The Sahel and Sudan zones are the “harsh lands” of West Africa. These arid and semi-arid lands include parts of present day Senegal, Mali, Northern Ghana, Mauritania, Niger, Northern Benin, Upper Volta, Chad, and Northern Nigeria (Map 1). “Harsh lands” denotes a region of extreme environmental uncertainty, but one in which man has learned to survive by exploiting their inherent qualities and the productive capability of their micro-environments, by forming cooperative relations with people of contrasting, but complementary life styles, and by constructing biologically enriched habitats in which select plants can grow. These survival techniques are commonly employed by farmers and nomads throughout West Africa, and while they may not be highly productive by western standards, they are highly dependable.

The people of these harsh lands never depend entirely on the resource endowment of their region for survival. Inter-ethnic exchange, both within and between territories, is a fundamental strategy for aquiring supplementary food in poor harvest years. Self-sufficiency is a concept foreign to the economic history of West Africans.

Nevertheless, the harsh lands of West Africa are deteriorating at an alarming rate. Rescue and restoration efforts must involve the reinstatement of ancient, but improved, land use practices that stress biological regeneration of the plant cover, and interregional exchange must be expanded to a scale that far exceeds that commonly known to have existed in the past. The purpose of this article is to show how land use practices deliberately employed by West Africans to combine local environmental conditions, and the selection of plants and animals to construct an enriched habitat in which the latter can grow, have been altered in the last 60 years and to analyze the impact of that alteration on the arable land of West Africa. It concludes by arguing for an ecobiological approach to full restoration of the harsh lands of West Africa.

Modern African life has been profoundly affected by the brief period of European colonial domination during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the past is prologue for all states, the ramifications of Africa's colonial past have been felt with particular acuity in the current era due to the speed of Africa's transition from colonial status to that of independence. Many aspects of contemporary Africa reflect the residual effects of colonialism, but few do so with the clarity of the boundary situation. This study will focus on one particularly important aspect of that boundary situation—boundary conflict. In particular, it will define the explanations for boundary conflict offered most often in the traditional literature and test their validity using empirical methods.

The boundaries of modern Africa were the creation of European diplomats who partitioned Africa among themselves with little regard for, or knowledge of, the socio-cultural characteristics of the continent. As a result of the capriciousness of the European partition, a typical African boundary may group together many ethnic groups in one state, it may cut across many ethnic or national boundaries of the past, or it may create a state whose physical characteristics hinder political, social, or economic stability. Since the colonial boundaries were used, with few exceptions, as the basis for the devolution of sovereignty in Africa, the current leaders of the continent have had to deal with the effects of this boundary situation.

African international relations have also been influenced by the presence of externally defined, artificial boundaries. Political boundaries mark sharp discontinuities in political jurisdiction, but in Africa few of those discontinuities correspond to the patterns of the socio-cultural environment. It has, therefore, been frequently charged that the artificial boundaries of Africa form the basis for conflict between the African states (Emerson, 1963: 105). In order to make their boundaries more congruent with the ethnic landscape, some states might attempt to adjust their boundaries at the expense of a neighbor. If Africa's modern boundaries had been allowed to evolve in a more natural manner, or if the colonial powers had based their partition upon a more thorough appreciation of the ethnic contours of the continent, it is assumed that the states of Africa would be less prone to boundary conflict.

In this article an attempt is made to achieve three separate but complementary tasks. First, to make a contribution to the ethnography of the rural Hausa of northern Nigeria. Although considerable attention has been paid to the historical development of the centralized emirate systems which provide the overarching framework for the organization of Hausa society (see for example Smith: 1960), comparatively little attention has been paid to the lower levels of Hausa political organization especially in the rural areas where 90 percent of the Hausa live. A notable exception to this neglect of the rural Hausa is the outstanding contribution made by Polly Hill (1972 and 1977), who in her introduction (1972: xiv) states her insistence that “rural (Nigerian) Hausaland is … the great under-explored region of West Africa.” Hill, however, concentrates her effort mainly on economic life and the more directly political aspects receive relatively little attention.

Secondly, this article seeks to examine critically the relationship between the political structure existing in the village and the various, seemingly contradictory, ways in which the inhabitants describe it. It shall be suggested that at several critical points the structure is ambivalent and exhibits a variety of tensions which pull it in different directions. It shall be further suggested that the divergent descriptions of the structure given by informants are, in fact, an ideological representation of these (empirical) tensions. As such they are individually partial, both in the sense of being incomplete and in the sense of representing particular configurations of interest.

Thirdly, to suggest some explanations for the tenacity of these traditional institutions and the continuance of the traditional leadership patterns as the major political force in Hausa village life. In doing this it shall be argued that to attempt an explanation in terms of autochthonous village equilibrium dynamics cannot really answer the problem. Rather, it is only by placing this microcosm in the context of the Nigerian political and social systems as a whole that the basic lack of major change can be fully understood.

Zambia, like all African countries, is experiencing significant political, economic, and social change. The Zambian government and ruling party seek to control change and channel it in certain directions, but many aspects of change are not initiated by them and a substantial proportion of these are not to their liking. Politically initiated changes and government reactions to other changes have inevitably affected the legitimacy of the Zambian political system and its major components in the eyes of a wide variety of Zambians. In his contribution to the Social Science Research Council's volume on the crises of political development, Sidney Verba indicates that all such “crises of development” or problems associated with change “would seem always to involve problems of legitimacy as well as one of the other problem areas” (Verba, 1971: 306). Thus it is important to study the effects of change on legitimacy since they will be crucial in determining whether the Zambian government and ruling party will be successful in directing change into the paths they desire.

Political legitimacy can be defined as a generalized appraisal of the political system as a whole, its various components, and the policy outputs they produce, which indicates that these objects are appropriate in terms of accepted values and norms. To define legitimacy as a generalized appraisal of appropriateness is to differentiate it from specific appraisals of political structures and policies made in terms of perceived interests. These two types of appraisals are empirically interdependent in the long run, but they can be independent of one another in the short run (Easton, 1965: 267-77). They tend, however, to be very closely related in most new political systems, where most diffuse bases of legitimacy have not had time to develop (Binder et. al., 1971: 90-91, 158, 194, 315-16). A complete description of legitimacy in a political system must indicate who grants what degree of legitimacy to what political objects on the basis of which values and norms.

With the increasingly rapid urban growth in Nigeria in recent decades, and with its consequent multiplication and complication of the urban problems of traffic and transport, housing, health, and sanitation, the need for a more purposeful planning and management of cities has come to attract increased public policy attention. The institutional and organizational setting for city planning and management, particularly the role of municipal governments in these activities, still remain colonial and therefore ill-suited to the demands of present urban developments. City planning and management responsibilities are so fragmented among so many institutions and organizations that the municipal local governments have had very little authority over what happens in the city.

The overlapping responsibilities of the various institutions make for conflicts and the net result is general inefficiency in the planning and management of many cities. The recent (1976) Local Government Reforms which aimed at decentralizing some functions from the state and federal governments to local governments do not seem to have altered the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and city management matters.

The aim of this paper is to put the origin of the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and management into political and historical perspective. It also seeks to argue that until city planning and management responsibilities are centralized on strong, autonomous municipal governments, headed by popularly elected urban chief executives, the present chaos in Nigerian cities is likely to continue.

When Haile Selassie returned to Ethiopia he used the Italians to insure his own survival. During the war period the Ethiopians began to appreciate the Italians. They demonstrated this attitude by not taking revenge for the crimes committed during Rudolfo Graziani's 1936–1937 administration. Instead, they aided the Italians to escape to safety when pursued by the occupying British military authorities. The Ethiopians even went so far as to espouse the Italian underground movement against the British, in a strange form of Italo-Ethiopian collaboration (Wingate, 1973: 206). For Haile Selassie the battle of El Alamein was the turning point in the relations with both the British and the Italians. Until this time, he was concerned with securing his own position, something he could not do until he had a clear reading of who would ultimately win the war.

Italy's colonial efforts in Ethiopia from 1936–1941 failed for lack of organization, incompetent colonial personnel, and high costs. Yet, the most important hindrance to Italy's progress in East Africa derived from the Patriots and the hostility of the Ethiopian farmers. Italy was neither able to obtain adequate food supplies in Ethiopia, nor obtain enough land for demographic colonization. Nevertheless the success of new agricultural methods and modern forms of government could not be accomplished in Ethiopia in a short time. Therefore when Italy entered the Second World War, on 10 June 1940, the Italians in Ethiopia were in the midst of experimentation, and the Ethiopian people had barely begun a period of transformation in their lives.

Wọle Ṣoyinka in his recent Myth, Literature and the African World (1976) attempts to divest himself of the reputation that some of his earlier pronouncements have earned him as a denier of the existence of a distinctive Africanity, and to shake off the foreign sympathizers who have unfairly, he claims, exploited those early positions to bolster their racist denial of an “African world.” His intention in this book is to demonstrate his belief in the “African world,” to show how it is “self-apprehended” by the true African, and to “call attention to it in living works of the imagination, placing them in the context of primal systems of apprehension of the race” (ibid.: xi-xii). The first illustration he uses for this “apprehension of the race” is “The Imprisonment of Obatala,” a play by Obotunde Ijimere (1966). This choice is startling and baffling because Obotunde Ijimere is actually Ulli Beier, a German who was actively involved with Nigerian and especially Yoruba culture from 1950 until 1967.

First Ṣoyinka's use of the play to illustrate the Yoruba world-view will be summarized. The myth of Obàtálá (the creator arch-divinity) is that while he was engaged in the creative task entrusted to him by the Supreme Deity, Olódùmarè, he became thirsty and drank some palm wine to slake his thirst. Unfortunately the effect of the wine put him to sleep. The Supreme Deity, observing the cessation in the creative process, sent Odùduwà (the ancestor of the Yoruba) to complete the task. Odùduwà did and, before Obàtálá woke up, he installed himself on the throne as the ruler of the people. Obàtálá did not forgive Odùduwà for supplanting him. Therefore, both he and his progency engaged Odùduwà and his progeny in a long contest aimed at regaining the ascendency (see Idowu, 1963: 71 ff; Adedeji, 1972). The annual observance of Obàtálá's festival at Ẹdẹ includes a mock battle recreating an aspect of Obàtálá's contest with Odùduwà, and in which the former is captured, incarcerated, and later released after the payment of a ransom (Beier, 1956; Rotimi, 1968).

This paper is an attempt to examine the development of a profession on a western model in a developing, non-western society. It attempts to examine the relationship of the colonial social and political environment to the development of the legal profession in Kenya; and also the relationship of the post-colonial social and political environment to the changes occurring in that development. The paper proceeds on the assumption that like any occupation, the legal profession in Kenya has a history and that history, specifically the history of change from the colonial to the post-colonial social and political environment, has determined some aspects of the profession's structure (Stinchcombe, 1965: 153-54).

The literature of occupational sociology is especially rich in its treatment of one prominent category—the professions. The central theme in this literature has come to be the professional model, conceived as an ideal-type that permits comparisons between the abstract model and actual professions. The model is said to consist of a series of attributes which are deemed important in distinguishing professions from non-professional occupations. The attributes are conveniently categorized into two basic types: those that are part of the structure of the occupation and those which reflect the attitudes of the practitioners about their work (Hall, 1968). Wilensky (1964: 194) identified the structural attributes as: the creation of a full-time occupation out of the work done, the establishment of a training model reflecting the knowledge base of a profession, the formation of a professional association, and the formation of a code of ethics. The attitudinal attributes have been identified as belief in self-regulation (Greenwood, 1957: 44-55). the belief in autonomy (Scott, 1965), the use of a professional association as a major reference (Goode, 1957: 194), and the possession of a sense of calling to the field (Gross, 1958: 77-82). Although criticized (Johnson, 1972: 1973; Roth, 1974: 7-25), the professional model has come to gain some acceptance in the literature of occupational sociology as the ideal type measuring tool used to determine how far along the professionalization path a particular occupation has moved. Movement toward correspondence with the model is what is generally considered to constitute the process of professionalization (Vollmer and Mills, 1966).

Long-distance radio broadcasting might have become a very important and successful tool of colonial administration had it been invented thirty years before its time. As it was, international short wave broadcasting began only a few years before the onset of the immediate forces that led to dissolution of empire. Ad hoc solutions to problems of colonial broadcasting were thus just beginning to give way to conscious policy when the end of the era came. The subject of this paper, therefore, is limited to the years between 1927 and about 1957, that is from the start of the British Broadcasting Corporation's experiments that led to establishing its Empire Service to the onset of postwar colonial devolution.

The very year that the British Broadcasting Corporation was organized it began experiments with short wave transmissions to the colonies. Such long-distance short wave broadcasts involved an untried technology, new concepts of programming, and innovative financial arrangements. The BBC experimented for five years before it was ready to inaugurate the Empire Service formally in 1932.

During that 1927-1932 gestation period of the Empire Service, the Colonial Office had explored the acceptability in the dominions and the colonies of such broadcasts from home. At the 1930 Colonial Conference, the secretary of state for the colonies spoke of “the possibility of creating a new and intimate bond of connection between the different British communities … and also possibly its utilization for the purposes of the natives” (Great Britain, 1930:9. Emphasis added). The priorities were thus clearly set forth. The Empire Service had as its primary role the maintenance of home ties with British expatriates overseas and with the dominions.

Multiple meanings are attached to the ideology of African socialism in post-socialist Ghana. The range and complexity of these meanings are best understood through experimental techniques. In this article Q analysis sheds new light on earlier findings regarding the subjective, affective, and cognitive elements of thinking about African socialism in Ghana. Subtle ideological differences are explored among a homogeneous group of Ghanaians. Ten years after the exile of Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, and after two military regimes and an intervening civilian regime, Ghanaians are celebrating a renaissance of Nkrumaism. For ten years following Ghana's independence in 1957, Ghanaians were subject to Nkrumah's prolific verbal output concerning “scientific socialism,” consciencism, and Pan-Africanism. The meanings attached to these concepts by Nkrumah and by his followers remain clearly ambiguous.

This ambiguity is understandable given the fact that Nkrumah's often contradictory writings on the subject of scientific socialism were devoid of the rigor which scholars often associate with that term. It could be argued that Nkrumah was more interested in political mobilization and constructive myth-making than ideological rigor. The routinization of the new order involves the transmission of the myths and folklore of the culture over time. The myths of a communal and ancestral heritage, for example, are important for cultural maintenance. This mythology contributes a unique dimension to Ghanaian culture which distinguishes it from others in the minds of natives. The literal applicability of Nkrumah's scientific socialism to any given situation is not as important as the Ghanaian belief that society is, for example, egalitarian or anti-colonial, and contains certain implicit rules circumscribing wealth and exploitation. In the end, the maintenance of cultural order is more dependent on these rules and distinguishing features than on rabbit farms and bicycle plants. While political regimes must provide the latter, they must engage in the transmission of the cultural norms and myths through continuing processes of socialization. Perhaps it is within the context of constructive myth-making that Nkrumah's ideological contributions can be best understood.

In 1970, drought and famine began to afflict Ethiopia (Shepherd, 1975: ix; U.S.Depart. of State, 1974: 41; Wiseburg, 1975: 299). By 1974, almost 8 percent of Ethiopia's people had experienced starvation (Shepherd, 1975: 39) and more than two hundred thousand Ethiopians had perished in the famine's wake. The famine captured an exceptionally high level of public and media attention throughout the world. Considerable public concern arose within Ethiopia and abroad over the vast dimensions of human suffering involved and in reaction to the government's callous attempt to conceal rather than alleviate the consequences of the disaster. Eventually, the famine and unmasking of the moral bankruptcy of the government's response to it became important precipitating factors in the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie I and termination of monarchical rule by military coup d'etat in 1974.

The central purposes of this article are to show how the pre-coup legal order created conditions which left Ethiopian peasants vulnerable to famine, to describe pertinent changes in the legal order introduced by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC), and to explore the short- and long-term impact of such changes on food production and famine prospects in Ethiopia.

The growth of Johannesburg is synonymous with that of South Africa's gold mining industry and the expansion of the metropolitan area from a ramshackle collection of huts to one of the continent's major urban concentrations attests to the impact of visions quickly accumulated wealth on patterns of human movement. This is particularly true of the city's early white community, the prospectors and later the purveyors of capital and mining technology, to whom the imminent possibility of riches compensated for the rigors of existence on the geographically featureless Witwatersrand. Yet similar imaginings of affluence also partially explain the historic drift of blacks to “N'goli” (the city of gold) where today they constitute the overwhelming majority of its population. The opening of the gold reefs in 1884 brought unprecedented wealth to white South Africa (if not to the legions of black labor responsible for the precious metal's extraction). At the same time the discovery of gold set in motion the process of black urbanization of which Johannesburg is the epitome. By 1896 approximately half of the fledgling town's population were blacks seeking refuge in mine wage labor from growing poverty in the country areas and by 1913, with rural dispossesion aggravated by the Natives Land Act, an irreversible momentum was set in motion. Twelve years after the striking of the first successful claims Johannesburg's population of 102,000 was roughly divided between black and white (Lewis, 1966: 3). A mere 80 years later, despite the barriers to black urban influx institutionalized by successive white governments, the racial distribution of population was of the order of 3 to 1 with blacks the predominant element of the ratio.

When Britain's foreign secretary on 3 August 1914 ruefully observed that the lamps were going out all over Europe, he had not yet fully grasped the dimensions of the war about to begin. Within three days, however, Sir Edward Grey was attending a cabinet meeting in which he and his fellow members sketched a war strategy against Germany which was global in context. Whatever prewar British respect had existed for German empire-builders (Stengers, 1967: 345), the new War Sub-Committee of Britain's cabinet decided to seize as soon as possible all of Germany's overseas possessions. The initial motive was to secure the sealanes by occupying German overseas ports that could serve commerce raiding German cruisers and by destroying the German wireless stations which would serve those cruisers. Even then, however, Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt entertained the notion of British annexation of the whole German colonial empire (Louis, 1967: 36-37).

As Winston Churchill described that session,

Prime Minister Asquith, once a Gladstonian minister, later remembered, almost apologetically, “we looked more like a gang of Elizabethan buccaneers than a meek collection of black coated Liberal Ministers” (Asquith, 1928: II, 31). Since the principal German territories were in Africa, it was here that the major impact of Whitehall's action would be felt, and, indeed, an abundant literature on Africa in the First World War describes what happened.

A series of some two hundred questions on farmers' opinions, behavior, and attitudes were asked during the course of a traditional cost route farm management survey of one hundred Nigerian smallholders. The answers illuminated the following:

1. farmers' tendency to make significant changes in their allocation of resources from one season to the next, reflecting the inherent flexibility of the farming system practiced;

2. farmers' ability to distinguish clearly between the characteristics of different crops, including variability of physical yield levels;

3. the distinct uses to which different crops were put;

4. satisfaction with the nutritional value of their diet;

5. reasons for practicing intercropping;

6. farmers' planning capability;

7. assessment of some types of risk;

8. imperfect knowledge of factor prices; and

9. the extensive intra- and inter-family monetary relationships.

The sample of one hundred smallholders were located at three different villages in the former Western Region of Nigeria. All farmers were Yoruba and therefore had similar ethnic characteristics. Cropping patterns in each village were markedly different as each village was in a different ecological zone. Cocoa dominated the cropping patterns of Akinlalu village in the low rainfall forest region, yam and cocoa dominated at Idi-Emi in the derived savannah region; and maize and yam dominated at Hero village in the southern Guinea savannah region. The survey was carried out during the 1970-71 crop season. The sample size was 33 at both Akinlalu and Idi-Emi, and 34 at Ilero (see Zuckerman, 1979, for details).

In at least one respect the mid and late 1970s have been similar to the mid and late 1960s, namely in the amount of attention devoted to the problem of world hunger. From a variety of popular and professional media the message is broadcast clearly that millions of people are starving and malnourished and that the future will be even more bleak than the present unless population growth is slowed, food production increased, and wealth redistributed. Africa, in particular, has become a source of much concern. The recent highly publicized famines in the Sahel and Ethiopia, and recurrent food shortages in such places as Senegal, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, and Botswana have given the impression of widespread precarious food-population balances. Additionally, it is stated that numerous deficiency diseases are virtually endemic, especially among young children.

The exact dimensions of food deprivation in Africa are not well know, however. This is because most food related investigations traditionally have focused on production rather than consumption, and when they have been concerned with consumption they have dealt either with selected, localized populations, or with highly aggregated data, usually at the national scale. The many volumes by Jacques May (1965, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971) on the ecology of malnutrition provide examples of both of these approaches. Generally missing are middle range comparative analyses that attempt to delineate and explain patterns of similarities and differences from place to place and culture to culture. Yet as Whitehead (1977) has noted, there is considerable variability with regard to who is malnourished and why, and thus it is precisely these investigations that are needed in order to avoid the “blanket approaches” to remedial policies which he rightly condemns.

In the wake of revelations concerning the activities of foreign lobbyists in the United States, and especially the Koreagate scandal, increasing attention has been given in the press and on Capitol Hill to the effect on American policy-making. The most explosive instance of foreign influence peddling is the massive campaign of South African officials to improve that country's image in the western world. The most recent phase of South Africa's propaganda war, unleashed in 1972, has not only raised questions about official U.S. relations with South Africa but has provoked the worst political scandal in South African history. For several years there had been assertions by investigative journalists that the South African government was behind a variety of schemes designed to win friends and influence policy among its western allies. By 1979 it had become clear that many of the allegations were true. The South African Department of Information had spent $100 million on unconventional methods for this purpose in a seven year period.

The man at the center of the scandal was Dr. Eschel Rhoodie, former secretary of the Department of Information, who revealed in some detail the secret projects his government had undertaken to buy influence. In an interview with BBC television in March 1979, Rhoodie made no pretense about the ruthlessness of the methods employed by his department to assure South Africa's survival in a world hostile to its apartheid policies. The intellectual underpinnings of the propaganda campaign are found in the book written by Rhoodie in 1969 entitled The Paper Curtain, a kind of Afrikaner version of Mein Kampf. The book has subsequently been withdrawn from circulation. The Paper Curtain told how a curtain of lies and communist propaganda had isolated South Africa from the west and argued the necessity of mounting a counterattack through unorthodox methods. The book attracted the attention of the Minister of Information, Connie Mulder, who appointed Rhoodie to his post and gave him responsibility for telling the country's story abroad. In that capacity Rhoodie was the architect of an ambitious program which ranged from engaging the services of legal and public relations firms to wooing black African heads of state and subsidizing various publications. In all, Rhoodie claimed that his department financed over one hundred secret projects.

In this paper three interrelated topics are examined: First, the conflicts and strains prevalent in a matrilineal society are described. It is argued that these conflicts are the result of a central structural contradiction inherent in matriliny, namely, that between relations of production, which are individualistic in nature, and distribution processes, which involve social relationships that are communalistic in character. The contradiction results primarily from matrilineal inheritance practices which ensure that all wealth accrues to the matrilineage. Since spouses belong to different lineages and since the fruit of their labor cannot be inherited by affines, nuclear and bilateral extended family members do not cooperate nor invest in family or larger cooperative enterprises. As a result, Luapulans have become individual producers.

Second, the impact of the industrial-market system on the preexisting tensions is described. Specifically, it is argued that the contradiction in matriliny fosters a rural class structure and a capitalist route to rural development. The wealthy, who find the matrilineal distributive justice (Poewe, 1978) in conflict with their desire to accumulate capital for purposes of reinvestment, have disengaged from matriliny and adopted Protestant ideologies to justify and further their business interests. By contrast, the poor, who find that matrilineal inheritance holds out the hope of receiving initial endowments, continue to support matriliny because they see in it the means to propel them along the path of private enterprise.

Ghanaians not only have good reason to be extremely cynical about politics and politicians in their country, but also to keep considerable distance from the current debate about the proposals for a civilianized “Union Government” that would follow the retirement of the country's military government. Ghanaians have seen enough political upheaval in 20 years to make them extremely suspicious of what may in fact turn out to be yet another purely symbolic exercise in popular consultation. Militaries ceding power to, and then taking it back from, civilian regimes has become a fairly frequent exercise in recent years; Ghanaians obviously remember the Busia interregnum of 1969–72, and the examples of similar unsuccessful experiments in Upper Volta (1971–74), Dahomey (1964–65, 1970–72), Zaire (1961–65), and the Sudan (1964–69) provide little comfort to the optimistic. Besides, none of the Ghanaian governments since 1957 can be said to have been unqualified successes. To be sure, the Nkrumah regime enjoyed massive popular support during its first few years; yet, when it fell to the February 1966 National Liberation Council (NLC) coup, few except the privileged CPP elite mourned its passing. The NLC managed to accumulate a few good marks during its three years of rule, but its departure was also accompanied by sighs of relief. It was said with all sincerity that nothing so became the NLC as its departure, and given its relative inability to repair the economic damage done by its predecessor, its passing was more welcomed than deplored. The Busia regime fell victim as much to its own ineptness as to Colonel Acheampong's soldiers, and the current military regime's poor showing in the economic realm has certainly not endeared it to Ghana's restive middle class, to say nothing of the peasants victimized by rampant inflation, capricious and corrupt bureaucrats, and such disasters as crop disease, drought, and famine. Even the high price of cocoa has failed to benefit anyone except those who can smuggle their crops to illicit and licit markets outside the country, or who can rake off high percentages from internal transfer.

The geographical context of this article is the Sudanese Three Town agglomeration embracing Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman. The main social content is that of the socio-historical process of class formation and urbanization. In an effort to measure effects of this process in this region a focus is made on changing patterns in the institutions of marriage as barometers of wider social change. The basic hypothesis to be tested is that the rise of more complex systems of class stratification is associated with a decline of former patterns of endogamy.

The data presented here are analyzed within the epistemology of dialectical and historical materialism which assumes, inter alia, that (1) there is an integration of the component parts of society, (2) that changes in the material (empirical) basis of the organization of society will have effects in other social spheres, and (3) that the cumulative effects of social change eventually lead to qualitative changes in social relations. Another theoretical assumption unifying this research and analysis is (4) that data must be viewed in a processual rather than in a mechanical, synchronic, or ahistorical functionalist manner. Nevertheless the empirical studies of the urban anthropologist only permit the researcher to segment a portion of social reality for closer scrutiny taking maximum care that the living, changing society is kept in the fertile medium of history and in the context of changing political and economic relations. Finally it is assumed that (5) a measure of class differentiation is essential inasmuch as urban patterns of socio-cultural variation have a class content.

The recent demand by underdeveloped nations for improvements in quantitative and qualitative presentation of their images abroad reflects their dissastisfaction with existing patterns and content of world news flow (Africa Currents, 1977: 19-21). This demand is based on allegations that the news media of the developed nations disseminate distorted images about them. To investigate this allegation, this study analyzes Canadian newspaper treatment of one underdeveloped region, Africa.

The first section of the paper concerns aspects of Canadian African relations, indicating that the region could be of some news value to Canadians. Section two argues against the proposition that increasing functional proximity between nations would be the answer to poor treatment of underdeveloped nations abroad. The third section concerns the role of foreign correspondents and African newsmen in the service of the world news agencies. After a content analysis of presentation of Africa in certain Canadian newspapers, the paper concludes with suggestions for improving coverage of Africa.

Questions like, “why are we in Africa at all?” and “what do we get out of it?” indicate how restless Canadians have become about Canada's involvement with Africa (MacEachen, 1975: 1, 4). These questions smack of disapproval especially of the rationale for Canada's involvement in the region which is late Lester Pearson's dictum “it is only right for those who have to share with those who have not” (ibid.:1).