Citing recent case study evidence from various parts of Africa, this article argues that the income diversification efforts of most rural dwellers over the past decade have been directed at meeting daily needs amidst declining returns to commercial agriculture. Individuals and households have experimented with new forms of livelihood, expanding their non-agricultural income sources, while retaining their base in subsistence farming. Various livelihood patterns are emerging, depending on historical, geographical and agro-ecological factors at local and national levels. Livelihood experimentation has catalysed overlapping arenas of dynamic change, notably disequilibria between households and individual members, tensions between generations, the recalibration of gender power balances, and a search for new social networks. So far this surge of livelihood ‘multiplexity’ has not generated adequate overall levels of gainful employment, technical innovation, purchasing power or welfare improvement. Thus, probing the complex interplay of economic, social, cultural and political dynamics in rural Africa becomes all the more essential for effective policy formulation.

Though policing is widely regarded as an inherently public good, in reality non-state policing is widespread in South Africa, doing everything that the public police force does. The paper examines the extent, nature and attitudes towards non-state policing in South Africa in its different forms, that is, autonomous citizen responses, ‘responsible’ citizen responses and commercial private security. The paper concludes by assessing the social and political implications of non-state policing.

In apartheid South African society, racial and ethnic identities were institutionally imposed. The end of apartheid has brought about the need for new identities to be created among South Africans, and for South Africans to forge a new relationship with their society and country. With this objective in mind, the national government is engaged in a process of nation-building. But in post-apartheid South African society, sub-national identities are also strongly coming to the fore. This is an empirical study of established and emerging identities in the Western Cape province, and the processes whereby these are constructed. The investigation shows two parallel flows of identity construction in the Western Cape: on the one hand, political leaders in the province attempt to foster an autonomous provincial identity; on the other, residents of the province show little evidence of strong political identities linked to the Western Cape. Instead, social identities are being constructed around residents’ local neighbourhoods and long-existing ethnic, class and racial identities. Rather than the social cohesion sought by the post-apartheid South African government, these identities point to persistent social polarisation.

The paper is concerned with the unintended consequences of aid as a relation of governance: in this case, the failure of aid agencies to improve the lot of displaced Southerners living in North Sudan after more than a decade of engagement. It is argued that aid, as a governance relation, is complicit with wider forms of oppression to which Southerners are subject. The aid-based IDP (Internally Displaced Person) identity, for example, resonates with state forms of deculturation. At the same time, developmental ideas of self-sufficiency articulate with the commercial need for cheap agricultural labour. Developmental strategies have tended to reinforce the subordination of displaced Southerners rather than enhancing their autonomy. Examples of this collateral effect are examined in relation to share-cropping, food aid, debt and asset stripping. The paper ends by calling into question the appropriateness of aid as a vehicle for a shared duty of care.

This article makes two major claims. The first is that independent Botswana was able to generate and sustain a type of developmental state because of the presence of an indigenous initiator state culture that was preserved by the Protectorate state and was inherited by the post-colonial state elites. The second is that the non-emergence of the developmental state in post-colonial Zimbabwe is explained by the presence of a non-initiator indigenous state culture which was preserved by the Rhodesian colonial state and was inherited by the post-colonial state elites. The article briefly reviews the literature, analyses the Tswana and Shona pre-colonial state cultures, and shows that these were preserved by the colonial states and inherited by the nationalist politicians.

This paper analyses the effects of privatisation and deregulation of the Dar es Salaam transport system. It starts with an account of the decline of the government-owned transport company and the first opening of the market to private buses in 1983. The analysis then moves to the progressive deregulation of the sector and its impact on transport supply. Competition between private operators in the oversupplied market manifests itself in non-compliance with safety rules, and inefficiencies in the fare structures. Labour relations with the private sector are then examined to illustrate the logic of the market. The results of a questionnaire answered by 668 workers suggest that the reaction of casual workers to exploitative conditions of employment characterises many aspects of the operation of the transport system. The impact of deregulation is therefore most clearly to be seen in the nature of labour relations within the sector, and it is argued that there is a need for state regulation to monitor and enforce conditions of employment within the private sector if service provision is to be improved.