Economic dependence and cultural diversity are the bedrock upon which the élites of ex-colonial states attempt to construct a functioning state apparatus, a viable economy, and a sense of nationhood to surround and enshrine the emergent order. The achievement of national integration is sought in language and education policies, cultural and ideological programmes, and the structuring of access to – and distribution of – available resources. It is basically for this reason that a number of governments in the Third World require their highly educated youth to spend a year of service to the nation after they leave the university. Hence the National Youth Service Corps in Nigeria, which started operating in 1973, amidst great publicity, and has since become an established part of governmental and student planning. By mid-1979 about 46,000 had passed through the programme, serving the nation in a variety of jobs, mainly as teachers, before being employed in either the private or public sector.

The article analyses Russia's recent return to Africa. It attempts to answer the question to what extent Russia has abandoned its traditional tools of cooperation such as nuclear energy and military cooperation and engaged in new ‘smart’ ones as indicated by former Foreign Minister Ivanov in 2011. The paper builds on three case studies of African countries having the largest trade volume with Russia in 2018, i.e. Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, and analyses their changing relationship with Russia over the last decade. The results show that Russia has not abandoned its traditional tools but has intensified the use of new ones. The North African region as such has regained significance in Russia's foreign policy. Bilateral relations with all three North African countries have increased at both political and economic levels recently.

The emergence of the new states of Africa into world politics not only influenced the traditional balance of power in the international system, but also created a response among the older African states to restore the equilibrium of order maintained on the continent and fill the vacuum created by the departure of the colonial powers without clashing with the new nationalist movements. Henceforth, the search for influence had to take an ideological overtone. The activities of Egypt in Africa are a reflection of this. Since the mid-fifties, her African policy has aimed at creating a sense of community, cultural loyalty, and political integration. An attempt was made to reinforce the existing culture created by Islam and to transform it into what Pye and Verba call ‘political culture’.1 Thus, Egypt turned gradually toward the employment of religion on the African continent as an instrument of its foreign policy.

The French colony of Niger gained republican status on 18 December 1958 and political independence on 3 August 1960. This vast country, twice the size of its ex-metropole, and which figures amongst the 25 least-developed countries in the world, was under the political direction of the Parti progressiste nigérien for over 15 years. The P.P.N. had come to power in September 1958, after capturing 78 per cent of the votes cast in favour of continued membership of the now defunct French Community, and was headed by Hamani Diori, the leader of the local section of the Rassemblement démocratique africain, the more or less common platform for French-speaking West African politicians after World War II. However, President Diori formed his first cabinet only after the independence constitution had been promulgated on 8 November 1960.

This article offers a political analysis of the practices and motives of public order policing in Ethiopia and Uganda. It offers an explanation of the continuation of forceful tactics against political protest in a context of changing methods of information gathering, organisation and mobilisation by urban activists resulting from their access to internet and communication technology. It finds the two regimes, as anocracies, are caught between legally allowing protest and yet, conscious of their fragility, determined to crush opposition. For the latter approach, their militarist leaderships rely heavily on continued police violence. The paper concludes that failure of the police to adapt their public order policing to the new protest environment leaves them increasingly ineffective and unpopular. It is likely to provoke an escalation of violence and may both undermine the legitimacy of their regimes and reverse their attempts to open political space that justified their rebellions against former autocracies.

This essay attempts to outline, and partially to expound, a conceptual framework for studying political change during the colonial and post-colonial periods.

It should be noted at the outset that the term ‘political change’ is purposely used instead of such terms as ‘political development’ or ‘political progress’, with reference to nationalism, organised groups, administrative evolution, and so on, in developing areas. This is more nearly akin to the rather value-free term ‘social change’ used by sociologists and anthropologists ever since the 1920's.1 Basic alterations in political systems do not occur through a simple addition of new institutions, norms, and procedures; rather, the process of political change involves its own set of inter-related norms, institutions, and procedures. It may be that the term ‘political change’ may better evoke this image in the mind of students of politics, just as the term ‘social change’ seems to do for sociologists and anthropologists.

International concern over the pathology of political corruption increases apace. The last five years have witnessed a proliferation of organisations, conferences, and meetings dedicated to analysing the phenomenon as well as proposing workable policies of containment and control.This rising concern is a consequence partly of accelerating globalisation which not only increases awareness of the incidence and appalling scale of corruption but, more seriously, allows the contagion to infect the international system of trade and finance as a result of the activities of organised crime syndicates, money launderers, arms dealers, and the like. Furthermore, the ending of the cold war has meant that the ‘great’ powers are now having to confront the consequences of their longstanding indulgence, in the interests of political expediency, of sundry seedy dictators and their cronies; kleptocrats who seemed to devote much of their incumbency to transferring millions of dollars, sometimes billions, from the public treasury into Swiss bank accounts.

In August 2006 the chief of Udo, a small town in Edo State, Nigeria, was deposed and the town taken over by the ‘youth’. This event presents the classic fall of a ‘big man’ who had lost support, but also involved long-standing chieftaincy rivalries, electoral competition in the run up to the 2007 elections, and conflict over a nearby oil palm and rubber plantation. Through an examination of Udo's crisis, this paper engages with three key questions concerning contemporary communal politics in southern Nigeria: the manifestations of patrimonial power and resistance to it; the meaning and role of ‘youth’; and the impact of expatriate capital.

As the Ebola epidemic ravaged the Mano River Basin in 2014, there was concern in Senegal that the resident Peul community of Guinean origins will cause the spread of the disease to Senegal. These fears went unrealized as the Peul migrants embraced many of the epidemic control and prevention measures, which often distanced them from primordial publics in Guinea. While partly motivated by concern over the dangers of Ebola, Peul migrants embraced these measures also because the epidemic and measures advocated to curb it allowed them to assert greater autonomy in their often-fractious relations with primordial publics in their places of origin in Guinea. Their embrace of these measures suggests a rethink of the emphasis on intercommunal strife, intra-communal conviviality and trenchant state-society chasms, which pervades much work on the political economy of postcolonial Africa and which draws significant inspiration from the work of Peter Ekeh.

In this article I explore the making of national culture through bureaucratic routines in the Centre for National Culture in Wa, North-Western Ghana. I focus on an aspect of bureaucracy that is usually left aside: the productivity and creativity of bureaucratic routines. State, nation and culture are not fixed entities, but have to be constantly produced through processes of negotiation and meaning-making and through the continual reproduction of their boundaries and the categories that determine what is to be promoted or preserved. Bureaucratic routines and administrative processes are analysed as practices objectifying and nationalising culture and naturalising the boundaries and categories created through the cultural officers' practices.

This article tests the theory of advocates who celebrate the potential of civil society to promote and deepen democracy in Africa, by examining whether the human rights ministry of a Catholic parish in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya was able to consolidate democracy through a civic education programme during 2002–5. It concludes, from an analysis of the social, economic and political environment in Kibera, that parishioners who participated in the programme demonstrated an observable improvement in their democratic values and behaviour at a localised level within their own parish groups. However, civic education did not stimulate most participants to increase their involvement in advocacy and lobbying efforts to hold government officials to account for their abuse of power in Kibera. Parishioners were inhibited from promoting their rights primarily due to fears of violent retaliation by local government officials and politically sponsored youth wingers. Other factors such as apathy, ethnic divisions, limited resources and restrictive church protocols further curtailed parishioners' actions.

It is generally advisable to get a reasonably firm grasp of the past and present before attempting to achieve an approximate ‘fix’ on the future. Prognostications about the furture are always risky and especially so in reasonably unpredictable fields like science and technology, which can be demonstrated to have been congenitally immune to accurate predictions throughout history. Scientific and technological break-throughs have often, in the past, produced unanticipated changes, and they have frequently led to the solution of heretofore unresolvable problems. History gives us instances of communities which have taken advantage remarkably quickly of advances in science and technology, but it also shows us instances of societies which for one reason or another failed to adapt. And one might add that while some scientific and technological innovations take on global relevance, others have remained specific and have been circumscribed by time and place.

During the past 25 years, there have been several efforts by developing countries to establish regional economic institutions to address their poverty, underdevelopment, and external dependency. Although the economic imperatives and rationales for their creation intuitively seemed sufficient to ensure that the national political leaderships would choose to engage in whatever give-and-take was necessary to achieve their stated goals, the historical record reveals that these regional organisations have experienced uneven results at best. Several are now defunct. Why is this the case?

The resettlement of nomads recently has become a renewed topic of interest within the literature on development. The general purpose of most schemes is to sedentarise nomadic peoples through farm or manufacturing co-operatives to be able systematically to provide them with the necessities of existence, including health services and education, and to reduce their vulnerability to the vagaries of their day-to-day search for green pastures and water. Nomadism has been defined as ‘the movement of the household during the annual round of productive activities’, while its polar opposite, sedentism, is ‘the immobile location of the household during the annual round of productive activities’.1

Concern with the social and economic consequences of inflation has induced the governments of most African states to introduce statutory price controls. Thus, of the 25 countries covered by the International Monetary Fund's Surveys of African Economies,1 all but four or five had introduced price-control legislation, and other important examples not covered by these volumes include Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, and Liberia. Economists tend to be sceptical about the desirability and effectiveness of such controls, and this article attempts to throw some light on this issue, as it relates to the circumstances of tropical Africa, by examining the operation of price regulations in Ghana during the 1960s.

In the three decades that have elapsed since the end of World War II, the overseas empires created by the European powers have almost all come to an end, and a wide range of new states, large and small, has taken their place. Now, when many of these nations are approaching the 25th anniversaries of their independence, it is a fitting moment to ask how well they are doing, not in any spirit of paternalistic chauvinism, but rather in order to see how far the hopes and expectations of the last years of dependence have been fulfilled in the first years of freedom, and whether a modern polity, modelled essentially on the nations of Europe, can be created and sustained by peoples of very different traditions, working within arbitrarily imposed boundaries that were not of their own choosing.

Following the 1994 genocide, scholars have criticised the Rwandan government's official account of national history and its restrictions on competing historical narratives. But what might Rwandans be doing with that state narrative besides conforming to it out of fear of reprisal? I argue that to understand what sustains official narratives we must grasp not only their coercive aspects, but also how social actors put them to work for different reasons. I offer four possible forms of agency in which Rwandans engage when they reproduce official history to show how – while forcibly imposed – government narratives are nonetheless cultural resources that people can turn to personal and collective visions, projects and desires. The article aims to develop a more robust understanding of how people respond to imposed narratives of nationhood and history, since it is important to attend not only to resistance, but also conformity to them.

Foreign investment in South Africa during the past 20 years has been subject to criticism form several diverse schools of thought, ranging from those who believe it has contributed to country's economic growth without improving the condition of the black workers, to those who maintain that – at best – apartheid has been modernised rather than fundamentally changed.

Today the focus of attention has shifted to collective bargaining and trade union rights, to the action that can be taken on their own behalf by the ecomomically underprivileged and the politically dispossessed, and to the assistance which foreign-owned companies have been given in improving the terms and conditions of employment of their own non-white employees by the codes of conduct that have quite recently been adopted by their own governments.

A report of the conference on the legal, economic, and social aspects of African refugee problems, which took place in Addis Ababa in October 1967, appeared in this Journal, V, 4, December 1967. That conference had recognised three phases of activity on the African refugee problem: the phase of succour and relief when the refugees first pour across the frontiers of the countries of asylum; the second phase, when they are rescued from their overcrowded reception areas, and established on the land to produce their own food, with at least a minimum of social services and amenities; and the third phase, which was of most interest to the conference, involving the new concept of zonal integration and development. Since then there has been some important progress in clarifying, planning, and putting into practice this new form of rural development, which by now merits a separate report.

Whilst the so-called ‘new right’ shrilly proclaims victory for capitalism and liberal democracy in the cold war, quieter voices see in the death agonies of European Stalinism the seeds of socialism more as it was meant to be. I refer not any triumphal Trotskyist depiction of the popular overthrow of bureaucratised ruling classes, but rather to wide-spread searchings throughout Eastern Europe for ‘a third – and better – way’. From this perspective, however much the electoral thaw may give rise to stridently anti-communist, anti-central planning, pro free-market parties, the dynamics of the new situation will virtually require pursuit of a mixed economy featuring selective state intervention.