The first three decades of African independence have been an economic, political, and social disaster. The number in absolute poverty is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and is expected to exceed 250 million by the turn of the century. Once fine universities are in decay, and governments are chronically over-staffed and underperforming. This sad state of affairs is not simply a consequence of an unfortunate coincidence of collapsing commodity prices and mismanagement, but rather because of a fundamental flaw in the prevailing development paradigm. This was based on the erroneous proposition that state institutions derived from metropolitan models could be made the engine of development in the post-colonial era. In retrospect, it is all too obvious that the underlying cultural premises of these institutions were alien to the vast majority of Africans, and they started to crumble the moment the colonial administrators left.

The fact that this new nation has succeeded in fostering economic growth and democracy under the aegis of equalitarian values holds out hope for the rest of the world. For prosperity, freedom, and equality cannot be for white men only. If they are, then they will prove to have been as illusory and impermanent as the slave-based democracies of ancient Greece.

What Geertz refers to as the ‘pigeonhole disease’ is nowhere more evident than in the persistent tendency of political scientists to locate state and society in separate conceptual niches: one inhabited by a potentially predatory species and the other by a defenceless and fully domesticated pigeon. Only where a recognisable entity is sharing the characteristics of a state system, whose boundaries are analytically separate from those of the social system, can political science claim a disciplinary domain of its own. The ongoing debate over the relative merits or demerits of state-centred approaches has only served to add further salience to the dichotomy between state and society, but with little agreement as to where the one begins and the other leaves off.

The transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev era was truly seismic in nature. Re-evaluations were effected in all areas of policy, resulting, most visibly, in the fundamental reordering of relations with the United States and fellow N.A.T.O. countries, and the demise of the Warsaw Pact and communist régimes in Eastern Europe. Equally sweeping were alterations in approach to the Third World and, more specifically, sub-saharan Africa, where changes in policy Soviet retreat.

Soon after Algeria's independence in 1962, one of the so-called ‘Historic Leaders’ who had founded the Front de libération nationale (F.L.N.) in 1954, Mohamed Boudiaf, announced that the F.L.N. was dead and declared his opposition to Ahmed Bella's army-backed régime. Boudiaf explained why he disagreed with the policies and actions of the Government in a book entitled Ou va l' Algerie?, ‘Where is Algeria Going?’ (Paris, 1964), and remained in exile in Morocco until called back home in 1992 by the same army to preside over the Haut comité d' état (H.C.E.) that would suppress the electoral process and introduce another state of siege.

Since 1987–8 the World Bank, together with other donors, has been engaged in a programme of activities known as ‘Social Dimensions of Adjustment’ (S.D.A.). This is the latest in a line of ‘pro-poor’ initiatives which the organisation has sponsored over the last two decades. This article analyses the Bank's succession of policies against the background of the changing political and economic world situation, as well as alternative policy agendas.

It is generally agreed that the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in March 1988 marked the final attempt to secure a military solution to the Angolan conflict. Thereafter, in December 1988, South Africa, Cuba, and Angola signed the so-called ‘New York accord’ that included a timetable for the phased withdrawal of the South Africans and the Cubans from Namibia and Angola, respectively; in June 1989, the Gbadolite agreement initiated African attempts to end the continuing armed struggle in Angola; and in March 1990, Namibia achieved its long-awaited independence. But despite these efforts and developments, the war continued between the Government that had been established in Luanda by the Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola (M.P.L.A.) in November 1975 and the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (Unita), with devastating implications for the country's estimated ten million inhabitants. Not before May 1991 was a final peace agreement signed in Portugal, and then with considerably poorer options for political stability and economic recovery than would have been the case after the original accord in New York.

The ostensible purpose of intelligence collection and activity is the preservation of national security. A careful examination of what has been published in this field in recent years has convinced me that all African régimes and liberation movements have established some form of secret state-security apparatus, in many cases with considerable external assistance. As for foreign intelligence services, such as America's C.I.A., Russia's K.G.B., and Israel's Mossad, they have proved to be effective major mechanisms for influencing the internal affairs of African nations.

Given the socio-political and economic changes that have taken place since independence nearly 30 years ago, the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) Government has been remarkably slow to acknowledge the significance of those small-scale business activities popularly referred to as ‘Jua Kali’—Swahili for ‘hot sun’, since hardly any enjoy the benefit of either adequate shade or shelter.

International economics and global politics are unfamiliar territory for many. However, the operations of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) have profound impacts upon the countries with which they treat, and these extend beyond financial issues and geo-politics. This article indicates how the I.M.F. has imposed ‘conditionalities’ in sub-Saharan Africa as integral elements of Structural Adjustment Programmes (S.A.P.s) that affect not only the lives of all the inhabitants, but also the nature and landscapes of the nations concerned — their very geographical composition.

Kenya has for many years enjoyed a reputation for political stability, democratic institutions, lack of corruption, and economic growth, unlike a number of other countries in Africa. The Government has sought to emphasise this image in order to retain and attract foreign investment and aid, and to maintain a booming tourist industry. But for some time a corrosion of the rule of law has been taking place behind the facade of legitimacy, a process so accelerated during 1990 and 1991 that many people have questioned the validity of Kenya's reputation.

The imperative to regulate and redistribute land has become almost universal to governments in the developing world. In Africa, this kind of policy has been couched in impressive language that justifies increasing regulatory control as the only viable way to revolutionise the productive use of land for national development. Land reforms often signify one element of a larger trend involving the expansion of the state at the expense of other forms of societal authority. As such, they represent the frontier of a widening struggle over legitimacy and control between ‘state’ and ‘society’. Scholars from a wide variety of intellectual traditions have recently shown increasing interest in exploring the nature and impact of the state. However, the overall utility of such an approach in helping us to understand political developments in Africa has often been hindered by the absence of empirical data.

The ‘discovery’ of third-world women and their situation followed in the wake of research by feminists in western societies. In the late 1960s, Ester Boserup documented that especially African rural women had experienced a major increase in their workload during this century; they had become the main producers not only of subsistence food but also of cash crops.

Botswana has achieved rapid growth with stability since independence in 1966, largely through the supportive interrelations between an open market economy and a system of élite democracy, successfully blending ‘traditional’ and modern elements, and offering a range of fairly free and meaningful political choices. But growth, and the policies of a selectively interventionist state, have produced increasingly deep inequalities of property and incomes, posing problems for the stability of the political economy in future.

During almost two decades, beginning in the early 1970s, the Horn of Africa was racked by the ravages of hunger and war. Natural disasters are not new to the region, which historically could count on at least seven major droughts each century, but in the current era they have been increasing, in part due to massive deforestation and the changing pattern of weather. It is estimated that in Ethiopia alone, because of soil erosion and deforestation, 30,000 million tons of top-soil are lost each year. A second important factor affecting the severity of famine has been the dramatic escalation in the level and intensity of civil conflict, nowhere more evident than in Ethiopia.

It is a tragic irony of African nationalism that the potent weapon of democracy, which indigenous politicians wielded so effectively to dislodge European colonialism from the continent, has been misused and perverted in the independence era despite its continuing historical and moral appeal. Although many leaders passionately expressed commitment to the achievement of democracy before attaining state power, their actions thereafter have for the most part proved that they had appropriated this popular concept mainly for its instrumental value; namely, in order to mobilise mass support in the contest for power with the aid of an ideological slogan. Many of the most regrettable acts by African leaders may be attributed either to opportunism and cynicism or to a genuine incomprehension of the principles of democracy, because their implementation ought to have enhanced the human dignity and quality of life of all concerned.

One of the casualties of the gruesome nightmare that is gripping Somalia has been the capacity to think historically and systematically about the nature of the malady, and to find practical ways of controlling the present in order to build a more sustainable future. As explained by Ahmed Samatar: ‘the fullness of understanding a given situation is [not] coterminous with the immediate and experiential.Rather, any visible elements of a particular reality are usually signals that other more discrete factors could be at work’. For far too long, those opposed to Siyad Barre's régime refused to go beyond the General and his constellation of clients to identify ‘the enemy’. Their unwillingness to engage in any hard-headed analysis and their hostility to critical scholarship has undoubtedly helped to condemn the very people they ‘wanted’ to liberate.

Decolonisation was a policy of the West, as well as a process reflecting the radical transformation of the configuration of power in the international system. The Soviet Union, perceived as poised to dominate Eurasia, had to be ‘contained’ lest it expanded into the Rimland and challenged the West at sea. This geo-political obsession was reinforced by the ‘loss of China’ and the outbreak of the bitter struggle between North and South Korea. But the cold war was about ideology as well as military power, and containment was therefore not just a question of building pacts but of fostering the ‘right’ kind of political régimes.

Faced with global depression and political readjustments in the late 1980s, all states in Africa have been trying to implement major reforms. For socialist régimes, however, the demands have been the more daunting since these changes have often directly threatened the ideology (and the aspirations) of creating a more egalitarian social order in the wake of colonial rule. Their states faced fundamental social, economic, and ideological transformations, as well as political reconstruction; what was required was no less than the replacement of a socialist with a capitalist market economy, and corresponding alterations in property relations that involved enterprises such as peasant holdings, small family firms, and co-operatives, as well as large-scale farms, factories, and plants under state control. These reforms not only affected the lives of ordinary people, but also reshaped the power and privileges of the government, party leaders, and others directly dependent upon the state.

The emergence of a consensus that the performance of the public sector in Ghana had been poor, and that there were limits as to what it could achieve in terms of economic growth, led the Provisional National Defence Council (P.N.D.C.) to implement various policy reforms. As the Governor of the Bank of Ghana argued in 1984: ‘Given the dismal performance of the public sector, there is need for greater reliance on private investment in the Government's efforts to resuscitate the economy’. At the same time, the P.N.D.C. began to reassess the economic role of the public sector. According to a recent document prepared by the National Commission for Democracy, ‘changed national policies’ in Ghana include ‘the reduction of the state's rôle in the economic life of the nation through shifting of more responsibility to the private sector.