While most African states are struggling hard to correct the severe imbalances in their economies that have been created, in part, by declining agricultural exports and rising food imports, recent evidence from Zimbabwe suggests that growth is being fuelled by the strong performance of the agricultural sector. In September 1988, it was expected that the value of crop production for 1988–9 would rise by 40 per cent over the previous year, contributing strongly to a real increase in the gross domestic product (G.D.P) of 5–6 per cent.1 The great foreign-exchange earners, tobacco and cotton, broke previous output records and achieved very favourable prices on the world market as well, and the maize harvest also improved significantly.

The 19605 can be justly described as the decade of great expectations about the developmental potential of education. It started with the historic 1960 Ashby report on education in Nigeria,1 and the equally widely quoted 1961 Addis Ababa conference of African ministers of education; 2 before it expired, over 40 manpower-education plans had been published, not to mention a host of commissions of inquiry and academic studies. In the first five years alone, school enrolment in Africa rose by almost a half; the average proportion of the government budget spent on education jumped from one seventh to over one sixth— the highest for any continent except North America— and the proportion of national income devoted to education increased from 3 per cent to 43 per cent, exceeded only by Europe.3 These rates of growth were almost certainly sustained in the second half of the decade.4

Agricultural marketing boards in tropical Africa are heirlooms of the Great Depression and World War II, when colonial governments found their principal sources of revenue severely reduced and both European and African populations financially distressed. Marketing boards are of British origin, but similar efforts were made in French and Belgian Africa. The rationale for intervention is clouded; some of the principal reasons have faded into the past or were never openly expressed.1

The rapid and massive adoption of mobile money transfer (MMT) services in East Africa, particularly in Kenya, stands in stark contrast to historically low use of formal financial systems on the continent. Its ‘fertile grounds’ therefore require in-depth analysis to understand the implications for African financial systems. This paper argues for the need to examine the underlying conceptual environment that enables low income and poor people's MMT adoption. It innovatively combines anthropological with ethnolinguistic analytical approaches to distinguish two repertoires around resource exchange. First, is a relational financial repertoire where relationships are developed and consolidated to create support and ‘upliftment’. A contrasting resource-focused repertoire is more like that of the formal financial sector. Identifying the conceptual features of relationality, the study offers a new perspective on the adoption and use of MMT in Africa and highlights the potential for disjunctures with policy efforts to increase financial inclusion.

The role of post-1991 ethnic-based federalism on conflicts along regional boundaries has been a topic of great dispute in Ethiopianist literature. This article sheds new light on the on-going debate based on original ethnographic material from the Afar-Tigray regional border zone. Contrary to other studies, conflicts appear to have reduced in that area. Two key questions are addressed: how do different groups lay future claims to land; and which role does the post-1991 government play in those claims to land and in reducing conflicts? The case study reveals that people materialise religion to lay future claims to land and that conflicts have reduced with increased involvement of the state over the past two decades, but that this reduction has come at a high cost and may therefore not be sustainable in the long term.

Scholars of ethnic riots disagree on which are more susceptible to collective violence between ethnically segregated and diverse socio-spatial settings. Studies of riot-prone cities have produced contradictory conclusions. This article proposes that the ambivalence stems in part from disregarding the mobile nature of armed mobs and conflating their origins with their locations of violence. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork involving mobile interviews, in-depth discussions and visual documentation, the article maps the footsteps of armed mobs from their origins to sites of confrontation during the 2008 Christian–Muslim riots in Jos, Nigeria. Findings suggest both segregated and mixed settlements contributed to violence. While armed mobs were likelier to originate from segregated neighbourhoods, mixed settlements, especially those sandwiched between segregated ones, served as frontiers for fighting; armed mobs preferred narrow alleys inaccessible to security forces. These findings' implications can advance the understanding and management of ethnic riots in urban areas.

The official dismantling of apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment in Febuary 1990, and especially the first multi-racial elections in April 1994 followed by the inauguration of the Government of National Unity (GNU), have marked this decade as the most fascinating in the history of South Africa.

In the last few years there has been a growing interest in that very considerable and hitherto mostly unrecorded part of the economic life of the Third World which flourishes outside the state and foreign-owned medium and large-scale concerns. This great mass of non-enumerated enterprises and activities is a major source of employment and production. For the purpose of this article, it will be argued that many of those undertaking research in this sector can be regarded as belonging to one or other of two fairly distinct schools of thought formed by (1) a number of officials from the International Labour Organisation, the World Bank, and other international and government agencies, as well as some purely academic writers,1 and (2) the majority of social scientists attached to the British Sociological Association Development Group, some of whom operate to a greater or lesser extent within a Marxian or neo-Marxian perspective.2 For purposes of abbreviation only, these will be referred to as the ‘I.L.O.’ and the ‘Radical’ groups.

Although the analysis which follows centres upon the West African state of Mali, much of what is said applies in varying measure to other examples of military state capitalism in Africa and elsewhere. Its importance is underscored by the fact that this is an increasingly common régime variant in the Third World. Similarly, domestic militarism has been transformed from an unusual occurrence to a phenomenon which evokes little more than a déjà vu response. Today nearly half of the governments of the ‘South’ are directly or indirectly dominated by the military, whereas three decades ago little more than 15 per cent could be so classified.

This article examines the upsurge in denunciations of ‘tribalism’ in public debate during The Gambia's transition from the autocracy of Yahya Jammeh to the ‘New Gambia’ under President Adama Barrow. In these public debates, derogatory statements about particular ethnicities articulate fears of present or future alliances to monopolise political power. These fears are disproportionate to attempts of organised political mobilisation on ethnic grounds, which remain marginal. It is argued that accusatory politics are a salient, and neglected, feature of ethnic dynamics in contemporary Gambian – and African – politics. This politics of accusation involves the contestation and negotiation of moral legitimacy in the political sphere, in a manner challenging the separation of the moral and the political undergirding scholarly distinctions between ethnicity and tribalism.

When Julius Nyerere visited Mgeta in the Uluguru mountains while campaigning in 1987 for the chairmanship of what was then Tanzania's only party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (C.C.M.), he was confronted with a question relating to a long-running land dispute. Given that a national leader can expect to make little political capital from getting embroiled in such a controverty, Nyerere not surprisingly emphasised that he could not interfere with the work of the local primary court. It is doubtful, however, whether those present considered this a satisfactory reply as, in their experience, the administration of law – especially in relation to land–is highly problematic. Indeed, the magistrate handling this very case was removed by popular request because of alleged corruption soon after stating confidently: ‘After the hospital, we provide the most popular government service’. The demand for legal services is great in Mgeta, as elsewhere in the country, but at the same time there is little or no trust in the legal institutions.

A Recebt study by the U.N. Secretariat provides ample proof, if further proof were needed, that the problem of the economic development of the low-income countries cannot be solved without these countries becoming not only producers, but also exporters of manufactured goods, on an important scale.1 At present 86 per cent of the exports of the ‘developing countries’2 consists of primary products, and only 14 per cent of manufactured goods. But the world market for primary commodities expands only slowly, owing to the low income elasticity of demand. This is partly due to the low income elasticity of food consumption in the wealthy countries and the rapid growth of their own agricultural production, and partly to economies in the use of materials in industry and the development of synthetics. Since 1938, the volume of trade in manufactures has more than trebled, while the volume of trade in primary products has increased only by two-thirds.

The map of Africa was once notorious for bearing the various colours of the European colonial powers. Today the map of post-independence Africa is newly and neatly divided between the 18 independent African states which have chosen to become associated by treaty with the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) or Common Market, and the 16 independent African states which have either rejected such an association or—as with Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, South Africa, and the Sudan—were never offered the possibility of becoming associated.

The use of mercenaries in Africa has been almost universally condemned. Africans in particular loathe foreign mercenaries. Small wonder, with the memory and reality of the Congo experience still fresh. So pejorative has the label ‘mercenary’ become in Africa that at one point in August 1962, when United Nations troops had been occupying a none-too-quiescent Katanga, the Katangan Minister of the Interior passed a U.N. road-block manned by Indian troops and cursed them by shouting across the barrier, ‘Mercenaries, mercenaries!’1 And this came from a member of the very Government that had hired the first contingent of mercenaries in the independent Congo.

Afrikaner consciousness and identification have a tradition of very clear ethnic roots. Derived from a common ancestral stock that gives biological, historical, and linguistic characteristics to their identity, Afrikaners also share a Protestant religion tradition, with a major theme of Calvinistic predestination and being in South Africa due to divine providence. While opposing parties may vie for their support, the sentiment of favouring Afrikaners and whites – in that order – is shared by all.

The article argues that the impact of law enforcement efforts against corruption deserves more scholarly attention. Drawing on a mixed-methods study from Malawi in southern Africa, where a large-scale law enforcement operation has been investigating and prosecuting those involved in a 2013 corruption scandal known as ‘Cashgate’, the article explores the potential for corruption deterrence from the perspective of government officials in the Malawi civil service. Malawi provides a challenging environment for deterrence due to limited state capacity, weak law enforcement agencies and widespread corruption. Nonetheless, the research findings show that Malawian government officials perceive prosecutions and convictions to deter corruption, both with regards to the law enforcement response to Cashgate specifically and law enforcement efforts in general. The findings from Malawi suggest that law enforcement and criminal justice have the potential to make an important contribution to anti-corruption strategies in Africa and the Global South at large.

Within five years, some of the cadets to whom these remarks were addressed helped overthrow Kwame Nkrumah. Despite the warning, ‘Politics are not for soldiers’, the armed forces in Ghana – as in 14 other African states – assumed full political control. The military thus changed in Africa from relatively insignificant relics of colonial administration into prime arbiters of political disputes – settling arguments, in many instances, by the direct seizure of power. Praetorianism had reached south of the Sahara.

The potter is regarded as one of the few truly ‘traditional’ craftsmen still operating in West Africa. But, though the resilience of the craft has been noted, a general decline in its significance is accepted. Nor is this simply a matter of numbers. Nearly 40 years ago, K. C. Murray commented that ‘Pottery, which is one of the most important indigenous crafts in Nigeria, has escaped progress altogether. The traditional work has remained unchanged, except that in recent years its quality has declined’. Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs has been placed on the ‘primitive’ nature of both the product and the craft, as well as the easy availability of metal and enamelware substitutes as a direct result of colonial penetration.

The Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (S.A.D.C.C.) was established in 1979 to eliminate the economic dependence of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe upon the Republic of South Africa, and to create regional self-reliance –that is, economic development and regional co-operation. To attain these goals, S.A.D.C.C. seeks financial and technical assistance from all possible public and private sources, inculding international commercial banks and industrial corporations.

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.