L'ouvrage récemment paru de Jan Vansina, “Le Rwanda ancien. Le royaume nyiginya”, m'a donné l'occasion de me replonger dans l'histoire de la royauté nyiginya en quittant les sentiers battus. Cet ouvrage est, en effet, le produit d'un travail minutieux de dépouillement de textes trop négligés et auxquels l'auteur applique les méthodes rigoureuses de la critique historique. Il nous conduit à une vision plus complète et plus nuancée de la royauté nyiginya que ne l'à fait aucun ouvrage antérieur pour la période pré-coloniale. Certaines hypothèses, souvent très plausibles, font irruption dans l'histoire telle que l'a produite le courant majoritaire de l'époque coloniale, la bousculent et la remettent en mouvement. Elles redonnent vie et humanisent ces rois et leur entourage. Ils quittent le carcan de l'idéologie dominante du moment, cessent d'endosser les costumes propres à satisfaire la contemplation fascinée des élites, tant locales qu'européennes. Les rois, incarnés et faillibles sous la plume de l'historien, restent cependant au centre de son ouvrage et l'interrogation demeure: qu' était le peuple des rois? Partant de l'autre point de vue, demandons-nous à quel point et de quelle façon les rois étaient présents dans la vie des populations? Peut-on faire l'histoire de ces populations? Et enfin, pourquoi est-il important de “repeupler” le pays et de faire parvenir le royaume—et ses séquelles gouvernementales—à la periode actuelle?

Comme Vansina l'écrit, l'histoire officielle rwandaise laissait de côté la population. A vrai dire, le but principal de cette histoire était de donner une légitimité à la dynastie.

The political climate of the post-war world did not permit the United States to embark on a new era of isolationism in 1945, but few Americans demonstrated much awareness of Asian or African developments. French North Africa was more familiar than many colonial areas because American military operations during the war had acquainted the public with Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. When demonstrations against French control erupted throughout the Maghrib after VE Day, a minority of Americans recognized that this region of French rule, but of intensely nationalist feelings, could become a serious trouble spot. With the subsiding of the riots, however, even the largest newspapers in the United States offered only limited information on North African events.

During the next decade, leaders of the independence movements waged a campaign to familiarize Americans with the situation in their countries and gain support for their views on how Franco-Maghribi problems could best be resolved. In outlining that campaign and discussing its strategy, this essay attempts to asses the importance which North Africans attached to American sympathy, the methods which they utilized to attain it, and the results which they achieved.

Late in 1946, a spokesman for the Committee for the Liberation of North Africa called the public's attention to the inadequacy of the coverage of the American press. In a lengthy letter to the New York Times, M. Aboul Ahrass accused France of denying foreign newsmen access to North Africa because of the fear that their reports would discredit the French administrations (December 30, 1946: 18).

Despite the prevailing presence of exploitation of the rural by the urban in present day Zaire, it is still too early to pretend to put forward a precise definition and measurement of this exploitation process, especially as far as Zairian small urban centers are concerned. No systematic field research has so far been undertaken on these small centers.

However, this study will show that in south-eastern Zaire the social environment of small urban centers is too suffocating to allow them to play a positive role in the development of the rural masses. Some stifling mechanisms are encountered in the small urban centers, which impede the efficient circulation of goods and services between the centers and the rural areas and exacerbate the exploitation of the rural people by the small urban centers to the greatest advantage of the urban elite and of world capitalism.

The geographical area of south-eastern Zaire, corresponding to the administrative Region of Shaba (formerly Katanga), seems a suitable field for the study of small urban centers. It constitutes, together with the economic pole of Kinshasa and the administrative Region of Bas-Zaire, one of the most industrialized areas in Zaire. Copper mining industry—including production of secondary minerals such as cobalt, zinc, iron, gold, platinum, cadmium, germanium, rhenium—is predominant in southern Shaba. The Gecamines alone supplies the Zaire state with 75 percent of its foreign exchange. It employs a personnel of more than 300,000 units and carries on its different productive activities on a concession of 20,000 sq km. Its extractive and service activities are concentrated in cities (Lubumbashi, Likasi, Kolwesi) and in small urban centers with populations growing from year to year (Kipushi, Kambove, Kwadingusha).

Nigeria has had three programs of transition from military to civil rule in the last 13 years. Despite the enormous resources wasted on the first two programs, by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, democracy remains a mirage in Nigeria. The demise of the two programs was not just a monumental failure on the part of the two leaders; it also vividly demonstrates the military’s inability to effect a lasting transition to civil rule. In addition, the utter failure of both programs has exposed the political brinkmanship to which the military is prepared to go to subvert democracy. Babangida’s brazen annulment of the June 1993 presidential election and Abacha’s repressive, dictatorial, and corrupt governing style brought Nigeria closer to the edge of the precipice than any other crisis since the civil war of the 1960s.

It is ironic that the United States, a nation purportedly born, out of revolution, should he so naive in its understanding and reticent in its recognition of other indigenous uprisings and nationalist aspirations. In the post-World War II era, no area has experienced more political upheaval than the continent of Africa. The rejection of colonialism within a wave of nationalist insurgency has produced no less than forty independent states. North Africa, in particular, provides a faithful reflection of the road to independence for the whole of Africa. The four Muslim states have attained sovereignty through United Nations supervision, French concessionary reluctance, and bloody civil war. Yet, in all cases, the United States belatedly withheld sympathetic diplomatic action.

American political insensitivity toward the Maghrib is evidenced by the scarcity of published materials on United States-North African relations. Perhaps if American interests in the area were only the product of the post-1945 period, this historiographical inadequacy could be excused within the argument of unfamiliarity and other foreign priorities. Yet the argument would be a shallow one. The United States has enjoyed deep-rooted, though irregular, historical connections with North Africa both before and during the colonial period. Although material on United States relations with North Africa, 1776-1945, centers on only a handful of topics, those sources of contact alone would partially invalidate the specious excuse of unfamiliarity and irrelevance which ethnocentric scholars raise.

Mozambique’s land law is notable for its intent to balance the recognition and protection of smallholder land use rights with attracting foreign and domestic investment to rural areas. However, the state’s legitimacy may be undermined through the process of recognition, as state actors and local elites circumvent the law for private gain. Walker focuses on two areas where the law has failed to protect smallholder rights: issues of women’s land rights, and the expansion of protected areas. These issues speak to the problem of recognition, revealing ways the state produces authority, but not necessarily legitimacy, in rural settings.

Students interested in the history of Liberia have been hampered by the dearth of serious studies on Africa's first republic. With few noteworthy exceptions, published works on Liberia can be grouped into two rather broad categories. The first consists of works which tend to be too journalistic in concept and execution to satisfy the demands of serious scholarship. The second includes a variety of memoir-like collections of reminiscences and observations recorded by individuals stationed at one time or another in Liberia while engaged in educational, missionary, or developmental programs. Much of the published material in both categories is useful, and indeed quite valuable, for it provides a good deal of information not readily found elsewhere. Yet, while informative, these books do not constitute a body of scholarly work which the serious student of West Africa would wish to have available.

One work which must have a place on the relatively brief list of trust-worthy books of reference relating to Liberia is the exhaustive compilation of basic documents prepared by the distinguished international jurist, C. H. Huberich. Paradoxically, it appears that it was this important work which discouraged many historians from searching further for basic source materials, for Huberich noted that most official Liberian documents were destroyed during a violent storm in Monrovia. Writers on Liberian affairs who accepted Huberich's statement as the final word on the subject seem not to have attempted to utilize unpublished Liberian government papers in their research. Even those researchers who have, in recent years, had sufficient interest to probe into this alleged disappearance of the Liberian archives, or who were desirous of determining the extent of archival materials which might have survived the disaster, were undoubtedly discouraged by ambiguous replies from Monrovia in response to their inquiries.

This bibliography attempts to list all known theses on sub-Saharan Africa accepted by the University of California at Berkeley, and catalogued by the University Library through January, 1969. The earliest item is dated 1914. The list was compiled from a card file of theses arranged by academic department which is maintained by the Library's General Reference Service.

The availability of theses on interlibrary loan is indicated by symbols following the number of leaves (L) in the thesis. An asterisk indicates that the Library has catalogued more than one copy of a title, and that the second copy may be borrowed on interlibrary loan. The symbol # indicates that the Library's Graduate Social Science branch has an uncatalogued copy of the thesis which may be borrowed. Absence of these symbols indicates that the title is not available on interlibrary loan. Photocopies of all M.A. and those Ph.D. these completed before September, 1962 may be purchased from the Library's Photographic Service; those Ph.D. theses from September, 1962 on, from University Microfilms, Inc.

The bibliography is in two parts. The first part contains those items which cover more than one country, and is divided into General, Central Africa, East Africa, and West Africa; the second part, arranged by country (present name), lists those titles dealing with only one political unit.

In evaluating the consequences of the $1.7 billion currently invested by U.S. corporations in South Africa, the issue is distinctly not whether or not the U.S. firms involved have adopted the Sullivan Principles. Those principles, purportedly designed to ensure upgrading and equal pay for blacks, are in reality little more than a smokescreen. Behind their rhetoric, U.S. transnational corporations continue to help South Africa build up its military-industry machinery to perpetuate oppression of the majority of black workers.