For the past three years or so, the world has been witnessing momentous changes. The world watched as the Berlin Wall came crashing to the ground; as the Solidarity Movement in Poland completed its methodical, relentless dismantlement of Polish Communism; and as the people of Czechoslovakia fashioned their velvet revolution. Even as this was happening, no one expected that it was just a matter of months before the entire Soviet Bloc would be in pieces. We were unprepared for such dramatic social changes. We had come to assume unquestioningly that the Cold War, East and West, Communism and Capitalism in ominous tension would always be with us. But, today we live in what is being called a unipolar world, as the United States and what is left of the former Soviet Bloc have decided to cooperate rather than compete on the world stage (Blight and Weiss 1992). President George Bush once dubbed this the “Era of the New World Order.”

One of the primary defining features of the “New World Order” is the resurgence of nationalism among large ethnic groups heretofore incorporated into multi-ethnic states. Moreover, the conflicts which grow from such developments have a high propensity to be internationalized. Take, for examples, the rebellion of the Baltic states against the former Soviet Union, or the breakup of Yugoslavia, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. In Africa domestic conflicts in Sudan, Somalia and Mozambique, to name only a few places, have created refugee flows and the flow of armed rebels across national borders, thus internationalizing what were domestic conflicts (Weiner 1992).

On 17 August 1884, the flag was raised at Bimbia in Kamerun and the territory was annexed as a German colony. Gustav Nachtigal, Consul General, distributed Schnaps in celebration and then billed the liquor to the German government: “Schnaps shared at the festive celebration was to be paid by Berlin” (Stoecker 1960, 69; Hueckirtg and Launer 1986, 62). This fleeting event is a commanding metaphor for the crucial role which bottled alcoholic beverages came to play under German imperialism in Cameroon; spirits, above all other trade goods, helped to secure Germany's annexation of Cameroon, its control over indigenous labor, and access to the country's interior. The occasion sets the stage for a continuous history linking bottled European alcohol to capital accumulation, elite power structures, and changing social relations in Cameroon.

Today it is impossible to overlook the significance of bottled alcohol production and consumption in the Republic of Cameroon. Bars selling bottled beers mark rural commercial centers and proliferate on city streets. They are so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine city, town, or village without them, though this image is of relatively recent origin. Just as European alcohol played an important role in the penetration of West African trade, so too bottled European beers permeate many contemporary African economies as highly remunerative commercial activities serving both state and international interests.

Crop cultivation and the rearing of livestock in the open spaces of large third world cities have reached the point where their importance as a part of the urban informal sector can no longer be overlooked. In East Africa, several recent surveys have confirmed that urban cultivation, carried on largely by women, is both prevalent and vital to the livelihood of a significant proportion of the population (Freeman 1991; Rakodi 1988; Mazingira Institute 1987). These surveys complement a rather slim body of previous field research focused specifically on urban agriculture in Africa. Most of the latter deal with cities in Francophone central and west Africa (Vennettier 1988, 1972, 1961; Jeannin 1972; Morriniere 1972; Lassere 1958). A number deal with cultivation in the peri-urban fringe (Swindell 1988; Guyer 1987; Haubert 1985). The general conclusion of these studies is that many urban households, at all income levels, produce a considerable proportion of their own subsistence needs. The more recent evidence further suggests that, despite a relatively short history in large African cities like Nairobi, cultivation of open spaces by women seems set to become even more important in the years to come.

By contrast, most studies dealing generally with African urban development and the informal sector have either ignored women cultivators altogether (International Labour Organization [ILO] 1985, 1972; Sandbrook 1982; House 1981; Rempel 1978; van Zwanenberg 1972), accorded their food-production efforts little real significance (Peil and Sada 1984, 59; Hake 1977), or viewed them as a subcategory of other, more visible activities of urban women entrepreneurs (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1991; Beavon and Rogerson 1990; Robertson 1976).

The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah's most recent novel (1978), has received less critical attention than it deserves given the importance of its theme—the sociopolitical liberation of Africa—and the compelling textual strategies it deploys towards that end. What scanty criticism it has attracted has concentrated only on the novelist's social vision, with the debates centering on the degree of faithfulness to the historical materials on which he bases his novel. Nevertheless, without due attention paid to the rhetoric, the peculiar idea of revolution that Armah advocates cannot be grasped fully. By rhetoric is meant the linguistic strategies employed by the writer to put his ideas forward-his style, the use of aesthetic means for achieving desired effects on the reader. This essay attempts to redress the picture and demonstrate the aesthetic elements that give Armah's novel its special stridency.

While it is true, as many critics have pointed out (Lindfors 1980, 91; Fraser 1980, 83-86; Wright 1989, 244-47), that The Healers uses the fall of the Ashanti empire in the 19th century as a paradigm of how other African societies were undermined during the period of Western imperialist incursions into the continent, fidelity to that history itself should never be at issue. Rather, since Armah is a novelist (and not a historian), of greater significance should be the quality of his imaginative use of the past for the purpose of furthering present sociopolitical objectives. If, as he has stated, “the human value of literature, after all, lies primarily in the interactions it makes possible between the way we live and the way we think-between our existence and the reflections we make of and on that existence,” it would not be inapposite to demand of the critics that they use “a high level of knowledge about technique, a craft, an art” (Armah 1985,356) to bring out the writer's total vision, his textual strategies, through aesthetic evaluations.

Understanding how Westerners have been perceived by the African cultures they are ostensibly studying constitutes an instructive reversal of the classical subject-object relationship in Africanist research. By examining the perception of the White Man as embodied in Hausa folklore pertaining to the colonial era we gain a firmer grasp of the indigenous perspective on this period of Nigérien and Nigerian history and better appreciate the significance of clientship as a factor in the colonial relationship. We also find confirmation for the contrast school of colonial historiography which argues that the differences between French and British modes of administration were substantively important for the Africans directly affected by them. While specifically related to African-European relations during the colonial era, the lessons gleaned from an investigation of Hausa ethno-ethnohistory may be generally applicable to the even more ambivalent relationship between social scientist and host community in contemporary Africa.

Western treatment of African history has evolved through several distinct phases. The first phase can be characterized as outright denial: Bereft of textual references to, or other corroborative documents from, the dark continent, the West generally denied that Africa had a history. This myth of a static, timeless, ahistorical Africa eventually gave way to the second, more substantive phase in which precolonial empire formation and dissolution was documented and archaeologically verified. African scholars, such as Diop, were instrumental in this renaissance of African historicism in the West.

Kenya has served as a model of rural development, to be praised and lambasted, for three decades. As early as 1964 Clayton hailed it as an “agrarian revolution” (1964). As recently as 1989, Lofchie argued that it is an “agricultural ‘success story’” that has dramatically raised the real incomes of smallholder farmers while achieving one of the highest agricultural growth rates on the continent (1989, 15). Equally common are those condemning it as the archetypical example of capitalist development, impoverishing the rural poor to provide benefits to a small and internationally dependent bourgeoisie. Neither perspective is completely accurate; both need to be re-examined in light of Kenya's recent political unrest and shift to a multi-party political system. If a more open political system is sustained, rural political demands can only be understood and predicted if we understand the effects of Kenya's development model on the bulk of the population: Kenya's peasants.

The Kenyan agrarian debate has produced an unusually rich literature on the effects of capitalist development on an African peasantry. At its heart is the question of whether the emergence of a rural market economy preserves a relatively homogeneous peasantry or dissolves it into landed and landless classes. This article reappraises and contributes to the debate by arguing that directly examining the historical process of social transformation brought about by capitalist development, rather than deducing the process from cross-sectional data, suggests a single, uniform explanation of seemingly conflicting empirical material.

Although the South African state officially collected taxes only from African men, taxes had a number of effects on African women as well. This paper contends that the first tax instituted, the hut tax, although it did little to change women's social, cultural and economic status by itself, did set a precedent for treating African women as legal minors. Later taxes combined with the development of migrant labor and the declining availability of arable land in the reserves to restructure women's roles dramatically. Taxes were by no means the only or the primary cause of this restructuring, but they were an integral part of the foundation.

It is important to consider the effects of taxes on women, particularly rural women, for two reasons. First, what little secondary literature exists on the taxation of the African population concentrates on how taxes affected the supply of male migratory labor (Ramdhani 1986; Cooper 1981, 307; Marks 1970, 15, 132-3). While this is a crucial question, it tends to link taxes to labor migration solely as cause and effect while ignoring the more complex social consequences of taxes. Some of these consequences were long-term as they played themselves out in people's self-definitions, especially with regard to gender and social roles.

Second, a study of tax regulations and tax collection can provide a mirror in which are reflected the attitudes, assumptions and priorities of state officials dealing with the “Native Problem.” The imposition of the hut tax in the early years of the takeover of African societies revealed a particular view of how those societies were constructed and how white officials thought they ought to be altered.

Since its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the principal forces in African international relations. Harare, the capital, has emerged as a major diplomatic center and Zimbabwe has served in major leadership positions, both at the United Nations, where, only two years after independence it was unanimously elected to the Security Council, and in the Non-Aligned Movement, which Zimbabwe was selected to chair in 1986. In this capacity, and as a member of the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe actively participated in the decolonization of Namibia and has actively lobbied the international community for comprehensive sanctions against South Africa.

Unlike other newly independent states in Africa, the government of Robert Mugabe brought with it a long heritage of activity in international affairs. This pattern of international activity by Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front)— commonly referred to as ZANU(PF)—grew out of its pursuit of a protracted, mass-based, and internationally supported armed struggle for independence. Thus, to understand the foreign policy of Zimbabwe, it is necessary to examine the international activities of ZANU prior to independence, when it was a liberation movement. It is precisely this link between liberation movements, sovereignty and foreign policy which is the focus of this study. Such an approach not only enables us to expand our notion of sovereignty, but also enables us to develop new approaches to the comparative study of African and third world foreign policy.

An intriguing, if little known, autobiography, Femme d'Afrique by Aoua Kéita (1975), is a valuable social document which allows us to reconstruct women's response to the independence movement in the French Soudan (now Mali). This response took the form of a nascent women's movement which emerged under the sponsorship of the Union Soudanaise du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (USRDA), an anticolonialist political party. Aoua Kéita's career as a pioneering midwife and political militant in the USRDA from 1931 to 1968 spanned the transition from colonial rule to independence in Mali (Morgenthau 1964; Foltz 1965).

Until recently, women were rarely included in scholarly discussions of African reactions to colonial rule. With few exceptions (Kanogo 1987; Ba 1989; Musisi 1991), most studies now available on the topic have been written by non-Africans and reflect the assumptions of western feminism (Riviére 1968; Dobert 1970; Van Allen 1974; Denzer 1976, 1981; Urdang 1979,1984; Rogers 1980; Geiger 1982, 1987; Johnson 1982; Mba 1982; O'Barr 1984; Wipper 1985; Cromwell 1986; Presley 1991). As an account by an African woman of the movement for independence in the French Soudan, Femme d'Afrique provides a welcome counterweight to discourse about third-world women by first-world women (Barthel 1975; Robertson 1984; Hay 1988; Staudt 1989).

Trying to avoid lending authority to any one culture over others, current advocates of multiculturalism generally emphasize the appreciation of difference among cultures. Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina today provide horrifying evidence that difference can have precisely the opposite impact. On the one hand, difference can be necessary to national self-confidence, but, on the other, it can stir destructive tribal or national pride. Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart represents the cultural roots of the Igbos in order to provide self-confidence, but at the same time he refers them to universal principles which vitiate their destructive potential. Seeing his duty as a writer in a new nation as showing his people the dignity that they lost during the colonial period, he sets out to illustrate that before the European colonial powers entered Africa, the Igbos “had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity” (1973, 8). Achebe, however, cannot achieve his goal merely by representing difference; rather he must depict an Igbo society which moderns can see as having dignity. What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they have achieved the foundations of what most people seek today—democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, a viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art. Achebe apppears to have tested Igbo culture against the goals of modern liberal democracy and to have set out to show how the Igbo meet those standards.

From the onset of the post-World War II international campaign for the development of the Third World, much attention has been paid to the role of various media forms in the process of making Africa modern. In the discourses of many state officials, development agencies, Western economists, sociologists, and political scientists, development was defined in terms of a country's ability to urbanize, industrialize, and democratize. What was needed for development to occur in Africa, and in the rest of the Third World for that matter, was a transformation of societies from traditional to modern.

As channels for the dissemination of modern ideas and practices, mass media were seen as integral to the very process of social transformation. In the view of those working within this dominant modernization paradigm, a modern mass media system—radio, newspapers, television, and cinema—once established, would serve to prepare developing countries for modernity by transforming the values, attitudes, and behaviors of traditional society (Golding 1974; Fair 1989, 131). The mass media's role in the national development process, then, was to act as innovators and mobilizers of transformation, changing old habits and fostering a new ethic.

Essential to the modernization perspective was the assumption that backward societies remained mired in their traditional ways as a result of ignorance of the outside world and of the inarguable benefits of modernity. Sociologist Daniel Lerner, referring to the Middle East expressed the underlying sentiment of the role of the media in the national development process as well as anyone when he wrote, “what is required there to ‘motivate’ the isolated and illiterate peasants and tribesmen who compose the bulk of the area's population is to provide them with clues as to what the better things in life might be” (1958 411).

In Sudan the postindependence era witnessed a succession of attempts by the state to intervene in the country's agricultural markets with the purpose of achieving an effective control over both the physical and financial forms of the agricultural output. The impetus underlying the state's efforts at control originates in an increasing incapacity to finance annual and long-term public expenditure and investment. Given the fact that the Sudan economy is predominantly agriculture-based, effective control over the bulk of the country's agricultural resources was considered instrumental for the resolution of the persistent fiscal problems. However, the state's efforts at controlling the agricultural economy were systematically undermined by a powerful commercial bourgeoisie. Over the three decades following political independence in 1956, the Sudanese peasants, who constitute three-quarters of the total population and produce a considerable portion of the aggregate agricultural output, seem to have been the only losers in a long-drawn scenario involving the state and the commercial bourgeoisie.

Those who follow the debate on the conditions of the Sudanese economy and society are aware of the powerful influence the country's merchant bourgeoisie exerted over the workings of the agricultural economy and the extent of the documentation of this influence. When compared to the recent contributions to the study of the economic crisis in Sudan and the role of the commercial bourgeoisie in the dictation of national policies (Barnett 1988; Elhassan 1985; Mahmoud 1984), the following analysis could be differentiated in terms of its emphasis on the link between merchant control over the state and the economic crisis, and the overall effect of the crisis on the state's attitude towards the agricultural economy.

The debate about the state in the Third World has led to the emergence of different paradigms. Although still in use, the bureaucratic-authoritarian and the inherited postcolonial state theses have been superseded in recent years by new models. There has been a resurgence of Weberian analyses of the state in third world studies, especially those dealing with Africa. The African state has been referred to as weak, soft, declined, absent, decayed, juridical, or normative. Many of the writings define and explain the problem the same way. One can say these studies are based on the soft state or declined state paradigm, even though some of them rely more explicitly on Max Weber's notion of patrimonialism. Even those writings in which soft state terminology is not explicit are, in fact, linked to the soft state paradigm (see Osaghae 1989). As Robert Fatten, Jr. correctly points out, since the 1950s, all the different ideological currents in African studies have been unable to “move beyond the talismatic concept of the ‘soft’ or non-institutionalized state” (1989, 170). In the 1980s and 1990s, the concept has been even more closely identified with Africa. Although Gunnar Myrdal was the first to use the term soft state to characterize the states in South Asia (Myrdal 1968, 66, 277, 895-900) and others have recently applied it to the state in the Third World in general (see Migdal, 1988), the concept has been given a particularly African flavor by those writing about Africa. Consistent with the prevailing view that Asian and Latin American countries are different and better off than African countries, Myrdal's initial use of the concept—questionable as it was even in his hands—has been removed from Asia and almost exclusively applied to Africa. Even those writers who attempt to apply the concept to the Third World in general acknowledge this almost exclusive use of the term but still tend to reinforce it. Because of its pervasive influence through modernization theory's notion of institutionalization, the soft state paradigm and its sui generis, particularistic assumptions and explanations about Africa frame the debate on today's democratization process in Africa.