In 1961, soon after the beginning of the first United Nations Development Decade, a conference of African Ministers of Education was convened by Unesco. The meeting resolved, inter alia, that by the year 1980 primary schooling throughout the continent should be ‘universal, compulsory and free’.1 As we have now reached that date, it is appropriate to review progress. A few countries have achieved the goal, but many others have fallen short. This article will examine the experience of the last two decades, and assess its implications for ultimate objectives and the strategies for achieving them. Despite national policy variations and divergent social and economic conditions, instructive overall patterns may be discerned.

What is ‘essence’ and what is ‘appearance’ in African politics? Does class or interest-group analysis describe and explain the various realities? These questions are unanswerable without an examination of the methods by which claims to correct understanding are made. All claims to knowledge are arbitrary until the methods of enquiry and the justification for their validity are made explicit.

In 1965 Kwame Nkrumah published a book which was to exert a powerful influence on thinking about economic development.1 His thesis was that colonialism had been replaced by neo-colonialism, ‘the last stage of imperialism’, the essence of which was that ‘the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’.2 He went on to argue that ‘giant financial interests’ exercised control over nominally independent states,3 with the result that foreign control was used for ‘the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world’.4

Ever since the signing of the Camp David accords and the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty of March 1979, rumours and predictions have abounded of a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and Black Africa. Israel's unique relationship with those states, which commenced immediately following their independence and ended with a dramatic rupture during the last months of 1973, has continued on a discreet and unofficial basis since then. This article seeks to provide a greater understanding of the present relationships between Israel and Black Africa, and its future possibilities, through an examination of the forces and trends which have determined its course during the past two decades.

In the last few years there has been a growing interest in that very considerable and hitherto mostly unrecorded part of the economic life of the Third World which flourishes outside the state and foreign-owned medium and large-scale concerns. This great mass of non-enumerated enterprises and activities is a major source of employment and production. For the purpose of this article, it will be argued that many of those undertaking research in this sector can be regarded as belonging to one or other of two fairly distinct schools of thought formed by (1) a number of officials from the International Labour Organisation, the World Bank, and other international and government agencies, as well as some purely academic writers,1 and (2) the majority of social scientists attached to the British Sociological Association Development Group, some of whom operate to a greater or lesser extent within a Marxian or neo-Marxian perspective.2 For purposes of abbreviation only, these will be referred to as the ‘I.L.O.’ and the ‘Radical’ groups.

Virtually all analyses of Lesotho's political framework have agreed that strong elements of national identity have neither forestalled domestic conflict nor served to promote a unified assault on awesome economic problems. Hence many writers imply that a major asset, rarely found in independent Africa, has been wasted.1 Roger Leys has perceptively applied dependency theories of a ‘labour reserve’ economy to Lesotho,2 and spends considerable effort on historical analysis aimed at demonstrating the duration and pervasiveness of this process of systematic underdevelopment. In his conclusion he suggests that ‘the long and courageous battle of the Basotho to assert their dignity and worth is in fact a resource and political weapon of incomparable significance in the long-term battle for the liberation of southern Africa.’ Leys infers that national and class identities are interrelated, and possibly reinforcing, when he says that ‘the history of the struggle of the Basotho people and the very degree of their integration into the black working class of South Africa is a formidable weapon.’3

Amílcar Cabral was primarily a man of action. His political leadership is best understood by looking at what he did rather than at what he said. More importantly, his writings were essentially analyses of the events in which he was involved; they were not theories about, or inquiries into, abstract social or political questions. He did not view himself as a political theorist although his writings obviously have theoretical relevance. He was loath to commit himself to any ideology or theory. The majority of his writings are party documents, and they reflect the very specific purpose and audience for which they were intended.

A fundamental dilemma has long lain at the heart of the Organisation of African Unity. Two contradictory principles have helped it maintain solidarity: the first recognises that domestic jurisdiction rests at the foundation of sovereign equality, while the second stresses that national policies such as apartheid have international consequences. These principles clash directly in the broad area of human rights.

Changes in the nature of federal financial relations were among the most striking features of the nearly 14 years of military rule in Nigeria. At the time of the January 1966 coup there was a great imbalance in the size of the four Regions, with a consequential built-in tendency for political instability. At the resumption of civilian rule in October there were 19 States of relatively balanced size, with an important rôle for the Federal Government as a mediator between them as well as an initiator of change.

In his classic study of decentralisation and development, Henry Maddick argued that economic growth and social modernisation depend in part on the ability of Third-World govenments to diffuse responsibility for development planning and administration, to expand participation in economic activities, and to promote new centres of creativity within society. Over-concentration of administrative authority stifles development, Maddick insisted; it leads to waste and corruption, delays action, and creates irrational and inefficient management practices, the costs of which developing countries cannot afford.1 To illustrate his point, Maddick cited the effects of the centralised supply system in the Sudan in the late 1950s, through which ‘shoes made in Fasher were sent 400 miles by rail to Khartoum where the whole shoe supply was concentrated. When Fasher wanted shoes for school children and government personnel it had to send to Khartoum for them.’ He also noted that school desks and equipment for the provincial city of Juba had to be ordered from Khartoum, which was 900 miles away and connected only by inefficient river transport, even though the wood from which the furniture was made originally came from Juba.2

The term ‘parastatal’ is used rather loosely in Zambia, being often applied to a wide range of bodies such as boards, corporations, and companies that operate in the state-dominated sector of the economy. It is unfortunate that there has not been greater consistency in official usage, but these organisations have grown up over the years in different forms to meet felt needs and not according to a preconceived plan. The vagaries in terminology also reflect a degree of uncertainty in government policy on how the public sector should be ordered, as well as a piecemeal approach in its interventions in the economy since independence. However, in recent years the nomenclature has received greater attention out of a recognition that the parastatals loom rather large in the economy, often being more prominent than government departments and more visible than the private sector.

In the course of several field studies carried out during 1978–9 on behalf of the Working Group on Recurrent Costs established by the Comité Inter-états de Lutte contre la Sécheresse dans le Sahel and the Club du Sahel, it became clear that imperfect functioning of domestic capital markets hampers the efforts of Sahelian governments to raise domestic non-tax resources for budget finance. Inasmuch as the operation and maintenance of development projects compete for a severely limited pool of uncommitted government revenues – that is, revenues not committed to debt service, meeting the civil service payroll, and other inflexible obligations – reforms that augment this pool are of particular interest from the viewpoint of ensuring that these projects function properly once established.

A striking commentary on Tanzania: two respected scholars, having studied the same country, having relied largely on the same data, reach opposing conclusions. There is not only disagreement here, but confusion on the nature of change in Tanzania. There is also misunderstanding of the processes of change in the Third World more generally. The first task in the analysis of the recent Tanzanian experience, therefore, is to free ourselves of encumbrances. To make sense of what has happened we must first sort through some of the major confusions and distractions that unfortunately permeate the literature.

Events in independent Zimbabwe have confounded pundits on the left and the right who assumed that African resistance to settler colonial rule was more revolutionary than nationalistic. How can the rather unexpected direction of political and economic change in Zimbabwe since April 1980 be understood? The Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) Government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has committed itself to redress the severe social inequities of the past, but has decided, at least at the outset, to reach its goals through a prudent rather than a doctrinaire approach. What factors explain the current development strategy? Does the apparent accommodation of Z.A.N.U. (P.F.) with private capital signal a dangerous divergence from the stated goal of building socialism? Or does it represent an awakening to the idea that economic production, even if organised on capitalist lines, is a prerequisite of development in Africa?

Theories of modernisation and social change have been increasingly challenged during the past decade by events in the Middle East and other areas of the developing world. Leaders of oil-rich nations are choosing to industrialise but not to westernise, and Islamic revivals are shaping new patterns of political and social development. For example, improvements in female status can no longer be regarded as the inevitable concomitants of industrialisation; to the contrary, gender inequality may actually be exacerbated by national resurgences of religious and cultural traditions which often accompany planned social change.1

Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968, and was then said to be the paradigm of the small isolated, poor, dependent country, only emerging from the colonial era to fall immediately into neocolonialism – the Third World's Third World.

‘The artist has always functioned in African society’, he said, ‘the record of mores and experiences of his society and … the voice of vision in his own time. It is time’, he concluded, ‘for [the artist] to respond to this essence of himself.’ The words appeared in mid-1967; their author Wole Soyinka, already celebrated as a leading poet and dramatist, representing the younger generation of writers among Africa's newly independent nations.

In 1955 the South African Government began to demolish a black freehold suburb in Johannesburg, and to relocate its inhabitants in a state-controlled township. Resistance to these moves by the leading black political organisation of the time, the African National Congress (A.N.C.), was short-lived and unsuccessful. Despite its abortive nature, the attempt to oppose the destruction of Sophiatown was historically significant for several reasons.

Foreign investment in South Africa during the past 20 years has been subject to criticism form several diverse schools of thought, ranging from those who believe it has contributed to country's economic growth without improving the condition of the black workers, to those who maintain that – at best – apartheid has been modernised rather than fundamentally changed.

Today the focus of attention has shifted to collective bargaining and trade union rights, to the action that can be taken on their own behalf by the ecomomically underprivileged and the politically dispossessed, and to the assistance which foreign-owned companies have been given in improving the terms and conditions of employment of their own non-white employees by the codes of conduct that have quite recently been adopted by their own governments.

Ethiopia has long been regarded as the only African state, along with Liberia, to have escaped the ravages of European colonialism, the epitome of African independence and self-determination.1 It was also considered a stable, relatively integrated, and viable political community amidst a continent of new states characterised by chronic instability.2 But by 1974, most if not all of these myths were in the process of being broken, as Ethiopia struggled for its very existence against pressures from within and without that threatened to dismember the Empire.