In 2005, Cabo Verde became the second African country to receive the new foreign aid programme of the USA, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). It was among the few recipients of a second grant. Foreign aid has always been a controversial and hotly contested issue, and the MCA is no exception. This paper, based partly on personal experience with the programme, provides a critical examination of the nature, process and implementation of the MCA grants in Cabo Verde. The country had campaigned aggressively for the grants. The MCA not only financed important public investments, it was debt-free and without conditionalities. However, even while it allowed more leeway over its use and implementation compared with other aid programmes, it engendered its own challenges.

The English-speaking independent countries of Central and Southern Africa, with widely different economies and natural resources, face at this stage in their development very similar manpower and educational problems. Shortages of skilled technical workers are still acute in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, and Malawi; and shortages of educated people, particularly those with professional or degree-level qualifications, are obvious. Most of the countries in this region, therefore, are still at a stage where the output from schools and universities has not yet been sufficient to localise many skilled posts, particularly those in the private sector. So although unemployment is beginning to appear at the junior secondary levels, the crucial questions as seen both by ministries of education and by planning units still tend to revolve around the central dilemma of ‘How fast ought we to expand?’ In this sense the priorities are different from many countries further north in Africa where surpluses of secondary and higher educated workers have been apparent for some time.

Nation-Building implies integration on a variety of levels, but the converse is not true. Integration may result in a dependency, but does not imply the mental awareness of unity. Because of the ethnic interaction that has taken place over the centuries before and during the era of colonialism, there exist greater and lesser degrees of functional integration in Africa. Because of this interaction, Ronald Cohen and John Middleton have stated that ‘ethnic units as clear-cut entities are sociological abstractions ’1 However, one would be hard pressed to find anything approaching the breadth and depth of integration so necessary for us to ignore ethnic identity and diversity within any modern African state. Nation-building indicates a movement from simple interaction, through varying degrees of systems integration, to an ultimate awareness of membership in a common polity.

The term Falasha is derived from the Ge'ez or Amharic word maflas, ‘to remove’, and denotes people without land or roots, strangers, and will be used in this article because of its wide international recognition, although most Ethiopian Jews now prefer to be known as Beta Israel. According to their tradition, the Falasha have lived in Africa for more than two-and-a-half millennia, for the most part unaware of the existence of other Jews in the world. In recent years, an increasing number have felt impelled to seek a permanent home in Israel, and by June 1991 as many as 43,000 had managed to achieve this goal. Although most of these Ethiopian Jews must have anticipated that emigration would not be easy, it is very unlikely that they, or anyone else, could have known just how difficult would be their ordeal.

Like many other Sub-Saharan African countries, Ghana implemented an orthodox Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), to resuscitate its ailing economy, in the early 1980s. Subsequently, there has been a dramatic expansion in the production and export of processed wood. Based on an empirical study of Ghana's formal wood processing industry, this paper discusses the various determinants that have combined to boost the export-oriented output in the industry, particularly in the first decade of the programme, and assesses the extent to which the SAP-based policy actions account for the change. The study concludes that adjustment played a major role in the change, and suggests that even though SAP supporters and critics disagree on the nature, dynamics and effects of the programme, government measures under the programme are an indicator of what real commitment on the part of African governments can do to engender production expansion in comparable African manufacturing industries.

The World Federation of Trade Unions (W.F.T.U.) was one of the most hopeful ventures of all the Communist front organisations. Unlike some of the other fronts the Russians did not create it. They captured the W.F.T.U. after it was established, and had a good start. Once captured, however, the W.F.T.U. represented merely an extension of the pattern of the earlier Red International which had been created by the Comintern following World War I as a vehicle to reach the working masses of the world and rally them to Moscow. But like its predecessor—dissolved in 1937—the W.F.T.U. has also failed to make significant inroads among the workers in western countries and win control over them. While it has affiliates in the west, the French Confédération Générale du Travail (C.G.T.) and the Italian Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (C.G.I.L.) being the most outstanding examples, the W.F.T.U. does not at all dominate these movements. Rather, control for the most part is exercised through the local Communist parties, some of which, while still very much an integral part of an international apparatus, have won some measure of autonomy from Moscow.1

Over the last several decades, officials in both the public and private sectors have applied economic, military, cultural, academic and diplomatic tools to promote the spread of democratic pluralism in African and elsewhere. With the fall of Africa's most resilient tyrant, Mobutu Sese Seko, there is hope that even one of Africa's most troubled systems may be transformed into a state that reflects the will of the people and promotes the common good. Sober observers, however, remain pessimistic. Laurent Kabila's spotted record on human rights, his stubborn intolerance of political opposition, the challenging global economic and political environments, and the long history of bad government in Mobutu's Zaïre are obvious reasons for concern. Furthermore, the example of most other African states is not encouraging. With the exception of countries such as South Africa and Botswana, even the most tenuous democratic progress in Africa is often slowed, blocked or reversed.

Generally, blame for this state of affairs has been levelled against the African political elite, the burden of colonialism, or international political and economic pressures. Specifically, for the Congo, Mobutu's kleptocracy, Belgium's paternalism, America's backing of a friendly dictator and the World Bank's support for ill-advised ‘development’ schemes all have been criticised. While such reproaches may be well deserved, this article argues that it is important to ask if the persistent failure of democracy in the Congo as well as in other African states is also related to African political culture.

The restoration of the Kabaka of Buganda a quarter century after its abolition was the unexpected and contested product of different views of Ganda social structure that had emerged over several centuries. Competing groups, despite acting on contradictory cultural principles, overcame the suspicion of a newly empowered central government. Selective recall of cultural norms and adroit organisational tactics of the individuals who recreated the Buganda Kingdom Government allowed them to surpass their rivals and become the main Ganda interlocutors with the central government. They persuaded the central government to restore the king, though not the kingdom. The compromise they struck permitted the king to be cultural, but not political. Not only did that raise further questions about the meaning of Ganda culture, it constrained the Buganda Kingdom Government's ability to promote Ganda interests with the central government and on occasion reduced its support from the Ganda public in the years following restoration.

In November 1963 the inhabitants of the Transkeian Territories, the largest block of Bantu reserve in the Republic of South Africa, went to the polls to elect representatives for a Legislative Assembly, upon whom the responsibility for the government of this, the first so-called ‘Bantustan’ to achieve a limited form of self-government, is to be laid. The election was the culminating point in a series of changes in the administrative structure of the area which have been characterised by an emphasis on the institution of chieftainship as the basis of local government. After approximately 60 years of rule through magistrates (later supplemented by a system of district councils) the Bantu Authorities Act of 1955 was introduced, giving greatly enhanced powers to the Chiefs, who now became the heads of the tribally-structured Bantu Authorities.

During mid-1985 a combined team of expatriate consultants and Swaziland experts examined in some detail the water-development options in the Komati river basin.1 This short article presents the abbreviated macro-economic ‘home’ that we constructed, because our policy and investment recommendations had to be consistent with the Government's overall development objectives. The incentive to publish our findings was prompted by the dearth of relevant data in the existing literature, and there may be others in a position similar to that in which we found ourselves – namely, that virtually nothing was readily available. Our 1986 draft was updated in 1988 to take advantage of the latest statistics.

In 2004, a long-awaited piece of post-apartheid legislation, the Communal Land Rights Act – to reform the land tenure of those living in the former ‘homelands’ of South Africa – was passed into law unanimously by parliament. This unanimity, however, conceals the extent to which the process towards this moment was deeply contested. Exploring the efforts by land sector NGOs to secure legitimacy in their engagements with this process reveals the extent to which wider power relations and contestations have determined their positioning. Those within the non-governmental land sector who opposed the legislation pitted themselves against African National Congress politicians and high-profile traditional leaders. However, the adoption of a Mamdani-inspired discourse to contest such politics and oppose the proposed legislation contributed to reinscribing narrow readings of knowledge considered to be legitimate. Their engagements were also shaped by changes in the NGO sector. Reduced funding for land sector NGOs and an increasingly ambivalent relationship between them and government contributed to contestations between NGOs and among people working within them. Their strategic engagements in such wider and internal politics influenced both the frames within which such policy change could be debated and the ways in which individuals working for NGOs consequently positioned themselves in relation to their constituents.

Africa's plural legal systems are often doubly bad for women: reinforcing patriarchal threads in indigenous practices while layering male-dominated Anglo-European laws atop. While these systems generally work to their detriment, women are sometimes able to take advantage of them. Under what conditions are women able to ‘win’ in Africa's plural legal systems? I examine women's interactions with the plural colonial court systems in the Gold Coast and Senegal. Based on an analysis of original court records in each country, I argue that women are more likely to win in plural legal systems in areas of operational ambiguity where applicable legal principles are contradictory. Leveraging this ambiguity enabled women in the Gold Coast and Senegal to win rights around inheritance and divorce, respectively. These victories were codified post-independence, though women face social pressures against exercising them.

Botswana, a country of some 648,000 people unevenly distributed over more than 600,000 square kilometres, is an extremely poor nation whose estimated income per capita is less than $100 per annum. It is land-locked and dependent upon transport routes through neighbouring South Africa and Rhodesia. Frequent droughts cause major losses in Botswana's cattle herds, whose meat provides the country with its major export earnings. According to the 1964 census, almost 228,000 of the 250,000 workers were in agriculture, forestry, hunting, and fishing, and a 1967–8 survey found only 28,148 in salaried employment. During 1967 an additional 22,735 Batswana were working in the mines of South Africa. Of the present number of jobs (estimated at 2,000) requiring the minimum educational standard of School Certificate, less than one-quarter are currently filled by Botswana citizens. In 1967 some 258 students – 55 per cent of those who sat for the examination – received the Junior Certificate (after three years of secondary education) and 66 students - 80 per cent of those who sat – received the Cambridge School Certificate (after five years of secondary education).

After years of constant struggle, the Pan-African News Agency (Pana) appears barely closer to commanding respect and economic stability today than when it issued its first bulletin in 1983. The yearning for noble repute might seem more to do with vanity than necessity, because Pana was created to perform a specific function: to counter what African leaders decried as the negative, distorted coverage of the continent by western news organisations being beamed back to Africa and out to the rest of the world. However, since arriving on the scene six years ago as purveyors of African liberation, content to implement their own ideas of what journalism should be, the Agency's administrators are increasingly making it known that they realise credibility is not superfluous: that in the business of international news, respect goes hand in hand with survival.

For more than a decade, the South African Government has tried to suggest that a rethinking of some of the basic tenets of that country's race policy—apartheid—was not only possible, but was actually underway. Starting with the March 1973 appointment of the Theron Commission to look into the position of the then 2·3 million Coloureds of South Africa (persons of mixed-blood), there have by April 1984 been no fewer than three government-appointed commissions of inquiry, two parliamentary select committees, and three President's Council reports—all dealing with such fundamental matters, in addition to the position of the Coloureds, as trade-union rights for blacks, the movement of Africans into urban areas, and—repeatedly—constitutional change.