The limited size of domestic markets, the availability of natural and technological resources in national units, and the desire to retain some form of protection against full global competition are all factors which promote the formation of regional economic groupings. National markets are usually too small to support efficient industries, exploiting economies of scale or specialization. The elimination of tariffs within an economic community and a common external tariff to non-members should divert trade from external to internal community sources. For industries favorably affected by trade diversion, trade expansion should enable the exploitation of economies of scale and specialization formerly unattainable because of the small size of the domestic market. Production should be allocated among members on the basis of comparative advantage and, following free trade theory, it should then be at its most efficient and low cost. Economic integration is essentially then a strategy of export promotion and free trade among members and of import substitution and protection towards nonmembers (Balassa, 1973; Berendsen, 1978).

As Balassa and Stoutjesdijk (1975) have noted, trade diversion and regional protection may have harmful effects. Goods imported from regional partners may be inferior or higher in price. Less competitive conditions may slow the adoption of new technologies. One of the problems of any economic community is, therefore, to minimize these disadvantages. Relevant policies include both the promotion of efficient and competitive intra-regional exchange by setting external tariffs at sufficiently low levels and, also, the maximum exploitation of member state comparative advantage.

In tackling the topic of current challenges to African universities, Akilagpa Sawyerr has chosen to paint with a broad brush. While giving appropriate acknowledgment to the diversity and complexity of prevailing circumstances in each country, he has elected to focus on a limited number of important issues that he believes constitute, in varying degrees, common challenges to universities across the continent. In electing this approach, he shows a preference for illuminating the dynamic interrelationships among these challenges, and for situating them with regard to some of the larger economic and political forces that have shaped African history in the latter part of the twentieth century. In consequence, he necessarily foregoes in-depth analysis of specific issues. To provide such analysis would require a book, which I sincerely hope Prof. Sawyerr will undertake in the near future.

What is valuable about this article? I would like to underscore three aspects.

First, it provides a clear overview of the main challenges that have confronted African higher education, especially during the past decade, together with helpful interpretations of the causes and consequences of these events. It also incorporates much of the very recent explosion of research on this topic, particularly by African scholars. The bibliography itself is a valuable resource for those interested in the subject.

Over the nine years since the overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s regime in February 1966, Ghana has come under three different governments: that of the National Liberation Council (February 1966 to October 1969), the Progress government (late 1969 to January 1972), and the government of the National Redemption Council (1972– ). Various views have been expressed in journals and magazines where writers have tried to depict the country’s foreign policy under the different regimes. For instance, Ruth First said that the government of the National Liberation Council (NLC) pursued a pro-West policy, and the Times (London) said a day after the coup d’etat of 24 February 1966 that Ghana had “swung back to reliance on the West.” William Gutteridge, however, maintained that the NLC government had restored a degree of neutralism to the country’s foreign policy rather than abandon the policy of nonalignment and neutralism in entirety. He added that the NLC had opted for more modest pan-African policies following Nkrumah’s pan-African excesses. Other people accused the NLC government of supporting the colonialists in Africa by refusing to allow freedom fighters the opportunity to meet and organize from within Ghana.

In spite of the growing recognition of the agency of youths in volatile societies, youths continue to be an under-utilized resource in conflict management. Thus, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nigeria, Adzande examines how youths are contributing to the management of farmer-herder conflicts. This study shows that youths are involved in informal policing as community vigilantes, as well as participating in mediation and the enforcement of restorative justice. A new initiative which is yet to be evaluated is the community-based security architecture in which youths can work with other actors to facilitate early warning, prevention, and resolution of conflicts between farmers and herders.

The popular view of military activities in Africa is one of a continent gripped by political chaos, uncontrolled conflict, and in the vise of an arms race. The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency recently reported that military expenditures among African countries rose 154 percent in the decade 1969-1978. To the inexperienced observer it appears that the African peoples have descended into a Hobbesian abyss, and that misguided governments are squandering their national resources on armaments rather than on programs for human development.

This article suggests otherwise: there are heartening signs amid disheartening news. Empirical evidence indicates that most African countries are engaged neither in conflict with neighboring states, nor in an arms race; indeed, there emerges, for whatever reasons, a pattern of military restraint. This is not to deny the presence of conflict in Africa. Fifty-three sovereign and semi-sovereign newly emerging states are not likely to coexist without contention, and this compounded by extraordinary border problems, the legacy of a century of conflict and compromise among the colonial powers. Rather, it is suggested here that while some African states may be squandering some national resources on armaments, many are not.

There must be reasons why many African states, newly emerging into an imperfect, often hostile world, renounce large security systems. It appears that some form of arms limitation is functioning among many African states and that rapid growth of armaments is confined to a few countries.

Since attaining independence nearly every African government has initiated a national planning exercise founded on the recognition that the technological imperatives of specialization and exchange essential for modern development require large markets, large capital investments, a broad range of natural resources, and the training of skilled manpower—all of which require mobilization of resources at least on a national level. Plans limited to allocating resources merely on a village or even on a regional level would be incapable of contributing to significant increases of productivity because such small units lack these essential prerequisites. However, the record of national planning in Africa has not been very successful in contributing to significant development (Waterston 1965). This is particularly true if development is defined—as it will be throughout this article—as increasing productivity in all sectors of the economy accompanied by raising the levels of living of the broadest masses of the population.

The somewhat dismal record of national plans underscores the realization voiced by more and more development theorists: development cannot be attained merely by transplanting to Africa the refined planning techniques devised to allocate resources in developed countries such as input-output tables, linear programming, or macro-economic models based on assumed capital-output ratios. This is true in part because the lack of adequate data requires that many of the essential coefficients must simply be “invented,” which, over time is likely to lead to results seriously deviating from planned goals (Lewis 1966, especially pp. 15, 20-21).

This article addresses the question of identity in contemporary North African cinema, situating the issue within the larger context of Arab discourse on tradition and modernity. It concentrates on two filmmakers, the Moroccan Farida Benlyazid and the Algerian Nadir Moknèche, and their different perspectives on the formation of postcolonial identity (especially for women). While Benlyazid opts for a new form of Islamic feminism—spiritual Islam—Moknèche portrays, in a provocative style, how Algerian women choose practices that subvert the retraditionalization of their country.

When his Lord said to him, “Surrender,” he said, “I have surrendered me to the Lord of all Being.” Koran, II, 125.

Every verse of the Koran has “an outside and an inside” (Lings, 1977: 29).

The full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner of a world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious of being free, with a freedom which immeasurably outweighs his imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from another, which accounts for certain apparent contradictions (Lings, 1977: 14).

The dominant forms of Islam which have penetrated sub-Saharan Africa in the last few centuries when Islam has taken hold of what are now predominantly Muslim regions (like the Eastern Sudan and West Africa) have been Sufi. Trimingham's (1959: 92) disparaging assessment that “(t)he orders in West Africa became ordinary non-esoteric religious associations… [which] rarely have anything to do with mysticism…,” and that “the ordinary member knows nothing of the mysticism upon which his order is based,” finds its echo in Lewis' (1980: 18) view that “their esoteric content is generally not strongly developed.” Nonetheless, the literary effusions of certain prominent African Muslim authors, like Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Tayeb Salih, seem to find inspiration in a well-defined, long-standing mystical tradition—one which has generated literary forms in addition to having supplied the ideological framework utilized by these authors. This framework varies somewhat less than do the forms adopted by the authors: Laye's and Kane's fictionalized autobiographical accounts seem to be worlds apart from the folktale or Romance which share certain qualities with Salih's Wedding of Zein and Laye's Le Regard du roi, although the two models meet, curiously enough, in Lave's Dramouss and in Salih's Season of Migration to the North.

Rwanda became a Belgian trusteeship under mandate of the Société des Nations after the first World War. With churches playing a prominent role in the political evolution of Rwanda, the two countries were closely bound together. After the 1959 revolution in Rwanda and independence in 1962, development cooperation with strong NGO input still linked them. While the genocide still has tragic influence on the new Rwanda, Belgium has undergone a political process leading to a federal state. The colonial past refers to a national past. Changes in Rwanda and Belgium question any collective attempt of mourning for a past that is very different for all parties involved.

The research that has been done in the various areas of development has tended to focus on the structure of the state and economic modes of production. This approach ignores the intrinsic variables such as culture and traditional Africa's modes of association which incorporated the cyclical nature of existence and experience. This work departs from the traditional mode of development analysis by articulating the concept of social death as the basis for the reinvention of the African woman, consequently enabling a rethinking of development analysis formulations from a more authentic African perspective. For the purposes of this work, “Africa” and “African(s)” refer to and include physical, abstract and intellectual spaces involving precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial experiences of Africans and/or their interaction on the continent and in the diaspora. A viewpoint based on the assumption of Africa as an all-inclusive heritage, it requires the maintenance of the match between the African experience and the acquired modes of discourse that have been used to explore and exclude that experience.

For example, the orthodox school of thought looks at development from an economic perspective whereby the macroeconomic variables are such that that which cannot be quantified, the non-visible, is not a subject of study. On the other hand the historical approach of the radical school of thought (the political economy school of thought) has not done enough to incorporate the role of the traditional African woman into its mode of analysis. Both schools of thought are derived from the western unilineal mode of analysis which forms the strong base for the development and maintenance of scientific thought and practice.

The World Bank has become a subject of controversy, of learned discourse and endless debates between the Left and the Right. The Bank has become the foremost multilateral international lending agency, with an expanding role covering a variety of sectors and involving billions of dollars worth of loans to the Third World, on terms that are not available from commercial banks.

As its role expanded, the Bank began to draw increasing attention, both favorable and critical. The London Economist recently called it “a bank for all seasons.” It is viewed differently by different people, depending on their ideological positions or perspectives. These perspectives may be reduced to two basic positions, divided along a Left/Center axis and a Center/Right axis.

The Left critique has found the Bank—on its record—an instrument of Western corporate capital (Hayter, 1972; Payer, 1982; Bello, 1982). The thrust of the Leftist argument is that the Bank has not proved to be useful to the great mass of the Third World peoples, and that the ruling elites of its borrowing countries have derived benefits from its lending activities. The argument also holds that multinational corporations stand behind its activities also benefiting by selling their goods, which are not a matter of basic necessity to the ordinary peoples.

The Centrist position is essentially supportive of the Bank's role as an important vehicle for the transfer of resources for development of the Third World and as a facilitator of trade among nations (Reid, 1975; Hurni, 1978; Krueger, 1982; Mason and Asher, 1974).

In 2012, three male elders in Tanzania filed a lawsuit against the government and a foreign investor for trespassing, justifying the case as rightful resistance to land grabbing. Based on ethnographic research, however, Chung argues that their action is more appropriately understood as gendered lawfare; the plaintiffs drew on their multiple positions of privilege to exclude a diverse array of legitimate resource users, including their wives. Their lawfare was not only perverse in its design, but also in its effects. It increased the uncertainties surrounding the rights and status of local people and reinforced intersecting inequalities within the “local” itself.

Conversations around transitional justice often focus on concepts of victimhood and perpetration. Such has been the case in Rwanda in the decades following the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. However, even as Rwandans continue to observe state-led transitional justice reforms which divide them into victims and perpetrators, they simultaneously draw on state discourses of unity to carefully critique and re-work the language and practices which produce such divisions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Berman illustrates how a new generation of Rwandan youth is transforming political ideology by creatively engaging the discourse of ubunyarwanda (Rwandanness) to forge inclusive post-genocide politics.

“Shortcut English” is a pidgin spoken between Zambians and Chinese migrants at a Chinese-operated mine in southern Zambia. Contrary to most historical contact languages, the symbolic valences of Shortcut English favor the Zambian laborers over the Chinese mine managers and owners. In the past, Zambians at Summers have categorized Chinese as bamukuwa/ “whites.” Haruyama analyzes how the racializing dynamics of the new pidgin Shortcut English increasingly result in Chinese being figured as machainizi, a denigrated racial other whom Zambians see as unfit to run the mine, which contributes to sometimes violent resistance.