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.

The notion of African continental government has run the gauntlet of criticism and ridicule in its day. Not a few African ‘moderate’ or conservative leaders and their agreeable tribe of western scholars have been only too keen to fire broadsides at it from time to time. Thus, Nigeria's Abubakar Balewa saw it as a ‘nightmare’; a union government, he said, ‘might come, so might world government’. To Dennis Austin the pan-African movement – ‘in its fundamentalist-Nkrumaistic sense of a united Africa’ – is ‘plainly chimerical’.1 And Scott Thompson, not to be outdone, saw the whole thing as ‘essentially a mirage’ – the ‘myth of Eden’ – and the endeavour towards it as one of ‘chasing the whirlwind ’.2

The purpose of this article is to explore the pattern of South African responses to external pressures. My study grows out of a concern with the regional conflict situation in Southern Africa, whose dimensions have become relatively clear only since the coup in Portugal in April 1974. Whatever the specific details of the policies and actions of the rest of the world; these should not rest on a misperception of the basic motivation and dynamics of South African decision-making vis-à-vis external pressures.

I have come to the conclusion that General Haji Idi Amin Dada is not a bizarre or maverick intrusion upon the Uganda political scene,1 but deeply and significantly entwined in it. I wish to present what appear to me to be the most important interrelated factors in the conventional functional sense, but to do so diachronically, so that they become continuous themes or forces,2 in which successive events have causative effect on one another.3 This raises all kinds of interesting theoretical and epistemological questions which I shall not be able to dispose of at the same time. I shall also be forced to be selective, without being able to justify each choice and step of the argument as it deserves. Central to my interpretation is the fact that General Amin is a Nubi, and that the history of the Nubi is important for the understanding of contemporary events. The present régime is more and more dominantly a Nubi régime, and its core strength is a Nubi strength.

The study of the military as an agent of societal change began to attract the serious attention of western social scientists after World War II. Since then the independence of the African states has given rise to many coups d'état, thereby awakening the concern of Africanist scholars in the rôle of the military in contemporary society. Predictably, this interest has largely been confined to recent military developments, including the liberation movements in Southern Africa and Guinea–Bissau.

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.

If books and articles about the United Nations can hardly compete in sheer volume with the words produced by the Organisation itself; the literature is abundant. A review has therefore to be selective, and in this article attention is concentrated on what has been written about, but not by, the Secretariat in the last decade. The scope is further narrowed by focusing mainly on what has been published about the activities of the U.N. in Africa. Even so the range remains very wide, and no claim is made that all the relevant literature has been assessed.

In recent years African literature has-at last-been receiving the serious treatment it has long deserved, largely as a result of the efforts of the literary critics who have demanded strict attention to texture and structure.1 Although there are still a few old-time missionary critics, such as G. D. Killam and Ernest Emenyonu, who pass off environmental commentaries under the shibboleths of literary criticism, the general thrust appears to be towards more formal textual consideration: the examination of how the content of a work is satisfactorily shaped into a perceivable Gestalt.

Solutions to old problems are sometimes found in new paradigms and models which provide alternative means of approach and analysis. It is suggested here that South Africa's socio-economic and political problems, stemming from the country's multi-ethnic structure, may be viewed within a conceptual framework that emphasises the spatial dimensions of the associated conflict. A model suitable for understanding this will stress the many disparities and tensions between the white core élites and those black counter-élites – including the leaders in the Homelands – who are emerging from the subdominant peripheral groups. Moreover, an analysis of the interaction between core and periphery will highlight the transformation necessary to reduce and resolve the conflict between whites and blacks in the South African spatial system and so promote their more equitable development?

The theme I have chosen for my address is what seems to me to be the overriding issue of the moment: change and what it signifies for the peoples of this country, and especially the young people like many of you who are completing your studies, or at least an important stage in those studies, and are naturally thinking about what lies ahead. For it is clear from all that has happened lately that you are part of the first batch of students to graduate in a new era of change that has opened this year in Southern Africa, with all that this means for your futures.

‘The general guide should be to transfer power to the smallest unit consistent with the scale of the problem.’ This quotation is based on the experience of the United States, but should be even more applicable to less-developed countries, because of their poor system of communications. In this article I shall examine the attempts to decentralise planning and economic decision-making in Ghana, analyse the rationale for such moves away from centralisation, and evaluate the Ghanaian experience against the existing body of knowledge on this subject and the special local conditions that are relevant.

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.

‘Chad should follow a genuine policy of authenticity and should unite behind this national movement for its cultural and social revolution.’1 This suggestion was not made by President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre, the founder and chief proponent of authenticity, but by President Mouammar El Kadhafi of Libya in an address to the party leaders of Chad. It illustrates the increasing influence of authenticity as a guiding ideology in Africa, and perhaps in other continents as well. Not only are a number of nations using the phrase, but they are taking steps to make it a reality. Before describing these measures, let us examine the recourse to authenticity and compare it to its predecessor, négritude.

Industrialisation in Africa and elsewhere has been beset with problems, many of which relate to the selection of ‘inappropriate technology’, or processes which are far from optimal in their use of labour and capital in the context of developing economy. Many products have no alternative methods of manufacture because they have been created in an industrialised economy, and the only existing technology reflects the skill, labour, and capital constraints of that environment. Plastics moulding, oil refining, and many metal-forming techniques are examples of this situation. The process itself is basic to the nature of the product, so that the choice of a more labour-intensive technology would result in the selection of a different product altogether. There might be no viable alternative, as in the case of petroleum products, or the alternative might be unacceptable because of its inferior performance in relation to the more sophisticated product which people already know. Processes which appear hopelessly capital intensive, and thus quite unsuitable for a developing country, may be appropriate because they form an essential part of an industry whose raw material involves economically and socially beneficial methods of production. In certain circumstances a paper-making factory could fall into this category, since the ‘inappropriateness’ of that technology might be offset by the benefits of the timber industry which is labour intensive and spread over a wide area. Some products, such as medicines, books, or fertilisers are essential and expensive to import, so it may be economically sensible to manufacture them locally in spite of other considerations.