Today Burundi resembles a torn-apart patchwork of Batutsi and Bahutu colonies by being divided territorially into almost isolated enclaves, ethnically purified to a high degree, and more or less closed off from their surrounding areas. Most Batutsi believe that they can only live in security if sheltered by the army in various urban agglomerations, including the capital, Bujumbura. By way of contrast, most Bahutu are to be found in the hills of the countryside in an often entrenched and hidden way, and close to economic self-sufficiency. Such an unusual situation is undoubtedly a big challenge to the relations that need to be established between state authorities and citizens in rural as well as urban areas.

AFRICA South of the Sahara became so marginalised during the 1980s that its share of world trade fell from 3·8 per cent in 1960 to 1·05 per cent in 1989. And it has attracted relatively little foreign investment, with the exception of a few exporters of petroleum: only 2,000 million US dollars in 1995 corresponding to 2 per cent of the total for developing countries. Indeed, the continent's share (including North Africa) declined from 11 per cent in 1986–90 to 4 per cent in 1994.

‘Governance’ and ‘exclusion’ are two buzz words of the 1990s.This short article describes some paradigms – i.e. ideal forms – of social exclusion and of governance of the economy, and presents a framework for analysing the types of policy actually found in the real world. It has two purposes. The first is to stress that governance takes a variety of forms, each one of which has its strengths and weaknesses in meeting the objectives of the economy and society. The second is to conduct a cursory exploration into the types of exclusion associated with different kinds of governance, and to comment on the implications for economic policy when the forms do not correspond to the wishes of society. What follows is not designed to promote a particular strategy, but to provide a structure within which any policy can be better understood, and therefore more effectively promoted or opposed, depending on the reader's own objectives.

Soon after midnight in early January 1994, an Air Afrique cargo jet took off from the airport of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. It roared north over the sleeping city carrying 15 tons of première-qualité, extra-fine green beans bound for Paris. Within several hours, the beans would be unloaded and trucked to the sprawling wholesale docks of Rungis, on the outskirts of the French capital, and put up for sale to restaurant and supermarket buyers from throughout Europe. The jet's blast marked the first time in over a decade that a cargo flight had carried the region's garden produce overseas. It represented, perhaps, the opening of an isolated and stagnant economy, the linking of local producers to the global market. It was exactly the kind of ‘take-off’ the World Bank hoped for from this poor but deadly earnest country when it began a structural adjustment loan programme in Burkina Faso in 1991.

The months of negotiations and labour preceding this landmark flight, however, had hardly gone as smoothly as the lift-off from the darkened savannah runway. Indeed, the whole enterprise was so fraught with mishap that simply the arrival of that first shipment in Europe mattered more, especially to those who initiated the ‘green bean scheme’, than the fact that it made no money.

The ownership, management, and supervision of South Africa's automobile industry has since its inception been overwhelmingly white. It was also highly oppressive in that the foremen, armed with powers of hiring, promotion, and dismissal, ruled the shopfloor with grim determination. Black workers, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly confronted these labour relations practices with collective industrial action that sometimes made enterprises ‘ungovernable’. Over the last few years, however, structures and agreements have risen that serve to eliminate confrontations and place profitability at the centre of everyone's concerns. This consensual approach to labour relations is informed by corporatism, and involves the participation of unions, employers, as well as other collective bodies, in state institutions.

In the flourish of literature now attempting to explain transitions to democracy in sub-Saharan Africa a curious consensus has emerged concerning the relative importance of internal and external causes. It is almost uniformly maintained that the real causes were internal, and that international factors were merely supportive. Accordingly, John Wiseman claims in the introduction to his recently edited volume on democratic reform that changes in the global political environment ‘made things marginally less difficult for those in Africa seeking to democratise their political systems and marginally more difficult for those (mainly incumbent authoritarian elites) who sought to prevent them from doing so’, emphasis added.

This article takes issue with such reductionism of politics to the domestic level. Internal and external causes are interlinked and intertwined in such complex ways that what at first glance appears to be internal may on closer inspection reveal strong external influences. The attempt to determine the relative importance of each is thus deemed futile and prone to ideological bias. The assertion that exogenous factors are only inspirational and supportive implies that the international financial institutions (IFIs) and bilateral donors are neutral and disinterested observers of current events, rather than active and ideologically motivated participants in global and national debates and developments.

The beast lives unhistorically; for it ‘goes into’ the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder ... But man is always resisting the great and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him down and bows his shoulders.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (Indianapolis, 1949), p. 5.

If the past is ‘dead’, it dances, a lively corpse indeed, on new graves everywhere almost every day in whatever kind of time.

– Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 121.

THE past has a social purpose of stressing the virtues of courage, endurance, and sacrifice. Picturesque folkloric characters such as Robin Hood and Nicholas Chauvin become models for selflessness and patriotism. The term chauvinisme, which appeared in France by the 1840s, for instance, did not carry any negative connotations. Instead, it helped the nation-state to inculcate a sense of oneness in its people, who began to say ‘Nouns sommes tous français, Chauvin’. The past, thus, has a double mission. It is both therapeutic and vital political ammunition.

Since 1990, more than 30 sub-Saharan states have introduced multi-party electoral systems to choose their national governments. This development, normally understood as part of the post-cold war ‘wave of democratisation’, has led many to think that there is something intrinsically new about such a competitive process in Africa, which is not the case. This article looks at some elections that have been held in various states and studied, both before and after their independence.

Le Hasard et l':histoire: entretiens avec Belaïd Abdesselam, Vols. I and II, by Mahfoud Bennoune and Ali El-Kenz Réghaïa, ENAG/Éditions, 1990. Pp. 471 & 409. Dinars 120 & 115 paperback.

Stratégies de développement pour l'Algérie: défis et enjeux by Abdelhamid Brahimi Paris, Éditions économica, 1991. Pp. 425. Also published by Éditions Dahlab, 1991, as the 2nd. edn. of L'Economie algerienne.

Inflation, dévaluation, marginalisation by Mourad Benachenhou Algiers, Dar Ech'rifa, 1993. Pp. 155.

Algérie: la libération inachevée by Ghazi Hidouci Paris, La Découverte, 1995. Pp. 303. FF155 paperback.

Le Mal algérien: économie politique d'une transition inachevée by Smail Goumeziane Paris, Fayard, 1994. Pp. 307. FF130 paperback.