This article develops the concept of ‘mediating bureaucrats’ by exploring their role during liberal reforms that led to rehabilitation of the sugar industry in Mozambique. By focusing on how relations between the state, government and business are mediated by a group of cadres who have occupied positions in different social domains, the article argues that these ‘mediating bureaucrats’ cannot easily be identified in one-dimensional terms as belonging to either the public or private sector, the state or the market. It is argued that as ‘socially embedded actors’, the group of ‘mediating bureaucrats’ are in a position to translate and mediate between diverse and sometimes conflicting interests and aspirations of the state, the government and business. We use the rehabilitation of the sugar industry in Mozambique to show how mediating bureaucrats adopted two practices – muddling through and translation – in order to straddle conflicting interests during different reform initiatives in post-independence Mozambique.

We cannot do better than Marcello Cecco's (1984: 1) concise definition of an international gold standard: it exists ‘when gold is the effective numeraire in most countries, and/or when the other means of payment used as monetary numeraire in those countries are readily redeemable in gold at their bearers' request’. Such a standard existed from the mid-1890s to 1914, even though Britain went on the gold standard much earlier than that, in 1816, and Germany a little over a half century later, in 1871. The Latin Union in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy) did not join effectively until 1900 (Mertens 1994). Many claims were, and are still made for the system: that it facilitated international trade by providing a uniform standard of value; and as an automatic adjustment system, it freed markets from the (nationalistic) interference of public authorities while it created price equalisation in traded goods and ensured, over a protracted period, price stability.

The ‘Gold Standard’ in the title of this talk refers to the ‘academic gold standard’ invoked by Lord Ashby (1964; see also Austin 1980), one time Master of Clare College, Cambridge, a British educationist who was deeply involved with the development of universities in the later years of colonial rule in British West Africa. Although the University of the Witwatersrand and the city of Johannesburg owe a great deal to the gold industry, my talk is not about money or the metal's place in it. It is about the metaphorical ‘academic gold standard’.

The destructive impacts of oil exploitation on the natural environment, which the inhabitants of the Niger Delta depend on for their livelihood, pose major threats to food security. Environmental damage alienates the local people from their ancestral lands and erodes their sources of livelihood. This study examines the effect of oil exploitation on the local people's access to sufficient, safe and culturally acceptable food. The study is based on data collected through interviews with key informants and Focus Group Discussions in the oil communities in Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers States. Environmental and livelihood sustainability are intricately interconnected. They have significant implications for food security of people in the oil-rich region. Nutritional adequacy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for food security because cultural acceptability is also required. This study addresses the interplay between these factors and their implications for household food security in the Niger Delta.

With five years to go until 2000 is upon us the debt campaign is at present concentrating on two elements important for success. The first is capturing and extending what might be described as grass-roots interest: signs already have appeared of some sympathy with, and even support for, the campaign among economists, bankers, civil servants, diplomats, and politicians; discreet encouragement from the inner courts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has been recorded. The second is a change in the international, political, and intellectual climate to favour remission.

Up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ethiopia remained essentially what it had been for centuries – a highly isolated, thoroughly traditional, fervently Christian kingdom. During the closing decades of the last century, the kingdom was greatly enlarged through a vast territorial expansion southwards which created the Ethiopian empire as it is today, and established the Christian Ethiopians as the dominant group within the heterogeneous state. The expansion, and the contemporary appearance of European imperialism in the Horn of Africa, helped to break down the historic isolation of this ancient society. In the decades that followed, sporadic attempts to introduce modernisation in Ethiopia had only a superficial impact, and it was only after World War II, following a brief but painful experience with Italian colonialism during 1935–41, that this process commenced in earnest.

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.

Legislation in the former British colonial territories exhibited a pair of paradoxes. First, it spoke in legalese, a patois that only judges and lawyers can read easily. Many laws concerning development, however, addressed ordinary citizens. Second, drafters invented and used a specialised style to reduce official and judicial discretion by making legislation more precise, but this frequently endowed officials with discretion as broad as the unbroken sky. In Africa, the uses of legalese seemed to war with the purposes for which it was developed.

Too often dismissed as a feudal backwater in a seething continent, the kingdom of Burundi has scarcely received the attention it deserves from social scientists. If not out of indifference, perhaps out of sheer consternation in the face of the contradictory policies followed by its successive governments, most outside observers have prudently avoided speculating on future developments in this part of Central Africa. This neglect is unfortunate on several counts, not the least being the sense of dismay of certain Burundi élites upon discovering that so few westerners are even aware of the existence of Burundi on the map of Africa. Nor is their rancour in any way assuaged when they realise that the term Watutsi conjures up in the public mind a form of exertion more akin to St Vitus' dance than to the realities of their national culture; and though it is plain that Burundi politics often tend to exhibit signs of disorderly convulsions, policy-makers here and abroad obviously need more in the way of explanation. Quite aside from policy considerations, however, the fact is that Burundi offers one of the most fascinating laboratories for the study of social change, as well as a unique opportunity to observe and analyse the forces which transform traditional orders into modern ones, or, perhaps more appropriately, which impede this transformation.

Ten years ago Kenneth Robinson published ‘A Survey of the Background Material for the Study of Government in French Tropical Africa’, in The American Political Science Review (Washington), L, 1956, pp. 179–98. In the absence of published studies dealing directly with government and politics in French African colonies, his survey was necessarily limited largely to official publications and to studies of French colonial policy, legal and constitutional developments, and ethnography. At the same time Thomas Hodgkin's Nationalism in Colonial Africa (London, Muller, 1956), the first and perhaps the most successful attempt to analyse and compare postwar political and social developments, had to rely on a few sociological studies for relevant material on French colonies. At that time, Hodgkin's own articles in West Africa (London) and a few articles by Robinson were the only available pieces of published research on politics in this area.

Decolonisation in British and French West Africa presents some interesting parallers and contrasts. The pressures facing the most important colonial systems during and after World War 11 came from the two new superpowers — particularly the United States — nationalist movements, and internal dissensions. The war Seriously undermined the power of Britain and France and brought into question the moral right of one nation to rule over another. Initially both remained unconvinced about the merits of independence, and in fact the evidence suggests that considerable efforts were made to thwart the process of decolonisation. By the mid-1950s, however, Britain and France succumbed to the three pressures mentioned above, and rather than wait until the situation was uncontainable they chose to guide their colonies along an ‘approved’ path to independence.

Certain problems and prospects of economic development are common to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Any discussion of the Maghreb must consider the restrictive influence of the limited size of the national markets. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Libya with its population of only about 1, 800,000. Naturally, it is the spending or consuming capacity of that population rather than its actual size which is the limiting factor. Studies by Chenery, amongst others, suggested a national product of $30,000 million as the minimum optimal market size for an economy, with a $300 income per capita.1 Furthermore, the lower the average income per person, the higher the total national product needed to support efficient manufacturing plants and, particularly, an industry producing capital goods. By the mid- 1960s the independent countries of Africa together had a ‘continental product’ of about $40,000 million, and a population of about 300 million, often with extremely low income per capita. In short, the entire independent continent provides market conditions of just about the minimum optimal size for rapid development; the market of any subcontinental group, and obviously of any individual economy, is less than a quarter of the optimum size. When one considers countries like Chad, Malawi, and Togo, it is a case of national market sizes smaller than those of medium-sized European cities.