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.

War and military institutions have played a crucial part in the history of Angola. Colonial wars, auxiliary armies, expeditions, and soldiergovernors fill the pages of this history, and it is no exaggeration to recall that military expenses have, except for some years during 1930–58, represented the major item in annual budgets since the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese began to conquer the Luanda hinterland. The character and role of the armed forces in Angola, however, have undergone changes: especially since 1961, new developments promise possibly important influences on future events in that territory, events which may not follow traditional patterns in history.

The introduction of the one-party system in Tanzania in 1965 was in part explained as a means of rescuing the National Assembly or Bunge from decline and decay. This institution had become a rubber stamp, according to the Presidential Commission, making few meaningful contributions to the system of government: debates had become ‘lifeless and superficial’, and legislation was passed rapidly and uncritically, ‘without challenge to basic principles or careful examination of detailed provisions’. The President had appropriately raised the question of whether the National Assembly should be formally removed from the structure of the state, or amalgamated with that of the ruling party.

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.

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.

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.

The monetary evolution in the less developed countries in recent years has led to renewed interest in the functions of financial institutions, particularly in the potential contribution of commercial banks to economic growth. Since many of the developing countries have inherited banks and banking techniques from highly industrialised countries in Europe the question has been asked whether these institutions are capable of performing adequately the varied functions that the growth-conscious new nations now expect of them.

Descriptions of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a relatively resilient rebel group in the Congo–Uganda borderland – are almost solely focused upon the rebellion's Islamic extremist characteristics. Through looking specifically at the ADF's recruitment practices, this paper seeks to problematise existing accounts of the group's constitution. It discusses how Islamic extremism has had a significant influence on various aspects of ADF recruitment, and therefore helps to explain particular dimensions of the ADF's composition. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that focusing on the role of Islamism alone, leaves a large part of the ADF's story untold – such as the important role played by recruitment networks associated with marginalised and militarised ex-combatants, or the populations of disenfranchised youth in the borderlands. Indeed, unresolved political and socio-economic injustices amongst the people of the Rwenzories have been just as significant motivating factors for joining the rebels as have Islamic sources. Thus, this paper argues that the ADF's recruitment practices and constitution cannot be sufficiently analysed without adequate recognition of the rebel group's position within a borderland context.

The early years of the East–West Cold War in sub-Saharan Africa are remembered for the violence surrounding the 1960–1 Congo crisis. While the crisis in the Congo threatened to spin out of control, on 6 January 1961 Nikita Khrushchev delivered his secret ‘sacred wars of national liberation’ speech, which suggested that Moscow intended to undermine Western influence in the region by fanning war and subversion. Despite the nasty turn of events in the Congo and Khrushchev's blustery rhetoric, Soviet activities in sub-Saharan African remained limited in scope and within the bounds of ‘peaceful coexistence’. Moscow sought to challenge Western hegemony in the region by offering economic and military assistance to developing countries, ‘free from any political or military obligations’. Although Moscow first targeted the radical West African governments in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, as part of his break with Stalinist orthodoxy Khrushchev was also willing to extend Moscow's ‘friendly hand’ to moderate African countries.

Moscow achieved an important strategic breakthrough within the moderate African camp in November 1963, when the Republic of Somalia announced that it would accept a $30 million military aid offer from the Soviet Union, thereby foiling an attempt by the West to preclude Soviet military aid to Somalia. During 1962–3, a consortium of Western powers, led by the United States, had presented a series of arms packages of increasing value to Mogadishu. This was done over the strong protests of Washington's long-time ally in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopian Emperor Haile-Selassie. But in the end, Moscow won the bidding war for Somalia by raising the arms ‘ante’ to a level which the Western powers were unwilling to match, owing to Washington's fear that to do so would jeopardise strategically vital US base rights in Ethiopia and provoke Haile-Selassie to adopt a less moderate voice in African affairs.

Although students of the Cold War in Africa are familiar with this general outline of the 1963 Soviet–Somali arms deal, scant attention has been paid to the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres and bureaucratic conflicts arising over the efforts of the Kennedy administration to dissuade Somalia from accepting military assistance from the Eastern bloc. A more probing analysis of this event is instructive in furthering our understanding of future developments in the Horn of Africa.

South Sudan is in a unique combination of (post)-conflict reconstruction and the birth of a new state in which old policies are re-activated and new policies introduced. By looking at three case-studies of taxation and private sector regulation reforms, the paper will show how the overlapping and often contradictory regulatory frameworks of the state provide the setting for bricolage strategies by different actors. These actors, and particularly state officials, rely on a variety of institutional resources to implement, resist or remake certain regulatory measures. Although the breadth of regulatory measures has increased exponentially, the institutional corridor – the space in which bricolage is performed and on which various actors can rely – remains narrow. This space is contingent on wartime authority structures, and more particularly pre-existing Sudan's People Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) power structures, as well as a deep-rooted resistance to centralised control. Importantly, these regulatory practices are not fixed: intense periods of rearrangement of the social order or ‘open moments’ may provide a window of opportunity for regulatory reform.

Increasing participation in decision-making processes by service users is one of the objectives of decentralisation reforms in Tanzania. The argument is that decentralisation enhances participation by all sections of the community, and by women in particular, and results in decisions that better reflect local needs. This paper examines the impact of decentralisation reforms on service users' participation for delivery of water and health services in rural Tanzania, using a gender perspective and principal-agent theory. The paper investigates how decentralisation has fostered spaces for participation and how men and women use these spaces, and identifies factors that constrain or encourage women's participation. It shows that decentralisation reforms have created spaces for service users' participation at the local level. Participation in these spaces, however, differs between men and women, and is influenced by the socio-cultural norms within the household and community. Men have gained more leverage than women to exercise their agency as principals. Women's participation is contributing to addressing practical gender needs, but strategic gender needs have been less adequately addressed because gendered power relations have been largely untouched by the reforms.

The manifold torments of the Third World press themselves upon all of us for solution. Poverty, disease, oppression, early death: this is the fate of most of mankind. Today all the world plucks at the sleeves of the academy, asking, What do you know? What are you good for?1 Any answer must include a statement of the discipline's response to the troubles that beset the less-developed countries. How lawyers respond ought to define the domain of the study of law and development.

Important changes have been occurring in the ill-defined area of study called development economics. The purpose of this article is to identify and describe what are judged to have been the most important changes in development economics during the last decade, and thereafter to evaluate their relevance to the circumstances of the economies of Africa.

Kenya has a bad image among those who see themselves as ‘friends of the people’, who for many years must have thought of it as the land where it is always 1788. But although some years ago we were informed by a reliable authority that ‘Africa is ripe for revolution’, in Kenya up till now – though who dares predict what will be in the newspapers tomorrow? – it is still not 1789: the revolution has not arrived.

In the Third World the need to find solutions to the growing problem of unemployment is becoming increasingly urgent, as reflected in many recent economic development plans:

The current tempo of economic activity is insufficient to provide productive employment to all…A major objective of the Plan is to create more employment opportunities in the rural and urban sectors on an increasing scale.1

Concern for democratisation, central in the study of comparative poiltics over recent years, has tended to shift attention away from the African continent. North Africa, in particular, has been neglected in this literature, though it has witnessed important liberalising political changes – most notably with the removal from office of Tunisia's President-for-Life Habib Bourguiba, and the dramatic decline of the Frot de libération nationale (F.L.N.) in Algeria following political violence in October 1988.

The listing of the African elephant in Appendix I to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in late 1989 provided a dramatic indicator of the overwhelming pressures threatening the natural heritage of a number of states in Africa. While both their leaders and international organisations express concern about the longterm environmental stability of many areas, the more immediate economic difficulties in producing enough food and obtaining sufficient foreign exchange to finance essential imports and service debts mean that effective conservation measures have been largely neglected.

Most new African countries have faced the problem of overhauling and refurbishing their local administrative machinery to cope with a variety of new tasks, and to fill the gap left by the removal of expatriate district officers. Indeed, it is precisely because this problem is not unique to Tanzania that students of government outside East Africa may be interested in an account of its regional administration.1

In 1965 Kwame Nkrumah published a book which was to exert a powerful influence on thinking about economic development.1 His thesis was that colonialism had been replaced by neo-colonialism, ‘the last stage of imperialism’, the essence of which was that ‘the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’.2 He went on to argue that ‘giant financial interests’ exercised control over nominally independent states,3 with the result that foreign control was used for ‘the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world’.4

The Republic of Somali has recently been conducting a militant campaign for the reunification of ‘the five parts of the Somali nation’—British Somaliland and Italian Somalia (already united), French Somaliland, the Ethiopian regions of the Ogaden, the Haud, and the Reserved Area, and the Northern Frontier District (N.F.D.) of Kenya. The two principal weapons in this campaign have been diplomacy and the radio. This article is concerned with one aspect of the radio war—the series or Somali songs and poems broadcast regularly between September and December 1963 from Mogadishu, and to a lesser extent from Radio Cario.