Today's African political class is much more diverse in character and aspiration than the one that overcame colonial rule and inaugurated independent governments. Sons of early liberation leaders now jostle for power in a few countries (Chad, Kenya), descendants of successful autocrats perpetuate family rule in others (Gabon), several long-serving hegemons remain in control after decades in office (as in Cameroon, Djibouti, Rwanda and Uganda), a clutch of kleptocrats continue to defraud citizens (as in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe), upstart soldiers oust elected placeholders (Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali), and here and there democratic stalwarts (Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia) are delivering authentic, uplifting, leadership to their followers.

This author made her first study of the Muslim brotherhoods in 1966, and then ten years later reassessed their political position.1 Now, after almost a similar length of time since 1976, this brief evaluation is written in the hope of illustrating the gradually changing position of Muslim leaders or marabouts, and their rôle in Senegalese life and politics.

It is generally agreed that the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in March 1988 marked the final attempt to secure a military solution to the Angolan conflict. Thereafter, in December 1988, South Africa, Cuba, and Angola signed the so-called ‘New York accord’ that included a timetable for the phased withdrawal of the South Africans and the Cubans from Namibia and Angola, respectively; in June 1989, the Gbadolite agreement initiated African attempts to end the continuing armed struggle in Angola; and in March 1990, Namibia achieved its long-awaited independence. But despite these efforts and developments, the war continued between the Government that had been established in Luanda by the Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola (M.P.L.A.) in November 1975 and the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (Unita), with devastating implications for the country's estimated ten million inhabitants. Not before May 1991 was a final peace agreement signed in Portugal, and then with considerably poorer options for political stability and economic recovery than would have been the case after the original accord in New York.

African states and studies are in a profound period of revisionism as the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s yields to the ‘adjustment reforms’ of the 1990s. The relative optimism and expansion of the initial years of independence have long since been superseded by pessimism and contraction as successive energy, drought, debt, and devaluation shocks have resulted in impoverishment and inequalities. The former has affected ‘vulnerable groups’ in particular – women, children, elderly and peripheral communities1 – while the latter has occurred both within and between states. A few classes and countries have thrived despite or because of the continental crisis – more bourgeois fractions and more informal sectors on the one hand and, on the other, Botswana, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe. Africa at the end of the 1990s will likely be more marginal, vulnerable, and unequal than ever, as indicated in the final section, hardly the revolutionary, nationalist scenario anticipated after World War II, but more realistic and realisable none the less.2

‘The time has come’, writes James S. Coleman, ‘to recognize the professional respectability as well as the practical essentiality of the ancient and honorable hybrid discipline of political economy.’1 Such an approach to the study of developing countries is as timely as it is prudent. This article attempts to apply the approach of political economy to the question of elite recruitment, the process by which individuals are selected and assigned to strategic, political, and administrative roles.2 It seeks to examine recruitment as a conflict of interests facing decision- makers in Kenya. Such a task seems most meaningfully handled by enlarging the boundaries under examination to include recruitment of the élite who are to manage Kenya's economy as well as its political structure. This method of analysis leads almost inevitably, under Kenyan circumstances, to a discussion of the crucial issue of resource allocation, for the priorities established in expenditure patterns are of direct relevance to the opportunity for members of various ethnic groups to compete in the market place for political and economic positions.

The political revolution of contemporary Africa has so far largely been limited to the centre and to re-establishing the same institutional forms and processes which failed Africa in the 1960s. These regimes are already showing signs of erosion. This problem can be understood through the theory of public goods. Key collective or ‘public’ goods problems impede the collective action necessary for institutional development. Top-down strategies cannot surmount these problems because they cannot integrate and unify the population or structure consensual and sustained collective action.

As currently constituted, national levels of government in Africa will be poor partners with local communities in development, be it of democracy or of the economy. In many cases, national regimes only exist at all because minimal contributing sets or political monopolists controlled, were given, or mobilised the resources to establish constituting rule systems which they used to sustain their existing relative advantages during the break-up of imperial systems. As this advantage is usually at the expense of the majority which lives outside the capitals, resources and policies to improve these areas are slow in coming. The slow, bottom-up process by which a true public constitution is built, one which reflects and elaborates generally held values, is built on existing political relationships, and protects social diversity, has never been allowed to develop.

Refounding the African state must resolve these problems if it is to succeed. Ethnically and religiously diverse peoples will rule themselves better under federal and consociational systems which give local leaders space to lead local institutional development, authority to play a role in national governance, a process to develop consensus on central policy and to check the centre when there is no consensus. This requires a foundation of viable, real, developed structures of local governance if it is to succeed.

This paper provides a framework-based approach for assessing the potential for mobile finance (m-finance) services to achieve greater financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa. The conceptual approach synthesises market and user perspectives, and constructs an evidence-based exploratory framework based on analysis of a single country, Uganda. Case evidence is used to inform four lifecycle stages for m-finance, moving from design to access, usage, and outcomes associated with differentiated m-finance applications. Based on analysis of published sources, findings from Uganda suggest that early adoption of m-finance has favoured those already financially included and market-driven solutions for the financially excluded are limited. Simple market modelling is found to be an insufficient basis on which to assess potential amongst the unbanked majority. The paper argues that the perception, behaviour and capability of users, and forms of user appropriation, should be a paramount concern, and potential for m-finance should be considered within a deeper understanding of a specified financial services context and within a defined market, regulatory and policy environment.

The need for regional economic integration in Africa was appreciated by most African leaders soon after their countries had become independent sovereign states early in the 1960s. Although they did not always make enough distinction between economic integration and political unity (indeed some, particularly the leaders of the so-called Casablanca group of countries, held the doctrinaire view that political unity and the formation of a United States of Africa must precede economic integration), and although very little has been achieved in either field, yet the past decade is likely to go down in African history as the decade of economic and political integration rather than the development decade.1 However, if positive results are to be achieved in the 1970s, the old doctrinaire attitude must give way to a more pragmatic approach, which neither demands political union as a precondition for economic integration nor takes an all-or-nothing attitude to the latter.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have a long history of promoting grass-roots membership organisations, but have made few attempts to document this experience in ways that are accessible to external audiences. Academic analysis has partially filled this gap by identifying the characteristics of strong organisations, but has had relatively little to say about how they develop, or the specific rôle which NGOs might play in helping them to emerge. This issue has recently assumed greater importance in the light both of donor wishes to strengthen civil society, and the more specific concerns of NGOs to scale-up their activities by helping the organisations with which they work to become more self-sufficient.

This article is drawn from a wider study which explores the strategies employed by NGOs in promoting membership organisations, and asks whether this can be done in ways which are both broadly equitable and reasonably cost-effective. It describes a programme mounted by the pan-African NGO consortium known as ACORD (Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development) to initiate a process of institutional development in the Nebbi District of Uganda. The case is of particular interest as an example of an attempt to introduce new institutions into a highly volatile environment, and provides a basis for arriving at a number of more general propositions about good practice.

Since 1990, more than 30 sub-Saharan states have introduced multi-party electoral systems to choose their national governments. This development, normally understood as part of the post-cold war ‘wave of democratisation’, has led many to think that there is something intrinsically new about such a competitive process in Africa, which is not the case. This article looks at some elections that have been held in various states and studied, both before and after their independence.

The chain reaction set off in Paris by the Franco-Moroccan Declaration of 2 March 1956 still reverberates in the politics of north-west Africa. On that day, France ended 44 years of its protectorate over Morocco, restored to Mohamed V full sovereignty over 162, 120 square miles of land and some seven million people, and pledged ‘to respect, and see to it that others respect, the integrity of Moroccan territory, as guaranteed by international treaties’.1

Over the last decade or so scholars in the social sciences have been reassessing works on the rise of nationalism in Africa published in the 1960s and early 1970s. These earlier studies, written during the euphoria following independence and the spread of liberation ideology, regarded the transfer of power to the African élite as signalling the end of subjugation to European control and the emergence of modern African states.1 This revision focused on the post-colonial state and its rôle as a mediator between competing groups for power and the allocation of resources.2 Since then, the trend has generated a revival in understanding ethnicity which is again seen as a major force in most of the crises which have troubled Africa.

This article explores the role of perceptions in donor-African relations and the extent to which donor ‘images’ of African governments can be managed by these same governments to their advantage. The article focuses on donor views of ‘reliability’ in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and compares differing international perceptions of Kenya and Uganda through this lens. Arguing that donors have an exaggerated sense of Ugandan ‘compliance’ or reliability and Kenyan unreliability in fighting terrorism, it explains this by examining the two governments’ international ‘image management’ strategies, or lack thereof. The analysis contends that Uganda's success at promoting itself as a major donor ally in the GWOT, compared with Kenya's general reluctance to do the same, has played a significant role in building and bolstering these differing donor perceptions. This, the article suggests, raises important questions about the nature of African agency in the international system.

By the early 1980s, it was becoming increasingly apparent to the Frelimo Government in Mozambique that its agricultural policies were not having the required effects. Production had not recovered to pre-independence levels as intended, agricultural exports remained generally low, and there was hunger in certain areas of the country. Queues and shortages were widespread in the cities, and rationing was introduced in the capital, Maputo. There were many exogenous factors accounting for these problems: alternating years of drought and floods, a constant state of war, first against the Smith régime in Rhodesia and then against South Africa and its client groups, and finally, of course, the world recession and worsening terms of trade.

Why does electoral clientelism persist when ballots are secret and elections are competitive? The provision of material rewards during campaigns is seen as the standard way politicians secure votes in ‘patronage democracies’. Yet monitoring clientelistic bargains is difficult when voting is secret, several competitors may provide material inducements simultaneously, voters view such inducements as gifts and not obligations, and candidates' records are more credible signals of future performance. I argue that where elections are competitive and voters expect gifts, candidates engage in a two-pronged strategy: affirm their own status through public displays of wealth, and undermine opponents' rewards by matching inducements or encouraging voters to break reciprocity norms. In result, neither side's gifts are sufficient for a win, and parties are forced to pursue different linkage mechanisms to voters. One such mechanism involves defining and targeting broader constituencies through policy proposals. Micro-level data from Ghana confirm these expectations. The theory is better suited to environments where candidates' past records are known to constituents than existing explanations, and accounts for the apparent contradiction between the ubiquity of campaign clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent empirical findings that performance evaluations and non-contingent incentives matter most to voters.

Samir Amin has recently argued that black African countries are all characterised by extreme forms of underdevelopment. In his view, this situation is produced by the dependency of African states on more developed countries that is a consequence of the continent's common historical experience of economic exploitation by European-organised mercantilism, the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. Moreover, via the mechanisms of western-based neo-colonialism, African under-development has been perpetuated, and perhaps even increased, during the achievement of political independence over the past 25 years.

The Mozambican Land Law of 1997 intends to provide flexible rules of access to land, while securing local people's customary rights, as well as equal rights for women and men. Drawing on participant observation during a ‘land delimitation’ process in central Mozambique, this article analyses the complex negotiation ensuing from the implementation of the Land Law in a local community. It shows how the delimitation process provided spaces for asserting – male – roles of power and authority, while local women were increasingly marginalised in the process. By presenting oral testimonies from women in the community, the authors seek to balance the account, providing women's perspectives on the highly gendered character of interests in, access to, and exclusion from land. The analysis ends with the question: What would be required to provide a space for local women to articulate their interests in a secure access to land during the delimitation process itself?

Democratisation has been the subject of much scholarly discussion during the past few years, notably the so-called ‘third wave’ that is taking place in Africa and the former Soviet bloc. Of particular interest is the concept of the abertura, or opening of the political system, that many have come to believe is the prerequisite for a fully fledged transition to democracy. After years of military rule, this is what appears to have occurred in Ethiopia, and hence the aims of this article are (i) to trace the origins and platforms of the various political parties that have had a relatively open forum for opposition since 1991, (ii) to evaluate their effectiveness both in providing a viable alternative to the régime in power and in aggregating the interests of the different societal and ethnic groups, and (iii) to examine the future of democracy in their country.

South African scholars writing about the end of apartheid have been unanimous in the contention that it is useless to seek parallels and learn lessons from what has happened elsewhere in the continent in the process of decolonisation. South Africa was not a colony but an independent country, they argued. No metropolitan power had the ultimate say concerning its future, let alone the ability to impose a settlement on the white minority that meant handing over power to a new black government. Rather than decolonisation, the end of apartheid meant a transition from authoritarianism to democracy like that experienced in Latin America during the 1980s.

Along with modern technology and modern forms of commerce, Europe has exported wage labour, trade unions, and collective bargaining to Africa. Before the coming of Europeans, various forms of indentured, communal, and customary labour existed, but there was no class of wage and salaried workers in the modern sense. During the nineteenth century, a wage labour class emerged, to one degree or another, in every part of Africa. As in other industrialising areas, this soon led to an organised labour movement.