The United States and Africa are in deep trouble when the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities disowns its sponsorship of the Ali Mazrui series The Africans on the grounds that it is an “anti-Western diatribe…and politically tendentious.” It bodes ill for the U.S. because it marks a return to the “know nothing” approach to Africa which has dominated American thinking about the African continent throughout most of our history. And it lends respectability to a cold war view of that continent which can only lead to greater misunderstanding, confrontation, and bloodshed for African peoples. What is so disturbing about the reaction of the NEH and a number of the series' reviewers is their exclusive focus on Mazrui's view of the West. Of the many important themes running through the series, did they not see or hear anything else? This self-indulgent preoccupation with the occasional opinion about “the West” is all too indicative of our times.

That criticism of colonialism can somehow be interpreted as “anti-American” points not only to a profound lack of comprehension of the nature of colonialism, but to the proclivity in U.S. policy toward Africa to identify with the wrong side. “Colonization should not be attacked,” claim many on the American right, “because that era was not only the apex of African development but a time when there was no communist threat on the continent.”

The right wing, however, has no monopoly on such myopia and misperception. America and Africa are also in deep trouble when specialists attribute all of Africa's maladies to colonialism or neo-colonialism.

In our original perspectives and hypotheses on Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa, we stated that these small centers are “the most strategic key to problems of Rural Development…points of articulation between the national systems of marketing, distribution and policy development on the one hand and the interests and productivity of the rural poor on the other.” They are “points of articulation of incentives for greater productivity…at which local rural interests are aggregated and expressed to government and party…sources of new ideas and belief systems…what some would call ‘modernizing centers,’ sources of innovation, politicization, mobilization and national integration” (Southall, 1979: 371).

As knowledge grew, our hopeful optimism was punctured and this rosy, positive picture faded. We had recognized the stagnation of the rural sector, the over-centralization and over-bureaucratization of goverments, increasing the fiscal burden, weakening popular local institutions, benefiting mainly elites and even resorting to counterproductive coercion (Southall, 1979b: 375-7). In short, we had recognized that rural development efforts so far have been disappointing and that hypotheses on rural development “must take the form of assuming conditions which do not now prevail.” None the less, with hindsight, we see that our propositions tended to state aspirations as facts, in the wrong tense and the wrong mood. We now recognize in them the same flaws that we still recognize in many other grant-seeking documents.

We had also entertained the hypothesis that a three-tiered structure of local points of concentration, somewhat analogous to the Chinese three-tiered commune-production brigade-production team hierarchy, was likely to emerge if positive small center development took place; it was a valid model even without the Maoist ideology (Southall, 1979:377).

When I went to live and learn among the Alur for the very first time in 1947, the great linguist Archie Tucker described them to me mysteriously as “very wild and woolly.” What anthropologist could resist? Indeed, although part of the colonial state, no one in Southern Uganda really knew who they were. The refined BaGanda referred to them in lilting labials as Balulu, uncouth northerners, who came to do the unskilled work, and grow cotton on the Ganda landowners' estates. The Alur reciprocated by not really considering themselves in Uganda, despite the legal facts. When they crossed the Nile to go “down country” they spoke of going across to Uganda.

In the then Belgian Congo, where many Alur also lived, they were very differently regarded. The Belgian District Commissioner of Mahagi wrote of them as “civilizers of the hordes” (Quix, 1940). In the vast ethnic wilderness of eastern Zaire, the white administrators saw the Alur as a ray of hope, an intelligent and progressive people with the capacity to rule over others and bring them to order—the fundamental requirement of development then (as now) when “Toe the line!” was the requirement of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Agency for Development (AID), Overseas Development Agency (ODA), and so on, however deceptively camouflaged.

For some centuries the Nilotic Lwo immigrants had been establishing themselves and incorporating more and more people from the surrounding ethnic groups into their evolving system, thus creating a new entity: Alur society. When I tried to find out how and why it was that the Alur were able to exercise this domination and why the other peoples submitted to it—since it did not seem to be a simple matter of military conquest—the symbolic answer always was “we brought them rain.”

One of the earliest and most systematic studies of urban concentrations in Nigeria was made by Mabogunje (1968) who found that historically, there have been two main types of such concentrations. First, there were pre-industrial and pre-colonial urban settlements which grew as centers of import and export trade and commerce involving gold, salt, pepper, minerals, craft products, textiles, gunpowder, slaves, coral beads, ivory, horses, and manufactured goods. Second, colonial and postcolonial industrialized centers offered urban context for population concentration. In a broad sense, these two categories correspond to the African Type A and Type B town formations presented by Southall (1961: 6-13).

By their 1917 Township Ordinance in Nigeria, the British Colonial Government established first, second and third class categories of townships on the basis of which population, utilities and services, including water supply, roads, and electricity, were provided. Such basic infrastructures produced changes in the economic foundations of the township and facilitated the work of increasing numbers of administrators and professionals. Apart from rearranging the economic, political, and administrative spatial integration of these townships, the new developments increased the use of urban technologies thereby attracting further population growth.

The two categories of urban population concentrations referred to above may merely be regarded as dated analytical distinctions because in the contemporary Nigerian situation, the pre-colonial, pre-industrial features in any one town vary in content in comparison with the post-colonial industrial characteristics; both co-exist and the latter may be regarded as extensions and revivals of the former. On the basis of this insight, it is obvious that there are several sources of urban population concentrations in Nigeria, each center having its own peculiar cluster of spatial, socio-economic, and socio-political characteristics.

Early in this decade a political observer, looking at one of Africa's least known and most sanguinary states, described Equatorial Guinea as “Cambodia minus ideology” (Pélissier, 1980:13). During the eleven year presidency (1968-1979) of Francisco Macias Nguema, up to half of the population was liquidated or went into exile. Little is known on the internal workings or ideology of the regime. However, just as we can no longer say that there are peoples without histories, we can no longer assume that there are rulers without ideologies. Much statistical and other information on Equatorial Guinea is fragmentary or missing. It is possible, however, to trace the lineaments of the rise and fall of the first post-independent government. It is the purpose of this essay to examine that development. We shall seek an explanation, although it be a partial one, of the ideological and economic conditions which provided the context for the creation of a mass concentration camp in the tropics.

Since the nineteenth century, the materialist/idealist dichotomy has been at the center of much historiographical debate. A sub-theme has been the role of the individual in history. An increasingly wide range of scholars have used material conditions as the basis for their analysis. The individual is not an automous historical force, but rather represents a class and its interests as the class acts to maintain or establish its hegemony. Others, on the contrary, continue to maintain that the individual can, under certain circumstances, mold history to his or her will. It can and has been maintained that the idiosyncratic behavior of a leader can be an important independent variable in history.

In the early 1960s when the South African Government outlawed the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the South African trade union movement was an almost unnoticed casualty. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), affiliated with the ANC in the Congress Alliance since 1955, had become the leading trade union movement based on non-racial principles in direct competition with the racialist Trade Union Congress of South Africa (TUCSA). Although not completely outlawed, SACTU's leadership was driven into exile or underground and a decade after its founding SACTU was moribund and union organizing within the country was at a virtual standstill (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980; Feit, 1975).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, what little international support was generated for the South African working class was funneled through the exiled SACTU organization and its ANC ally. This was a small but important part of the general campaign against Apartheid South Africa, which like the campaign against apartheid sport, sought the total isolation of the regime and all apartheid institutions. As with the sports movement, statements of support by international bodies and the exclusion of internal Soulh African bodies from international forums was the key to the SACTU/ANC policy on South African labor (Luckhardt and Wall, 1980: 470-91).

In the early 1970s, a spontaneous revival of trade union activity within South Africa challenged the racialist principles of TUCSA and the authority of the South African state. The independent black trade union movement which dates from the Durban strikes of 1973 represented a new phenomenon among South African workers (Macshane et al., 1984).

Liberation is not necessarily at hand in South Africa. The government still has the means to, and to all appearances still intends to, enforce apartheid. Yet, the process of change has become so great that many have begun to consider questions related to the nature of the post-apartheid state. The purpose of this paper, then, is to capture at a point in time the two primary competing images of what shape that state will be.

First, there are those who support a federal state and capitalism. This position is represented, in one form or another, by the so-called left wing of the Nationalist Party (NP), the opposition Progressive Federal Party (PFP), and the country's major business interests. Various so-called homeland leaders, most respectably Phatudi (who recently died) of Lebowa and Buthelezi of Kwazulu, have also spoken in support of federalism. But one is inclined to believe that their opinion will prove of little account. In order to portray the capitalist and federalist image there is reference to Lijphart (1985); the views of the PFP which both represent those of the country's major business interests and often precede policy shifts of the NP: and a recent federal blueprint suggested by members of the left wing of the NP, Lombard and Du Pisanie (1985).

Next, there are those who support a unitary state and economic arrangements which range from a mixed economy to socialism. While one might include here the Azanian People's Organization and the Azanian Congress of Trade Unions, they are generally held to be eclipsed by the African National Congress (ANC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

In the past ten years, increasing attention has been focused on what are variously termed small cities, secondary cities, and intermediate cities in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. A number of conferences and workshops have been held, and research projects generated. The first of these seems to have been the 1978 Madison, Wisconsin conference on the role of small urban centers in rural development in Africa (Southall, 1979). In addition, the International Institute for Environment and Development organized a comparative research project on the role of small and intermediate urban centers in development (Hardoy and Sattherthwaite, forthcoming); the United National Center for Regional Development sponsored a similarly-titled effort, with case studies of twelve small towns and intermediate cities in seven developing countries (UNCRD, 1983); the Asian Institute of Technology organized a conference on small towns in national development (Kammeier and Swan, 1984) while the East-West Population Center had a conference on intermediate cities in Asia (Fawcett et al., 1980). The East-West Center conference, like the Madison conference, focused on one specific region—in this case, Asia—whereas the other projects included cases from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the same period, government and international agencies, most notably the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), planned projects in which ideas about systems of cities, and the role of secondary cities, have been central. (See Rondinelli, 1984 and, for a critical review of USAID's approach, Bromley, 1984a).

The major concern in these efforts has been the role of small and intermediate cities in development, and most have taken an approach based in urban and regional planning.

Tanzania is one of only a few African countries which have had a long political stability guided by a “national ideology.” The evolution of goals of development policy can be traced back to the period of the independence struggle, especially since the mid-1950s with the establishment of the Tanganyika (later Tanzania) African National Union (TANU), the party of independence. It was not until 1967, however, with the Arusha Declaration, that a clear orientation was explicitly spelled out in terms of a country economic and political ideology: the policy of socialism and self reliance. The period from independence in 1961 to Arusha (1967) has been characterized as a period of shaping a new state and a new ideology while allowing the economy to a large extent to carry on its own pre-independence tracks (Wangwe and Mabele, 1985). The Arusha Declaration articulated TANU's aspirations for a formal development manifesto in a “declaration of intent,” with the main objectives of: a gradual and directed transition to socialism; creating an egalitarian society through the reduction of inequality and universal provision of basic public goods; and building a self-reliant economy in the medium to long term.

Two developments subsequent to Arusha constituted the pillars of the evolving socio-economic setup: the increased and dominant role of the public sector in the economy, and the evolution of an incomes policy meant to enhance egalitarianism.

The public ownership and/or control of the major means of production and distribution (the so-called “commanding heights”) in the economy is an essential feature of socialism.

The debate concerning whether the West should impose sanctions against the Republic of South Africa has been mostly political in nature. Moreover, much of the discussion has concerned the morality of sanctions; less, especially by advocates of sanctions, has dealt with the effectiveness of proposed measures. The economics literature has been particularly sparse, and most detailed analyses are inaccessible other than to professional economists.

This paper attempts to fill the gap. The discussion is non-mathematical, although the propositions put forth can be derived from formal models. The arguments are generally straightforward and intuitive, though, so that the absence of technical details obscures little. In particular, this paper will seek to outline which sorts of sanctions will be most effective in achieving the dismantling of the economic (and possibly political) aspects of apartheid, and which are likely to harm southern Africa's black population least.

The analysis suggests two central points. First, effective sanctions may exist that do not greatly hurt poor South African blacks. Second, effective sanctions must be accompanied by a generous policy of infrastructural aid to South Africa's neighbors if these countries are to remain stable.

The next section briefly describes current sanctions, while the following section outlines salient features of the southern African economies. The paper then discusses the impact of specific trade and investment sanctions. The final section summarizes desirable sanction strategies, considers the apartheid government's ability to shift the consequences of such measures, and presents a positive strategy for developing the rest of southern Africa that will be useful even in the absence of effective sanctions.

This paper charts the catalytic forces of urbanism in a small area in Southern Uganda. It shows that the roads, the rail lines and the rail station played a major role in spreading urbanism in the countryside. But the main focus of the paper is on Mukono township. It is argued that the life cycle of Mukono township is closely linked to the interests of landlords. Mukono, the place and Kyagwe, the region, were accorded prominence in the oral traditions of the development and consolidation of the pre-colonial Buganda state. Throughout colonial and post-independence times, Mukono served as headquarters for Kyagwe county. Since 1974, Mukono has also been the district headquarters of the East Mengo district.

Mukono township as perceived by the local people consists of two dozen building structures situated at a major crossroads. Mukono is crossed by the major roads connecting the northern counties and districts to the capital city and the major road connecting Uganda to the Kenyan seaport of Mombasa. There are also minor roads connecting Mukono to the surrounding agricultural areas and the fishing points of Lubanga on Lake Victoria.

In reality, Mukono is much more than the shops, tea rooms and bars at the crossroads. Mukono is surrounded by undulating hills on which are situated institutions that serve important functions to the environs. Mukono has been famous because of its schools which educated quite a sizeable number of prominent Ugandans. During the 1920s, the Church Missionary Society acquired twenty acres under the British-introduced free hold land tenure system.

The system of comprehensive price controls in Tanzania was established under the Regulation of Prices Act of 1973. Prior to that, price controls applied to a few urban consumer staples including beer, matches, sugar, beans, rice, wheat and maize flour, bread, grey sheeting and khanga, a popular dressing material. By May, 1973, four hundred items had been put on the price control list. The timing of the act was due to several possible influences. As a result of the Arusha Declaration in 1967, the early 1970s had seen an increasing regulation of the economy with the nationalization of rental housing, the enactment of a drastically progressive income tax, and the nucleation of the rural population in villages. In 1967 the government adopted a wages, incomes and prices policy which placed restraints on the growth of wages. The control of prices was, therefore, a logical consequence of this policy. On the economic front, there had been drastic price increases in late 1972 and early 1973 partly arising from a worldwide spurt in inflation.

In the subsequent period, starting mid-1970s, inflation increased even faster. Using 1976/77 as the base year, the National Consumer Price Index (hereafter, NCPI) increased from 42.4 in 1970 to 52.8 in 1973, 156.7 in 1980 and 775.2 in 1986. The minimum wage earners' price index in the principal city of Dar es Salaam which was 33.4 in 1970, rose to 41.7 in 1973, 165.2 in 1980 and hit 787.9 in 1986. For the same sub periods, the middle-grade civil servants' price indices were 42.3, 50.7, 176.6, and 911.5. Increasingly, the response of the government to these developments was to resort to price controls for the management of inflation.

A dialectic running through the literature on agricultural development in Africa is between coercion and incentives, between the necessity of compelling peasants to produce certain crops or employ particular technology and the possibility of motivating peasants to opt for specific production strategies through rewards. Coercion presumes peasants lack the capacity and or will to develop agriculture and must be forced. Incentives assume peasants will choose development if given the opportunity. Recent examples of coercionist approaches include Hyden (both 1980 and 1983), La-Anyane (1985), and Hart (1982:156-157). Recent examples of incentive-based approaches include Bates(1981), World Bank (1981), Brown and Wolf (1985), and Lele (1984).

Both sides of this debate are seriously flawed. Policies based on them are unlikely to break the pattern of underdevelopment in African agriculture. In fact, past policies of coercion and incentives have contributed to present conditions. Current frameworks lack an appreciation of the ways in which African agriculture has already been transformed. They therefore underestimate the structural impediments to progress.

This article calls for greater attention to the conditions and relations of production in African agriculture. Specifically, we must examine three factors. The first is the degree to which subsistence production has been undermined. This includes considering how dependent producers are on the market, to what extent out-migration has taken place and how far landlessness has spread. Second, we must look at the degree of control farmers have over production decisions. They may be restricted by such factors as competition for land with commercial growers, sharecropping and other land-tenure relations, lack of resources to provide inputs to agriculture, regulations of development projects or cooperatives, and/or by pressure to allocate resources to off-farm strategies (such as wage-labor) to meet household needs.

The Sultan of Sokoto, locally known as the chief of Muslims (Sarkin Musulmi), was the most influential traditional ruler in Nigeria during the colonial era. His influence came from his predecessor, the caliph, who was the political head of the Sokoto Caliphate which was comprised of about twenty emirates. Under the colonial administration, however, the sultan and the other emirs of northern Nigeria were powerless.

Many scholars have imputed northern Nigeria's socioeconomic backwardness, when compared to southern Nigeria, to the emirs' “sluggishness, conservatism and egocentricity” (Heussler, 1968: 187-89; Fika, 1978: 273; Ozigi and Ocho, 1981: 40-41; Hubbard, 1973: 192). It is generally assumed that under the indirect rule system which the British allegedly practiced in Nigeria during the colonial period, the emirs had powers to initiate development projects to improve socioeconomic development. It is currently argued that they failed to do this so as not to jeopardize their positions (Heussler, 1968: 119; Ozigi and Ocho, 1981: 41). Such assertions are based on a misconception of the emirs' powers under colonial rule, a misconception that is largely due to a misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the system of indirect rule.

The purpose of this essay is to assess the sultan's performance as an administrator of the Sokoto emirate in his dual role of responsibility toward the colonial regime and duty toward his people during the first forty years of colonial rule. Students of the colonial history of northern Nigeria have ignored this subject, but it is essential for understanding the nature and effects of colonialism in Nigeria.

Over thirty years ago a Nuer said to me: ‘We do not want what you Turks call progress. We are free men. All we want is to be left alone.’ (Jackson, 1955: 150)

This brief essay sketches an outline of the social history of small towns and their role in transforming the social and physical environment of the pastoral Nilotes of the southern Sudan. In broad terms, it is a review of historical and ethnographic facts which have a wider currency in pre-colonial Black Africa. I am less concerned, however with the detailed peculiarities of this centuries-long Nilotic experience, than with an understanding of how unintended circumstances have, over time, engendered the many problems imposed upon local peoples in the contemporary world.

The increasingly common dependence on history for anthropology emerges clearly in the course of these remarks and observations. In the effort to highlight process rather than detail, the paper begins with some relevant observations written by 19th century travellers in the region, authorities in their own time who through their writings, invited and encouraged more intensive European occupation of these territories. Clearly, their observations on the effects of alien exploitation in the southern Sudan were not intended to serve this end, yet the 19th century sources offer muted echoes of the more recent observation by Southall (1979: 213) that “Most small towns [in Africa] appear as the lowest rung of systems for the oppression and exploitation of rural peoples.” A corollary to this insight is the obvious fact that small towns have been a vital resource for those in a position to oppress and exploit.

In his introduction to the 1978 Conference papers on Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa, Southall (1979: 1-2) suggests that the relations between these centers and their hinterlands are largely oppressive and exploitative, and, in the absence of fundamental social transformation, unlikely to change. The Zambian rural centers studied by this author (Siegel, 1979) strayed some from this general pattern. Nearly all were relatively recent extensions of the national and provincial governmental agencies. And given Zambia's foreign exchange crisis at that time, and the consequent shortage of goods and services of every kind, the influence of these peripheral centers was far more ineffectual than exploitative.

Exploitative relations did exist, but these were focused upon the continuing political, economic, and social domination by the neighboring “primate” cities of Ndola and Luanshya, both of which were colonially created administrative, commercial, and industrial centers in Zambia's historically dual and increasingly polarized economy (Baldwin, 1966: 40-57, 214-21; Barber, 1967; Southall, 1979: 14). When combined with the foreign exchange crisis, the producer's price structure then in effect had so limited rural livelihood opportunities in central Ndola Rural District that nearly half of the able-bodied males had left their homes to single women, the very old, and the very young (Siegel, 1984: 104-8). Zambians in general disparage the drudgery and poverty of “sleepy” village life, and this is especially true in the Copperbelt, where there is an 80-year-old history of derogatory stereotypes about the “backward,” “weak,” and “lazy” Lamba villagers (Siegel, 1984: 54-85, & n.d.).

The notion that urban centers are oppressive and exploitative of their hinterlands has a history of its own, as reflected in the various theories concerning the origin of the state (Service 1978).

The economic development and relative political stability of the Ivory Coast over the last three decades has attracted sharply contrasting views. The interpretations range from enthusiastic endorsements of the Ivory Coast as a model for other developing African countries to sharp criticisms of the liberal economic policies which the state has pursued. In the view of the World Bank, the economic accomplishments of the Ivory Coast illustrate how the correct incentives to rural producers and a liberal investment code can result in sustained economic growth. Between 1960 and 1975 the economy grew at an annual rate of seven percent. Although the Ivory Coast is beginning to regain some momentum after five years of economic recession, its economy has still fared better than many other African economies. Critics, however, contend that the economic crisis is a manifestation of the structural limits of the liberal economic model adopted by the Ivorian political elite. While there is no consensus on whether the liberal approach adopted by the government benefitted the majority of Ivorians or has made the country extremely dependent on France and other Western nations for capital and technology, the Ivorian state is at the center of the various interpretations. The state takes on a different role depending on the form of analysis applied to its activities; nevertheless, the fact that the state played a pivotal role in the country over the last three decades is not a matter of argument. What is contested is whose interest the Ivorian state serves: the Ivorian peasant, a small planter bourgeoisie, or the bureaucratic elite itself?

Land and land shortage lie at the center of Kenyan political history throughout the colonial period and beyond. Land alienation created a keen sense of loss among Africans and attempts by the colonial government to assuage this, such as the Kenya Land Commission of the 1930s, did little to meet the problem of growing African land shortage. The land problem was most strongly felt and expressed by many Kikuyu, especially in the south.

There were many issues relating to land alienation and resulting shortage: legal definitions, questions of occupancy, political constraints, and moral concerns. The origins of the Kikuyu land problem need further investigation, however, for they lie not simply in a blatant and bloody land grab, nor in the possession of vacant land by settlers and the colonial state. Rather, there was a complex mesh of haphazard appropriation, bureaucratic chaos, fitful economic growth (by settlers and Africans), economic co-operation and conflict, and frontier readjustment. This paper examines the dynamics of land alienation, land use and mounting land shortage in the Kiambu District of Kenya during the first twenty-five years of colonial rule.

Kiambu was, and is, an area of transition (Figure 1). In an environmental sense it lies between the cool, fertile, densely populated and, formerly, thickly forested Kikuyu Uplands and the lower, warmer grassland of the south and east. Before 1900, the area also marked a fluid boundary between the pastoral Maasai and the predominantly agriculturalist Kikuyu. There was no firm frontier: trade in stock, grain and brides was important to both and their spheres of settlement and economic activity not only met but overlapped.

This essay examines the roles that Ogun, Yoruba god of iron and war, plays in communication and in the construction of boundaries in the systems in which he is worshipped in an attempt to gain some additional understanding about the nature of Yoruba religion.

The idea of Ogun, both in symbolic and practical expressions, is indigeneous to the Yoruba, most of whom live in the southwestern part of Nigeria. In the New World as well as Benin (Dahomey) where Ogun is also worshipped, the practice is associated with people of Yoruba descent. The god has taken, within syncretic formations, a new name in the Americas (Herskovits, 1971; Lewis, 1978; Gordon, 1979). It is St. George in Rio de Janeiro and St. Anthony in Bahia, Brazil. For those in Trinidad it is St. Michael. The Yoruba themselves have seven variants of the god (Idowu, 1962; Ibigbami, 1977). The elevation of one variant above others raises the issue of religious identity: whereas Ogun is not immune from the variety of conflicting traditions in the Old and New Worlds, it is clear that, even in the New World, Ogun's affiliation to any community is expressed in action—in the common performance of the prescribed practice and the adoption of a way of life. World writers have emphasized the syncretic adaptations of the African indigeneous cultural forms in line with Catholic dogmas and symbols the African slaves met or interacted with in their new settings (Herskovits, 1937, 1971; Mischel, 1967; Hamilton, 1970; Gordon, 1979). Their theoretical orientation is informed by a search for African retentions or survivals.

Wartime causes [of the 1942 agitation] include the hardship caused by…sudden strain to which the workers have been subjected in an effort to increase efficiency and output simultaneously; inescapable privations necessary to satisfy the needs and demands of the Metropolis of the Empire.

Memorandum of the Land and Survey African Technical Workers Union of Nigeria (Great Britain, 1946: 117)

Maybe it would be better to have employees controlled by Mr. Patrick than by Mr. Stalin and to be quite candid I think that is at the bottom of it all. I think that we have got to face the fact that if we don't get labour organised and controlled we shall be up against much bigger problems when they organise themselves.

An elected member of the Kenya Legislature in 1947 (Quoted in Singh, 1969: 194)

A wave of general strikes and urban protest, reaching from Durban to Tunis, and from Dakar to Dar es Salaam, took place in Africa in the years immediately following the Second World War. While each general strike possessed its own specific features, taken together the strikes shared several common characteristics. They were all primarily economically motivated, and African workers initiated and led them. The most salient feature of this unrest was the participation of all segments of the urban population, because its structural causes were economic conditions which deleteriously affected whitecollar civil servants and unskilled laborers alike. Furthermore, railway and dock workers in particular often assumed prominent roles. The strikes demonstrated the existence of contradictions in colonial social formations which required resolution, and authorities throughout British Africa reacted in a similar manner.