Only a few social scientists outside the field of Middle East studies are aware that in the sovereign state of Libya today there is no government. Indeed, it is not likely to have one so long as the country's strongman, Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi,1 continues to be the leader of the Libyan revolution. This has been the case ever since 2 March 1977, when the institution of government in its traditional legal-bureaucratic sense was dismantled, and the people's authority, exercised through people's congresses and committees, was proclaimed. By this action, Libya initiated in practice the so-called era of jamahiriya—the era of the masses and the practice of direct democracy – and has taken a number of steps in that direction. A recent example was the renaming of some of its embassies overseas as ‘people's bureaux’, with Libyan students and citizens taking charge of their functions and management.2 This action, instigated personally by Qadhafi, was intended to illustrate to the world that since Libya has no government, ordinary Libyan citizens overseas represent themselves directly to foreign peoples.

Important changes have been occurring in the ill-defined area of study called development economics. The purpose of this article is to identify and describe what are judged to have been the most important changes in development economics during the last decade, and thereafter to evaluate their relevance to the circumstances of the economies of Africa.

In October 1970, after the civil war had ended, General Yakubu Gowon reiterated his earlier pledge that military rule would be terminated on 1 October 1976, but two years before that date he postponed the return to civilian rule indefinitely on the grounds that Nigerians had not yet demonstrated ‘moderation and self-control in pursuing sectional ends’.1 In July 1975, nine years after his own elevation to Head of the Federal Military Government (F.M.G.), Gowon was removed by a coup d'état led by Brigadier Murtala Mohammed, who cited mismanagement as the immediate reason. However, after the coup, ‘well-placed spokesmen for the new administration…reaffirmed that the goals of the coup were to restore the good image of the military and to create conditions which will make reactive military intervention unnecessary in the future’.2

Our country [Nigeria] is the largest single unit in Africa… we are not going to abdicate the position in which God Almighty has placed us… The whole black continent is looking up to this country to liberate it from thralldom.

The creation in November 1979 of a Transitional Government of National Unity under the leadership of Wodei Goukouni was greeted by most observers with a sigh of relief and a measure of guarded optimism. The composition of the new régime in Chad, and especially the enhanced rôle of the defeated Sara south within it, may possibly stabilise a situation still exceedingly volatile and inherently unstable. Yet, as West Africa cautioned, ‘twenty years of government by a group unrepresentative of the country, pretending to fill the vacuum at the centre of power and doing so with conspicuous ineffectiveness, cannot be easily erased’.1 Even given the sincerity and goodwill of all 11 groups in the new power hierarchy – which is far from assured, because every conceivable opportunistic faction has been included – the attempt to bring unity and stability to a land that has never experienced either may easily founder against the harsh realities of sharp internal divisions.

Few would disagree with the observation that the schools and universities of sub-Saharan Africa are perhaps the most important contemporary mechanisms of stratification and redistribution on the continent. They are not simply reflections of extant patterns of social and economic differentiation, but rather powerful independent forces in the creation of new and emergent groupings based on the variable possession of power, wealth, and prestige. Moreover, in using the word ‘contemporary’ we should not overlook the fact that formal educational systems are not a recent phenomenon in Africa. Schools existed on the western littoral in the eighteenth century, and their development in many parts of Africa, though slow up to the beginning of World War II, was of great significance. However, the African ‘educational explosion’ is largely a post-war phenomenon, and as a result we can no longer regard the school as an alien and intrusive institution perched precariously atop a range of predominantly ‘traditional’ societies. In most parts of Africa, the school is now as familiar a part of the local scene as the corrugated iron roof. Virtually everywhere, a whole generation would think it inconceivable to be without schools and, what is more, though Africa still remains the least formally educated of the continents, almost everyone now has a lively sense of the individual benefits that education can bring. As in other areas of social life, Africans perceive schooling in shrewd, pragmatic, and instrumental terms.

Genuine efforts have been made in recent years to build a more egalitarian and just society in Tanzania. A ‘leadership code’ forbids senior government and party officials to have a second income from business interests or rents; a steeply progressive tax system reduces income differentials from a ratio of 1/100 before independence to 1/10 in the 1970s; a period of national service is obligatory for secondaryschool and university graduates; fairly successful attempts have been made to radically reform the whole educational system; and the major financial, industrial, and commercial enterprises have been nationalised. But 13 years after its inception in 1967, it is now generally acknowledged that the policy of creating ujamaa villages has failed in terms of what they had been designed to achieve: namely, the building of a socialist society in the rural areas of Tanzania where more than 90 per cent of the population lives.

The inter-state boundaries of Africa have changed remarkably little since the end of colonial rule, despite their lack of contiguity with the economic, ethnic, and political realities of African societies. In the few cases where attempts have been made to reject, in principle, the boundaries which were inherited at the time of independence, the demands for change have emerged in three major forms: as irredentist claims by established states based mainly on assertions of pre-colonial hegemony; as calls for the re-establishment of early colonial states which had been either partitioned or integrated into a larger state by the time of decolonisation; or as ethnic nationalist demands by partitioned communities.1

Late in 1979 the Zambian Government unveiled its Third National Development Plan which will guide policies until the year 1984, and this implies that problems of unemployment, particularly in urban areas, will be partly overcome by an expansion of self-employment possibilities.

Such was the enthusiasm for the new initiative that the absence of reliable information surrounding it was largely ignored. This article attempts to provide relevant data concerning a number of issues which will be vital in implementing any measures to encourage self-employment in the so-called ‘informal sector’ of the Zambian economy. In particular we shall endeavour to quantify the likely flows into the labour force, particularly from the educational system, the possible growth of formal wage employment in urban areas, and the current size and composition of the informal sector. Finally, conclusions are drawn concerning the possible rôle of this sector in absorbing the unemployed in the plan period.

There is general agreement that sports are used for political purposes. The controversy over whether this should or should not be the case is really a struggle about how they should be used. Those who argue for the separation of sports and politics tend to be satisfied with the existing use, while those against the separation tend to be dissatisfied with the present situation. The positions are rational: each group seeks to use this arena to achieve its own political objectives. Although some involvement of politics in sports appears universal, the degree varies considerably from country to country.

The primary purpose of this article is to survey the political history of the Union Defence Force (U.D.F.) and the South African Defence Force (S.A.D.F.) – the former term applying to the Union and the latter to the Republic of South Africa – from 1914 until 1979, in such a manner that other scholars can undertake comparative research on African armies in general and those in Southern Africa in particular. Although the focus is on one geographical area, namely, South-West Africa or Namibia, for a 65-year time span, this need not constrain other analysts in their choice of location or duration. A secondary purpose is to include the additional element of international organisations, specifically, the League of Nations and the United Nations, because hopefully this will enrich the comparative utility of the research design. The principal organising device of the enquiry is that of the differing rôles of the military unit, an approach which has been utilised in the literature concerning armed forces in non-western areas.1

Does Zimbabwe provide the model for the likely transformation of white minority rule in the industrial heart of Southern Africa? With their morale boosted, the expectations of many black South Africans have been raised. Likewise many outside commentators predict the inevitable downfall of the white bastion along similar lines of escalating military confrontation after the last buffer state but Namibia has gone. Even Nationalist newspapers draw the lessons by admonishing the Government to pay attention to the ‘real leaders’ of the subordinates instead of unrepresentative collaborators. The Afrikaner political leadership uses the Rhodesian example to drum home its message of ‘adapt or die’ to a bewildered electorate.

Discussion of industrial activity in capitalist Third-World countries has usually centred on a series of dualistic frameworks, most recently the opposition between the so-called ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors of an economy. Such dichotomies attempt to divide the activities of labour as cleanly as possible into two groups sharing common characteristics. The categories that emerge – modern/traditional, large/small-scale, formal/informal – overlap to a considerable degree because, in effect, they all attempt, with varying crudity, to compare the socio-economic characteristics of those dominant capitalist enterprises which are based on intensive capital, high-level technology, and a large scale of production, with those activities in the economy which are not based on such features. As such, the second category tends to have both negative and residual components.

The defeat of Amin and the liberation of Uganda by Nyerere's Tanzania is the most significant African event of the last decade. With it Africa came of age, able to criticise itself, no longer determined to support the honour of corrupt rulers against the world simply because they are black. Amin's buffoonery at last grew tiresome with surfeit. He was a clown who lived his life of power, self-indulgence, and tyranny to the utterance, making himself and his country a total jest, so that all the world must recognise the basic absurdity and iniquity of post-uhuru military régimes in Africa.

In the three decades that have elapsed since the end of World War II, the overseas empires created by the European powers have almost all come to an end, and a wide range of new states, large and small, has taken their place. Now, when many of these nations are approaching the 25th anniversaries of their independence, it is a fitting moment to ask how well they are doing, not in any spirit of paternalistic chauvinism, but rather in order to see how far the hopes and expectations of the last years of dependence have been fulfilled in the first years of freedom, and whether a modern polity, modelled essentially on the nations of Europe, can be created and sustained by peoples of very different traditions, working within arbitrarily imposed boundaries that were not of their own choosing.

A popular story made the rounds in the European community in Léopoldville at independence in 1960. It was said that the new Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and President Moïse Tshombe of the dissident Katanga Province could only confer through an interpreter. Whether this colonial tale was true or not, neither French nor Flemish were widely diffused in the Belgian Congo; indeed, no single lingua franca had emerged during some 80 years of Belgian rule. This article examines the origins of the decisions taken and the attitudes established during the Léopold era, 1879–1908, that continued to influence language policy throughout the entire colonial period, and even thereafter.

Although the analysis which follows centres upon the West African state of Mali, much of what is said applies in varying measure to other examples of military state capitalism in Africa and elsewhere. Its importance is underscored by the fact that this is an increasingly common régime variant in the Third World. Similarly, domestic militarism has been transformed from an unusual occurrence to a phenomenon which evokes little more than a déjà vu response. Today nearly half of the governments of the ‘South’ are directly or indirectly dominated by the military, whereas three decades ago little more than 15 per cent could be so classified.

The constitutional development of Nigeria which started under the British occupation has been marked by two fundamental principles: the decision to set the political evolution of the country on a federal basis, and the effort, far less successful, to integrate the traditional institutions into a modern political system. This second principle will be the subject of this article, which I hope will also shed some light on the complex relationships between tradition and modernity, and thus show the importance of ‘primordial loyalties’ in political life.

The continuing prominence of coups d'état in the political life of the Third World has sustained interest in the question of whether, and in what circumstances, the armed forces are capable of making a positive contribution to modernisation. During the 1960s, a number of scholars began to take a favourable view of the military's modernising potential based on ideal-typical conceptions of armed-force organisations which, in Henry Bienen's felicitous phrase, were ‘unencumbered by empirical detail’.1 A second dimension of support for the positive image was perceived in the attitudes and class background of the officer corps.2 Critics of this viewpoint questioned the accuracy of these characterisations given the impact that transfer to a different socio-economic and political context has on institutional performance. Case-studies of Third-World militaries found that many lacked a single corporate identity, suffering from factionalism along cleavages of age, ethnicity, and regionalism; organisational cohesion was undermined by a proliferation of patron-client relationships.3 The motives for staging coups also were questioned, the military being perceived as particularly well-equipped to defend and pursue its corporate interests.1

In 1968, Guenther Roth perceptively argued the utility of using the concept of patrimonialism to analyse rulership in developing states.1 Roth described two principal types: ‘the historical survival of traditionalist regimes’, of which he saw Ethiopia as the foremost example; and the ‘personal rulership on the basis of loyalties that do not require any belief in the ruler's unique personal qualifications, but are inextricably linked to material incentives and rewards’.2. His distinction remains apt and serves to focus our attention on two modal political forms that continue to find expression in post-independence Africa. However, these useful categories are not mutually exclusive, and need further amplification if they are to provide much insight into the rich variety of political experimentation that still goes on throughout the continent. Moreover, since the terminology is self-consciously borrowed from Max Weber, both the traditional and modern matrices of African patrimonialism need to be explored briefly lest the reference to the Weberian connection constricts rather than enlarges the analysis.