Agricultural marketing boards in tropical Africa are heirlooms of the Great Depression and World War II, when colonial governments found their principal sources of revenue severely reduced and both European and African populations financially distressed. Marketing boards are of British origin, but similar efforts were made in French and Belgian Africa. The rationale for intervention is clouded; some of the principal reasons have faded into the past or were never openly expressed.1

As the state has moved back to the centre of analysis of political change and conflict, increasing attention has focused on its rôle in forming new classes and in structuring the possibilities of class action. As Nelson Kasfir notes, both Marx and Weber ‘saw the vital role the state could play in consolidating the class position of a dominant social group’.1 Neither, however, saw the state as the inherent locus of the process of class formation and of class domination. For Marx, the state was typically the instrument of a ruling class whose origin and basis was in control over the means of production. For Weber, power, class, and status were potentially independent dimensions of stratification.

The establishment of marketing boards in British West Africa in the 1940s was heralded at the time as a drastic, perhaps revolutionary change in the produce trade. The political implications were undoubtedly great: public enterprise (the marketing boards) had replaced private enterprise (a number of trading companies), and the ongoing debate on their relative merits made a colourful excursion to West Africa in the 1950s because this region offered a clear-cut case for comparison.1 The differences between the organisations were thus inevitably highlighted.

In the decade of the 1970s the Arab world, its resources swelled by surplus oil profits, looked to the Sudan to become the area's granary. Arab leaders knew that the country possessed abundant arable and pasture land, thought to be capable of supplying 40 per cent of the grain requirements of the region, and substantial fish and red meat supplies. They saw Sudanese development as leading to regional food self-sufficiency. In this vision of economic transformation they expected the Sudanese private sector to work in combination with Arab oil money and western technology.

Ever since the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Jan Smuts, one of its principal architects, had visions of transforming it into a ‘Greater South Africa’,. The South Africa Act of 1909 which established the Union provided for the eventual incorporation of other African Territories. It madespecific reference to Southern Rhodesia and the neighbouring British dependencies of Basutoland, the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland, Known collectively as a High Commission Terretories because, pending transfer to the Union, they were admitted by the British High Commissioner to South Africa.

The International Monetary Fund has established itself as the most important economic actor among the many international agencies of our day. Indeed, the most powerful market-economy governments and banks now look to it for leadership in assessing and resolving the key difficulties of world finance. But the I.M.F. has yet to resolve the major problem that it faces as an institution and that its most influential members refuse to recognise as they try to fashion a world economic order: dominated politically, legally, and institutionally by the market élite, the Fund has yet to make the cultural and political leap necessary to understand and work with, rather than against, the majority of its members who are in the Third World. Until the I.M.F. does so, it will continue to be harshly criticised and distrusted by the less-developed countries (L.D.C.s), and it will never achieve either its economic and political potential as a major international agency, or its supposed goal of ordered world economic prosperity.

The Sudan, Africa's largest country, not much smaller than Western Europe, is caught up once more in the convulsions of a civil war pitting the Northern against the Southern Sudanese. Inevitably the present conflict is associated with the older civil war which began in the early 1960s and dragged on for ten years, claiming the lives of around one million, and bringing about a famine and devastation little known to the outside world. There are obvious communalities, but the contemporary struggle is hardly a replay of that smouldering little war that had been fought by the Southern Sudanese with the most meagre of means and but a trifle of external aid. I shall deal in some length with what can now be called the first Sudanese civil war, in order to provide the background for an understanding of the real issues at stake today, and to place this second Sudanese civil war in perspective. More generally, the ‘Southern Problem’ provides insights into communal conflicts and their international dimensions, important though overlooked and often unacknowledged problems of today's world.

This study documents and evaluates the so-called ‘brain drain’ from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States during the period 1974–85. The objective is to use the available data to provide some insights into the rôle of this region in the international labour market for trained personnel. This is done by comparing the relative volume, pattern, and trend of migration to the United States from a sample of 17 countries against that for Africa as a whole, and against that for the world. The rationale for this kind of analysis rests on the need to determine the significance for all concerned of the growing transfer of technology, and to identify the factors which control the process.

Amongst commentators and scholars of the turn-of-the-century partition of Africa, it has become virtually axiomatic to note the ‘artificial’ nature of the boundaries drawn up by the colonial powers. Cutting, as they often did, through otherwise homogeneous ethnic, religious, linguistic, and even geographic clusters, the European remapping of the continent is criticised, at least implicitly, for its allegedly blind or indifferent disregard for indigenous social and cultural systems prevailing at the time of the conquest.

In March 1985 the Second National Women's Rights Conference was held on the Copperbelt. Although Betty Kaunda, wife of the President, addressed the 135 participants in her opening speech as if they were representing the Women's League of the United National Independence Party (U.N.I.P.), surprisingly only two of them, apart from the invited guests of honour, claimed to be associated with this organisation. Hardly any of the issues raised by the League entered the discussions during the three-day conference, and the recommendations were far form being a reflection of its stated aims.1

The Government of Socialist Ethiopia has decided to move all rural inhabitants into newly established villages as part of its strategy for promoting economic growth through agrarian socialism. Known as ‘villagisation’, this programme started in 1978 in parts of Bale Region and continued in Hararghe Region in 1984. Based on this experience, as well as on lessons learned while resettling those evicted to make way for state farms in the Wabe Shebelli valley, the Government began a nationwide campaign in late 1985 designed to move some 33 million rural people into consolidated settlements by 1995.1

The history of the past three decades in Africa would seem to confirm that the rôle of the military in political and economic development may no longer be considered transient. Armed interventions have become institutionalised, if not constitutionalised, in many African states. By December 1985 no less than 60 successful and 71 attempted coups d'état had occurred in 37 states since January 1956.1 Just as most of the first generation of African politicians chose ‘socialism’ to explain and justify their policies, so ‘revolution’ has become the rallying cry for the military leaders, even though they have often quickly been content just to ‘take over’, and not to transform, the previous civilian régime.

There is a little-known machinery-producing sector in Kenya that not only continues to survive but even to prosper, at least in pockets, albeit not impervious to the enumerable constraints which dog the local market. The success stories are few, however. It would indeed be surprising if this were otherwise, considering the nature of the overall economy, since industrialisation is constrained not only by the obvious limits of domestic demand, but also by the official preference given to the development of traditional exports, which has meant that the intensity of the industrialisation drive has been weakened by progressive reliance on the foreign-exchange earnings of cash crops.1 This increasing dependence is ironic in view of the fact that the stimulus for this kind of industrialisation is often precisely to diversify the economy away from the reliance on traditional primary exports.2

At the conclusion of a meeting of the Armed Forces Ruling Council in October 1986, President Ibrahim Babangida turned to the Inspector- General of the Nigeria Police Force, Etim Inyang, and asked, ‘My friend, where is Anini?’. At about this time, Nigerian newspapers and journals were publishing numerous articles and editorials on the ‘Anini Challenge’, the ‘Anini Saga’, the ‘Anini Factor’, ‘Lawrence Anini – the Man, the Myth’, ‘Anini, Jack the Ripper’, and ‘Lawrence Anini: A Robin Hood in Bendel’. The Guardian asked, almost plaintively, ‘Will they ever find Anini, “The Law”?’, and when he was finally captured in early December, the cover of the magazine Thisweek blared forth, above a picture of the badly injured criminal in his hospital bed, ‘Anini. Face to Face with The Law’.

Both Eritreans and Ethiopians have been trying to sway international opinion about one of the most ticklish questions of modern nationalism which seems to defy rational analysis. This study attempts to present their contending views, and to find an interpretative framework for understanding this continuing conflict in the Horn of Africa.

Political analysts often tend to focus upon periods of high-level diplomatic tension or ‘crises’ when examining and attempting to draw conclusions about foreign policy. Since these critical and highly visible episodes generally bring to the foreground the underlying combinations of geo-political, strategic, economic, ideological, and bureaucratic elements, as well as individual styles of leadership which affect interstate relations, this attraction to political drama is understandable. But in adopting a ‘crisis’ approach for determining when and what events merit serious exploration, consequential changes may be overlooked, or recognised belatedly, which have subtly crept into a particular government-to-government relationship during relatively uneventful times. The need for scholars to look to the past with more discerning eyes, as well as for foreign policy decision-makers to keep abreast with the day-to-day non-crisis international affairs of state, can be illustrated by the long-term impact of fundamental changes which occurred in the policy of the United States towards the Horn of Africa during the relative calm of the mid-1960s.

French culture, economy, and polity have long dominated the small African country of Gabon. The French control of the colonial era, which reached its nadir in the 1898–1930 period of the brutal ‘concessionary companies’, has been replaced, since independence in 1960, by an insidious rapprochement with Paris, fashioned by Gabon's leadership. A French journalist long familiar with the continent has written, ‘Gabon is an extreme case, verging on caricature, of neocolonialism ’.

In this historical conjuncture of profound socio-economic disorders, the condition of the peoples of the so-called periphery is as desperate as it has ever been. Understanding the making and nature of their predicament is certainly one of the most basic conundrums in development studies in general, and the study of Africa in particular. A useful way of looking at the continent's dilemma is to focus on two broad factors: structural constraints and subjective conditions. The first speaks to the complex of historical circumstances, habits, and rules bequeathed by the past – ‘the grid of inheritance’, to borrow from E. P. Thompson – and the overbearing logic of the contemporary global systems of production, exchange, and information. The second signifies political choices that are made as the battle with the past, the present, and for the future continues.

ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of ‘the breakdown of democracy’ in Africa, so often associated with primordialism, tribalism, and class conflict in plural societies, seldom grasp experiences of the breakdown itself.1 From the external perspectives of national integration and voting behaviour, popular violence involving mobs and crowds is characterised as affective, ‘irrational’ action, in contrast to the ‘rational’ norms of institutionalised democracy.2

Amílcar Cabral was perhaps the foremost political thinker to emerge out of the many independence movements of post-World War II Africa. His insightful theory of class struggle in the continent, his informative analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau, his original concept of ‘class suicide’, and his notion of the relationship between national liberation and culture,1 helped convince many scholars of the viability of a class and ideological approach to the study of African politics.2