It seems that one of the major fallacies today is that of generalisation. We have all had our fill of the writer or speaker who refers to ‘the African and his animistic religion’, ‘the Zulu and his impi-membership’, or the ‘military syndrome’ in African politics. Every intelligent reader and student is conscious of the danger of generalisation and the tendency to lump under some uniform heading ‘the African’, ‘the Negro’, and ‘the Afrikaner’. While animism, the impi, or military coups may mark or may have marked particular groups of people at a particular time, it is as dangerous to use such generalisations as it is to use the sweeping term ‘the Afrikaner’.

The relationship between religious movements and political authorities in Africa has been a growing problem in political and social development. So long as these institutions of cultural life were less differentiated, and the head of the political unit was automatically the leader of organised religion, the difficulties appeared less acute. Because regal and sacerdotal roles were performed by a single person, conflicts of authority and allegiance hardly arose.1 Traditional African religion was also accommodating to foreign deities, a situation congruent with polytheism, and there was no assumption of religious exclusiveness.2 But, with the advent of different brands of Christianity and Islam, the relations between religious and political authorities changed; the former increasingly became church missionaries and the latter the agents of the colony, and eventually of the state. Perhaps the most extreme religious rejection of secular authority is found in the Watch Tower movement, whose early relations with the state of Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) are the main subject of this article.

President Nkrumah, in opening this Congress in the Great Hall of the University of Ghana, called for the objective scientific study of Africa. He urged: ‘While some of us are engaged with the political unification of Africa, Africanists everywhere must also help in building the spiritual and cultural foundations of the unity of our continent.’ This appeal had in a sense already been answered by the arrival of scholars from nearly every State in Africa.

Much recent analysis of South Africa's outward-looking policy towards independent Africa has asserted that the implications of this are primarily economic in character: ‘South Africa is thrusting out into Africa for a number of reasons. She needs markets for her manufactured goods. She wants to export capital.’1 Indeed, many observers carry the argument further, and suggest that she is seeking an economic and political role in Africa analogous to that of the United States in Latin America. In the words of Sean Gervasi:

Among the states of Africa, Algeria has been one of the most active participants in international politics. Its leaders have defended their considerable concern with foreign policy by arguing that the distribution of world power is a major variable in the success of the country's development objectives. Aware that many Third-World states have not attributed the same importance to the international situation, Algerians have insisted that it is in the general interest of the Third World to increase its influence in world politics. In the absence of economic and military strength, Algeria has emphasised political consciousness as an instrument to defend the interests of the developing countries. This approach has been particularly important in Algeria's relations with black Africa. This article is intended as a study in inter-African politics, examining the impact of Algeria's African policy upon the inter- African system and, to some extent, upon the Algerian political system.

The only official United States contact with the liberation movements of Southern Africa has been the educational programmes administered by the African–American Institute under contract to the U.S. Government. In addition to providing education and scholarships to refugee students in Africa, the A.A.I. has since 1962 administered the Southern African Student Program (S.A.S.P.) for refugees in the United States at the college and graduate levels.

The past decade has seen an increase in the scope of relationships, both political and economic, between Africa and the United States. These vary with the complexion of the government in power, though some would say that this was more in emphasis than in substance, others definitely not. It is felt by many Africans, nevertheless, that the Carter Administration's emphasis on human rights has now been downgraded by the present Reagan Administration and that, instead, the geopolitics of U.S.–U.S.S.R. rivalry, and the economic importance of developing the private sector at the expense of bilateral or multilateral aid, have been moved to the fore.

An understanding of Tanganyika's economy must begin with the bleak geographical facts. In 1945 an area of some 343,000 square miles, larger than France and Britain together, supported a mere seven million people. The size and distribution of this population resulted from an oppressive physical environment over which remarkably little human control was exerted. One example of this was man's subservience to the tsetse fly, which—as a result rather than a cause of under-population1— infested some 60 per cent of the land. Even more serious were the hazards of a rainfall that exhibited all the vices—inadequate and irregular in its geographical distribution, capricious in its seasonal visitations. Prolonged periods of drought were common everywhere except at the coast and near Lakes Victoria and Nyasa. As the overwhelming majority of the people were subsistence producers, the incidence of rainfall was a principal and variable determinant of economic welfare. Thus, for example, 1946 was a bad year; there were food shortages in every province and in some areas the Government had to organise famine relief. The rice crop failed almost completely, maize was grievously affected, and even sorghum and millet, the most drought-resistant of grain crops, were sufficient for only half the year. In the following year rainfall was heavy and well distributed; indeed in the Highlands it was excessive, destroying crops through flood and disease. But generally harvests were the biggest since 1943 and ‘a long back-log of tribal ceremonies’ was elebrated.2

With the intensification of the Southern African crisis, its ramifications have spread ever more widely until now they pervade and corrode virtually every sector throughout the black states neighbouring South Africa. The prospects for peace and prosperity in the region, once heralded with such high hopes, have long since faded as energies have increasingly been absorbed in the daily challenge of sustaining a precarious human existence.

Freedom of expression is not only a fundamental human right but also constitutes one of the essential elements in the establishment of a democratic society. No country can seriously profess to be a democracy, or pretend to be making efforts towards this, if its citizens cannot freely express their opinions. Recent moves to introduce freedom of expression in Cameroon have come at a particularly difficult time. Like most African countries, it is on the horns of a dilemma. As it struggles to cope with an ever deepening economic crisis, it has come under strong internal and external pressure to democratise. The winds of change which blew into Africa at the end of the 1980s, when former communist-block single-party régimes collapsed, appeared to herald the beginning of a new era. But as leaders are increasingly pressed by impatient citizens to unfreeze their political, social, and economic rights, tyrants and dictators posing as democrats seem to be determining the nature and guiding principles of the new order.

Somalia has a long history of famine and humanitarian crisis. This article focuses on the years 2008–2020, during which governance and aid practices changed substantially and which include three crisis periods. The article examines whether and how governance analysed as a political marketplace can help explain Somalia's repeated humanitarian crises and the manipulation of response. We argue that between 2008 and 2011 the political marketplace was a violent competitive oligopoly which contributed to famine, but that from 2012 a more collusive, informal political compact resulted in a status quo which avoided violent conflict or famine in 2017 and which functioned to keep external resources coming in. At the same time, this political arrangement benefits from the maintenance of a large group of displaced people in permanent precarity as a source of aid and labour.

Many large-scale land acquisition studies focus on the role of powerful transnational corporations, foreign and domestic governments. Instead, we shift the focus to the role of local actors, in this case, pastoralists in Samburu County, Kenya. Here, we apply the concept of ‘intimate exclusion’ and show that pastoralist elites' desire and ability to maximise productive and financial gains from customary land, coupled with their privileged understanding of land-related laws and regulations and ability to use or threaten others with violence, enables the control of extensive customary lands and the exclusion of weaker pastoralists. These processes, we find, are rooted in the country's capitalist development trajectory traceable to colonial rule. Overall, the paper highlights local ‘homegrown’ actors’ role in large-scale land acquisition, how social intimacy provides space and opportunity for unequal benefits and how historical gains offer unique opportunities to gain from new political and economic developments.

The years that Gandhi spent in South Africa have been admirably described by several scholars. This articles traces the development of a philosophy which became uniquely identified with Gandhi, and then looks at his legacy in South Africa, especially his influence in the social, religious, and political spheres. How is it possible that the shadow of so apparently frail a figure was cast so widely over events during most of this century?

It is generally acknowledged that a policy of agrarian reform involves much more than the mere redistribution of land to obtain an equitable system of production. A parallel and essential supporting range of complementary institutions usually need to be reorganised at the same time, concerned with credit, marketing, extension, and settlement, so that they can further rather than constrain and negate the reform. The old skewed land-holding structure, especially if involving latifundia estates, has probably contributed to a particular pattern of rural settlement that is quite inappropriate to cope with the more equitable distribution of land, unless large private estates are directly converted into state or multi-member farms. The beneficiaries of reform frequently need resettling on or near their newly-acquired land, and associated co-operative agencies for equipment, inputs, and marketing, together with programmes to provide basic social and commercial services, may well call for a nucleated form of settlement to be created.

What is the precise nature of the relationship between the so-called Third World and the industrialised West? While a question of this sort was much more easily answered in the era of direct colonial control over vast non-European regions, there is much debate concerning the symmetry of economic and political relationships in the postindependence period. In fact, to a considerable number of observers, it is asymmetry which characterises the ties between the industrialised and ‘underdeveloped’ countries, based on a long historical process of incorporation into the western capitalist system. Political independence, these critics argue, has merely shifted a ‘colonial’ to a ‘neo-colonial’ relationship, leaving the unevenness basically intact.

After many years of poverty and neglect, Mali is today faced with a unique opportunity to develop its rural economy. The rapid expansion of demand for beef in some of the coastal regions of West Africa has recently caught up with the available supply from the interior, and cattle prices have increased dramatically. This price rise has been accentuated by the effects of recent drought which seriously depleted the herds. Consequently, there is enormous incentive for interior regions to find new ways of increasing production which, at the same time, take pressure off their overburdened range-lands. Mali is fortunate in having a resource endowment which has considerable potential in this respect.

Fiscal sociology has alleged the existence of a mutually reinforcing effect between the emergence of representative government and effective taxation. This paper looks at Benin, a low-income country that successfully democratised in the early 1990s. It finds that Benin appears to have reinforced its extractive capacities since democratisation. However, the effect of democratisation has been indirect, while the influence of the International Financial Institutions (IFI) and the size of the country's informal sector have played a more direct role. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that effective taxation is based on a quasi-consensual relationship between the state and the taxpayers finds some confirmation.

Against the background of conflict in the Great Lakes Region, the UK and France promised, at their 1998 Saint-Malo summit, to set aside rivalries and cooperate on Africa. In subsequent Anglo-French gatherings, they singled out the DRC and pledged to work together there to promote peace and tackle poverty. This article asks whether this coordination took place and whether it involved a ‘deconflictualisation’ of approaches, ‘coincidental’ cooperation, or ‘sustained and reciprocal’ collaboration. It looks for evidence of institutionalisation of UK-French ties and policy cooperation in the fields of peacebuilding and poverty reduction. It then identifies the pressures for, and barriers to, collaboration, focusing particularly on the role of interests, foreign policy norms, institutional factors and resource constraints. It concludes by setting out the wider implications of UK-French cooperation and the limited prospects of closer future collaboration.

In recent years the housing problems of Africa's burgeoning cities have become a primary concern of governments, international agencies, and scholars, but there appears to be a marked distinction between the approach contained in many national development plans and the focus of much academic research. A central feature of plan documents is the assessment of accommodation needs and the elimination of established deficits which are based, in the main, on conventional demographic data from the national census together with various cost estimates.1