Over the last decade China has become a dominant player in Africa's rapidly growing hydropower sector. These mega projects typically employ thousands of Africans yet research on labour relations at these sites remains extremely limited. This article provides a rare systematic analysis of workers’ experiences on a Chinese-financed-and-constructed hydroelectric dam in Africa. We find that chronic verbal abuse of African workers by Chinese managers is a defining feature of labour relations at this project in Uganda. This abuse has tainted many workers’ attitudes towards the Chinese contractor Sinohydro, the Chinese government, and to a lesser extent Chinese people themselves. Workers also perceive Ugandan organisations and the Ugandan government as complicit in these poor labour relations. These findings underscore the limits of accountability to labour standards by Chinese firms operating in Africa, especially in contexts where host organisations and governments fail to advocate aggressively for the rights of African workers.

The fascinating events of the Ethiopian revolution have led to an explosion of papers, articles, and books.1 However, only a few studies published since 1974 are underpinned with original field work. Most are based largely on combinations of deductive logic and newspaper reports, discussions with foreign-service officers, interviews with political exiles and academic visitors, and close reading of officially released government documents. Such methodological approaches have a rational, factual content which should be approached with caution, for lack of access to data may lead to the reification of incorrect facts by subsequent authors who footnote the reports of others. Since there is increasing evidence that Ethiopia will be closed to field research for some time, and that academic involution will occur as scholars convince themselves of the validity of data reported by others, it seems useful for Ethiopianists to remind themselves how close they are to the early commentators on Lenin's Russia, or the China watchers of the 1950s,2 by considering only one of several cautionary tales about facts reported in the increasing number of articles on the Ethiopian revolution.3

UNTIL recently the tendency has been to look at African population largely in terms of crude density. From this standpoint tropical Africa was often rated as ‘underpopulated’, and even the recent and prestigious Pearson Commission, although noting the overall effect of population growth on development, stated blandly: ‘In Africa and Latin America…settlement is so sparse that it is impossible to speak of overpopulation.’1 Yet two years before, by synthesising a number of land-use studies and by demonstrating that, in terms of available land suitable for agriculture and pastoralism, there was pressure on rural resources, a prominent geographer had attacked, and one would have thought, had laid to rest, this argument. I do not wish to reiterate his case.2 Instead, using his article as a base, I will attempt here to make very crude prognoses and predictions and then to look at their policy implications, both for the sector discussed by him and for other sectors of social and economic development.

Stefano Ponte's article in the first JMAS issue of 2001 brings good news: previous pessimistic accounts of the dynamics of economic life in the Uluguru Mountains, especially mine, have to be revised (Ponte 2001; van Donge 1993c). There may have been economic decline in the area, but economic liberalisation has turned that around and raised incomes. Ponte collected rich material, especially in his household survey. Whereas I found it difficult to get precise estimates of money, land, and so on from people there, he collected precise quantitative insights. This information covers not only their present situation: people recalled with considerable precision their situation back to the mid eighties when I did research there. His critique touches, however, not only changes over time, but also the assumptions about how actors behave: people are much more resourceful than I portrayed them.

Widespread scepticism prevails that the proper conditions for negotiations do not as yet exist in South Africa. Yet, most major parties to the conflict (with the exception of the Pan-Africanist Congress) flaunt negotiations as the magic formula for settling a seemingly intractable dispute. From the western governments to the Soviet Union, from the African National Congress to the National Party, all advocate negotiations. In 1989 the N.P. fought a successful election campaign to receive a mandate for talks. The A.N.C. issued a lengthy policy document that aims at preparing its constituency and setting wellknown preconditions (lifting of the emergency, release of political prisoners and return of exiles, free political activity). Even the Conservative Party admits that it eventually will have to negotiate the boundaries of a Boerestaat when it ‘opts out’ of an increasingly integrated, undivided one-nation state.

The South African commitment to racial separation is well-known. The deep historic roots of apartheid, the religious fervour with which it is justified by its proponents, and the rapidly growing weight of criticism by which it is condemned throughout the world have served to make it a familiar ideology and policy. Less well-known is the extent to which separation in a relatively superficial, transient context – in stores, theatres, parks, some hotels and restaurants – has been eroded in recent years. Least familiar, despite the substantial propaganda of apologists for the system, is the transmutation of the negative commitment to apartheid into an affirmative effort to foster and guide what the Government labels ‘separate development’. One of the most significant achievements thus far of this policy was the birth on 26 October 1976 of Transkei, presented to a doubting world by its South African parent as a sovereign, independent nation in which its African citizens could work out their destiny, just as the dominant white population of the Republic of South Africa assert an entitlement to realise their own.

Few English-speaking scholars realise that a francophone network of scholars has powerfully developed the study of contact between French and African languages over the past decade, and that this is currently being synthesised in the form of an Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire. This corporate work, sponsored by the Association des universités partiellement ou entièrement de langue française (A.U.P.E.L.F.) and the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique (A.C.C.T.),1 is of considerable linguistic, educational, and sociopolitical significance, and deserves to be widely known in Africa. Indeed, it will be remembered that at the founding of the West African Linguistic Society in 1961 two surveys were mooted: West African languages and, later, English in West Africa, of which the former was accomplished with the help of the International African Institute and the Ford Foundation, while the latter was forgotten. With the ‘Inventory of French in Africa’, the francophone network of scholars has certainly stolen a march on English-speaking Africa.

Gurage is a cover-term for a dozen south Ethiopian-Semitic tongues spoken by some half-a-million people in a small and compact area about 70 miles south-southwest of Addis Ababa bounded to the north by the Awash River, to the east by Lake Zway, and to the south and west by the Omo River. Completely surrounded by Cushitic languages, especially Galla and Sidamo, Gurage forms, as it were, a tiny Semitic island floating in a vast Cushitic sea. The variety, diversity, and fragmentation of tongues in such a small area, 100 miles at its broadest and widest, is puzzling and problematic, not least because Gurage represents the highest concentration of linguistic diversity attested in the Semitic world. A satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon has not yet been offered, and unless and until further data, both synchronic and diachronic, becomes available, this short note will have to suffice, for better or for worse.

Nigeria's Third National Development Plan is based on the proposition that judicious use of current oil revenues to build social and economic infrastructures, and to radically transform the nature of economic activity, represents the quickest and most effective means of development.1 Top priority is to be given during the period 1975 to 1980 to manufacturing in the belief that an industrial base is the firmest foundation for self-sustained growth.

Police reform in South Africa has been a crucial component of democratic consolidation. Yet recent research presents a contrasting set of opinions, indicating low levels of public trust in the South African Police Service (SAPS), but continued belief in their right to enforce the law, and a strong sense of isolation amongst officers themselves. As police are constitutive of the officers who populate their ranks, attention should be given to how ‘democracy’ is perceived by those charged with its protection. Through a series of interviews, this article examines how SAPS officers understand and experience ‘democracy’. Situating officers in the broader society and communities in which they work, it shows that officers conceive of democracy predominantly through the lens of ‘rights’ and that their role in protecting rights is complicated by the transitional nature of South Africa's democracy. It also provides insight into a sense of disempowerment amongst officers, suggesting negative conceptions of the quality of democracy and of the balance of liberal constitutionalism with the democratic impetus of building safer communities.

The latest annual session of E.C.A. was also a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the organisation, in the presence of H. I. M. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, and U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations. Only those who were there can hope to evaluate fully the proceedings, but the reflections of one who attended the five previous sessions in a working capacity, and is now able to view E.C.A. from a more distant perspective, may be not without interest.