This paper investigates the quest for legitimacy conducted by hereditary, traditional leaders in dual legitimacy systems. We theorise that traditional leaders engage in meta-constitutional bargaining, i.e. bargaining among constitutionally and traditionally defined actors within the meta-constitutional space. This process resembles constitutional bargaining in federations over the institutional balance between the members and centre, and among members. We thus propose a parallel between the theory of federal bargaining, on the one hand, and, on the other, the process of institutional balancing between agents in constitutional and traditional authority structures in dual legitimacy systems. Evidence from narratives of institutional balancing between constitutional and traditional authorities in Southern Africa suggests that actors’ strategies in dual legitimacy systems accord with the framework here. The narratives also disclose that both constitutional and traditional authorities rely on the state's courts for adjudication. The paper enriches social science scholarship on traditional authority, political economy and federalism.

Following the adoption of the Senegalese Law on Parity and the subsequent influx of women to the National Assembly, we saw a strong gendered polarisation of attitudes towards women as political leaders among the Senegalese population. This study explores whether similar attitudinal changes are found among political elites in the Senegalese National Assembly. Theory suggests that an increase in the number of women elected to legislatures (‘descriptive representation’) will challenge people's perceptions of politics as a male domain and strengthen belief in women's ability to govern (‘symbolic representation’). Although the effects of gender quotas on women's representation has received considerable scholarly attention, the field of symbolic representation remains under-studied. A case study of the effects of the Senegalese parity law addresses this knowledge gap, contributing with new empirical insights. This study also develops indicators that can help measure potential developments in the symbolic representation of women. Parity appears to have contributed to slightly more acceptance towards women as political leaders within the National Assembly. The findings are discussed in the last section.

The concept of ‘agency’ and its role in capturing the dynamics between Africa and external actors feature increasingly in the African IR scholarship. Over the past decade, Turkey has become an increasingly prominent actor in Africa, strengthening political, cultural and economic ties with African states and providing humanitarian aid and development assistance. In this paper, we examine Turkey's relationship with Africa from the point of view of African agency and ask ‘How much and what kind of agency can we identify by examining the way in which Turkey approaches African states?’ The conventional understanding of the concept of African agency defines it in materialist terms and emphasises its transactional nature; it does not adequately explain incidents of enhanced outcomes for Africans in their relationship with Turkey. We argue that an under-examined aspect and a vital source of African agency lies within the discourses of Turkish policy which provide an enabling source of policy space for negotiation for Africans. We demonstrate that the notion of Muslim kinship in Turkish discourses not only distinguishes Turkey from most of the other external powers engaging with the continent but also enables African interlocutors to negotiate enhanced outcomes.

The Sudan, Africa's largest country, not much smaller than Western Europe, is caught up once more in the convulsions of a civil war pitting the Northern against the Southern Sudanese. Inevitably the present conflict is associated with the older civil war which began in the early 1960s and dragged on for ten years, claiming the lives of around one million, and bringing about a famine and devastation little known to the outside world. There are obvious communalities, but the contemporary struggle is hardly a replay of that smouldering little war that had been fought by the Southern Sudanese with the most meagre of means and but a trifle of external aid. I shall deal in some length with what can now be called the first Sudanese civil war, in order to provide the background for an understanding of the real issues at stake today, and to place this second Sudanese civil war in perspective. More generally, the ‘Southern Problem’ provides insights into communal conflicts and their international dimensions, important though overlooked and often unacknowledged problems of today's world.

It can be suggested that the ‘economic development’ of most Third-World nations today will be reflected in two distinct but interrelated processes: (1) a rise in economic productivity and in real incomes, and (2) a reduction in fertility and a corresponding slowing down in the rate of population growth.1 Historically, an increase in both the number of cities in a country and the number and proportion of the population living there, has been closely associated with both these processes. Accordingly, as urbanisation proceeds in Africa it might logically be assumed that economic growth and demographic modernisation are also taking place. It is our purpose in this brief article to offer a partial explanation for the fact that this historical association has not characterised recent trends in the continent.

The classical school regards international trade as the main engine of growth. But modern empirical studies have failed to show any simple and generally consistent correlation between foreign trade statistics and macro-economic aggregates such as savings, investment, consumption, and growth. The more generally accepted view is that development through trade — where it occurred — was partly the consequence of favourable internal factors, and partly the result of a conducive external environment.

The rise of the feminist movement in the West has served to stimulate serious research on sex rôles and inequalities, and the recent growth in the number of African and female researchers has had an invigorating effect on various arguments about the status of women in Africa. So far, however, the controversy has generated more heat than light, as a result of both the relative paucity of sound research findings and the combined effects of the sex, race, and ideology of researchers.

On 21 March 1985, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the infamous Sharpevile incident, South African police, without provocation or warning, killed 20 unarmed black marchers at Langa in the Eastern Cape. Most were shot in the back. The outnumbered contingent of white and black police with two armoured vehicles, felt that the blacks, on their way to a funeral, would threaten the white township.

The repetition of this crudest form of state violence against politicised youngsters and workers, threatened by recession after two-and-a-half decades of anti-apartheid opposition, suggests that little has changed in the repression by a minority ré. The rulers command the guns and the subordinates are left wiht no alternative but to submit or perish.

This short article examines the present land transport situation in tropical Africa, and discusses the severe economic constraints facing continuation of even the present low levels of vehicular activity. In addition, some new approaches to both passengers and freight are suggested in line with existing difficulties.

As defined here, tropical Africa includes all the countries in the continent except Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, as well as South Africa and Namibia. In 1984, the population was just over 400 million, but is expected to reach about 650 million by the year 2000.1 Overall, the region is characterised by low levels of income per head, a high proportion of the workforce employed in agriculture (over 50 per cent everywhere), and correspondingly low levels of urbanisation. Given the great differences between the region and the industralised countries, it is possinle that transport policies appropriate to the West may not be particularly relevent.

This short article analyses the demand for and the use of educational indicators with reference to Swaziland. The data requirements are considered as well as the policy implications of establishing a fixed series, and an educational input-output table is constructed in an attempt to derive an all-embracing set of indicators. The Markov model presented here was initially created in order to help forecast what might happen to the Swaziland education system rather than to describe it. As the discussion of the data requirements below suggests, however, this can be considered a fortunate birth.

In spite of the predilections of some development economists, the spate of programmes for industrialisation in develop countries – some times supported or sponsored by technologically advanced countries and international organisations – attests to the current widespread belief that industrialisation is a sine qua non for rapid economic growth of most developing countries. However, unlike Japan's industrialisation, which was achieved mostly by internal reorganisation and the acquisition of knowledge and techniques from abroad, Nigeria's industrial progress has so far been charted largely by foreign capital and expertise, so that planners, although imbued with a religious faith in industrialisation, begin to entertain fears about the country's over-dependence on external sources of capital, high-level manpower, and enterprise.1 These fears found expression in the National Development Plan, 1962–68, thus:

When Zambia introduced weekly foreign-exchange auctions in October 1985 in order to determine the value of the kwacha vis-à-vis the dollar, together with other measures aiming at liberalising external and internal trade and at restructuring the pattern of production, they were widely acclaimed as a model for reforms elsewhere in the continent. The Economist praised Zambia for ‘taking one of the bravest economic gambles that any African country has taken’,1 implying that even in the view of liberal commentators the Government ran a considerable risk in trying to implement this reform programme. The new measures enabled Zambia to reach a fresh stand-by agreement with the International Monetary Fund in early 1986, the previous one having broken down in 1985 because the authorities failed to meet the I.M.F.'s economic targets.

The post-colonial evolution of the Tanzanian economy has been strongly influenced by public policy, notably since the adoption of the Arusha Declaration in 1967,1 which established the following guidelines:

1. Self-reliance, albeit not self-sufficiency or autarky, since, at least in theory, selected foreign assistance may be the catalyst rather than the basis of development.

2. General social equality, aimed at regional, inter-personal, and rural—urban equity.

3. Socialist and co-operative economic activities, emphasising priority for rural development per se, with a bias towards co-operative work through communal ujamaa villages.

4. Public ownership and control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.

This is an exploratory approach to the question of what universities have to do with nation-building in Africa, and to the more general question of how people learn to behave like nationals.

The major problem of agriculture in Africa has been the low productivity of the traditional sector. The general thrust of development strategies to this point has been towards providing opportunities to small-holders and ‘encouraging agricultural development within existing peasant production units’. This essentially laissez-faire approach has emphasised the need to improve producer incentives and the necessary infrastructure, as well as to provide new crop varieties and modern agricultural inputs in general. Social scientists, in turn, have studied the general question of how farmers respond to changes in incentives and, especially, to the availability of technological innovations.

Orthodox approaches to development view the market as a key institution for driving economic transformation and for fostering innovation and competitiveness. The working of markets alone, however, does not always lead to improved outcomes such as increase in productivity or production efficiency in the context of smallholders. The role of non-market institutions, therefore, remains important. This paper examines the role of intermediary coordination in addressing constraints to efficiency and productivity of smallholder sugarcane producers in Tanzania. It also makes a contrastive analysis of a different organisational arrangement for smallholder sugarcane producers in Malawi. The key proposition is that while intermediary organisations of cane outgrowers in Tanzania have played a significant role in promoting effective market linkage, an increase in productivity required for competitiveness is limited by the lack of effective horizontal coordination.

This paper looks at the policy and practice of cross-subsidisation in the water sector, focusing on the Zambian experience. Setting a price for water services is a sensitive and controversial issue. Pricing water services below cost recovery can threaten the sustainability of the service and human welfare in the long term, while water pricing at full cost recovery often restricts access to water services for poor households, compromising their well-being. This paper looks at one of the approaches that policy makers use in an attempt to balance the trade-offs – cross-subsidisation. Lessons from the experience of implementing the cross-subsidy policy in Zambia are identified and discussed. This paper argues that while the objectives behind the cross-subsidisation policy are clear, the results from the implementation of this policy are, at best, unclear. The Zambian experience shows that for an indirect subsidy, such as cross-subsidisation (as opposed to a direct subsidy), to generate positive results, a careful consideration of the actual context in which the policy is to be implemented must be a precondition to its implementation.

In recent years over half of all African states have re-introduced some form of universal basic service provision, though many more have done so in education when compared with health. Most existing explanations of these developments have emphasised the importance of demand side factors associated with democratisation. This paper argues that while democratisation has been important in generating pressure for reform, alliances with actors outside the state – such as donors and non-state service providers – have been the critical enabling factor allowing weak states to overcome their capacity constraints and respond. Two illustrative case studies are used to show how variation in alliance opportunities has led to differences in outcomes both between social sectors and across countries. An inter-sector comparison of health and education policy in Tanzania shows how a difference in donor policy preferences between sectors – donors having converged behind the principle of universal primary education but not universal healthcare – has led to variation in alliance opportunities and hence policy outcomes. A ‘least likely’ case of healthcare reform in Lesotho shows how an alliance with a non-state provider has made difficult reforms possible.

The presence of large numbers of refugees in independent African countries is one of their gravest problems. These refugees do not normally come into the countries of asylum in manageable numbers, but enter in tens of thousands, usually totally destitute, into regions poor in communications and social services—even for the local inhabitants—and with little if anything in the way of surplus local food supplies. The logistics and finance of providing immediate succour have presented enormous difficulties, intensified by the need to remove them as far as possible from the frontiers of their countries of origin, in order to avoid political tensions between the countries concerned and to observe the Organisation for African Unity's recommendation of 1964. Their settlement, among people who are only just self-sufficient in subsistence foods, places great strains on the technical resources of countries struggling for a decent standard of living for their own inhabitants, and deeply committed to their own development plans.