The long-heralded U.N.C.T.A.D. II took place in New Delhi's splendid conference hall, Vigyan Bhavan, equipped with every modern facility— simultaneous interpretation in five languages and a daily Journal in three, a vast secretarial staff, and an elaborate documentation service running off the millions of words written and spoken during the conference. The 133 member countries were represented, many at ministerial level, as well as all the specialised agencies and regional commissions of the United Nations, and many other international bodies. The U.N. Secretary-General himself came to inaugurate the conference with his blessing, although—significantly, perhaps—Vietnam negotiations delayed his arrival for a few days. Technical experts from all over the world were in attendance; and New Delhi felt for a time like the world capital that some say it is destined to become.

This conference was attended by the Presidents of Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Upper Volta, and Senegal, the Prime Minister of the Gambia, the representative of the Chairman of the National Liberation Council of Ghana, and the representative of the Head of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria.

The initiative had been taken by the Heads of the Senegal River Basin States (Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal) following meetings held by them at Nouakchott in November 1965, and at Bamako two years later. They proposed that such a conference should be held at Monrovia in order to create a West African regional group, and requested President Tubman of Liberia to play host. The conference was organised in two stages: a ministerial preparatory meeting, from 17 to 21 April, and the session of the Heads of State and Government, from 22 to 24 April 1968.

‘There is a tendency for laymen to talk of the problem of “illiteracy” in terms which suggest that this problem is simply one of teaching people to read and write and that once they know how to read and write, all will be well…The point…is that all of us are to some extent “higher illiterates”, and that all of us need to cultivate the habit of reflective thought in order that what is seen and read may lead us to a more accurate perception of the world and its peoples. For all of us, therefore, developing the habits and skills of reading means not merely deciphering words more quickly, or abstracting ideas more effectively, or recalling more fully what we have read, but also thinking more purposefully about what we can decipher, abstract and recall.’

This meeting was organised jointly by the Government of Haute-Volta and by the Cultural Division of U.N.E.S.C.O., which had taken the initiative, as part of its preparation for a general History of Africa. In this context one must mention also the recent colloquia held at Niamey and at Timbuktu, the former concerned with oral, the second with written sources, ofAfrican history. This Ouagadougou meeting was essentially logistic in character; having established in principle that it is necessary to collect African oral traditions in order to fill out the outlines of history, the task was to list the problems of all kinds posed by the work of collection, and to consider possible solutions, especially in connection with both national and international research plans.

The Africa Christian Press was established in January 1964 as a new publisher in Africa. The aim was to provide Christian books relevant to the African situation. The means of attaining this has been to find Africans with a genuine Christian faith, and to encourage them to put something of that faith into writing. English is the medium, enabling a book written in West Africa to be enjoyed in East Africa, and vice versa. Writers in 12 English-speaking countries are sharing in this work, and to date 14 small titles have been published.

This conference, held under the auspices of the British Ministry of Overseas Development, was the twenty-first in the series of annual University of Cambridge Overseas Studies Committee conferences. Originally devoted to colonial administration and development, especially in Africa, their concern has now spread to the third world as a whole. All the same, among the 150-odd academics, administrators, and politicians who attended, Africans and Africanists still predominated, as did African examples in the 14 papers presented.

Organised and sponsored by the U.N. Public Administration Division, this intercontinental seminar dealt with problems related to the development of senior administrators in the public service of the developing countries. The 37 participants were either leading civil servants or heads of training institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; in addition there were observers from the advanced countries and the specialised agencies of the United States. The seminar's four working groups met regularly in the afternoons to explore in depth the topics discussed at the morning plenary sessions. These included: the definition of the senior administrator and the delineation of his responsibilities; the identification of his developmental needs; the personnel system under which he operates; the institutional arrangements for the development of his administrative potentialities; and the evaluation of the methods and techniques designed to achieve these objectives.

Experts in the problems of community development and animation rurale from Africa, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States were brought together in this seminar sponsored by the Institut de recherche d'application des méthodes de développement (I.R.A.M., Paris) and the Geneva–Africa Institute to discuss, in the quiet, academic setting of the Institute, the differences in methods, techniques, and trends between ‘community development’—largely an outgrowth of British and American techniques—and ‘animation rurale’—developed mainly in the French-speaking world.

This seminar, held at the Kenya Institute of Administration under the auspices of the Commonwealth Foundation, was attended by the principals and some of the staff of schools and institutes of public administration in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mauritius, Malawi, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana; in addition, C.A.F.R.A.D. and E.C.A. were represented by observers. The proceedings were under the general chairmanship of J. E. Kariuki, principal of the Kenya Institute of Administration. Papers on five main subjects formed the basis for discussion.

This workshop, sponsored by the University of East Africa and the Institute of Social Research at Makerere University College, with additional financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, was subdivided into two brief conferences. The underlying idea was that the more traditional disciplinary concerns of the political scientists of East Africa should form the basis for the first day, after which the workshop would broaden into an interdisciplinary experiment, with additional participants.

The O.C.A.M. Charter was signed on 27 June 1966 in Tananarive by the Heads of State of the following 14 countries: the Federal Republic of Cameroun, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo–Brazzayule, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Gabon, Upper Volta, Madagascar, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Chad, and Togo.

In September 1967 a conference of 18 experts (geneticists, anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, historians, and jurists) from 16 countries—Belgium, Brazil, Cuba, France, India, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Poland, Senegal, Sudan, Trinidad and Tobago, the U.S.S.R., the U.K., the U.S.A., and Yugoslavia—met in Paris to discuss the biological, sociological, moral, and ethnic aspects of the race question, with special reference to the propositions adopted at a similar meeting called by UNESCO in Moscow in 1964. These in turn had brought up to date earlier statements made in 1950 and 1951. The Paris Conference agreed unanimously on the following statement, recently released for publication by UNESCO:

Perhaps a major decision that must be made by the organisers of professional conferences is whether to structure them in terms of a particular theme or alternatively to allow for a wide diversity of presentation and topics. If the former course is followed there is some danger that specificity of focus will be achieved at the expense of over-all attendance, but this did not appear to be the case at the recent meeting of the A.S.A., attended by over ioo members. Fortunately, the subject of the conference, ‘Education in Africa: current experiment and research’, was itself diffuse enough to enable contributions to be forthcoming from a wide variety of disciplines and from scholars whose research preoccupations were extremely diverse.

Political speeches by African leaders are seldom fully reported outside the country concerned; and it is especially difficult for English-speaking research workers to track down the ephemeral political documents of Francophone Africa. It therefore seems appropriate to publish the following extracts from an important speech delivered by President Boumediène to senior officials— les cadres de la nation—meeting at the Palais des Nations, Algiers, on 19 June 1968.

This year's annual seminar of the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, organised by Professor Carl Gösta Widstrand, the director of the Institute, was devoted to boundary problems. It was an interisciplinary gathering, attended by some 30 scholars, from 12 countries. The daily proceedings were divided into two: in the mornings, the papers were delivered as public lectures at the University, and in the afternoons, the seminar met for discussion.

The African Studies Center at U.C.L.A. has recently inaugurated an intensive 15-month seminar in African studies for 30 faculty members, nominated from I 5 out of the 75 institutions which applied to participate. The purpose of this programme, which is being financed by the U.S. Office of Education, is to encourage the growth of African studies in teacher education. The 15 participating colleges were selected on the basis of their commitment to introducing African studies or to expanding their existing courses. Each was asked to nominate two faculty members, in the conviction that by interacting with one another (as well as with administrators and other colleagues of their home institutions), two participants can do much more to stimulate African studies than could one person, acting singly. The U.C.L.A. seminar is being directed by Dr John Povey of the Department of English and Dr Michael Lofchie of the Department of Political Science; it has three distinct phases.

Organised by the Economic Commission for Africa, with the Government of Niger as host, this meeting brought together delegates from 16 African Governments (11 French-speaking, 5 English-speaking) and observer/ participants from the United Nations and its specialised agencies (I.L.O., U.N.E.S.C.O., U.N.I.C.E.F., F.A.O., W.H.O.), the O.A.U., the World Assembly of Youth, the World Y.W.C.A., the Organisation internationale des employeurs, and the All Africa Conference of Churches.

…Dear brothers, officials of the nation, it is useful today to examine the progress and achievements accomplished during the last three years and to review the various aspects of the Revolution during this period…

Certain ill-disposed persons have tried to spread doubt and confusion by means of a hostile propaganda campaign intended to convince public opinion in the country and throughout the world that on 19 June [1965] we took a step backward and not a leap forward. People acting out of selfinterest, others motivated by private material interests who regarded all revolutionary progress as a threat to their privileges, as well as agents in the pay of foreign countries, have deliberately tried to create and maintain this atmosphere of doubt and confusion…