Showing papers in "African Studies Review in 1977"

Experiments with a public sector peasantry: agricultural schemes and class formation in africa

Abstract: The African landscape is littered with the remnants of failed agricultural schemes. Yet, international agencies and national governments, both purportedly interested in development, continue to experiment with schemes that are little better planned than some of their more spectacularly misbegotten predecessors. This government persistence in the face of repeated failures is not interpreted as a defect of planning but as proof of government commitment to modernity in the face of cruel odds. Failures are explained by the intransigence or primitiveness of peasants. Such explanations begin to break down upon closer examination of actual experiences. Agricultural schemes are commonly over-capitalized, under-planned, and poorly managed (Palmer, 1974). It is worth considering the hypothesis that governments persist in these costly and unremunerative experiments neither because of a commitment either to modernity or productivity or because of simple ineptitude but because of their quest for control. Control over the peasantry is crucial since peasants are the majority of the population in all tropical African countries and earn the bulk of the governments' foreign exchange in all but Nigeria, Zambia, Angola, Botswana and Liberia. Because of this political and economic dependence on peasants, governments want a productive peasantry, but one that remains under secure control. Governments do not want peasants using their productivity to wrest either political or economic concessions. Tensions arising from government attempts to control peasants on whose productivity they depend provide useful insights into contemporary processes of African class formation. In understanding class formation it is useful to begin where Marx began, with the search for a principle of differentiation and stratification that reveals the processes through which classes are developed, rather than with a list of classes that may share nothing more fundamental or enduring than certain shortterm interests. The process of class formation is more usefully approached from analysis of the process than from analysis of the apparent results of the process, or what seem to be classes (Marx, 1973: 83-111). A decision to begin with a search for principles of class formation does not necessarily simplify the inquiry into class formation in Africa. There are two competing principles of class formation, each of which has produced one major class with internal differentiations. African class formation is proceeding concurrently through both Marxian and neo-Marxian processes. Marx's principle of class formation was access to control of the means of production (ibid.). African peasants are a class according to this criterion. Peasants are small-scale rural

Land Reform in Ethiopia, 1974-1977

Abstract: In March 1975, the Ethiopian ruling military council, or Derg, proclaimed a sweeping land reform, which aimed at bringing about a complete transformation in the country's complex land tenure system and in its social and political structures. More than a land reform, the measure should be called a land revolution, for there was nothing reformist in the Derg's approach. It simply opened the floodgates of rural discontent, allowing the peasants to take over the land and encouraging them to organize into “peasant associations.” The government did not seriously attempt to control the process, partly for ideological reasons, and partly because it simply could not do it. Rather, the peasant associations were allowed to decide whether to redistribute land among their members, or to enter into collective forms of land cultivation. The ambitious scope of the reform, and the suddenness with which it was announced and implemented, led most observers, including many radical Ethiopians and most diplomats from socialist countries, to forecast economic disaster and social breakdown. Such dark predictions did not come true. The economic consequences of the land reform were some increase in production, due mostly to good weather conditions (Dalton, 1975), and a tangible improvement in the peasants' living conditions. The urban population, though, suffered because of the sharp price increases that resulted from the disruption of the marketing system and an increase in on-farm consumption (Holmberg, 1976). Social turmoil undoubtedly was part of the land reform process, and thousands of people lost their lives in it.

Order and Conflict in the Asante Empire: A Study in Interest Group Relations

Abstract: Conflict and change in precolonial African societies excite considerable scholarly interest, but historians have yet to produce a very useful theoretical framework for analyzing them. This is certainly true of the study of conflict in Asante, one of the best known kingdoms in precolonial Africa. Beginning around 1700 as a small confederation of segmentary, matrilineal chiefdoms, Asante rapidly expanded in the eighteenth century along lines of economic, political, and strategic advantage. Through conquest and various processes of differential incorporation, it succeeded in establishing its control over all its neighbors. A smashing defeat of a British-led army of coastal Fante and allied states in 1824 crowned the long imperial enterprise. To Thomas Bowdich, a British commercial agent and visitor to Kumase in 1817, Asante was “indisputably the greatest and the rising power of western Africa” (1819: 341) By 1820 the asantehene's power and influence extended over an area perhaps one and a half times the size of modern Ghana, with a population of some three to four million. Without any doubt, one of the most impressive aspects of Asante history is the systematic development of a national ideology and the elaboration of complex social and political institutions for the management of the society's affairs. Outstanding early rulers like Osei Tutu (ca. 1695-1717), Opoku Ware I (1717-1750), Osei Kwadwo (1764-1777), and Osei Bonsu (1801-1824) created an elaborate military organization and a sophisticated centralized bureaucracy to ensure order, stability, and effective administration in the huge empire.

Occupational Specialization By Ethnic Groups in the Informal Sector of the Urban Economies of Traditional Nigerian Cities: The Case of Benin

Abstract: The significance of the informal sector in the economy of developing countries is a recurring theme in the literature on urban and regional development planning in Africa south of the Sahara. This is of particular importance in Nigeria where it has been estimated that enterprises within this sector provide about seven times as much employment as those of the formal sector (Callaway, 1967: 163). Although economists such as Kilby (1963: 18) view small-scale enterprises in the informal sector merely as a "quasi-sponge for urban employment," their persistent survival and expansion has led to recent investigations into the conditions which have made this survival possible (Lewis, 1972, 1973, 1974; Aluko, 1972; Bray, 1969). In spite of the fact that the dualistic nature of the urban economy in many developing countries has been recognized by researchers for some years now, there is still some controversy about the most appropriate terminology which can be used to describe the pattern. McGee (1973: 138), for example, has suggested that most cities of the third world can be seen as "consisting of two juxtaposed systems of production-one derived from capitalist forms of production, the other from the peasant system of production." On the other hand, Geertz (1963) described the two systems respectively as the "firm-centered economy" and the "bazaar-type economy." These definitions emphasize the distinctive organization of production activities, whereas the usual "modern-traditional" dichotomy refers to the technology used. Hart's (1973) study in Accra introduced the concept of formal and informal income opportunities. He based the distinction between formal and informal urban economic activities on that between wage-earning and selfemployment. The key variable is the degree of rationalization of work; that is, whether or not labor is recruited on a permanent and regular basis for fixed rewards. Hart, therefore, defined formal income opportunities as public and private sector wages as well as transfer payments. He further divided the informal income opportunities into legitimate activities including primary, secondary, and tertiary enterprises, and small-scale distribution; and illegitimate activities such as prostitution, bribery, smuggling, petty theft, and gambling. One significant respect in

Education and economic development in nigeria: the need for a new paradigm

Abstract: The point has been made about the dangers inherent in attempts to analyze the underdeveloped world's problems purely in terms of the experiences or models of the industrialized, developed countries of the world. It is often warned that nations and cultures differ; and that what may have worked for one society may not necessarily work for another. Consequently, these critics caution against a blind transplantation of foreign tools or models to the distinctive conditions of the contemporary developing nations. Akeredolu-Ale (1972: 119-20) put it rather sharply in the Nigerian context: … economic process cannot be studied in isolation but only in their social, political, and demographic setting…. Purely economic interpretations of the economic development process as it is going on in the less developed countries are bound to be incomplete. One striking feature of economic life in such countries, is the greater role which political factors (domestic and international) are playing in the determination of the process of economic evolution… Any investigation of the economic process in a contemporary underdeveloped country such as Nigeria, if it is to avoid superfidalism, must begin with an analytical framework that is much less restricted than that derived from orthodox Western economic theory. The transfer of Western theories, models and concepts to the study of economic problems… is not harmful per se, but it could be a source of great bias and distortion… when new facts require that they be seriously modified.

Mountain Witchcraft: Supernatural Practices and Practitioners among the Meru of Mount Kenya

Abstract: One major consequence of black African independence has been the redirection of the continent's historians. Since the 1960s, researchers have sought not only to rediscover but revise Africa's pre-colonial image. On one hand, efforts have been made to recover those aspects of history and tradition that had been suppressed or destroyed by colonial power. On the other, attempts continue to restore other areas which were merely distorted by European rule. Too often it was the European distortion rather than the African tradition that was passed on to the younger generations by colonial educators. As a result, youngsters throughout the continent were deprived of those portions of their heritage of which Europeans disapproved. This is nowhere more true than in the sphere of the African supernatural. The entire network of relationships between the gods, ancestral spirits and the living, which formed so great a portion of the latters' daily lives, was initially greeted by colonial hostility and contempt. Trapped within their own religious framework, Europe's missionaries and administrators—with a few striking exceptions—were unwilling to examine what they saw. They placed every form of supernatural practitioner and practice under the labels of “witchcraft” and “witchdoctor,” while attempting to replace them with values of their own. A few European and African scholars have opposed the general trend. Their works have probed deeply into supernatural tradition at a regional or tribal level. In West Africa, Bohannen, Debrunner, Basen and Field, in studies of Nigerian and Ghanaian societies, have investigated the relations between West African gods and their human servants.

Peasants and Economic Development: Populist Lessons for Africa

Abstract: This study argues that in technical terms the usual economic models of international trade and development are misspecified because they deal only with market relations and omit important social and political equations (i.e., the social relations of production) which are important variables in the development matrix. This omission has led to development strategies which favor the “modern sector” at the expense of the traditional sector; the agricultural communities are undermined and impoverished. The traditional sector is maintained as a reservoir for cheap labor and as security for the old and the indigent to cushion off crisis in the capitalist modern sector. The traditional sector is undergoing a prolonged crisis without a smooth transition to capitalism or socialism. A more humane and viable process of development of the African economies is suggested: it is argued that Third World policymakers shift from the “dualistic” paradigm of economic development—a post World War II neoclassical paradigm associated with the work of Lewis (1954), Fei and Ranis (1964) and Jorgenson (1970)—to a version of the populist strategies of the Narodniki (Russian) and Maoism in transforming the backward agrarian economies of the Third World (Walicki, 1969; Gurley, 1975). Most Third World economies may be classified as subsistence economies with industrial enclave sectors. The majority of the world's population live in an agrarian environment. Yet neoclassical and Marxist economists, having preoccupied themselves with the study of the capitalist system, have ignored agrarian economics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1970). Noncapitalist economies have simply not captured the interest of most economists.

The state of economic integration in north west africa south of the sahara: the emergence of the economic community of west african states (ecowas)

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent African regional cooperation can be of assistance in building economic foundations that would provide viability for the new states and to what degree this would generate self-sufficiency, integrated economies, decolonization, and a reduction of the dependence resulting from inherited institutional structures. Because political unions tend to be short-lived, it seems clear that the organizing units must be based on the principles of maintaining sovereignty of national entities and non-interference in the internal affairs of states. Nevertheless, since all modern African states aspire toward political union, it is necessary to ask the question of to what extent and under which conditions can regional cooperation be a step in that direction.

Peasant participation in communal farming : the Tanzanian experience

Abstract: The transformation of peasant agriculture is a central concern of many African leaders. Since the population of most African countries is predominantly peasant, rural change is considered a requisite of national development. Several leaders have turned to the socialistic experiences of the Soviet Union and China for models of rural transformation. Some have seen in the idea of establishing rural socialist communities, a notion similar to that of the nineteenth century Russian Narodniki, an appropriate strategy for such transformation. They believe that such communities will involve the peasantry in new political and economic relationships of a sort which will improve the way of life of both rural and urban inhabitants. Among African adaptations are such entities as the Algerian socialist villages and the Tanzanian Ujamaa villages. Tanzania's efforts to establish Ujamaa villages, in turn, have attracted attention throughout Africa and the Third World. The country formally committed itself to building a socialist state in the Arusha Declaration of early 1967. Major private industries were immediately taken over by the government. Leaders, however, realized that the key to their efforts would be the establishment of socialism in rural areas. In September of 1967 President Nyerere issued a policy paper titled “Socialism and Rural Development,” which proposed the creation of Ujamaa villages where people “lived and worked together for the good of all” (Nyerere, 1967b: 337-66). Since the majority of the peasants lived scattered on individual plots of land outside villages, people had to be moved together.

Peasants as a Focus in African Studies

Abstract: Are there peasants in Africa? This question is not academic, though academics have contributed extensively to the discussion. Once seen as a transitional stage, peasants and peasant societies have emerged as a focus for research that, to an increasing extent, cuts across disciplines, continents, and historical periods. This developing academic interest is conveying new insights into the relationships between rural dwellers and their political and social systems. Africa is a continent without peasants, so the conventional wisdom has stated. The syllogistic reasoning runs as follows: cultivable land is relatively abundant, at least in most parts of tropical Africa, resulting in a relative absence of population pressures. Patterns of communal land tenure remain the norm in rural areas. Hence, given the absence of both pressure on the land and individual land title, Africa lacks peasants-since there are neither landlords to collect nor rents to be collected. "Tribal" feelings of solidarity, it is further asserted, preclude the emergence of the peasantry as a class cutting across diverse groups. Finally, the absence in many parts of tropical Africa of cities and structured states meant that cultivators rather than peasants were common. Let us look briefly at these arguments. Available statistics indicate that land is indeed available. Most African states rank relatively high in terms of total area of agricultural land. The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators lists 130 states in ascending order of agricultural area: Egypt places 9, Mauritius 13, Gabon 27, and Nigeria 37-but African states also account for 21 of the last 34 states in the table (Taylor and Hudson, 1973: 303-5.) Population density data similarly suggest relatively limited pressures. Of 136 countries listed by the same source, only 3 African countries appear in the first 59 (Rwanda and Burundi show the most extreme pressure, ranking 28 and 29); 38 of the last 69 are African countries (Taylor and Hudson, 1973: 299-302). Thus, leaving aside such crowded areas as the Nile Valley, the interlacustrine Bantu-speaking area, and parts of coastal West Africa from Ghana through Cameroon, the picture of low population densities appears generally accurate. Land abundance, however, says little, if anything, about soil fertility and productivity. The relatively low population densities indicated by United Nations figures may be due to inadequate natural resources and historical factors. In blunt terms, it may not be possible to support significant rural populations in Africa. Hopkins (1973: 15), in his Economic History of West Africa, points to such causes as inadequate soils, lack of water and salt, mortality from disease, and conflict as explanations of the relatively low densities. The long term demographic consequences of the slave trade have often been noted. Whatever the causes may be,

Dependency, Development, and Inequality in Black Africa

Abstract: Recent studies of development in Africa reflect the broad ideological gulf between the perspectives of classical capitalist developmentalists and neo-Marxist dependency theorists. In the capitalist view, development is seen as a problem of modernization (i.e., westernization). Marxists, on the other hand, perceive the underdevelopment of the third world as a product of western development and the emergence of the world capitalist system. In an effort to inject an empirical element into this ideological debate several analysts have undertaken comparative examinations of the merits of the alternative approaches (Kaufman et al., 1975; McGowan, 1975; 1976; Vengroff, 1975; 1976; Walleri, 1975; Stallings, 1973; Chase-Dunn, 1975). A general examination of the relative merits of the developmental and dependency approaches is beyond the scope of this brief paper. Here die author will attempt to assess the utility of these conflicting approaches as explanations of the particular phenomenon of domestic inequality in black Africa. The question of domestic inequality and development in Africa has unfortunately received only limited empirical consideration (Vengroff, 1976) and then usually from a national rather than a cross-national perspective (Leys, 1973; Harris, 1975). Proponents of capitalist theory suggest that inequality is a natural, short run outcome of the development process. As the level of development increases, there is a broad expansion of the middle class, and hence a decline in inequality (Adelman and Morris, 1973; Paukert, 1973).

Algeria's 'Agrarian Revolution': Peasant Control or Control of Peasants

Abstract: A virtual crisis in Algerian agriculture has been experienced since the early 1950s. This crisis, which has its roots in the dislocations created by the seizure of the best lands by the French and the implantation of the colon regime of agriculture since the conquest of 1832, has been primarily a crisis of underproduction. The war of national liberation, which was fought primarily in the rural areas of the nation, the forced "regroupment" by the French army of approximately two million people during the war, and the massive destruction of livestock and of farm and forest lands resulting from the eight year war exacerbated the problem of underproduction. The relative contribution of agriculture to the GNP in 1954 was 34 percent, for example; whereas in 1968 it dropped to 15 percent, declining to less than 10 percent in the early 1970s (Viratelle, 1974: 196). The failure after 1962 of the post-revolutionary governments to stimulate agricultural production adequately or to create new or additional rural jobs helps to explain the constant decline in the peasant contribution to the Algerian GNP and to the development of the country after independence. A massive rural-urban exodus also continues unabated. Approximately one hundred thousand farmers leave the lands, the villages, and small towns of the Algerian countryside each year swelling the already overcrowded cities of the north. This exodus, though not a recent development, has not been arrested in a sector where unemployment in the early 1970s reached one out of two persons (Ammour et al., 1974: 78). The magnet of "escape valve" that France has traditionally offered to the unemployed, the upwardly mobile, and the desperate among Algeria's peasantry and urban sub-proletariat, only accounts for approximately 25 thousands Algerian emigres each year to the former metropolis and to other Common Market countries (Mallarde, 1975: 208). These trends could be discounted only to the detriment of Algeria's heavy industrialization program in 1971. They almost forced the Boumediene government to act. In spite of these trends, agriculture still provided employment to three out of four employed Algerians in the summer of 1972 when the government actually launched the Agrarian Revolution (Viratelle, 1974: 143). Instead of revising its development priorities by recognizing the centrality of agriculture, the government reduced the projected expenditure of funds for the agrarian sector. The First FourYear Plan (1970-73), for example, assigned 16 percent of all development funds

Obstacles to "peasant war" in africa

Abstract: The headnotes typify growing interest in political change effected in developing countries by rural insurrection. Extraordinary and recent successes in Africa and Asia have led some authors and would-be leaders to suggest "the people"-as embodied in a revolutionary foco-are invincible. Some evidence is clear, to be certain. The PAIGC liberation of mainland Guinea-Bissau, coupled with extensive FRELIMO pressures in Mozambique and increasing challenges in Angola, hastened political change in both Portugal and the three African territories (Henricksen, 1976). The success of Mao Tse-tung in banishing the Kuomintang to Taiwan and unifying mainland China under strong central rule cannot be overlooked. The United States of America suffered military and psychological defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh's peasant fighters. All were, and are, touted as peasant successes. Their potential applicability to contemporary tropical Africa is the subject of this essay.

Recent studies on african women

Abstract: For years, indeed until the recent emergence of feminism, the worlds of women were relatively unexplored. Social scientists solicited neither women's thoughts nor their opinions. They highlighted child-bearing and rearing as women's productive activities. Any roles other than the domestic were often misconstrued, if not entirely ignored. Women were written off to a mundane existence in the home. Now that the study of women has become respectable, a new literature has blossomed. As a discussant on a panel entitled "Women in the Migratory Process," Anthony Leeds stressed his "ever-increasing malaise with the spurious reification of 'women' as a unit of analysis-a unit I see ideologically generated, not scientifically" (Leeds, 1976: 69). Leeds's primary objection is with the individualistic emphasis of the category. Women should not be studies qua women, but as players in role-sets who articulate with the larger social fabric and whose activities are socially determined. Leeds's complaints are not uncommon. They are addressed, for example, by the editors of the anthologies under review. The collected pieces illustrate that often the biological fact of "woman" determines the kinds of roles that women play. The editors justify the publication of their respective volumes by setting forth explanations of why and how the subject of women has suffered, and why and how it should be pursued. Although the two books are related, they vary substantially. The Hafkin/Bay authors represent a variety of disciplines, but all are Africanists focusing upon African women. The Ardener contributors are all anthropologists, but their female subjects inhabit different geographic areas. The Hafkin/Bay

Sources of Socio-Political Instability in an African State: The Case of Kenya's Educated Unemployed

Abstract: On a continent where military coups, civil wars, and other forms of violent disorder have been commonplace, Kenya has appeared an anomaly. The regime of President Jomo Kenyatta has maintained uninterrupted and relatively peaceful civilian rule since the country's independence in 1963. Until recently, Kenya's postindependence body politic had shown few outward signs of social or political stress. Kenya's era of stability may now be nearing an end, however. In early 1975 the country began experiencing a series of crises and disorders that constitute the worst violence since the 1950s nationalist revolt that brought Kenya's present elite to power. Some observers are beginning to question the Kenyatta regime's ability to contain a variety of mounting tensions and pressures (see Africa Report, 1975a: 29, 48-49; 1975b: 28; 1975c: 23-24). In the pages that follow, I present an analysis that predicts a continually escalating state of social and political unrest in Kenya. In the first section, I argue the inherent long-term instability of the Kenyatta regime in terms of the regime's failure to adapt to the aspirations and demands of significant portions of Kenya's newly independent citizenry. In the second and third sections, I present, as a case study of the kinds of underlying social and political processes contributing to instability in Kenya, an examination of the mechanisms through which it appears that members of a growing body of unemployed school leavers are being inexorably drawn toward points of social and political rebellion.

Angola before 1900: A Review of Recent Research

Abstract: Since the last published survey of scholarly research and general research conditions in Angola (Bwrmingham, 1974), much has changed. An independent government has begun to implement fresh policies bearing on scholarly research and on education. Numerous studies have appeared abroad, although historical works on the period before 1900 and ethnographies of Angola's rural areas—the subjects of this research note—have been less plentiful than analyses of the rapid and spectacular political changes that have taken place in the last three years. Research on the earlier periods of Angola's history have filled in several of the gaps that until recently limited our knowledge of the region anachronistically defined to include all the territories now within the independent nation, even though Portuguese “Angola” before 1900 comprised only a small area around the coastal towns of Luanda and Benguela. Current research on Angolan history builds on bases laid down by several imaginative scholars of the 1950s and early 1960s, beginning with James Duffy's overview of Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique (1959, 1962). Numerous Portuguese-language surveys have also been available, as well as a variety of Portuguese and French-language studies of the Kongo kingdom in northwestern Angola. More immediately, Jan Vansina (1966) and David Birmingham (1966) initiated efforts to integrate the history of Africans in Angola into modern African historiography. Recent works also draw on Douglas Wheeler's studies of nineteenth century Portuguese policy in Angola and on the origins of the autonomous intellectual community of Luanda (1963, 1971, 1972, 1973), whose members founded the first improvement associations and semi-political movements that preceded the formation of the Movimento Popular para a Libertacao de Angola (MPLA) and the present government of the independent nation of Angola.

The african cultivator: a geographic overview

Abstract: Focusing attention on subsistence cultivators is one of the logical starting points for examining rural Africa from a geographical perspective. Such farmers, functioning within a physical setting that provides both opportunities and constraints, must depend for survival on a familiarity with environmental qualities and contend with extreme conditions. Within this situation an agricultural system must be designed to provide for current food consumption plus a surplus that will vary with local circumstances. Both agricultural practices and environmental characteristics impinge, in turn, on systems of settlement and mobility. Neither the individual nor the farm family is static, but circulates within a defined area and may eventually relocate when circumstances require. When land is actually allocated, not only subsistence needs are taken into account, but also social regulations such as those concerning the distribution of homesteads relative to the distribution of fields. Thus, this overview of the rural African will be concerned with a sequence of four interrelated factors: (1) the dominant mode of food production, (2) the environmental setting, (3) a scheme for organizing terrestrial space at a local scale, and (4) a systematic approach to migration. Within the context of these spatial and environmental factors, the process of change can be superimposed; operating gradually at first and then accelerating, especially during the last hundred years. As population density has increased, as land has become more scarce, and as the commercialization of agriculture has spread, the basic relationship of environment, production, settlement structure, and mobility have been modified. Simultaneously, the cultivator has been evolving into a peasant.

American Philanthropy and African Education: Toward an Analysis

Abstract: Since the passage in 1969 of congressional legislation intended to regulate the activities of tax free philanthropic foundations, a spate of works dealing with the role of foundations in American life has been published (Cuninggim, 1972; Heimann, 1973; Nielsen, 1972; Peterson, 1972). Most of these works have dealt in a general way with the responsibilities of philanthropic organizations in a period of rapid change. Several were commissioned by the larger foundations themselves, perhaps to indicate to a potentially hostile legislative branch the foundations' willingness to evaluate their performances to date and to establish socially “responsible” goals for themselves. None of these studies has analyzed specific policy issues in which the foundations have been involved or themselves have helped to create. The central role played by foundations in the growth of American institutional life has been seriously neglected by scholars, more specifically by political scientists, whom, one would think, would have an especial interest in studying these institutional pillars of American society. If the role of American foundations in the evolution of institutions at home has been neglected, the significant role of American foundations as institution builders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and as implementors of American foreign policy is hardly even known. It is with the role of American foundations overseas, particularly in Africa, that I am concerned at this juncture.

South africa's strategic vulnerabilities: the 'citadel assumption' reconsidered

Abstract: In assessing the patterns of conflict in southern Africa, it is commonplace to stress the theme of South Africa's overwhelming strengths against the threat of black nationalist forces. Most observers support this thesis of South African invulnerability by citing the country's enormous mineral resources, impressive military capabilities, continuing strategic importance and economic links with the west. Leonard Thompson (in Thompson and Butler, 1975: 408) ably summarized this popular view, citing other noteworthy domestic and international variables to buttress the point: In resisting "terrorists" South Africa's government has the ardent support of four million Whites who consider their very survival is at stake. South Africa has a far more powerful industrial base and far more formidable military equipment than any government that has been overthrown by guerrilla forces. It has the capacity to produce atomic weapons; the terrain in the vicinity of its borders is treeless or sparsely wooded savanna, which affords guerrillas scant opportunity for concealment. Moreover, the South African revolutionaries in exile are divided into rival factions; the capacity of Black African states to launch military expeditions against the Republic is limited by domestic economic and political weaknesses, interstate rivalries, and serious logistic problems; and neither the Soviet Union nor the People's Republic of China seems prepared to make a major commitment in southern Africa in the near future. Consequently, although guerrilla groups launched across South Africa's land frontiers may become a continual irritant to the regime, they do not seem likely to be able to overthrow it.

Using the personalized system of instruction to teach african history

Abstract: Reluctantly and sporadically college and university instructors of African history surveys are discovering that effective teaching is not guaranteed solely by the excellence of our research. Like historians in other specialties we are also discovering that student and administrator evaluation of our teaching, particularly at the lower division survey level, is growing more critical. Unfortunately few of us are prepared to bridge the gap between the specialized approach engendered by our graduate school training and the pedagogical needs of the increasingly heterogeneous audiences we meet in our undergraduate history surveys. This essay is directed toward bridging this gap. Rather than simply presenting a theoretical discussion on the relative merits of this particular approach to undergraduate education, a single sample unit is offered for critical evaluation.

The Emergence of an African Regional Literature: Swahili

Abstract: Some scholars feel that an African, or, more properly, Pan-African literature is developing in Africa. This literature is seen as continent wide and is written in the various colonial languages. It is seen as a unified literature responsive to a simultaneously emerging African society (Roscoe 1971: 252; Joyaux 1972: 313-14). Adrian Roscoe, who holds this view, feels that given such a continental literature, it is unlikely that Africa will see the development of independent national literatures (1971: 252). Whether or not one subscribes to this view, it is the thesis of this paper1 that there is another kind of literature emerging in Africa-an East African regional literature. East African literature in Swahili, as it is developing, appears to differ from what is being referred to as African literature in both non-vernacular and other vernacular languages. It is a regional literature in an African language with a character which is neither tribal, national, nor continental. In East Africa, unlike the rest of the continent, literature in the colonial languages has never flourished as much as that in Swahili. Swahili has been spoken and written on the coast since the thirteenth century. At first, Swahili literature was written in the Arabic script employing Arabic genres and now it employs the Roman script adapting and modifying western genres. The emerging regional Swahili literature is receiving added impetus from conscious efforts being made in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya to promote Swahili literacy in the Roman script and to encourage Swahili as a national and and official language. The point here is that modern written literature in Swahili has developed in the last thirty years as a distinctive regional East African literature through its use of western literary genres. This development of modern written Swahili literature is in contrast to the classical written literature of the Swahili coast which is influenced by Arabic forms and Islamic themes. It is also in contrast to the Pan-African literature in European languages. In the 1950s and 1960s modern writers in Swahili began to produce biographies, autobiographies, essays, novels, poetry, and plays. These literary genres must be considered alongside the modern and classical Swahili poetry in the Arabic script commonly thought to be dominant in Swahili letters. In general that classical literature, though vernacular, was based on the coast and accessible to a primarily religious literate elite rather than to a heterogeneous regional population. On the

The Politics of Intrigue in Ankole: 1905

Abstract: The death of a colonial official in the early days of colonial rule in Africa was always a matter of grave concern to the imperial powers. Trained manpower was scarce and the sense of isolation and vulnerability must have been intense when the entire white establishment numbered a few dozen men. When that death was not from disease or accident, but was the result of an act of violence by an African subject, the concern felt by the colonial authorities was comparable to that caused by a local rebellion or armed insurrection. Such was clearly the case when a senior officer was murdered in the Ankole District of Uganda in 1905, only six years after the first British officer took up a post in the district. The result of the murder was a political crisis and a far reaching probe into the crime and its circumstances which serves to lay bare the political intrigues, divisions and motives of the entire collaborating elite of the Ankole Kingdom. Like a rebellion, the crime of assassination offers us not only a story of intrigue and drama, but an avenue into the workings of the colonial regime and the African political systems which it encompassed. The complicated new structures of factional competition which were uncovered in the course of the murder investigation were fundamentally the same political structures that persisted during the entire colonial era in Ankole. It is for this reason that the murder of a single colonial officer deserves careful scrutiny.

South Africa's Strategic Vulnerabilities: The ‘Citadel Assumption’

Abstract: In assessing the patterns of conflict in southern Africa, it is commonplace to stress the theme of South Africa's overwhelming strengths against the threat of black nationalist forces. Most observers support this thesis of South African invulnerability by citing the country's enormous mineral resources, impressive military capabilities, continuing strategic importance and economic links with the west. Leonard Thompson (in Thompson and Butler, 1975: 408) ably summarized this popular view, citing other noteworthy domestic and international variables to buttress the point: In resisting “terrorists” South Africa's government has the ardent support of four million Whites who consider their very survival is at stake. South Africa has a far more powerful industrial base and far more formidable military equipment than any government that has been overthrown by guerrilla forces. It has the capacity to produce atomic weapons; the terrain in the vicinity of its borders is treeless or sparsely wooded savanna, which affords guerrillas scant opportunity for concealment. Moreover, the South African revolutionaries in exile are divided into rival factions; the capacity of Black African states to launch military expeditions against the Republic is limited by domestic economic and political weaknesses, interstate rivalries, and serious logistic problems; and neither the Soviet Union nor the People's Republic of China seems prepared to make a major commitment in southern Africa in the near future. Consequently, although guerrilla groups launched across South Africa's land frontiers may become a continual irritant to the regime, they do not seem likely to be able to overthrow it.