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.

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.

For decades, Plateau State in Nigeria's Middle Belt has witnessed repeated ethnoreligious violence. Over this period, both state and federal governments have established formal Commissions of Inquiry (COIs) in response to unrest, tasked with investigating violence, identifying perpetrators, and – ultimately – strengthening accountability. While commissions’ mandates and specific outcomes varied, there is general consensus that inquiries have been largely ineffective at securing justice or establishing accountability for violence. This study seeks to understand the expectations placed on, and role of, COIs in Plateau State as pathways to formal accountability in a context of recurring violence. We argue that COIs are embedded in the complex, multilevel networks and politics of state and non-state institutions. Civil society, in turn, has diverse expectations and demands, and articulates these in fragmented ways. As a result, COIs served primarily as another avenue for interest-based negotiations.

Reform and the transformation of authoritarian régimes in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Horn of Africa have been associated with rampant nationalism, secession of component units, and ultimately, demands for the return of lost territories. By contrast, within supposedly ‘tribal’ Southern Africa, the African National Congress (A.N.C.) and its Africanist opponents are agreed that any settlement must apply to the whole of the Republic of South Africa, including the so-called ‘independent Homelands’.

In the early 1960s pan-Africanism was thought by many scholars and leaders of government to be the force which would bring political harmony coupled with rapid economic development. During the last decade a number of regional and sub-regional organisations were developed as first steps towards greater African unity. In English- speaking Africa the East African Community formed by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda exemplified, with all its frustrations and aspirations, this type of grouping. In French-speaking Africa the limited success of the Union douanière et économique de l'Afrique central, its successor the Union des états d'Afrique centrale, and the Union douanière de l'Afrique occidentale has raised serious questions of whether these organisations, at this point in history, can attain their goals of regional economic integration and development.

It is the hypothesis of this article if the Provisional Military Administrative Committee, which took power in Ethiopia on 12 September 1974, is really intent on uprooting the feudal social system that has flourished for so long, then a revolution by violent means is necessary. As Frantz Fanon says, ‘if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists’.

This admirable analysis of the role of traditional leaders among the Nyamwezi in Tanzania throws light on some of the most intriguing problems of government in contemporary Africa. Recent reports from African societies confirm Dr Miller's finding that the traditional rulers are not withering away, but on the contrary have survived and are helping their people to adapt to the modern state. This would not be surprising had not many of the revolutionary and non-revolutionary leaders of the modern African states shown such hostility to the traditional leaders. Many politicians felt that the chiefs were reactionary and should be eliminated so that the African states could modernise and develop. Other modern leaders favoured retaining the chiefs while encouraging or coercing them to help modernise their societies. A few modern leaders felt that the chiefs should be honoured as custodians of the cherished values of their respective societies. But even here the hope was that the chief would help in a dialectical process of change by providing a secure base from which the society could take off.

Representative institutions are a feature of political systems everywhere. The political systems of the new states that have emerged since World War II are no exception. Despite the far-reaching changes made by them in the institutions bequeathed by their colonial masters, they have almost everywhere retained, albeit with significant modifications, the representative assembly.

The situation of African states as they enter the 1990s is generally considered to be desperate. Extreme weakness in a number of forms characterises their politics, while their economies are either stagnant or deteriorating. It is not clear what resources are relevant to solving these problems, nor how they will be acquired, although increased external assistance obviously will be needed.

A striking commentary on Tanzania: two respected scholars, having studied the same country, having relied largely on the same data, reach opposing conclusions. There is not only disagreement here, but confusion on the nature of change in Tanzania. There is also misunderstanding of the processes of change in the Third World more generally. The first task in the analysis of the recent Tanzanian experience, therefore, is to free ourselves of encumbrances. To make sense of what has happened we must first sort through some of the major confusions and distractions that unfortunately permeate the literature.

The new nations of the world hold many expectations for their education systems. They expect that schools will produce the labour force for their manpower requirements, the leadership for their bureaucracies, and the citizenry for an enlightened social order. In pluralistic countries, governments expect also that schools will assist in integrating sub-populations fragmented by religious, linguistic, or ethnic differences. This article will examine the theme, ‘education and national integration’, in Nigeria, whose federal form of government was erected in recognition of profound cultural disparities.

The urban explosion is one of Africa's outstanding characteristics. Its many facets provoke a multitude of problems in such diverse yet interrelated fields as administrative efficiency, health control, land values and engineering, juvenile and other crime, prostitution, the provision of housing and educational facilities, efficient traffic flow, and much more.

During 1999–2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it repeatedly; re-orient its legislative processes; explicitly oppose virtually all of the Executive Branch's fuel price hikes; and reject key anti-labour provisions in a government bill. Yet the movement did not always succeed in its efforts to influence the National Assembly. This article maps, discusses, contextualises and analyses these generally remarkable developments. It also argues that while many factors combined to facilitate or militate against the movement's impact on legislative reasoning, process and action during the relevant period, this movement's ‘mass social movement’ character was the pivotal factor that afforded it the necessary leverage to exert considerable, if limited, influence on the National Assembly.

The oil boom that lasted from the early 1970s until about 1983 spawned a phenomenal expansion of the Nigerian economy. Within a few years, oil revenues rose from 1·4 billion naira in 1973 to 12·86 billion naira by 1980. The oil boom led to the assigning of substantial sums of money to the cocoa industry of southwestern Nigeria. In spite of these investments, the cocoa industry stagnated during the oil boom years. Using oral interviews and archival documents, this paper examines structural change in the cocoa industry before the oil boom, and analyses the failure of government rehabilitation programmes during the oil boom years.

In the 1950s the South African Government developed a broad strategy aimed at maintaining the supply of forced labour, named apartheid or ‘separate development’. Much more than a system of segregation, the programme involved moving large numbers of Africans from the urban centres into the underdeveloped Reserves, comprising 14 per cent of the least arable land in South Africa. Industry would then be shifted to the borders of these Bantustans. This last element of the scheme, the policy of industrial decentralisation, has been the main instrument for providing income to Africans in the rural areas. By examining this element in South African state planning, within the context of the apartheid system as a whole, I have tried to isolate some of the crucial dynamics of forced labour.

The African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa, having made compromises in the transition of 1994, has been accused of resorting to undemocratic ways in dealing with the frustrations of government. The instability of political leadership at the provincial level appears to confirm pessimism. The central organs of the ANC have tried to bring wayward provinces into line, most recently (May 2000) by dissolving the local party executives in two provinces. But there have been successes in provincial leadership and the party has resolved a number of disputes flexibly and arguably effectively. Conventions of political management are solidifying and may help to pattern ideological conflict in democratic ways in the future.

In 2013, the Kenyan government adopted a hybrid censorship strategy that relied on regulation, the presence of a strong security state, and the willingness of Kenyans to self-censor. The goal of this censorship strategy was to ensure a peaceful election. This study examines two issues. First, it investigates steps taken by the Kenyan government to minimise hate speech. Second, it explores how efforts to minimise hate speech affected citizen communications over SMS during the 2013 election. An initial round of qualitative data was gathered (n = 101) through a structured exit interview administered election week. A statistically significant, representative sample of quantitative data was gathered by a reputable Kenyan polling firm (n ≥ 2000). Both sets of empirical data indicate that Kenyan citizens cooperated in large part with efforts to limit political speech. Yet speech was not always completely “peaceful’. Rather, voters used electronic media to insult, offend, and express contentious political views as well as express peace speech. This study argues that the empirical evidence suggests hate speech over text messages during the Kenyan election declined between 2008 and 2013.”

Providing a good standard of living for all the peoples of Africa means that there must be more than simple economic growth. The alleviation of tremendous poverty requires special measures to ensure that those at the bottom of the social structure benefit by receiving part of the product of growth. Two problems of equal importance involve: first, the necessity for changing the life-styles of peoples and the economic forces of production of centuries; and secondly, the creation of the appropriate political apparatus to guarantee a more suitable distribution of the new goods that are produced. Francophone planners soon after the end of World War II used the word encadrement to convey a sense of the processes and institutions involved in coping with these problems.

The colonial system is a system of social relations based on the political and economic domination of backward peoples by imperialist powers, in a world divided territorially and economically. The colonial régime is a monopoly exercised by the bourgeoisie of an imperialist country, based on economic and extra-economic pressure in a dependent country. This imperialist monopoly has two basic functions: on the one hand, it exploits the colonies; on the other hand, it maintains and develops the political enslavement necessary for its own existence.

In February 1974, Ethiopia entered a period of deep and occasionally violent political and social change, the result of the breakdown of a semi-feudal system under the impact of economic modernisation. Despite the fact that the army played, and is still playing, the central rôle, it would be wrong to regard the change simply as a coup d'état which replaced one authoritarian régime with another. The political movement that started then was the result of significant social and economic changes which took place during the last 15–20 years of the Emperor's reign.