A recent trio of books by Professor Ali Mazrui deals largely with the phenomenon and impact of Africa's emergence into independence. The Anglo-African Commonwealth (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1967) argues the fertilising influence of English and English liberal ideas on the growth of African nationalism, and explores the changing character and role of the Commonwealth due to its progressive ‘Africanisation’ over the past decade. On Heroes and Uhuru-Worship (London, Longmans, 1967) is a collection of papers on ‘the politics of African independence’.

During the 1970s, enthusiasts for Africian – Arab solidarity emphasised the potential benefits of political co-operation and economic partnership between sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab Middle East. The interest in such a relationship gained momentum among African and Arab Head of States, culminating in their summit meeting in Cairo in March 1977. It is now time to examine both the basis of the euphoria and the prospects, or lack of them, for the development of a comprehensive and durable relationship between the contiguous regions.

Countries live in the shadow of their past: responses to current circumstances are conditioned by what has gone before. In developing countries plans for economic growth are conditioned by previous policy – or the lack of it – and by what was done or what was not done in previous decades. In Africa south of the Sahara, with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia, it is the past history of colonial domination which conditions the present.

Between the Middle East and Eastern Africa, the city of Harar is often considered as the main historical centre of Islam in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Until recently, the cultural hegemony of the Muslim elites inhabiting Harar was commonly opposed to the almost pagan behaviours of the Oromo – or ‘Galla’ – farmers and cattle herders living in the wide rural vicinity of the town. The 1995 Constitution provided the different ‘ethnolinguistic nationalities’ of the new Ethiopian federation with the same institutional recognition. However, the institutionalisation of the two Harari and Oromo ‘nationalities’ seems to foster the historical duality between the city-dwellers and their close neighbours. This article proposes another political history of Harar and its ambivalent Oromo partners through the local dynamics of the Muslim city/countryside models. It reveals the both competing and complementary orders that have probably bound together the populations of Harar and its rural hinterland for more than five hundred years.

In a speech to the South African Senate on 23 October Prime Minister Vorster declared that the situation in Southern Africa had reached a point at which a choice had to be made between peaceful negotiation on the one hand, or escalating strife on the other. He offered Africa ‘the way of peace’. Within three days President Kaunda responded favourably. In a graduation day speech at the University of Zambia, he described Vorster's overture as ‘the voice of reason for which Africa and the world have been waiting for many years’. Without hesitation policy-makers and the press in South Africa fastened upon the term détente, hoisted it from another context, and applied it to describe both the atmosphere and substance of ensuing interstate relations in Southern Africa.

The diamond industry is perhaps the most successful commodity cartel of the twentieth century. It is not, and has not been since the turn of the century, a monopoly in production: De Beers has normally been the major, but by no means the only, producer. The cartel has been maintained by the system of ‘distribution through one channel’, the Central Selling Organisation (C.S.O.), a subsidiary of De Beers.

The Ivory Coast was lauded as a development ‘success’ for 20 years after independence in 1960. In fact, the 1978 World Bank report on the Ivory Coast was sub-titled ‘the challenge of success’. Six years after the publication of this economic study, the so-called ‘miracle’ looked more like a mirage, so much so that an analyst could write: ‘no African country's creditworthiness has fallen more spectacularly than that of the Ivory Coast’. Domestically, it has been obliged to implement a severe austerity programme, and externally, to request a rescheduling of its debt. From a real growth rate of G.N.P. that had averaged more than 7 per cent a year since 1960, growth fell to 2 per cent in 1981, to zero per cent in 1982, and to −4.3 per cent in 1983.

Primarily aiming to highlight and exemplify how a technology can be socially and culturally appropriated, this article draws attention to the role of mobile phone communication in straining relations between married couples on the basis of material from Ethiopia. The findings show that mobile phone-mediated interactions between spouses are filled with monitoring and controlling activities, expressed in such forms as checking call logs, text messages, making casual calls, and switching-off phones, leading to highly strained relations that may result in the marital relation as a whole falling apart. These findings show how a technology can actively shape or influence interactions, and reveal interactions that might otherwise be concealed.

In the decade of the 1970s the Arab world, its resources swelled by surplus oil profits, looked to the Sudan to become the area's granary. Arab leaders knew that the country possessed abundant arable and pasture land, thought to be capable of supplying 40 per cent of the grain requirements of the region, and substantial fish and red meat supplies. They saw Sudanese development as leading to regional food self-sufficiency. In this vision of economic transformation they expected the Sudanese private sector to work in combination with Arab oil money and western technology.

The second Kenya debate has prompted a close examination of the role of an ethnic business community – Indians/Asians – in the country's industrial development. While this community does own up to three-quarters of the country's medium and large-scale manufacturing firms, a narrow focus on manufacturing understates the contribution which Africans have made to the economy. A progressive rural business class is more likely to re-invest in profitable farming activities and to branch out into agro-processing, transport and trading than to undertake risky investments in urban manufacturing. As a result, historical ethnic-sectoral cleavages will tend to be reinforced. The article provides new calculations on the extent of African involvement in manufacturing, and reviews an ancillary literature which uses institutional and socio-economic analysis to understand differences in Kenya's business communities.

In October 1988, Algeria began a process of transition from authoritarianism. Political reforms were introduced, on the surface, to facilitate the process of transition, but in reality to ensure the survival of the incumbent regime. The reform of the electoral system played a significant part in this survival strategy. Between 1989 and 1997, Algeria witnessed the adoption of three distinct electoral systems as the authorities sought ways to give a façade of democratisation while manipulating the rules to suit their purposes. This paper looks at the Algerian transition, asks why the Algerian authorities switched from one system to another, and assesses the impact of the three different electoral systems that the country has experienced.

The establishment and functioning of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights challenges a basic principle of positivist international law on which the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U.) has long based its policies: the sovereign domestic control of member-states.

The majority of southern Africa's inhabitants are economically marginalised. Robert W. Cox's macro-theory of change suggests that the marginalised are a social force that could bring about political economic transformation from below. Other contemporary analysts also stress the importance of focusing on the marginalised as a source of social instability. The paper uses empirical data from the Afrobarometer (Round 1, 1999–2000) to investigate whether this expectation for the marginalised to act as a catalyst for change in seven southern African states is substantiated. The analysis shows that the political protest potential of the marginalised is lower than that of the economically integrated, that they are more tolerant of authoritarian political alternatives, and that they are not significantly more economically dissatisfied than other groups. They are also inclined to accord somewhat more legitimacy to the state than are the integrated. Societies where large parts of the population are poor and marginalised are thus not necessarily more prone to political instability in the form of protest actions (violent or non-violent). Those who are justly concerned about equity and greater inclusiveness must take cognisance of the need to access the profile of the marginalised.

This article suggests that a ‘politics of security’ characterised white South Africa from 1961 to at least the time of the death of Prime Minister H. F. Verwoerd in 1966. It is still too early to know whether under Dr Verwoerd's successor, B. J. Vorster, South African politics will assume another character, although at the end of the article I will suggest that change is unlikely. I wish to argue, however, that over the last five years of the Verwoerd premiership politics in South Africa was qualitatively different from that which existed before the creation of the Republic in 1961.

Guinea and the Ivory Coast are neighbouring, former French colonies in West Africa. Both gained their independence about the same time – Guinea in 1958 and the Ivory Coast in 1960. The contrast in the subsequent economic performance of these two countries with closely corresponding resource endowments is remarkable. The Ivory Coast's gross domestic product has grown at an annual rate of about 8 per cent in real terms. The Guinean economy has stagnated. A review of the economic record of both since independence suggests that three factors were mainly responsible for their strikingly unequal performance: (1) differences in governmental philosophies of mobilisation and organisation of resources; (2) differences in the extent to which foreign markets shaped domestic economic expansion; and (3) differences in the role of foreign entrepreneurs in the national development effort.

This short article is based on the rather unusual research methodology of enforced participant observation. The participatory element was not simply a device to facilitate observation, but was enforced by the need to get petrol.1 The analysis presented here of Nigerian petrol queues has obvious parallels with earlier works by such writers as Max Gluckman and J. Clyde Mitchell.2 There are, however, some important differences, in terms of both the type of ‘situation’ analysed and the scope of the projections thereafter.3

The last two decades have witnessed a surge in studies of youth culture and social practice. In Africa, as elsewhere, this body of youth-centred research and writing has devoted considerable attention to specific groups within a given country's young population, while largely neglecting others seen to lack either culturally innovative or politically subversive traits. Youths in large cities and young combatants involved in insurgency or counter-insurgency have shared centre stage in studies of youthful Africa. This article argues for broadening the research agenda of African youth studies, calling for increased attention to the interpretive work performed by provincial youths as they try to understand and hopefully alter the future prospects of their communities in the new century. It shows how ideas about the meanings of globalisation and ‘the millennium’, intertwined with experiences of a recent refugee ‘crisis’, are shaping Guinean youths' socio-political reflections and yearnings. In doing so, it stresses just how complicated and cosmopolitan ‘provincial’ life, particularly for young people, has become in Guinea's forest region, as well as the variety and sophistication of the historical ‘materials’ and interpretive schemes through which these youths depict and judge possible local futures.

The subject of this article is the unfolding pattern of economic events in Ghana in recent years. No attempt is made either to blame or to excuse those who were responsible for the conduct of national economic affairs. The purpose is merely to reach an understanding of why and how things happened as they did. There does not appear to be much that is peculiarly Ghanaian, or even peculiarly West African, about the pattern of events. Indeed, the argument of this article owes much to the model of stages of economic development propounded by Dudley Seers with mainly Latin American experience in mind.

Afrikaner nationalism has been analysed from broadly-speaking two perspectives. In the main, the literature has focused on the evolution of a movement rooted in a common history, language, and religion,1 and has traced the roots of a nation-in-the-making back 300 years in South African history,2 before the inevitable flowering of Afrikanerdom in the twentieth century. In contrast to the growth of European nationalism which is linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie, studies of Afrikaner nationalism have tended to neglect the class dimension by emphasising ideology as a unifying force and organising principle. An alternative approach has been attempted by Dan O'Meara who locates Afrikaner nationalism within the dynamic of capitalist development in South Africa, explaining its ideology in terms of its class character, and although his study often lacks subtlety, it stresses factors that have been neglected by the more usual idealist accounts.3

The term ‘labour aristocracy’ first appeared in the literature on African economic development in 1968,1 although African wage labour had previously been described as a privileged elite on many occasions. I wish to question the accuracy and relevance of the type of calculation upon which these descriptions are based, and to present the situation which prevails today in Northern Nigeria, using detailed survey data on the earnings of rural farmers, urban workers, and those employed in small-scale enterprises.