The proliferating literature on the emergent states of Asia and Africa stresses as its theme their newness and lack of political experience. New nation states have arisen often where none existed before, and their leaders have been confronted with a host of problems which they had not faced previously. Nowhere are such states thought to be more novel and inexperienced than in Africa, where a scant half century ago peoples lived in tribal communities, their economic and political context being demarcated mainly by family and kin groups. Lucy Mair's appropriately titled book, The New Nations, puts the problem pithily: ‘The new African governments are recruited from new men…The relationship of the leader with his followers, of ministers with their colleagues, with bureaucrats, with the general public, are new relationships.’1

DURING the late 1950S and early 19605, Israel mounted an active campaign of aid to Africa, which took three main forms: technical help in agriculture, joint commercial ventures, and military assistance. Of the three, the military and quasi-military programmes made the most considerable mark in Africa;1 they were also an important part of Israel's overall foreign policy, in an attempt to gain political influence through military aid, and thus to help overcome her isolation in the Middle East. Israel's military assistance to Africa illustrates several important aspects of foreign aid. This article deals mainly with the political motives of the donor country, and the various ways in which it may be concerned to influence the actions of the recipient government. Later, there is some discussion of the social and cultural barriers to the transfer of military and para-military organisations from one culture to another.

Chinese involvement in Africa may be conveniently dated from the Bandung conference of April 1955, which marked the initiation of a policy of Chinese Communist co-operation with the states of Afro-Asia. Inasmuch as the movement in Africa which resulted in the independence of many states in the next decade had hardly begun at that time, the most significant African contact made by China at Bandung was with President Nasser. The development of contacts between the two states led Egypt in May 1956 to become the first African country to give its official recognition to the Chinese People's Republic (C.P.R.). Thereafter the Suez crisis served to bring the two countries still closer together.

One of the basic concepts of modern political analysis is the dichotomy (or continuum) of left–right. It has been a fundamental element of the ideological apparatus of the modern world at least since the French Revolution.

There have been two kinds of intellectual debates concerning this concept throughout modern history. One revolves around the criteria that should be used to delineate the ideal-typical poles of the concepts, and the degree to which the concept has discrete points or is a continuum. A subordinate question has always been whether it is fruitful to make the concept tri-modal and include a ‘centre’. Obviously, this debate has both moral and intellectual dimensions, and it is doubtful whether it is either possible or desirable to separate them.

Social scientists studying the development of Liberian political and social institutions have frequently viewed the country as fitting the model of a plural society. M. G. Smith has defined such a society as the differential incorporation of two or more collectivities within the same society… presum[ing] significant antecedent differences of institutions, culture and ethnicity between the collectivities concerned and…restrict[ing] their assimilation by preserving or promoting the institutional distinctness.

Changes in Africa rarely go by halves – some developments have been spectacularly successful, such as education, but the failures have also been notable, particularly the lack of expansion in employment. In the words of a recent survey: ‘The most disturbing feature of the employment situation in Africa in recent years has been that the absolute level of wage employment has changed so little, despite high capital investment and the rapid growth of the public sector.’1 Table I shows an accurate and general picture of the problem as it confronts Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia; this article is concerned to examine some of the dimensions, both economic and political, of its solution.

Countries live in the shadow of their past: responses to current circumstances are conditioned by what has gone before. In developing countries plans for economic growth are conditioned by previous policy – or the lack of it – and by what was done or what was not done in previous decades. In Africa south of the Sahara, with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia, it is the past history of colonial domination which conditions the present.

As their countries emerged from colonial status, indigenous private entrepreneurs in tropical Africa turned to their governments for what they regarded as indispensable assistance. African businessmen, hampered by strong expatriate competitors (in many cases dominating their sectors), by foreign-owned banks unwilling to provide them with necessary credits, by their own managerial weakness, and by other severe disabilities, concluded that the broad and generous patronage of the central government was essential to the realisation of their aspirations for greater wealth and economic power.

While independence in West Africa focused academic attention on political parties, the proliferation of military régimes in the late 1960s– by 1970, seven West African countries had experienced military rule — brought two other institutions into prominence: the military and civil bureaucracies. This article seeks to throw some light on the place of the civil bureaucracy in Senegal through a study of the role of bureaucrats in the country's political process.

Whatever the origin of a federation, whether aggregation or devolution, its establishment at once raises three problems: how to allocate functions rationally; how to allocate taxing powers; and how to share revenue between the governments of that federation. It is for the constitution-makers to settle the first problem, leaving the remaining two to federal financial experts.

Somalia is one of the poorest countries of the world, with an estimated income per capita of about $50.1 Yet she is one of the largest recipients of foreign aid: during 1964–1969 she received an annual average of about $15 per head of her 3 million population.2 This rate of aid is more than three times the figure of $4.5 per capita, which represents the average annual aid to other developing countries during 1964–1967.3

In many West African countries there are large numbers of foreigners who have settled down to live and work or who come periodically to help harvest the crops. These aliens may be seen, from one point of view, as a useful and willing labour force, and a politically passive group requiring little in the way of services, or, from another viewpoint, as an insupportable drain on an economy which is not able to supply jobs for local people, and a source of political conflict because they have no allegiance to the ruling government. The growth in the economic power of Lebanese businessmen and local reactions to this competition have been ably discussed;1 this article will be concerned with African aliens, who are present in far greater numbers than the Lebanese and whose position has become increasingly insecure in recent years.

The connection between economic growth and population growth has been considerably played down by economists in the last hundred years, whereas eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists seldom discussed development without considering the effect of population growth. The earlier writers were not unanimous – as they are not today – on the optimum size and rate of growth of population and its effect on the gross national product per capita.

Land has had great prominence in Kenya politics throughout the country's colonial and post-colonial history. The purpose of this article is to advance a preliminary political analysis of the impact of two major land reforms undertaken in Kenya within the last 15 years. One of these, begun during the ‘Mau Mau’ rising in the mid-1950s, enabled Africans to consolidate and gain individual legal titles to their land holdings and subsequently to participate in the production of lucrative cash crops. The second reform enabled Africans to buy land from European farmers, many of whom wished to liquidate their holdings as far as possible before independence occurred in December 1963. Both land reforms are still in progress, for the Government is seeking to maximise the economic productivity of those who have benefited from them. Simultaneously, it is seeking to extend land consolidation and title registration to thousands of farmers who have not yet been affected.

Two conflicting views have been presented in this Journal recently concerning the necessity for African countries to restructure their economies and reduce their dependence on exports in order to attain development.1 Rather than attempt to enter into the controversy in detail, I propose to describe the dominant characteristics of the world markets for the major exports of sub-Saharan African countries, which render export expansion by itself unlikely to contribute to higher standards of living for the broad masses of the population.

In the summer of 1967, when Nigeria's first federal constitution had been virtually shattered by two bloody military coups, and when it looked very likely that the Eastern Region might try to secede from the Federation, a military decree was promulgated dissolving the four former Regions, and replacing them by a new structure of 12 States (see Map I). In the following pages the largest of these will be considered, namely the North-Eastern State, in order to assess the prospects of its survival as an entity and of its economic development in the years to come.

Recent years have witnessed a rebirth of interest in the study of local government (or local political systems, depending on one's theoretical orientation). This has been especially true among political Scientists seeking to develop new approaches more readily applicable to the political systems of the so-called emerging nations. It has become apparent to an increasing number of research workers that grandiose macro-theory of the Almond variety, while impressive on paper, may be of very little use in the field.1 Thus an attempt is now being made to return to the micro-level in order to gain greater conceptual clarity, and an understanding of behaviour in political situations. Unfortunately much of the new thrust to develop micro-level theory has been hampered by the continuing use of old, and at least partially outdated, tools, or what I have chosen to call (perhaps unjustifiably) ‘the public-administration approach’.

During the early years of independence, a militant women's equal rights movement has developed in Kenya. Led by urban, educated women, the movement rejects what is now seen as the traditionally inferior role of women. It wants for them an equal share in the responsibilities and the opportunities of nationhood. This article will describe the message, tactics, and leadership of the early phase of the movement.

For most organisations, a tenth anniversary session is a time for dwelling on the significance of past achievements while resolutely insisting that the best is yet to come in terms of new initiatives. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (E.C.A.) proved to be no exception when it met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during late January and early February 1969. Yet, behind the formal façade of celebration, one sensed an anxious attempt to overstate the results of past efforts in order to enlist support for a dynamic future which seems highly improbable. Because E.C.A. as an institution faces a serious crisis of confidence, its secretariat and its supporters seemed to seize on the tenth anniversary celebrations almost as if this were the last chance to change radically the Commission's role and image in the eyes of both Africa and the world. Indeed, the 1969 Commission session marked the culmination of an attempt by Robert K. A. Gardiner – the Commission's able Executive Secretary – and his associates to reverse the downward trend of E.C.A.'s influence and prestige since those halcyon early days of 1958–9 when Africans had such great hopes for their Commission.

Few authors have been able to write on Africa without making constant reference to ‘tribalism’. Could this be the distinguishing feature of the continent? or is it merely a reflection of the system of perceptions of those who write on Africa, and of their African ‘converts’? Objective reality is very difficult to disentangle from subjective perception, almost in the same way as concepts in the social sciences are hard to purify of all ideological connotations. Might not African history, written, not by Europeans, but by Africans themselves, have employed different concepts and told a different story? If so, what would have been the theoretical explanation? Are things what they are called, or do they have an existence which is independent of the nomenclature that attaches to them? When it comes to Africa, answers vary independently of whether the observer is a liberal idealist, a Marxist materialist, or an African ‘convert’.