Showing papers in "African Affairs in 1996"

Africa and International Corruption: The Strange Case of South Africa and Seychelles

Abstract: This article traces the development of corruption in one part of Africa - Seychelles - in a global context. It demonstrates how the ease with which capital can be transferred and commodities bought and sold and the speed of modern communication in general have been given considerable impetus to the linking of corrupt practices across borders, and that this process of transnational corruption was considerably encouraged by the Cold War. After independence in 1976 Seychelles was subject to intense international diplomatic and military activity, often of a covert nature, due largely to the islands' strategic location, which made them an asset both in US-Soviet rivalry in the Indian Ocean and in the more localized patterns of conflict stemming from South Africa's drive to assert its hegemony in southern Africa. This led to attempts to subvert or influence the islands' government by bribery and by force, while more powerful governments and business interests associated with political parties as far afield as Italy manipulated Seychelles' status as a sovereign State in order to perform various transactions of dubious legality. There is some evidence also that the islands were used for financial transactions by arms dealers and as a staging post for drug trafficking. Notes, ref

Local government and the return to multi-partyism in kenya

Abstract: UNDERSTANDABLY, THE LITERATURE dealing with the recent revival of democracy in Africa has focussed overvvhelmingly upon the impact and significance for 'good governance' of a restoration of multi-partyism in previously one-party or militarily-ruled states upon national political institutions and practices. This has entailed a particular concern with the framework, fairness and outcomes of presidential and parliamentary elections, the conditions for a 'democratic transition' from one regime to another, and attention to the reasons how and why particular authoritarian governments have successfully survived encounters at the polls. In turn, analyses of the prospects for democratic 'consolidation' have been closely connected to assessments of the ability of heavily-indebted African states to sustain democracy whilst they simultaneously implement painfully unpopular Structural Adjustment Programmes. However, although much recent analysis has come to argue that the new democratic orders will need to be underpinned by 'civil society', very little thought has been given to the implications of a revival of multi-partyism for local government, even though, intuitively, this would seem also likely to contribute to the making of 'the new political pluralism'.1 This lacuna may perhaps be ascribed, at one level, to the disadvantage that local level analysis requires local knowledge, not easily available to the host of distant commentators. At another, it may be due to remembrance of how, following independence, national level conflicts between political parties generally penetrated lower organs of government, to their detriment if not to the immediate disadvantage of ruling parties.2 Yet more importantly, it would seem to reflect the reality that in almost all African states (or where, at least, they have retained reasonable coherence), political power was fairly swiftly to be centralized by post-independence governments to the extent that local government was to be largely reduced to local administration. In such a context, the re-introduction of multi-partyism

Fishing rights, ecology and conservation along southern lake malawi, 1920–1964

Abstract: THIS PAPER DISCUSSES how issues of socio-economic class, race and politics were densely interwoven with the competition for fishing rights, access to land, and fears of ecological degradation along southern Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi) from the early 1920s to 1964. It seeks to demonstrate that it was groups of people with access to sources of political and economic power who competed for the lake's environmental resources. Colonial administrators feared that the intensification of this competition would result in over-fishing and ecological degradation along the lake front. The main contenders were traditional leaders, European and Asian (Indian) commercial fishermen and fish traders, a rising group of African 'smallscale' commercial fishertnen and fish traders, and nationalist politicians. The socio-economic characteristics of these groups is worth noting. The traditional leaders, chiefs, village headmen and family heads, were themselves entrepreneurs. They depended on pseudo-traditionalist avenues of accumulation using family labour and their control over 'junior' members of the households and extended families to appropriate the surplus generated by young men. They were usually the owners of fishing gear and controlled the distribution of the catch to the households. l The European and Asian entrepreneurs were a mixture of traders, commercial farmers, and transporters. The capital they invested in fishing and water-based recreational facilities came from these other enterprises. As transporters, owning lorries, they had easy access to fish markets in towns and the plantations of the Shire Highlands. Their lorries were also used to transport passengers and mail between the lake and the urban centres. The African 'small-scale' fishermen and fish traders were predominantly returning labour migrants and petty traders. They invested the proceeds of migrancy and petty trade in nets and bicycles thus often referred to as 'bicycle-boys'. Since the source of their economic power was from non-traditional avenues of accumulation, these entrepreneurs tended to break away from the control of the traditional leaders. As a result, they gradually, but effectively, undermined the position and influence of the traditional leaders in the fishing industry. From the early 1950s, they

Japanese Aid to Tanzania: A Study of the Political Marketing of Japan in Africa

Abstract: THIS ARTICLE IS AN ATTEMPT tO identify the possible application of aid as a political instrument, with the result dhat the recipient country's foreign policy behaviour towards the donor is constrained. The donor in this case is Japan. The country on the receiving end of such aid is Tanzania. The thematic focus, which remains limited to the application of aid by Japan's policy makers as a political (diplomatic) instrument, is dealt with more extensively in the second part of the article. The first part of the article attempts to assess and analyse the development of Japanese aid policy) and how sub-Saharan Africa fits into it. The chronological coverage of the article extends from the early 1970s to 1991. The arguments presented here are based primarily on what is referred to as the third and fourth phases ofthe development of Japanese aid (1974-85 and 1985-90), when Japan started to extend geographically the application of aid as a diplomatic instrument. The study concerns essentially aid to mainland Tanzania. The central argument proposed here is that Japanese aid to Tanzania, especially starting from the latter half of the 1 970s to the end of the 1 980s, was primarily determined by Tokyo's diplomatic interests in sub-Saharan Africa. By extension, the article questions the popular argument that Japanese aid was directly correlated to its economic interests in the recipient country. An attempt will, however, be made to show that aid to Tanzania was, in a not too convoluted manner, influenced by Japan's economic interests in South Africa. A common explanation of the foreign policy of weak states has been that their relative powerlessness means that in practice they have to conform to the dictates of dominant states.l The theory identifies a causal relationship (the threat and delivery of rewards and punishment by the dominant state) that ultimately ensures a compliant behaviour by the weak state. There is, however) a more carefially crafted argument by Bruce Moon, according to which he suggests a different explanation for the empirical findings central to the above theory.2 The alternative explanation he

Restructuring the local state in post-apartheid cities: namibian experience and lessons for south africa

Abstract: IT IS OFTEN PRESUMED not least as a hangover from colonial timesthat small, peripheral countries should 'learn' from the experiences of large, economically sophisticated and politically more mature countries. Such views are currently being reinforced by political conditionalities imposed on poor countries by Western donors seeking to promote political liberalization and apparent democratization through the adoption of Western-style institutional practices.1 This paper highlights the potential for and limitations to learning in the other direction, thus undermining the implicit hierarchical 'trickle down' and core-periphery thinking which is still prevalent within academic geography, other social sciences and the realms of political, economic and social action. Implicitly too, this perspective draws from a more critical geopolitics, in which the all too readily accepted terms, categories and simplistic attribution of motives on the basis of perceived ideological fixeties, must be challenged and deconstructed. Virtually all the 'critical geopolitical' literature has focused on national and global issues; it is actually rather more challenging to apply such notions at the local scale, where problems and issues are far more personalised and less easily generalised. It may be increasingly possible for metropolitan residents to consider themselves part of a global village, but in peripheral states and societies, the town, let alone the village,

The minefield of land reform: comments on the eritrean land proclamation

Abstract: A MINEFIELD IS A MORE THAN apt analogy for the dangers of land reform in Africa today Tensions within a society resulting from distribution of land that is viewed as partial or unjust, can lie like hidden mines until their explosion is triggered by external factors such as violence, famine or ethnic conflict South Africa, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe are all examples of societies in which land allocation has caused tensions which later exploded as political upheaval Since it won its independence from Ethiopia in 1991, Eritrea has embarked on a plan to implement a major land reform in the countryside 1995 has brought about the public proclamation and testing of this land reform This article will examine the planned land reform in detail both on its own merits and in comparative perspective with other countries in Africa Two themes to the Eritrean land reform will be followed in this article First is the political conflict which the land reform may generate as a result of its emphasis on securing agricultural, rather than pastoral rights to land The second is the inexplicable retreat into development strategies abandoned by other African countries in the 1970s and 1980s These two themes are bound together in a discussion of the intents and possible effects of the Eritrean land reform This article is based on the content of the land and investment proclamations as well as interviews about the proclamation and its intents with officials in the Eritrean government As implementation of the land reform is only beginning, a discussion of its eventual effectiveness must be delayed for a few years in order to fairly assess the changes brought about

Government witchcraft: taxation, the supernatural and the mpondo revolt in the transkei, south africa, 1955–1963

Abstract: WHEN THE MPONDO REVOLT broke out in the Transkei in 1959-60, white South African authorities were caught off balance. Magistrates and officially appointed chiefs and headmen all over the Transkei not just in Pondoland were in the process of implementing Bantu Authorities legislation that would eventually bring apartheid-generated 'self-rule' to the territory in 1963. Low-level unrest had been simmering for several years, particularly in those locations where 'betterment' and 'rehabilitation' schemes had already taken effect. Yet white officials consistently acted as if this unrest were of little consequence and could either be ignored or defused. The revolt proved them wrong. Students of colonial history in Africa have often grappled with the issue of why Africans did not rebel more frequently against imperial rule. Yet when analyzing the revolts that did occur, scholars sometimes find the causation unproblematic) arguing that colonial states provoked the revolts by being discriminatory and exploitative. While this was manifestly true, revolts should not be studied out of context. The question of why people revolted at one historical moment may be linked to why they did not revolt previously. To present the analysis in these terms is immediately to delve into a discussion of the political) social and cultural consciousness of the Africans involved. For, although the brute force at the command of the South African state did play a crucial-if comples-role in the nineteenth century subjugation of the Transkei) South Africa maintained its control in the twentieth century without an army of occupation, with local protests only occasionally upsetting its subsequent rule.l In fact, it was only after many months of sporadic violence in the Transkei that, in 1960-63! the state did send in military force to resubjugate the countryside. If brute force was not the sole basis for rule, then we are left with the issue of African acquiescence. Karen Fields has discussed this question with regard to British-controlled central Africa in the colonial period, a region that provides some useful comparisons with South African history. Fields notes that the British, once they took control of various regions, did not maintain that control through the constant use of military force;

Labour Migration in Colonial Tanzania and the Hegemony of South African Historiography

Abstract: It is argued that the migration and work culture model in South Africa does not apply to Tanzanian labor migration to European plantations under German rule. The model in South Africa should not be considered representative of Africa. Tanzanian social structures and patterns of colonialism were fundamentally different from South Africas. There were differences in the nature of capital penetration the participation of peasants in shaping the colonial economy and the role of women. Labor migrants in Tanzania had control of the patterns of production at work and thus affected the colonial labor system. Workers did not suffer from patterns of repressive taxation and collaboration between the government African elites district officials and settlers against migrants. Changes were made by German colonials after the Maji Maji uprising. Peasants productivity was encouraged as a means of increasing production. The policy gave peasants leverage in the labor migration process. Peasants used short-distance labor migration as a household survival strategy. Migrants settled in societies where caravan porterage was a tradition. After 1909 planters continued to recruit women and children. Peasants created their own societies on rural plantations. In Tanzania the laws did not reflect "time discipline" industrial labor patterns but did deal with plantation issues such as duration of contracts. The tax policy after 6 months of work relieved peasants of the tax burden. Labor recruiters and plantation owners to some extent used coercive means to secure workers. Migrants selected the work site carefully and examined food rations plantation upkeep recruitment fees food during the march to the work site and the reputations of plantations. The labor migration in Tanzania was far less repressive than in South Africa. Migrants collectively worked to improve their living conditions before returning to their core villages.