted to the borders of these Bantustans. This last element of the scheme, the policy of industrial decentralisation, has been the main instrument for providing income to Africans in the rural areas. By examining this element in South African state planning, within the context of the apartheid system as a whole, I have tried to isolate some of the crucial dynamics of forced labour.

FOR understandable reasons, the foreign policy behaviour of African states is only now emerging as a subject of investigation. Most of the new states have been politically independent for less than a decade and their international character is not yet clearly established. On occasion, observers are frustrated by actions which they do not approve or understand, and are tempted to depict African foreign policy as less than responsible. Keeping in mind that any interpretation must remain tentative at this time, there have been none the less a number of international events which yield significant material for evaluation as case studies. One such event, the subject of this study, was the fracas which followed the arrest, in October 1966, of a party of Guineans by Ghana authorities.

There are fads in development economics,1 and the latest today, at least in the North, is what may be called laissez-faireism. This states the belief that a retreat from government activism in economic affairs is the major means of improving the quality of a country's performance. It is seen as ‘central to the solution of a lot of the problems we see around the world’.2

Such a strategy stresses the benefits of reliance on markets, on profit incentives, and on the growth of private sectors. Free-market pricing is crucial not only for products (in Africa, particularly agricultural products), but also in factor markets and in international transactions. Wages should be allowed to find their own level, as determined by supply and demand. Exchange rates should also be permitted to approach their natyral levels, for artificially over-valued exchange rates are especially damaging. Tariffs and other forms of protection should be cut back. Countries should turn away from inward-looking import-substitution towards outward-looking export-orientation. 3

Urbanisation is often held to be responsible for social disorder and alienation. In fact, the stresses experienced in the process of urbanisation can produce both a breakdown and/or a reinforcement of patterns of social association. Many scholars have discarded the term ‘alienation’ because of its multiplicity of meanings, but I believe that when the word is defined in terms of social network ‘density’ there is considerable utility for social scientific interpretation. Even in relatively similar urban communities, small differences in network density have important manifestations in the types of response to urbanisation.

Providing a good standard of living for all the peoples of Africa means that there must be more than simple economic growth. The alleviation of tremendous poverty requires special measures to ensure that those at the bottom of the social structure benefit by receiving part of the product of growth. Two problems of equal importance involve: first, the necessity for changing the life-styles of peoples and the economic forces of production of centuries; and secondly, the creation of the appropriate political apparatus to guarantee a more suitable distribution of the new goods that are produced. Francophone planners soon after the end of World War II used the word encadrement to convey a sense of the processes and institutions involved in coping with these problems.

Fears that the supposedly sacred norm of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states has eroded in the last few years are not entirely groundless. Excuses to intervene, that now receive sanction by the Security Council of the United Nations, include humanitarian concerns, as in Somalia and Rwanda, international peace and security, as in Kuwait and Bosnia, and the denial of democracy, as in Haiti, all of which differ from the interventions of the cold war years. As Thomas Buergenthal has pointed out, ‘Once the rule of law, human rights and democratic pluralism are made the subject of international commitments, there is little left in terms of governmental institutions that is domestic.’

In February 1974, Ethiopia entered a period of deep and occasionally violent political and social change, the result of the breakdown of a semi-feudal system under the impact of economic modernisation. Despite the fact that the army played, and is still playing, the central rôle, it would be wrong to regard the change simply as a coup d'état which replaced one authoritarian régime with another. The political movement that started then was the result of significant social and economic changes which took place during the last 15–20 years of the Emperor's reign.

The term ‘New International Economic Order’ – often referred to as N.I.E.O. – suggests two immediate thoughts: the first is related to ‘New’ and the second emphasises ‘Order’.

The New Versus The Old International Economic Order

If there is to be a new order, then presumably it must be contrasted with an old order, an O.I.E.O., namely the Bretton Woods system which was established at the end of World War II as a result of Anglo-American negotiations, with an absorbing interplay between the intellect of Keynes, subtly representing British interests, coming up against the hard facts of U.S. power and economic supremacy.

Rural development in tropical Africa is taking place on two broad fronts. First, there are the major schemes of improvement inspired by the economic planners of government or international agencies. These range in size from a few massive resettlement projects, such as those associated with major dams (the Kariba or the Volta), to the medium-scale exercises in improved agriculture, co-operative farming and village regrouping which are common in most of the newly independent African states. There is a second type of rural development, however, which is much less obvious and goes largely unrecorded. This involves the apparently piecemeal diffusion of minor services—shops, clinics, schools, agricultural demonstration units, transport and marketing facilities—little of which is planned. Even the co-ordination between public and private sectors, and between the government departments involved in the extension of these services, is limited and frequently ineffectual.

The increase in crime and violence committed by young men known as lonetia in southern Karamoja, Uganda, has occurred in parallel to overall security improvements since the start of the 2006 disarmament campaign. This article examines the lonetia phenomenon from the perspective of the young men themselves. Panel data from four sets of interviews conducted in 2013 with approximately 400 young men provide details on the motivations of young men and the challenges they experience in the face of changing livelihood opportunities. We find that the lonetia category is highly fluid and that a set of behaviours and attributes correspond with the frequency of engagement in lonetia activity. Examination of seasonality highlights the contribution of hunger to lonetia frequency. We examine the perceptions of power and respect of young men in their communities as well as their propensity towards violence. The article concludes with thoughts on influencing lonetia involvement.

In the middle 1970s, scholars and politicians agree, the Soviet Union began a major effort to penetrate Africa. After a decade of relative indifference to African developments, Soviet arms and advisers, in support of Cuban troops, poured into Angola and Ethiopia. Involvement in these two countries was supplemented by further transfers of arms to a number of other African régimes, and this seemed to signal a dramatically heightened interest in the continent.

In February 1975, following a major cabinet reshuffle, General Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri reaffirmed his Government's basic commitment to the pursuit of an Afro-Arab foreign policy, and noted that this was not tied to particular personalities. For just as the appointment of the distinguished diplomat, Mansour Khalid, as Foreign Minister in August 1971, had prompted charges that the Sudan's Arab ties were to be sacrificed to African interests, so his departure from office to become Minister of Education aroused speculation that greater Arab involvement, if not actual African disengagement, would now follow.

To be a political leader in many parts of the world is to follow an extremely hazardous and insecure occupation. In addition, in sub-Saharan Africa, but elsewhere as well, the element of personal danger exists in a particularly acute form. Althought the extent to which this is true varies considerably not only from place to place but also over time, the evidence of the past 30 years clearly suggests that there are remarkably few states in which an individual could contemplate embarking on a career in politics free from the dauger of incurring severe personal penalties at some stage.