In the decade of the 1970s the Arab world, its resources swelled by surplus oil profits, looked to the Sudan to become the area's granary. Arab leaders knew that the country possessed abundant arable and pasture land, thought to be capable of supplying 40 per cent of the grain requirements of the region, and substantial fish and red meat supplies. They saw Sudanese development as leading to regional food self-sufficiency. In this vision of economic transformation they expected the Sudanese private sector to work in combination with Arab oil money and western technology.

The Sudan, Africa's largest country, not much smaller than Western Europe, is caught up once more in the convulsions of a civil war pitting the Northern against the Southern Sudanese. Inevitably the present conflict is associated with the older civil war which began in the early 1960s and dragged on for ten years, claiming the lives of around one million, and bringing about a famine and devastation little known to the outside world. There are obvious communalities, but the contemporary struggle is hardly a replay of that smouldering little war that had been fought by the Southern Sudanese with the most meagre of means and but a trifle of external aid. I shall deal in some length with what can now be called the first Sudanese civil war, in order to provide the background for an understanding of the real issues at stake today, and to place this second Sudanese civil war in perspective. More generally, the ‘Southern Problem’ provides insights into communal conflicts and their international dimensions, important though overlooked and often unacknowledged problems of today's world.

Amongst commentators and scholars of the turn-of-the-century partition of Africa, it has become virtually axiomatic to note the ‘artificial’ nature of the boundaries drawn up by the colonial powers. Cutting, as they often did, through otherwise homogeneous ethnic, religious, linguistic, and even geographic clusters, the European remapping of the continent is criticised, at least implicitly, for its allegedly blind or indifferent disregard for indigenous social and cultural systems prevailing at the time of the conquest.

At the conclusion of a meeting of the Armed Forces Ruling Council in October 1986, President Ibrahim Babangida turned to the Inspector- General of the Nigeria Police Force, Etim Inyang, and asked, ‘My friend, where is Anini?’. At about this time, Nigerian newspapers and journals were publishing numerous articles and editorials on the ‘Anini Challenge’, the ‘Anini Saga’, the ‘Anini Factor’, ‘Lawrence Anini – the Man, the Myth’, ‘Anini, Jack the Ripper’, and ‘Lawrence Anini: A Robin Hood in Bendel’. The Guardian asked, almost plaintively, ‘Will they ever find Anini, “The Law”?’, and when he was finally captured in early December, the cover of the magazine Thisweek blared forth, above a picture of the badly injured criminal in his hospital bed, ‘Anini. Face to Face with The Law’.

French culture, economy, and polity have long dominated the small African country of Gabon. The French control of the colonial era, which reached its nadir in the 1898–1930 period of the brutal ‘concessionary companies’, has been replaced, since independence in 1960, by an insidious rapprochement with Paris, fashioned by Gabon's leadership. A French journalist long familiar with the continent has written, ‘Gabon is an extreme case, verging on caricature, of neocolonialism ’.

We have it from the celebrated Max Weber that the behaviour of nations is determined not by ideas but by ‘interests’ – a loaded concept in the sense that these are dependent on the interpretation given by a nation to its environment. This implies that ‘images of reality’ are crucial in the definition of what are national interests and what are not. Perceptions thus determine inter-state relations, and existing Policies should be seen as reactions to images of interests, pressures, and assumed underlying objectives.

Few observers reckon that the white citadel will fall overnight, yet the days of racial minority rule in South Africa are now widely assumed to be running out. But the future can rarely be tamed in advance, and many of the more optimistic scenarios and hopes concerning a transition to a non-racial form of state may well prove to be hopelessly misplaced. Even so, to the extent that it is considered that history is now finally on the move, debate about the nature of opportunities available to, and constraints upon a post-apartheid state becomes not only more legitimate but more urgent. The ambition of this article is to provide a framework for consideration of whether a non-racial South Africa could or will be socialist.