Few people consider the armed forces hesitant in their actions. Speed, decisiveness, efficiency, directness—such are characteristics often attributed to the military. Especially in areas where protection of military autonomy is concerned, quick action may be taken.

Recent African history suggests that members of the armed forces exhibit willingness to leap into active political involvement when challenges arise to their corporate interest. Since June 1965 fifteen African states have experienced coups d'etat. The decisive act of intervention, however, rarely is mirrored by an equally decisive act of withdrawal. Coups are clear-cut events, transitions to civilian governments far less dramatic or marked. As the time to return to the barracks approaches, doubts and hesitations seem to grow. Officers pause, uncertain whether they have accomplished what their intervention allegedly was to correct. They are caught in a dilemma, and as S. E. Finer noted, “whether their rule be indirect of whether it be direct, they cannot withdraw from rulership nor can they fully legitimize it. They can neither stay nor go” (1962, p. 243).

Once military intervention has occurred, voluntary disengagement of the armed forces from direct political involvement comes when withdrawal seems to enhance the military's corporate interest. Splits within the military, relatively restricted objectives, and the opportunity to transfer control to civilians whose outlooks, policies, and backgrounds resemble those of the ruling military group facilitate disengagement.

Adventure stories are favorites among children in many parts of the world. Africa has been the locale of hundreds of children's adventure stories written by African and non-African authors for over a century. These adventure stories, along with other fiction, are just as powerful teachers about Africa as are professional educators.

This essay will compare the adventure stories of three wellknown and popular authors (as judged by literary critics and child readers) who based their stories on extensive firsthand experience in Africa. The writers belong to three different generations, and their adventure stories are typical of those of many other writers of their time. Representing the Victorian Age is George Alfred Henty, whose name is “probably identified above all others with the Victorian adventure story” (Townsend, 1975: 63) and whose books were so popular with children that in 1894 some British teachers limited the number that students could read (Welsch, n.d.). The early twentieth century is represented by Rene Guillot, the initiator of the exotic novel for children (Jan and Patte, 1973: 360) and winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Prize of the International Board on Books for Young People—a prize which has been awarded only three times since 1958. Although Guillot wrote all of his children's books in French, almost all of them have been translated into English. Barbara Kimenye (a journalist from Uganda, short story writer, and one of East Africa's most prolific children's writers) represents the mid-twentieth century. She writes about ordinary people “who live outside the pale of ordinary society” and makes their lives interesting (Nazareth, 1974: 167).

Anthropologists have long been interested in the sources and consequences of material inequality among African peoples. Societies in which such inequality existed during pre-colonial times have been investigated (cf. Maquet, 1970; Cohen, 1970; Hoben, 1970) but, especially since the close of the colonial era, attention has been directed toward societies originally without significant material wealth differences that have become internally differentiated due to exogenous social and economic forces. Emergent wealth differences have been related to a number of causes, including differential participation in labor migration (Mitchell, 1970; Watson, 1970; Wilson, 1977), differential incorporation into trade networks (Levine, 1962; Cohen, 1966; Mascarenhas and Mbilinyi, 1971), differential participation in ideological systems (Allan et el., 1948; Long, 1968; Barrett, 1974), and, especially, differential control over the factors of production (representative are: Ruthenberg, 1968; Vincent, 1971; Hill, 1972; Parkin, 1972; Feldman, 1974; Raid and Raid, 1975).

In East Africa today there is cause for particular concern regarding the extent to which differential access to land, labor and capital is generating patterns of rural inequality in which a few fortunate households are elevated while the majority remain poor. The concern exists not only because maldistribution of wealth and material well-being implies widespread suffering in rural areas, but because concomitant circumstances such as unequal educational opportunities (Sheffield, 1967; Court and Ghai, 1974), unequal access to development funds (Hyden et al., 1970; Heyer et al., 1971), and unequal nutritional intake (Gerlach, 1961, 1964; Dema, 1969; Kraut and Cremer, 1969), can lead to social, economic and physiological polarization of the rural population.

Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Partitioned into what is now fiftyone or more territorial units at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the continent presently has the largest number of states represented at the United Nations. This numerical strength has advantages and disadvantages for Africans. It is advantageous because it gives Africa greater visibility in the international voting process. It is disadvantageous because it turns this vast continent into a highly fragmented sector of the international community. Yet Africa's size and fragmentation have great significance for Africanists because together these factors make the continent a major laboratory for research on human society. Africa's numerous political and socio-economic units provide many examples of political and social engineering for students of underdeveloped world societies.

My presidential address tonight deals with Africa and its role and position in world history between two ages. The two ages addressed are the ancient/medieval and the modern/contemporary. As a historian, I see ancient African history as going back to the appearance of Homo Sapiens whose origins are now conclusively identified with East Africa. In tracing the historical past of Africa, I do not wish to travel so far back as to link up with those early Homo Sapiens, rather I wish to go only as far back on the world continuum as ancient Egypt to show in time how this magnificent civilization served as the birthplace of many cultural ideas that later travelled in all directions from the Nile Valley.

The subject of colonialism is still imbued with emotive overtones, and it is perhaps too early to expect complete agreement in the description and evaluation of the impact of colonial rule on Africa. This article utilizes an important indicator of government activity, public expenditure decisions, to aid in describing the nature of British rule in the Gold Coast from 1901 to 1939. The intention is twofold: first, to check the validity of certain propositions about British colonialism and, second, to investigate how well the apparent uniqueness of one particular Governor, F. Gorgon Guggisberg (1919-1927), is supported by this information source.

The descriptive strengths of government expenditure data are readily apparent. Expenditure is quantified and thus fairly comparable both over time and cross-nationally. Moreover, expenditure provides an empirical measure of nearly the entire range of government activities. Consequently, changes in governmental goals might be expected to be reflected in expenditure allocations.

There are, however, several problems which may impair the usefulness of government expenditure as a descriptive tool. First, every government, even the wealthiest, must operate within the constraints placed on it by the size of the revenue and, more fundamentally, the structure of the national economy. Strongly desired programs may, therefore, languish because of a shortage of funds. As is the case elsewhere in the social world, objective acts are often imperfect measures of subjective motivations. Second, the distribution of funds among various sectors is not always amenable to rapid restructuring, so that a change in goals may be sluggishly reflected in government expenditure.

Traditions about the foundations of the military kingdom of Dahomey, over which King Gezo reigned from 1818-1858, are well known. Suffice it to say here that this warlike kingdom was founded in the first half of the seventeenth century, probably around 1620, by one Dogbagri Genu (otherwise known as Dako), a fugitive prince from Allada, who had been ousted from the throne of his father by his brother, Te-Agbanlin (Akinjogbin, 1967: 22; Page, 1961: 93). Under its fourth monarch, Agaja Trudo, the nascent kingdom of Dahomey reached the height of its power in the eighteenth century. The glorious reign of Agaja Trudo (1708-1740) saw the expansion of Dahomey in all directions, particularly to the south. An inland West African kingdom, Dahomey, like the nineteenth century Egba state in southwestern Nigeria, needed a direct route to the coast, partly in order to participate in the West African trade with European traders and partly to have free access to gunpowder and arms, a sine qua non for any state that wished to acquire and sustain its greatness. Hence, in 1724, Agaja Trudo attacked Allada and included it in his rapidly growing empire. Three years later, Whydah was forced to become part of the kingdom of Dahomey. The basis of a future powerful state seems to have been laid by Agaja Trudo when Tegbesu, who came to the throne in 1740, pushed the state's frontier still farther, the intermittent incursions of Oyo notwithstanding.

Although a few trade unions had been formed in Nigeria before 1938, it was not until after the passage in that year of the Trades Union Ordinance by the Nigerian government that many trade unions were formed by Nigerian workers. Between 1940 and 1950, some 144 trade unions with a membership of over 144,000 were formed (Nigeria 1940-1950), and the prospects for further trade union growth were very bright. With the increase in the number of unions as time went on, the country was rocked by a number of industrial disputes (many of which were ill-advised), and a number of misappropriations of union funds by union officials also occurred. It was generally held that these problems could largely be overcame if the unions and their leaders were given adequate trade union education. In consequence, the government initiated a policy for giving trade unions and their leaders some basic training in trade union organisation and leadership.

The execution of this policy was the responsibility of labour officers in the trade union section of the Department of Labour. They were people with wide experience in trade union organisation and leadership. Such officers as Mr. R. Curry and his assistant Mr. M.A. Tukunboh were men with profound knowledge of trade unionism. Mr. Curry was “for many years the London and Eastern Counties Organiser for the National Union of Tailors and Government Workers,” and Mr. Tokunboh was “a former secretary of the Nigerian Trade Union Congress” (Nigeria 1946, par. 46). The main function of these officers was to work with the trade union leaders and assist trade “unions in such matters as accountancy, administration and organisation; to encourage the formation of benefit sections and, above all, to encourage and educate trade union officials and members in (1) the objects and functions of conferences, (2) the duties and responsibilities of officers and executive committees, and (3) the proper function of local committees and members' meeting” (Nigeria 1946, par. 46). The Department of Labour seems to have attached special importance to the education of trade union leaders. This was so because the leaders were the men on the spot to carry on the trade union education work in the interest of the rank-and-file trade unionists.

Most contemporary historians of the colonial period in Kenya emphasize the importance of the state. The colonial state, it is argued, ensures the conditions of settler capitalism, provides the infrastructure of transport, credit, marketing and agricultural research, creates by administrative action a supply of African labor, and generally ensures the interests of settler capital against those of an emerging African class of landed capital (Brett, 1973; Leys, 1975; Swainson, 1980). Equally, the theme of tension between the colonial and metropolitan states is a classic one in colonial history, and one which in much of the Kenya debate is seen as refracting tensions and conflicts between the interests of settler capital and the interests of international capital (Swainson, 1980; Cowen, 1982). Yet, despite this emphasis on the colonial state, very little discussion of its distinctive political features has occurred. The economic functions of the colonial state are stressed to the exclusion of questions about the basis of its legitimacy, of its citizenship principles and of its authority. Gavin Kitching (1985) recently pointed out that we have no really adequate theory of the post-colonial state. We are constrained instead to making negative statements to the effect that it is not simply the agency of one particular class force in Kenya, nor is it a unified force but die site of contending and fractured forces. The argument could well be extended to the colonial state.

Since the middle of the 1970s Sub-Saharan African states have focused increasingly on their severe economic and fiscal crises. These involve wrestling with the burdens of debt service and the rigors of rescheduling, conducting difficult negotiations with bilateral and private creditors, bargaining over conditionality packages with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or fending them off, distributing the painful costs of adjustment, coping with import strangulation and devising new development policies and strategies. Already highly dependent on the outside world, the intensity, stakes and levels of conditionality of these relations with external actors have increased substantially.

Often, for many analysts theorizing the brain drain, producing macrolevel statistics is considered enough to demonstrate the significance of the concept. Furthermore, nationalist and internationalist theories and perspectives have shaped the discussion of the brain drain, each seeking to determine whether the brain drain generates an economic loss for the country of origin or a gain for the welcoming country.

The concept of Pan-Africanism has been around for a long time in spite of great historical events. Beginning as the nationalist thought of more or less detribalized Africans in the New World during the era of slavery, Pan-Africanism has survived the impact of such developments as the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era, the rise and fall of the Garvey movement, European colonialism in Africa, the Russian and other socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, and the black freedom movements in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean since 1945.

African states have become increasingly unable to provide adequate health care to their citizens due to debt, structural adjustment, poverty, and mismanagement. The health crisis is worsening in many areas and driving up mortality rates after decades of decline. This article investigates how African communities and their citizens respond in light of state inability to deliver health-related services. Drawing on a survey of more than five hundred rural Kenyans, our analysis shows that people are dissatisfied with government facilities and are turning to mission clinics and hospitals as well as to private clinics. A number of factors determine choice of health-care facility, including cost, level of education, socioeconomic background, the time taken to reach a facility, the type of disease requiring treatment, and agro-ecological zones. These findings have profound theoretical implications for health and development models, which normally are biased in favor of developed Western countries.

Rural development in parts of Nigeria is a function of two comparable, if not, coordinate variables: the government and the townsmen residing in the urban areas. The government provides the access roads, runs schools and health clinics or hospitals built by the townsmen. These urban migrants, as we shall henceforth refer to them for reasons to be explained later, in addition to providing other infrastructural facilities, are the political and economic backbone of the rural communities as well as their source of modernization.

Smock (1971) dwelt upon the political and modernity role of ethnic unions in Nigerian cities. She showed how these unions “facilitated the accommodation between tradition and modernity in the Eastern political system…,” linked “traditional commitments with the modern political and administrative structures,” and prevented discontinuities, a characteristic feature of transitional political systems. For Smock, urban migrants, successfully manipulated tradition to politically modernize their rural villages. Little (1970) reasoned slightly differently. He saw the major functions of urban associations as the adaptation of traditional institutions and the integration of institutions whose raison d'etre is alien to traditional culture. These associations nurtured political leaders and the formation of political parties resulting in modernist ambition and nationalist aspirations for self-government. Meillassoux (1968) perceived urban migrants associations, or voluntary associations as he referred to them, as the mechanism by which the migrants approached the problems of social security and created new social networks. Meillassoux also saw a clear nexus between the norms of these associations and their rural origins in terms of their derivation, their roots, and their purposes.

It is mainly from this rural-urban link that we shall approach our present discussion. This paper shall also show that the psychological and sociophysical condition in the urban area, the acceptance that the city is a place for austere living and endurance of rough conditions all combine to prepare psychically urban migrants for their role in the economic maintenance and improvement of their home rural communities.

The past twelve months have witnessed the devastation of Rwanda. More than one half million people were murdered by the Rwandan army and the associated civilian militias, while over two million people fled the country after the death of former President Juvenal Habyarimana. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, which emerged in exile over the past thirty years and now dominates the government in Kigali, faces a dilemma: how does it consolidate its position amongst its core supporters, many of whom grew up in exile and recently returned to Rwanda, while at the same time gain the confidence of the domestic population, many of whom have recently fled? Resolving this dilemma is the central task for the regime, and is critical to the future political and economic development of the country.

In spite of its stated desire to create a broad-based government, the core of RPF support lies on a perilously narrow base, located as much outside of the country as inside. Domestically, the country is in ruins. The exodus of refugees resulted in the collapse of production and of the state.

Modeled after the U.S. presidency, the office of the president of Nigeria is easily the most powerful position in the land. The president is both the chief of state and the head of government. The authority of the nation’s chief executive expanded greatly during the patrimonial regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha. Indeed, not only was power concentrated in the hands of these despots, its exercise was also marked by massive corruption, brazen nepotism, and sustained brutality. Against this background, it was perhaps natural that the presidential election of February 27, 1999, would excite keen interest among the Nigerian populace, elite groups, ethnoregional blocs, and the international community. This article highlights some of the ethnoregional forces and elite interests that influenced the election and examines their possible implications for the sustenance of democracy and good governance in Nigeria.

Despite scant advance publicity, the hot and airless court-room of Malawi's Southern Regional Traditional Court was filled to overflowing on October 19, 1971, to hear the case against Walla Laini Kawisa. Every lawyer and senior civil servant who could possibly arrange it was there. The Police had cordoned off the area surrounding the Court. A huge crowd stood behind the barrier in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the proceedings. On the bench were three elderly chiefs, a legally-qualified magistrate and a young Judge from a lower Traditional Court. Police Superintendent Phuza prosecuted, assisted by the Attorney General and a senior CID officer. Kawisa was unrepresented and pleaded guilty to three counts involving eight murders. The Prosecutor told the Court that the accused had agreed to have other charges taken into account. Kawisa impassively pleaded guilty each time the details of a charge were read, causing a stir in the courtroom. On October 30, 1971, after an arduous presentation of the case by the Prosecutor, Kawisa was found to be solely responsible for thirty-one murders and fifteen attempted murders. Reading the Judgement, Chief Chikumbu said:

This article, part of a historical study of childbirth in the Sahel, draws upon oral interviews, ethnographic materials, and studies of midwifery to explore placenta burial in Niger. In the region the placenta is often referred to as the “traveling companion” that ushers the new human from one world to the next. Only through proper respect toward the placenta by means of careful burial can a woman’s future fertility be protected. The importance of protecting a woman’s future reproductive capacity accounts for both the centrality of this ritual to childbirth and for the appeal of the ritual expertise of elderly “traditional birth attendants” despite access to bio-medically trained midwives. Protecting a vulnerable parturient mother from the envy of those (such as co-wives) who might “tie up” her womb is an integral part of the process of childbirth. Appropriate placenta burial orchestrated by a woman’s therapy management group makes good on the cyclical intergenerational entrustment through which ancestors and descendants endure in a cycle linking birth and death, planting, and burial. “Traditional” rituals bear marks of major shifts in the agricultural economy, rapid urbanization, and ongoing adoption and reinterpretation of Islam. Multi-generational interviews reveal that across a broad range of ethnicities, status groups, and educational profiles, women in Niger share a concern for proper placenta burial. This approach to preserving women’s reproductive health and fertility is shared by adjacent neighbors, generations, and ethnicities.

The question, “Which language for literacy?” is often asked in contexts where a number of languages are used in a given community or state (Bhola, 1983; Carron and Bordia, 1985; Fordham, 1985). Although pragmatic reasons for the choice of language—availability of materials and of teachers, and economic considerations—are sometimes adduced, it is generally agreed that the question is above all a political one.

The problem of language choice is acute in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, where a nation-state may be comprised of a large number of linguistically heterogeneous groups (Nigeria, for example, has 413. See Grimes 1988: 295). While the merits and demerits of developing and using such small languages are ardently debated (Fasold, 1984; Pattanayak, 1985; Skuttnabb-Kangas, 1981), it is rare to find studies of particular situations where attempts have been made to develop and use such languages for the purpose of rural development. This paper will present such a study.

Cameroon is a country of 10.5 million people where 238 languages are spoken (Dieu and Renaud, 1983). The bulk of the population (80 percent) live in rural areas where they are engaged in subsistence and cash crop farming (Biya, 1986). National development policy has emphasized the rural areas under the official banner of the “revitalization of village communities”; this policy has been adopted partly to seek to stem the rural exodus to the towns, and partly because of a recognition that Cameroon's main resource in the long term is agriculture.

Leadership succession and regime change lie at the center of two perennial problems of governance: (1) how to ensure the political continuity of any regime without endangering the political stability of the political community; (2) how to protect both the regime and the political community against the natural disposition of those in power to manipulate their office so that they could extend their terms of office or succeed themselves against the provisions of written or unwritten rules of managing political power and succession rights. There can be little doubt, then, that the political acts that surround leadership succession and regime change constitute a most serious aspect of political life in any society. In all political systems in general, and in African politics in particular, such acts constitute an important index of the development or deterioration of politics.

The renewed focus on Africa since the middle 1950s as a subject of political inquiry and theorizing has contributed greatly to the existing body of literature on political development, modernization and related subfields of Comparative Politics. Unfortunately, this rather extensive body of literature has not provided us with a definitive knowledge of the dynamics of social and political change. In this regard, major events in African politics have continued to cast doubts on the validity of many an earlier theoretical formulation and expectation.

How should one relate culture to the modernization process in Africa? This paper will attempt to indicate how one might go about answering this important question, probably raising more questions in the process than providing substantive answers. A point of departure, in doing so, is to offer a critical exposition of the uses to which certain African political thinkers, principally Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, have put the culture concept.

The paper assumes that contemporary African political thought, especially since the 1950s, has been preoccupied chiefly with explaining the modernization process in cultural terms. A thesis, deriving from this basic assumption, is that the culture concept provides a useful focus for interpreting and assigning meaning to contemporary African political thought. This paper will illustrate this thesis with respect to aspects of the political thought of Fanon, Cabral, and some others.

Students of contemporary African political thought have tended to ignore and, therefore, have not explored the implications of the strong connection between the concepts of culture and modernization in contemporary African political thought. Hopefully this paper will correct this situation. In doing so, the paper will point to the explanatory dimension and force of contemporary African political thought. This is because the interpretation offered here looks upon African political thinkers as using the culture concept to explicate the consequences of colonial rule and the colonial inheritance for the modernization process.