The official dismantling of apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment in Febuary 1990, and especially the first multi-racial elections in April 1994 followed by the inauguration of the Government of National Unity (GNU), have marked this decade as the most fascinating in the history of South Africa.

There was a close and continuing relationship between the press and nationalist politics in colonial British West Africa which acquired a new dynamic towards the end of World War II. As the imperial impluse faltered, a younger, more radical African leadership appeared which saw newspapers as a means of carrying their message to a wider political class than that addressed by the relatively conservative pioneers. It had for some time been true that ‘The spontaneous expression of grievances, against this tax or that bureaucratic decision, was built up by a handful of…journalists into a generalized protest against the fact of British authority.’1 Now movers and shakers like Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria and Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast began to use the press in a frontal assault on their colonial régimes. Couched in terms ‘verging on joyful vituperation’, newspapers reached out beyond the elite of the cities to rural opinion leaders and the urban poor.2

The return of the generals to power following the coup d'état of November 1993 has posed fundamental challenges to the survival of the nation. On the one hand, it has brought out the worst in Nigerian politics: repression, intimidation, violence, corruption, betrayals, and the manipulation of primordial loyalties. On the other hand, it has exposed the nature and extent of the Nigerian political rot, and provided the still weak and fledgling civil society with added strength and legitimacy. Could the resurgence of military rule in Nigeria have been predicted? Could anyone have foreseen that General Sani Abacha would become such an all-powerful President? Was it possible to anticipate the popular protests and bloody confrontations which culminated in the hanging of nine environmental activists in November 1995? What is the way forward for the contending political communities?1

AUTHORITARIAN leaders and single-party régimes of all shades increasingly came under great pressures between 1990 and 1993 to liberalise and permit more participation in the political process. This transformation, which was part of what Samuel Huntington described as ‘the third wave of democratisation’,1 stemmed from sustained efforts by domestic political forces in African states, albeit assisted by a variety of demanded requirements from international financial institutions and industrialised countries, as well as by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. According to the US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, the ‘new resolve to establish new attitudes, arrangements and structures’ came directly out of the exhaustion of the cold war.2 In other words, the promotion of democracy in Africa was part of the so-called peace dividend.3 Expectations for political evolution throughout the world were so high that some analysts predicted the emergence of ‘an international democratic order’.4 As Keith Somerville has observed: ‘Africa entered the 1990S in a mood of hope and expectation’.5

Tanzania is one of the few African countries that has remained relatively calm since independence. However, its long history of ethnic, racial, and religious cohesion has begun to fray as the Government attempts to reform its ailing economy in accordance with World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities. This process offers an opportunity to explore the degree to which there is a causal link between liberal economic reform and social unity. This is especially relevant as many African régimes are implementing similar policy prescriptions in the form of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the terms of which often depend on the minimal financial leverage that African negotiators have vis-à-vis the advanced industrial countries of the North.1 York Bradshaw and Zwelakhe Tshandu have argued that ‘the burgeoning debt crisis may represent the “new dependency” for many African countries which cannot acquire capital from other sources besides the IMF and the World Bank.’

The brutal civil war that engulfed Liberia, following Charles Taylor's invasion in December 1989, has left an indelible mark in the history of this West African state. The six-year old struggle led to the collapse of what was already an embattled economy; to the almost complete destruction of physical infrastructure built over a century and half of enterprise and oligarchic rule; to the killing, maiming, and displacement of more than 50 per cent of the country's estimated pre-war population of 2·5 million; and to an unprecedented regional initiative to help resolve the crisis. Five years after the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) intervened with a Cease-fire Monitoring Group (Ecomog), an agreement that was quickly hailed as the best chance for peace in Liberia was signed in August 1995 in the Nigeriancapital, Abuja.

In the first two years following the peace accord in Rome on 4 Ocotber 1992 between Mozambique's governing party, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), and the Resistência National Moçambicana (Renamo) guerrilla leadership, over one million refugees returned to the country while as many as three million moved back to the areas they were forced to flee during the war. With the post-accord commitment of the United Nations to monitor the ‘peace process’ as well as the political transition to a multi-party democratic régime, the international community invested itself strongly in supporting Mozambicans in their attempt to rebuild their war-torn country. The United Nations Operation in Mozambique (Unomoz) presented an acid test for the future of UN-sponsored ‘peacekeeping’ initiativesthe recent difficulties or failures in Angola, Somalia, and Bosnia having thrown into question the sensibility of such expensive operations with little probability of producing sustainable results. For the donor community, the end of the war signalled an opportunity to advance discussions and practical steps towards liberalising the Mozambican economy and decentralising state power — thereby offering a new laboratory for model testing.

By the mid-1990s, it had become almost a truism in certain circles that the democratic system of government, with its accompanying protections of individual rights and its facilitation of private economic activity and political pluralism, was in the ascendancy in many areas of the world hitherto not thought of as amenable to that model. But although various achievements and setbacks in democratisation have been extensively and even painstakingly documented in all continents, one intriguing experiment in Africa has gone nearly unnoticed.

A Major thrust of structural adjustment in Ghana, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, is the promotion of the private sector coupled with the diminution of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).1 However, while these are sometimes undermined, as when shares are sold to private buyers or assets liquidated, their complete demise in the course of market reform is not always so clear cut. This is the case when SOEs are themselves restructured in order to become more market-oriented, or when they are charged with overseeing private sector development. In such a situation, state-based companies may lose a share of the market as they are forced to compete with private firms, while at the same time extending their purview as a regulator of a diversifying economic sector. The parastatals involved in Ghana's shea economy are characterised by this sort of ambivalent status.

With attention turning towards Kenya's second multi-party elections, due to be held before the end of 1997, it is imperative to look back to the flaws in the system which helped deliver President Daniel arap Moi and the Kenya African National Union (KANU) their victories in 1992. At present there is no sign of these defects being eradicated and the creation of new districts since then has demonstrated the Government's intention of enhancing an already biased structure. The underlying distribution of tribes and ethnic groups has had a fundamental impact on the electoral geography of Kenya, since they have controlled the delimitation of both the parliamentary constituencies and the administrative machinery of the whole country.1

Despite a competitive party system and regular free-and-fair elections, Botswana's polity has been characterised for almost 30 years by considerable authoritarianism focused on the extensive powers of the Presidency and based upon a hierarchical and highly inequitable society.1 But pressures have recently arisen within the country for more openness, participation, and equality, and their growing effects were clearly evident in the October 1994 elections and in the widespread disturbances soon after.

In an earlier article in this Journal, ‘Structural Adjustment in Africa: a failing grade so far’, Vol. 32, No. 4, December 1994, pp. 679–92, I scrutinised the World Bank's major attempt to demonstrate the efficacy of its set of programmes known as ‘structural adjustment’. By relying solely on data selected and arranged in Adjustment in Africa: reforms, results, and the road ahead (New York, 1994), and using the categories and ratings of reform performance in that policy research report (hereinafter referred to as AIA), I showed that they not only failed to support its conclusions but actually bolstered the contrary thesis: namely, that implementation of structural adjustment most often causes poorer performance.

This article examines the extent to which the foreign policy of South Africa has altered since the inauguration of the Government of National Unity (GNU), following the historic, non-racial multi-party elections in May 1994. Has the African National Congress (ANC)-led regime succeeded in its stated aims of ‘normalising’ relations with the outside world while simultaneously forsaking traditional assumptions and perspectives about the national interest, and how best to define, defend, and promote it? Or has the understandable preoccupation with, and demands of, internal reconstruction led to a situation where foreign policy is ‘on hold’, in the sense that little attention has so far been directed at substantive questions concerning the norms, values, and conventions implicit in the strategic culture and policy inclinations of the ‘ancien régime’? In other words, what are the elements of continuity and change?

While scholarly cautions are needed as regards both simplistic dichotomies and the subtle rhetoric that converts ‘civil society’ into a new sacred depository for ‘a wide range of emancipatory aspirations’,1 frequently pitted against that ‘predatory species’ we call the state,2 the view from Yaoundé suggests that questions about social classes are likely to be helpful in any analysis of the complex relationship between state and society in contemporary Africa.

Southern Africa has been at war since the 1960s. Following the capitulation of Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front and the acceptance of majority rule in Zimbabwe in 1980, the widely acknowledged root of most of the regional conflict has been South Africa. In defending apartheid, the régime in Pretoria engaged in a systematic campaign of destabilisation designed to bring its neighbours to heel. Military invasions, raids, sabotage, support of dissident groups, and assassinations were all part of the National Party (NP) Government's ‘total strategy’ that employed violence as a key element in its regional policy to achieve economic, military, and political hegemony. P. W. Botha during his tenure as Prime Minister and President, 1978–89, ‘politically modified the role’ of the South African Defence Force (SADF), as explained by Herbert Howe, and ‘created the military-dominated State Security Council, which effectively replaced the Cabinet and became the centre of national decision-making and official power in the 1980s’.1 The result was the militarisation of South African society and a swath of destruction across the southern part of the continent.

Upon taking power in August 1985, General Ibrahim Babangida promised a decisive course of economic and political change for Nigeria. Alongside a phased transition to democratic rule, the new President outlined far-reaching reforms intended to alleviate major distortions in the economy, to resolve a lingering impasse with external creditors, and to reduce a mounting burden of debt. Within a year, a comprehensive structural adjustment programme (SAP) was launched, incorporating key policies advocated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and yielding significant early results in stabilising the economy and arresting decline.

The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), and by extension the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the multi-ethnic coalition that it established and still dominates, is frequently considered to be a creation of, and beholden to, the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF). From this perspective the foreign loyalties of the TPLF made it an unsuitable, if not illegitimate, movement to lead the Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE) in 1991, and since 1995, the newly created Federal Democratic Republic. By way of contrast, this article attempts to demonstrate that the developing relationship between the TPLF and the EPLF during the course of their respective revolutionary struggles has been far more problematic and beset with tensions than critics are either aware of, or acknowledge, and that an understanding of their nature casts light on present and possible future differences between the respective regimes of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

In April 1974, 74 Malawian migrant labourers returning from work in South Africa died in a plane crash in Francistown, Botswana. Immediately, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the then [Life] President of Malawi, banned all labour recruiting activities in his country. Miners on holiday were not allowed to go back to their jobs, and those under contract with the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), known as Wenela, were to be repatriated — a decision that cost the South African mining industry some R7 million during the next two years. Thereafter, Dr Banda frequently boasted that ‘I have killed Wenela’, as for example on two public occasions in 1983: I have killed two recruiting agencies, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, Wenela, in short, and the Rhodesian Native Labour Bureau, or Mthandii… They no longer recruit in Malawi. They have surrendered all their buildings to the government…, because the majority of the people have responded to my appeal to stay here and work in their gardens or on the estates.

South African sports officials recently agreed to retain the Springbok as the emblem and sobriquet of the national rugby team. The decision, which followed protracted debate, raises important questions about the construction of national identity in the post-apartheid era. Why has this traditional symbol of white racial superiority been reprieved? And can Springbok rugby help mould all South Africa's peoples into a nation…with common feelings of loyalty and belonging to each other?

Just as 1960 was characterised by independence and 1966 by military coups, so 1990 marked a cautious move in many states away from excessive centralisation towards a distribution of political power. Multi-party elections were held, or scheduled, in countries as diverse as Benin, Gabon, Somalia, Zaïre, and Zambia. The partial liberalisation these represented did not amount to a full transition to democracy — indeed, they did not amount to anything positive in some cases — but they did suggest that a potential rebalancing of certain aspects of political power was possible, if not probable. Since then, have any significant changes taken place in police systems and behaviour, and/or in the organisation of internal security? This article suggests some of the variables requiring discussion, and indicates areas for future research.