What Geertz refers to as the ‘pigeonhole disease’ is nowhere more evident than in the persistent tendency of political scientists to locate state and society in separate conceptual niches: one inhabited by a potentially predatory species and the other by a defenceless and fully domesticated pigeon. Only where a recognisable entity is sharing the characteristics of a state system, whose boundaries are analytically separate from those of the social system, can political science claim a disciplinary domain of its own. The ongoing debate over the relative merits or demerits of state-centred approaches has only served to add further salience to the dichotomy between state and society, but with little agreement as to where the one begins and the other leaves off.

Since 1987–8 the World Bank, together with other donors, has been engaged in a programme of activities known as ‘Social Dimensions of Adjustment’ (S.D.A.). This is the latest in a line of ‘pro-poor’ initiatives which the organisation has sponsored over the last two decades. This article analyses the Bank's succession of policies against the background of the changing political and economic world situation, as well as alternative policy agendas.

Given the socio-political and economic changes that have taken place since independence nearly 30 years ago, the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) Government has been remarkably slow to acknowledge the significance of those small-scale business activities popularly referred to as ‘Jua Kali’—Swahili for ‘hot sun’, since hardly any enjoy the benefit of either adequate shade or shelter.

The ‘discovery’ of third-world women and their situation followed in the wake of research by feminists in western societies. In the late 1960s, Ester Boserup documented that especially African rural women had experienced a major increase in their workload during this century; they had become the main producers not only of subsistence food but also of cash crops.

Faced with global depression and political readjustments in the late 1980s, all states in Africa have been trying to implement major reforms. For socialist régimes, however, the demands have been the more daunting since these changes have often directly threatened the ideology (and the aspirations) of creating a more egalitarian social order in the wake of colonial rule. Their states faced fundamental social, economic, and ideological transformations, as well as political reconstruction; what was required was no less than the replacement of a socialist with a capitalist market economy, and corresponding alterations in property relations that involved enterprises such as peasant holdings, small family firms, and co-operatives, as well as large-scale farms, factories, and plants under state control. These reforms not only affected the lives of ordinary people, but also reshaped the power and privileges of the government, party leaders, and others directly dependent upon the state.

Of the 21 members of the Arab League, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has received perhaps the least attention, ranking far behind other North African states, much less those closer to the Arab—Israeli fault-line or the recent Gulf conflict. Mauritania's desperate economic condition (a G.N.P. per capita of only $446 in 1984) has been occasionally publicised, as well as advancing desertification (reaching even into the centre of the capital, Nouakchott), and the tensions between the ruling Beydane (‘white’) Arabs, supported by their cultural/political allies, and the black African tribes concentrated in the Senegal River valley that erupted into violence in April 1989, and which led to a near-war between Senegal and Mauritania.

Few can doubt the proposition that there is an important difference between information and knowledge, and that more of the former does not necessarily lead to the latter. Whereas a great deal has been written from all manner of perspectives about the situation in Africa both before and since independence, the resulting corpus of literature has seldom yielded a mainstream understanding of basic aspects of state politics. Doubtless many feel that the more they read about the continent, the less they known about what is going on and why.

The 1980s were a terrible time for Africa. The decade began auspiciously enough — Nigeria had returned to civilian rule, the Tanzania People's Defence Force had sent Idi Amin packing, and the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe was about to win independence. But this promising beginning was quickly transformed and Africa sunk into its ‘lost decade’.

Aviation in Southern Africa was subject throughout the 1980s to increasingly intense political pressures. As ever, the cause was protests about apartheid. The severe blow that black African countries dealt to South African Airways (S.A.A.), the Republic's state-owned national airline, in the 1960s by withdrawing overflying rights was magnified by similar action from a wider spectrum of non-African governments. In the mid-1980s, Australia and the United States of America, for example, revoked S.A.A.'s landing rights, and forbad airlines registered in their countries from flying to South Africa. Other carriers, such as Air Canada, closed their offices and then terminated representation in South Africa.

In Monrovia, the capital of the West African state of Liberia, Richard K. Sleboe, a Kru tribesman from Sinoe County and previously a Jehovah's Witness, founded in June 1970 the Kingdom Assembly Church of Africa. This came to be popularly known as the ‘Never—Die Church’ from its most distinguishing belief, namely that a true believer will never physically die but will live on this earth forever.

Before the late 1960s, historians generally agreed that World War II had increased mass support for African nationalism. Initially, they claimed that soldiers returned home politicised by war-time experiences and looking for opportunities to spread new ideas acquired through contacts with Asian nationalists. Subsequent scholars gradually chipped away at these assumptions, some completely discarding them as ‘myths’. Current opinion suggests that the way African soldiers reacted to the war depended on their ethnicity, class origins, education levels, and military occupations, and that their role in independence politics depended on local conditions.