To understand what people do and why, we need to know something about what they have done. Rarely, however, are social scientists direct observers of all events of interest to them. Hence, most often we rely on information that someone else has collected, more or less systematically, usually for some other purpose. The behavioural revolution in the social sciences, with its shrill cries of ‘falsifiability!’ and ‘reproducibility!’, has pushed us towards the sort of evidence that can be recorded and stored in quantitative form. It has as well urged us towards increasingly complex, and perhaps sophisticated, techniques for exploring relationship within that evidence.

This article looks at the railway workers of Ghana in the context of a struggle for domination between their own union and the Workers' Defence Committees created by the state after the coup d'etat of 31 December 1981, organised by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. The conflict between what might be called ‘moderate’ and ‘militant’ workers mirrored the disputes at the national level during 1982 between the political pragmatists, including Rawlings, and such socialist-oriented individuals as Chris Atim.1

Concern for democratisation, central in the study of comparative poiltics over recent years, has tended to shift attention away from the African continent. North Africa, in particular, has been neglected in this literature, though it has witnessed important liberalising political changes – most notably with the removal from office of Tunisia's President-for-Life Habib Bourguiba, and the dramatic decline of the Frot de libération nationale (F.L.N.) in Algeria following political violence in October 1988.

Since Italy's defeat in World Ward II, Ethiopia has pressed its claim to Eritrea. Following an abortive federation imposed by the United Nations in 1950, Haile Selassie annexed the former Italian colony in 1962, and for the last three decades Eritreans have fought for their independence.

Though the issues of the 1989 Senegal–Mauritania conflict were deep-rooted, the unexpected passions unleashed within the respective populations caught both Governments off-guard, leading to a total stand-off and the failure of all attempts at resolution. This occured among states which previously had experienced peaceful relations, were making progress in joint economic development efforts, and whose markets were intertwined through trade and labour migration.

Since its founding in May 1988, Africa Watch has documented and reported on human rights abuses in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These findings are available in eight book-length reports and more than 70 newsletters, with new evidence available all the time on such topics as, for example, the suppression of information in the Sudan, violations of laws of war in Liberia, the devastating impact of the 15-year armed conflict in Angola, slavery in Mauritania, and interference with academic freedom in Zimbabwe.

Genocide is easily defined: ‘the deliberate extermination of a people’. It appears to occur in human history primarily in association with the emergence of the state, or in the effort of an established régime to maintain or expand its domination, and is virtually unrecorded for ‘traditional’ or pre-state societies. Although the concept of ‘development’ is by contrast exceedingly ambiguous (other than as an ideal process or social form in an evolutionary typology), the meaning conveyed would be antithetical to the definition of genocide, being some form of material or moral improvement in social existence, rather than a means towards the rapid extinction of a cultural tradition.

The economic crisis of the 1970s in sub-Saharan Africa led to a critical evaluation of the rôle of government policies by international agencies, including two contrasting views of the problem by the Economic Commission for Africa/Organisation of African Unity and the World Bank. The E.C.A./O.A.U. largely placed the blame on the deteriorating external environment, emphasising the reduction of income inequality, poverty, and unemployment through a continuation of the state-led introverted development strategy of the previous decade. The World Bank responded in the opposite direction, mainly blaming the inappropriate state policies of the post-independence period, while encouraging a re-focus on economic growth through a structural reversal of the state-imposed impediments to the efficient operations of markets.

While a Research Associate attached to the Ministry of Community Development and Women's Affairs, Zimbabwe, in 1984, I studied the relation between gender and class in six Resettlement Areas (R.A.s) during an eight-month period in there north-eastern Provinces: Central and East Mashonaland, and Manicaland. The country is divided into five agro-ecological ‘Natural Regions’, numbered I to V, indicating decreasing rainfall and soil fertility, and the R.A.s studied were all in II or III, albeit in a year of drought.

Now recognised as the leading woman novelist of francophone Africa, Aminata Sow Fall first achieved literary attention with the publication of Le Revenant (Dakar, 1976). After a rather long stay in France, where she studied at the Sorbonne and became agrégée de lettres, Sow Fall decided to distance herself from other African writters by ensuring that ‘The Ghost’ contained few if any traces of her experiences in the West. As explained several years later, what really surprised her was that novels published by blacks always referenced themselves to the West, whereas she felt the need ‘to present our literature to others so that they see and understand us’: