The Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Príncipe is the smallest country in lusophone Africa. The inhabitants of these two islands in the Gulf of Guinea just north of the Equator number approximately 115,000,2 of whom over 95 per cent live on São Tomé which has a total area of 857 sq. km. The smaller island of Príncipe, with only 140 sq. km, is inhabited primarily by Cape Verdeans whose ancestors migrated there during the colonial era. The economy has always been dominated by cocoa plantations, known as roças, which despite changes in organisation have been the fundamental sociopolitical foundation of this creole African society.3 The continuity of this unit of production in the national economy, and its attendant impact on the structure of society, remains the central problem facing the country's leaders.

Shortly after assuming office as Head of State in August 1985, President Ibrahim Babangida inaugurated a 17-member Political Bureau, headed by Professor Sylvanus Cookey, whose terms of reference included ‘The review of Nigeria's political history, identifying the basic problems which led to failure in the past and suggesting ways of resolving and coping with these problems’.1 One of the most controversial of the Bureau's proposals was that the number of political parties should be limited to two in order to ensure that Nigeria's future politics would be based on principles and not ethnicity.2 The Government accepted this recommendation as part of the programme for a return to civilian rule in 1992, and has decided that two parties will be registered in 1989.3

In the debate over relief for Africa and the Third World, the situation of dictatorial, corrupt, and mismanaged régimes is often subsumed with the rest. It is rather uncritically accepted that indebtedness chiefly results from the impact of international factors, such as falling commodity prices, International Monetary Fund conditionalities, and rising metropolitan interest rates. The independent national state, whatever its policies and form, is seen as simply the passive victim of such forces, and little or no differentiation is made between the régime and the groups and classes of the domestic society.

The Foreign policy of Ethiopia, like that of other countries, is based on certain goals and values, and determinded by the dynamic interplay of domestic and external factors. Although its formulation has been clearly influenced by Marxist concepts about the nature of society and the alignment of forces in the world, there are elements of continuity as well as change, not least because Ethiopia has maintained its core values while playing an important rôle from time to time in the international arena long before the 1974 revolution. In other words, despite a shift in orientation, the central purpose of Ethiopia's foreign policy has remained the same, and a change in style has not brought forth a change in essence. Indeed, in some respects, the exigencies of a fast-changing international environment have been more significant than the replacement of the Emperor by the Dergue. It must be stressed that Ethiopian policy has been largely rigid, with adjustments being made only in response to certain fait accomplis that were outside the control of the decision-makers.

Nigeria is a nation of tremendous socio-cultural diversities – in historical background, ethnicity, religion, belief, and especially language, which more often than not is the strongest factor giving identity, harmony, and continuity to ethnic groups, shaping the perceptions of their members. John Paden sees language as ‘a major mechanism of social communication between sub-systems …and… of expressing values, culture and ethnicity within a sub-system’.1 It is easy to see, in this light, how the most difficult problems of the entire political fabric of Nigeria are related to its great diversity of language.

This short article examines the present land transport situation in tropical Africa, and discusses the severe economic constraints facing continuation of even the present low levels of vehicular activity. In addition, some new approaches to both passengers and freight are suggested in line with existing difficulties.

As defined here, tropical Africa includes all the countries in the continent except Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, as well as South Africa and Namibia. In 1984, the population was just over 400 million, but is expected to reach about 650 million by the year 2000.1 Overall, the region is characterised by low levels of income per head, a high proportion of the workforce employed in agriculture (over 50 per cent everywhere), and correspondingly low levels of urbanisation. Given the great differences between the region and the industralised countries, it is possinle that transport policies appropriate to the West may not be particularly relevent.

When Zambia introduced weekly foreign-exchange auctions in October 1985 in order to determine the value of the kwacha vis-à-vis the dollar, together with other measures aiming at liberalising external and internal trade and at restructuring the pattern of production, they were widely acclaimed as a model for reforms elsewhere in the continent. The Economist praised Zambia for ‘taking one of the bravest economic gambles that any African country has taken’,1 implying that even in the view of liberal commentators the Government ran a considerable risk in trying to implement this reform programme. The new measures enabled Zambia to reach a fresh stand-by agreement with the International Monetary Fund in early 1986, the previous one having broken down in 1985 because the authorities failed to meet the I.M.F.'s economic targets.

Zaïre has been open to external penetration from its earliest days as the Congo Independent State of King Léopold II, but unlike most other weak and vulnerable African states it has experienced repeated military interventions. When President Mobutu Sese Seko addressed the U.N. General Assembly in October 1973 he formally thanked the world organisation for preserving his country during the early 1960s:

If a small minority of member countries of this organisation had refused to participate in the Congo operation, at the time, the vast majority had, however, spontaneously put troops at its disposition or intervened in favour of this operation. This permitted the maintenance of peace, unity, and the integrity of the national territory.

The Soviet Union and South Africa – on the face of it, no two powers on earth look on each other with greater hostility. For many years, no diplomatic relations have existed between them. South African propagandists never tire of denouncing the Godless Soviet tyranny, and the ‘total onslaught’ waged against their country by communists at home and abroad. As the official Soviet interpretation would have it, South Africa is governed by a racist clique, and menaces all its neighbours.

The fact that Sierra Leone is one of Africa's little-known states is an acknowledgement of its marginalisation and reversal of fortunes since independence from Britain in 1961. But this observation is also a reminder that under colonial rule, Sierra Leone had received considerable notoriety for several reasons: an important naval base, commercial centre, and seaport; a hot-bed of political agitation and perennial challenge to British authority; and a centre of education – the so-called ‘Athens of West Africa’.1 In more recent times, however, Sierra Leone jas not caught the attention of international commentators and the world press. It has not achieved the strategic or international political significance of such major African states as Algeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Nigeria, Zambia, or Zimbabwe. And looking back to the 1950s and 1960s, it was not led to independence by the charismatic persona of a Kwame Nkrumah, who hoped to achieve the rapid transformation of Ghana to a modern industrial economy and society, ot by a romantic like Julius Nyerere, who hoped to turn Tanzanian peasants into citizens of modern communes.

In May 1989 the National Commission for the Study of National Unity appointed by President Pierre Buyoya issued its eagerly awaited report, ostensibly designed to find a lasting solution to the bloody confrontations that have repeatedly pitted Hutu against Tutsi. For the first time in the history of independent Burundi an official statement has been made public which explicitly recognises the centrality of the Hutu-Tutsi problem, and sets forth specific solutions to resolve it. As such this is a document of historic significance, and the sum of its recommendations must be seen as an important breakthrough towards national reconciliation.

Third-World governments have frequently professed the virtues of trade diversification, and they have voiced a number of legitimate concerns about what can happen if this is not achieved. First, the greater the geographical concentration of their export trade, the more vulnerable are they to fluctuations arising from changes in the level of imports, devaluations, or other developments in their principal markets.1 When, for instance, exports were directed predominantly towards the relatively slow-growing European Economic Community in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the exporting countries might have been better off if their outlets had been more diversified. Second, various pressures may be exerted to induce smaller countries to purchase most of their needed imports from the larger trading partner that has bought most of their exports.2 Those with geographically concentrated exports are particularly vulnerable in tariff disputes, or what J. A. Conybeare has termed ‘trade wars’.3 Finally, countries which are particularly dependent on individual export markets are vulnerable to ‘linkage’ pressures – attempts by their powerful partners to utilise economic leverage to force concessions on non-trade issues, often political in nature.4

During a visit to Kenya in June 1987, Yitzhak Shamir defended Israel's relations with Pretoria by claiming that everyone knows ‘our only interest in ties with South Africa is the existence there of a large Jewish community’. Although most analysts might claim that pragmatism and realpolitik are the sole foundations for Israeli–South African ties, the Prime Minister's explanation is in line with similar authoritative statements made in the past, namely: that Israel's national concerns in its relations with South Africa have been influenced by the collective interests of the latter's Jewish population.

Women could be said to be ‘the second sex in town’ in colonial Africa in that men predominated in the urban centres spawned by the political economy of colonialism. An explanation has to consider both employment and family separation. Although colonial governments, missions, commercial firms, and mines recruited men, it is not clear to what extent this was a matter of preference on the part of the major employers rather than the response of peasant households. Not at issue are the reasons for the latter's integration into the cash economy and the rôle of coercion, whether in the form of forced labour or indirectly through the imposition of tax. But what considerations were borne in mind when households deliberated about which of their members to dispatch? Whatever the part played by both employers and suppliers in determining the composition of the labour supply – and this so far totally neglected topic demands research – the result was that in many, if not all, African colonies, almost as a rule, domestic servants, secretaries, and nurses were male.

After years of constant struggle, the Pan-African News Agency (Pana) appears barely closer to commanding respect and economic stability today than when it issued its first bulletin in 1983. The yearning for noble repute might seem more to do with vanity than necessity, because Pana was created to perform a specific function: to counter what African leaders decried as the negative, distorted coverage of the continent by western news organisations being beamed back to Africa and out to the rest of the world. However, since arriving on the scene six years ago as purveyors of African liberation, content to implement their own ideas of what journalism should be, the Agency's administrators are increasingly making it known that they realise credibility is not superfluous: that in the business of international news, respect goes hand in hand with survival.