Boys shook their heads a number of times while girls covered their faces with white handkerchiefs as the pathetic story of Congolese first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was read out to a crowded audience by PYC dramatic group at the Lagos City College, Yaba, last Sunday.

This notice, describing the staging of a play by a youth club run by a Lagos newspaper, the West African Pilot, appeared in that newspaper on 31 March 1962.1 All over Africa Patrice Lumumba's meteoric rise and tragic death caught the imagination of men and women in all walks of life, and more especially that of the young. In Nigeria, however, this reaction is of particular interest. First of all, the news of Lumumba's murder in February 1961 provoked 'anti-white' rioting in a country where race relations had not been an overt issue for a decade. Demonstrations outside the United States Embassy in Lagos, the Federal capital, led to indiscriminate attacks on Europeans resulting in much damage to cars and serious injury to several individuals.2

The Kingdom of Lesotho is a small country, an enclave of South Africa, occupying 30,350 square kilometres of highland, ranging from 1,500 metres above sea-level at its lowest point to 3,300 metres at its highest. Although only about 13 per cent of the total area is arable, the majority of the de jure population of 1·5 million are predominantly rural.1 While the climatic conditions of this elevation are not alwaysfavourable to agricultural production, there are some fertile pastures in which sheep and mohair-producing goats graze contentedly.2 But the sanctity exuded by quiet mountain vistas is tempered by the stark hardships which accost many Basotho in their daily lives. The country is said to be ‘poor’ in that it cannot adequately provide for much of its population. Therefore many migrate to work in South African mines rather than trying to eke out an existence from the land or seeking limited employment in the cities.3 There are also others whose daily life revolves around desperately securing, by any means available, food for themselves and their families.

Praetorianism has been authoritatively defined as a situation in which ‘the military class of a given society exercises independent political power within it by virtue of an actual or threatened use of military force’.1 A praetorian state, by elaboration, is one in which the military tends to intervene and potentially could dominate the political system. The political processes of this state favor the development of the military as the core group and the growth of its expectations as a ruling class; its political leadership (as distinguished from bureaucratic, administrative and managerial leadership) is chiefly recruited from the military, or from groups sympathetic, or at least not antagonistic, to the military. Constitutional changes are effected and sustained by the militaty, and the army frequently intervenes in the government.2

One of the most pressing problems confronting development planners in Africa is how to increase local supplies of fuelwood. As explained in a donorcommissioned report at the begining of the current decade:

1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to meet future rural and urban needs: during the next 20 years, ‘annual fuelwood planting will need to increase by about 15 times over current levels’, and even this assumes optimistically that ‘up to a fourth of future fuelwood demand will be met by conservation or… alternative fuels’. In fact, negligible resources are being devoted to establishing new ‘plantations of any significant size’.2

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.

Focusing on three Ghanaian football academies, this article examines the role that dreams and aspirations play in shaping development schemes and in determining their impact. Football ignites the hopes and imaginations of entrepreneurs, aspiring players, their parents and supporters, and these aspirations serve as a blueprint for action both among founders and participants of academies. Imagined futures give birth to development initiatives, attracting participants, and providing them with opportunities to articulate their own aspirations. The following examination argues that it is vital for researchers and practitioners to understand how a variety of imagined futures comes into play in development schemes, as the conflicts and negotiations between divergent imaginaries can explain why individuals engage with development, how schemes evolve and how they leave their mark upon communities.

‘Governance’ and ‘exclusion’ are two buzz words of the 1990s.This short article describes some paradigms – i.e. ideal forms – of social exclusion and of governance of the economy, and presents a framework for analysing the types of policy actually found in the real world. It has two purposes. The first is to stress that governance takes a variety of forms, each one of which has its strengths and weaknesses in meeting the objectives of the economy and society. The second is to conduct a cursory exploration into the types of exclusion associated with different kinds of governance, and to comment on the implications for economic policy when the forms do not correspond to the wishes of society. What follows is not designed to promote a particular strategy, but to provide a structure within which any policy can be better understood, and therefore more effectively promoted or opposed, depending on the reader's own objectives.

Until the late 1950s it was conventional wisdom in East Africa that the major problem of manpower development was one of attracting and retaining sufficient numbers of workers into the European-controlled labour force. Strategies, however, differed radically between plantation agriculture and industry. In Kenya the Government published two reports in 1955 on wages which well illustrate the contrast, and provide valuable insight into the interests involved in the formation of employment policies in a colonial economy.

The purpose of this article is to explore the pattern of South African responses to external pressures. My study grows out of a concern with the regional conflict situation in Southern Africa, whose dimensions have become relatively clear only since the coup in Portugal in April 1974. Whatever the specific details of the policies and actions of the rest of the world; these should not rest on a misperception of the basic motivation and dynamics of South African decision-making vis-à-vis external pressures.

Third-World co-operation on human rights has manifested itself in many forms during the past two decades, but never more consistently and vigorously than on the South African policy of apartheid. This policy of separate development for each of the four racial groups – African, European, Asian, and Coloured – involves measures to effect a degree of purely local or spatial separation, e.g. with respect to residential zones, public utilities, education, transport, entertainments and public activities, and measures concerning political rights, e.g. separate representative councils; and also territorial separation, i.e. the reservation of specific areas for the exclusive use of one population group.1

This article is an exploratory attempt to understand the state of underdevelopment in contemporary Zaïre through a study of bureaucratic decision-making process at the local level. It is based on a series of investigations which the author and a group of colleagues carried out in 13 zones in Shaba Region during 1975 and 1976, but our reflections have evolved considerably since then and, to a large extent, have outstripped the reach of the research data, so that the present article should be considered as a report on work-in-progress.

The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) was established by the Treaty signed in Lagos on 25 May 1975 by the Heads of State and Government (or their representatives) from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. They were joined a few months later by Cape Verde, thereby increasing the number of member-states to 16. Following the post-World War II convention whereby international organisations formally insert in their constitutive instruments a declaratory statement concerning their status, it is not surprising that Article 60(1) stipulated that the Community ‘shall enjoy legal personality’. Although such organisations may be similar they are never identical, and this is why the nature and scope of the legal personality of each needs to be ascertained and discussed.

Events in independent Zimbabwe have confounded pundits on the left and the right who assumed that African resistance to settler colonial rule was more revolutionary than nationalistic. How can the rather unexpected direction of political and economic change in Zimbabwe since April 1980 be understood? The Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) Government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has committed itself to redress the severe social inequities of the past, but has decided, at least at the outset, to reach its goals through a prudent rather than a doctrinaire approach. What factors explain the current development strategy? Does the apparent accommodation of Z.A.N.U. (P.F.) with private capital signal a dangerous divergence from the stated goal of building socialism? Or does it represent an awakening to the idea that economic production, even if organised on capitalist lines, is a prerequisite of development in Africa?

In his recent article on ‘The Uganda Coup – class action by the military’ in this Journal, x, 1, May 1972, Dr Michael F. Lofchie points to two apparent paradoxes in the military takeover: Why did the army move against a regime to which it had previously been loyal? And why, in doing so, did it ally itself with the Ganda ‘civil service and coffee growing elite’ towards which it had shown nothing but hostility in the past? The only adequate explanation, we are told, is that these privileged groups were drawn together by a determination to defend their status against the threat implicit in President Obote's commitment to socialism. Confronted by egalitarian pressures they discovered a basis for common action in a class interest which transcended tribal rivalries.

The recurrent crisis in the (ex-Belgian) Congo, which first exploded soon after the country's independence on 30 June 1960, was the main event in the history both of the United Nations (U.N.) and of Africa during the 1960s. Its first phase (with which this paper largely deals) opened with the mutiny of the Force publique on 5 July, the intervention of Belgian troops on 10 July, and the proclamation of Katanga's independence on 11 July; it came to an end with the suppression of Katanga's secession, tentatively in December 1961 and conclusively in January 1963. The Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (O.N.U.C.) was authorised by the Security Council on 14 July, on the independent initiative of the U.N. Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, and in response to the Congo Government's appeals to the U.N. for technical and military assistance. The operation was the biggest and costliest by far in the life of the U.N.; 1 and its course was marked by political as well as financial ruin, from which the U.N. has never quite recovered. Evidence for this was furnished early. By the time the operation formally came to an end on 30 June 1964, the Congo was already in the thick of the second phase of the crisis; this phase, which began with the outbreak of rebellion in Kwilu in January 1964, was brought to an end of sorts by the Belgian-American military intervention in Stanleyville in November 1964, which produced few signs of activity by the U.N.

Population movements across the African continent form a major theme in African history, having usually occurred in response to natural diasters or pressures from a neighbouring community. Today, political and ecological forces still produce massive migrations, albeit with a new dimension: their growing concentration in urban areas.

In the making of a post-independence Namibian society, there are few areas of agreement between the contending parties in the contemporary struggle for power. Nevertheless, both the South-West Africa People's Organisation and the South African-backed Turnhalle groups have expressed the need to establish tertiary-level education in Namibia. The absence of a university and an associated intellectual community means that, in Richard Moorsom's words, ‘Namibian society lacks the essential means either of attracting social concern or transmitting basic information’. The ramifications of this are both sharply apparent and regrettable:

Africa's dismal economic performance in recent years has spawned a rather vigorous debate over where to lay the blame for the contonuing crisis. The United Nations and assoviated agencies cite factors outside the control of indivedual fovernlents, and stress the detrimental inpact if the poor condition of the world economy, notably the decline in commodity prices and foreign aid. By way of contrast, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund favour the school of thought that lays blame more directly on internal policy-making. Here the actions taken by government to distort, for example, exchange rates and agricultural prices, and to expand unprofitable state enterprises, are seen as the main reasons for the continent's economic decline.

In the history of Malawi's transport and communications, few modes of travel can be more unusual or fascinating than the flying-boat service from November 1949 to October 1950 between Southampton in Britain and Vaaldam near Johannesburg in South Africa, via Cape Maclear, a somewhat isolated and inaccessible spot on the south-west shore of Lake Malawi, 150 miles from the then administrative capital of Zomba and a further 50 miles from the main commercial centre of Blantyre. Although short-lived and of limited immediate practical importance, its long-term significance was considerable, whilst the details of how the service came about add to our knowledge of the early post-World War II history of colonial Nyasaland, and tell us a good deal about the Governor of the time, Geoffrey Colby.