There is a thriving literature of religious tracts in Africa. The few formal bookshops, and the far more numerous market-stalls and itinerant hawkers who sell books, offer for sale pamphlets and popular works on religious subjects in every country of the continent, it would seem. Some are theological inquiries into aspects of the Bible or the Koran. Others contain moral lessons derived from these sacred books. Perhaps the most common category, however, is testimonies of personal religious experiences. Much of this literature hardly makes its way outside Africa and is only rarely to be found in even the finest Western academic libraries.

The most puzzling genre, at least for anyone educated in modern Western academies of learning, is that of the numerous works on witchcraft and other perceived forms of evil, sometimes in the form of a description of a personal journey into a world of spirits. While many pious works on Christianity on sale in Africa are authored by American evangelicals and published in America, popular books on witchcraft and mystical voyages are almost invariably written by Africans and published locally. Similar material is circulated through churches, sometimes in the form of video recordings. This is also true of African-led churches in the diaspora, among African communities on other continents. It is impossible to know with certainty how many people give any credence to stories like these, but the indications are that very many do so. Not only do pamphlets describing mystical journeys appear to circulate in large numbers, but such accounts may clearly be situated within an older tradition of stories about witchcraft and journeys into the underworld which is to be found in collections of folklore and even in the literature of high culture. Studies of churches and of healers in almost any part of Africa indicate that incidents of perceived witchcraft and of shamanism or near-death experiences are relatively common, and probably have been for as long as it is possible to trace. Such evidence may be drawn not just from studies of the pentecostal churches which have attracted so much scholarly interest of late, but also of many other sorts of church including African independent congregations, of Muslim communities and of indigenous religious traditions. Thus, the popular literature written by people who claim to have experienced spiritual journeys or to have expert knowledge of witchcraft is not, we believe, an ephemeral genre but rather represents a modern form of an important tradition of mysticism in Africa.

We recruited fifty-four boys, mostly from Bugisu, and started training them at Nachingwea. Unfortunately, once again, these boys had not been well selected. They had been working mostly in towns like Nairobi and had a kiyaye (lumpen proletariat) culture. They began misbehaving in the Frelimo camp and soon after their training, the Tanzanian government dispersed them.

I took personal charge of the Montepuez group and stayed with the boys during the training months in Mozambique because I feared that some of the recruits might be undisciplined bayaye, like those of 1973, and they might have caused us problems. With my presence in the camp, however, we were able to suppress most of their negative tendencies and attitudes.

When the Revolutionary United Front/Sierra Leone (RUF/SL) entered Kailahun District on 23 March 1991, few people took them seriously or realised that a protracted and senseless war was in the making. The corrupt and inept government in Freetown was quick to label the movement as the handy work of Charles Taylor; the incursion a spillover from the Liberian civil war. This erroneous representation of the movement and the war was echoed by the media, both local and foreign; it later appeared in one scholarly investigation as ‘the border war’, and in another as an attempt by Charles Taylor to ‘do a RENAMO’ on Sierra Leone. Twelve months after the initial attack in Kailahun, a group of army officers from the warfront trooped to Freetown, the seat of government, and seized power from the corrupt politicians amidst popular support. Calling itself the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), the new regime declared its intention to end the war, revamp the economy, and put the nation on the path to multiparty democracy. Following an eventual return to civilian rule in March 1996, with the election of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, a further coup in May 1997 led to the bloody takeover of Freetown by elements drawn from both the RUF and the army against which it had been fighting, under the title of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC).

What is the relationship between these events? What is the link between the ‘revolution’ (coup d'état) in Freetown and the ‘revolutionary’ movement in the hinterland? What did the coup plotters, most of whom were in their twenties, share with those who had started the insurrection that gave them the opportunity to launch their ‘revolution’ in the city? Why did both movements borrow the same ‘revolutionary’ script? I provide answers to some of these questions by examining lumpen culture and youth resistance in Sierra Leone, for it is this oppositional culture which connects the ‘revolution’ in the hinterland (RUF) and the one in the city (NPRC and later AFRC). Both were products of a rebellious youth culture in search of a radical alternative (though without a concrete emancipatory programme) to the bankrupt All Peoples Congress (APC) regime. To understand the historical and sociological processes which gave birth to RUF, with which this article is concerned, it is necessary to situate the investigation within the context of Sierra Leone's political culture, especially the glaring absence of a radical post-colonial alternative. It is this absence, I argue, which paved the way for the bush path to destruction.

Analyses of Nigeria's adjustment experience have emphasised three main issues, namely, federal government dominance of reform processes; the macro-economic components and impact of the structural adjustment programme (SAP); and social responses to economic reform. Much illustrative material has been drawn also from the agricultural and rural sector, reflecting the locus of SAP-induced policy change in Nigeria. Less apparent in the available literature has been the place of state governments in the adjustment process. Also lacking is a historical perspective on the social infrastructure of étatism in rural society – official and quasi-official groupings of peasants, traders and rural dwellers.

This article examines continuity and change in farmer organisation in Nigeria's cocoa belt since the 1930s. Locating agricultural politics in Ondo State since the 1970s within this historical context, the article analyses the advent and operations of the Ondo State Farmers' Congress (OSFC), supposedly a ‘farmers' lobby’ established by the local state in 1988. Congress operations, it is shown, illustrate Nigeria's tradition of ‘top-down’ policy-making on agriculture and rural development. But Congress was also inaugurated about the same time as étatism was being dismantled. Congress's existence thus highlights critical issues in the design of SAP, the structure of policy-making on Nigeria agriculture, and the continuing debate on state–market conjunctures in Africa's economic development.

Shortly after the overthrow of the Traoré regime in early 1991, several thousand cotton farmers in the southern part of Mali rose up to demand significant policy changes in cotton production and marketing. This rural revolt symbolised a new era of ‘democracy in the countryside’, and brought forth a vital, new political actor (the National Union of Cotton and Food Crop Producers, Syndicat des Producteurs de Coton de Vivriers, SYCOV) in Malian politics. After listening to more than thirty years of governmental populist pronouncements, Mali's cotton growers finally had a real opportunity to realise a measure of empowerment.

Earlier assessments of agricultural development and technology policy-making in Mali confirmed the need to see SYCOV in the long tradition of discontented farmers' movements around the world. This article places SYCOV in a broader political and global setting. It explores how an analysis of the union's emergence and its political relationships can improve our understanding of the contours and dynamics of democratisation in Mali, and perhaps throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

The successful conclusion to South Africa's first all-race elections in April 1994 marked a turning point for political and economic relations throughout the whole of Southern Africa, not least since the regional ‘superpower’ which the sub-continent had previously tried to isolate was invited to participate in regional organisations. However, the ending of apartheid, unquestioningly the single most important factor determining the nature and evolution of future integrative efforts, has to be examined alongside other significant changes affecting Southern Africa throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Most importantly, the structural adjustment programmes instigated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), together with the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), resulted in a greater emphasis on economic liberalisation and political democratisation. Consequently, Southern Africa's most important regional arrangements (as shown in Figure 1) are all in a state of transformation as they endeavour to respond to the new environment. The Southern African Customs Union (SACU), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) have already changed, or are in the process of renegotiating, their treaties and constitutions.

The end of the Cold War has had contradictory effects on African security. Southern Africa and Ethiopia clearly benefitted from the end of superpower rivalry, whereas central and western Africa have seen an upswing of violence during the 1990s. The withdrawal of foreign patronage, the post-Somalia reluctance of the West and the UN to intervene militarily, heightened external demands for economic and political reform, and the changing nature of African insurgencies, have placed additional pressure on already weak governments. Many African states have only weak militaries to defend their security, the collapse of Mobutu Sese Seko's Armed Forces of Zaïre providing the most recent example.

As recently as 1990, the idea of African states relying upon mercenaries from the former South African Defence Force (SADF) would have seemed both preposterous and insulting. Yet since 1993, Executive Outcomes (EO), the world's largest and best known ‘mercenary’ group, has marketed itself as a defender of African state security in this post-Cold War era. A private army with access to some 2,000 ex-South African Defence Force (SADF) combat veterans, EO has helped to defeat discredited insurgencies in Angola and Sierra Leone. Large sections of Africa need effective militaries and EO, which claims to fight only for sovereign governments, presents itself as a stabilising force for African development. To some observers, EO is ‘with the possible exception of the South African army, the most deadly and efficient army operating in sub-Saharan Africa today’.

This article examines the controversial Executive Outcomes military as a security option for African governments. It sketches EO's history, its military effectiveness, and its political loyalty, to assess whether EO threatens or assists African state stability. The article concludes by looking at EO's possible future, and the lessons which it offers about African security.