This paper focuses on the deployment of a vocabulary of water and land in the rhetoric of power, resistance, and the politics of identity of clans and individuals around Lake Mutirikwi in southern Zimbabwe. When the Mutirikwi (Kyle) Dam was built during the colonial period of the 1960s, local communities lost a great deal of land, both beneath it and around it. Peoples' memories and claims over land that has, in effect, disappeared – alienated by water or appropriated to become commercial farms, a recreational park and game reserve – have not been obliterated. In recent years, disputes over these stretches of land have re-emerged in the context of the government's ‘fast track’ land reform programme. This paper explores the roles that clans claiming ‘original ownership’ of land have played in that land reform. In particular, it considers how some spirit mediums – representing the ancestral owners of the land who ensure its rainfall and fertility – have attempted to engage with new nationalist political rhetoric about land reform, in an attempt to substantiate their individual authority, the particular land claims of their clans, and broader social concerns about the role of ‘tradition’ and the ancestors in Zimbabwe today.

Why do non-state armed groups forcibly recruit civilians? To address this question I develop a conceptual framework distinguishing voluntary, coerced and forced recruitment. I then compare the recruitment tactics employed by ‘Mai-Mai’ militias and the RCD-Goma rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in order to inductively develop a theory explaining why groups with different initial economic and social endowments resort to force. This comparison draws on interviews with 41 former militia members and 11 former members of RCD-Goma. The theory suggests that forced recruitment is most likely to occur when non-state armed groups experience manpower deficits and when accountability (to local communities, government sponsors and/or the international community) is low. High levels of popular support will not necessarily prevent recourse to force under these conditions, but may mean that force is less necessary because voluntary and coerced recruits come forward to fill manpower gaps.

This article examines the trajectory of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), currently the ruling party in Mozambique, focusing on the complex interplay between various factors which contributed to the metamorphoses it has undergone since its founding in 1962. Recent work in the field of international relations and historical sociology has thrown light on the rôle of the state as an administrative-coercive entity constantly cross-pressured by domestic and foreign forces, and acting simultaneously on both fronts in pursuit of advantage. While this scholarship has not focused on ruling parties per se, it is arguable that the standard government versus state dichotomy is of limited analytical value in cases such as Mozambique, where the distinction between party and state remained in practice, until recently, a constitutional nicety. When the ruling party has been institutionalised to the extent of Frelimo, and where the state has become almost an extension of the party, it is the latter that is the key variable in any explanation of political and economic change within society.

In a recent article, Heribert Adam argued that the ‘prevalent view of South Africa combines conceptual errors with false methodological emphasis and, often, wishful thinking’, and that the ‘popular perspective represents a gross over-simplification of a far more complex situation.’1 The analysis to which he was objecting views South Africa as an outdated colonial society, in which white settlers enforce a racially defined domination upon an exploited mass of the black population, which is reduced to serving primarily as a source of cheap labour for white capital by an immense battery of totalitarian controls. Linked to this view - and now fuelled by the widespread riots during mid-1976 throughout African urban areas - is the assumption that substantive political change will necessarily come about by violent revolution, motivated by the growing determination of a burgeoning black population to force a redistribution of power and wealth. However, as Adam further pointed out, analysis of South Africa purely in terms of racial conflict leaves important questions unanswered, for there is need to explore how the differential distribution of wealth and resources - political and economic - originated, and how they are maintained.

It is known that the forms of physical education practised among ancient Greek communities reflected the differential importance attached to military and artistic activities.1 Similarly, today, variations in the relative pre-eminence of collective over individual sports are likely to reflect contrasts in the socio-economic and cultural profiles of contemporary societies.2 Moreover, modes of social participation in a particular game should be affected by the patterns of interaction prevailing in the society at large.

In recent years, there has been growing interest among lower-middle income countries (LMICs) to reduce their dependence on donor resources, framed normatively as ‘beyond aid’. Yet, public perceptions about beyond aid narratives remain under-studied. This article explores current public perceptions in Ghana about the ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ (GhBA) vision aimed at promoting structural economic transformation through the use of national resources while reducing dependence on donor aid. Drawing on 67 semi-structured interviews with government officials, civil society organisations (CSOs), donor representatives, academics, ‘ordinary citizens’ and media reviews, this article examines public understanding, rationale and perceived barriers to the implementation of the GhBA vision. I show that while GhBA is a welcome development for promoting structural economic transformation and ownership over national development priorities, mechanisms for propelling the GhBA are largely absent. Achieving GhBA will require a conscious effort by government and stakeholders to move beyond political rhetoric and partisan politics to setting out clear policy direction in addition to building a national consensus in promoting the vision. Implications of the research findings are discussed.

On 4 February 1976 the Federal Military Government of Nigeria promulgated Decree No. 6, initiating the removal of the national capital from Lagos to Abuja. Thus Nigeria followed Brazil, Botswana, Malawi, Pakistan, and Tanzania to become the most recent developing country to arrange for a transfer of its centre of government. The proliferation of new capitals constructed in the twentieth century has captured the world-wide attention of geographers, architects, planners, and demographers, but the literature on the subject examines these projects almost exclusively with a focus on planning for national development. This viewpoint too often neglects politics as the paramount force in the relocation of a nation's capital city.

Associations have been labelled the main ‘building blocks’ for creating social capital. It has been argued that community associations need to transform ‘bonding’ into ‘bridging’ ties to ‘reach out’ while also creating ‘linking’ ties to ‘scale up’. External development actions follow a reverse logic in promoting these associations: they assume that linking ties with the external intervener will reinforce prior social capital endowments. This article highlights the inherent difficulties of such a ‘social engineering’ approach in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, describing three development interventions in the north of Burundi. It defines the process of ‘institutional syncretism’ – merging local with global institutional settings – as a key element to social capital building. The findings illustrate how the three interventions failed to reach this objective, and question ‘bridging’ associations as ‘universal blueprints’ for restoring social cohesion within the liberal peace model for post-conflict reconstruction.

One inevitable result of successful insurgencies is the myth of their uniformity. Certainly, contemporary guerrillas have drawn upon the pioneering.Chinese model of a people's war and the widely-publicised military thought of Mao Tse-tung. This application has led some observers to conclude that there is imitation rather than selection by guerrilla cadres

It has become the common wisdom among students of sub-Saharan Africa since the publication of the so-called Berg Report that the poor performance of agriculture in the continent is a result of the economic policies pursued by most governments.1 Their intervention in the economy, according to several authors, has systematically favoured those living in the towns and cities at the expense of the vast majority in the rural areas. Urban bias is allegedly the consequence of the inability of the state to resist pressure from urban constituencies. Robert Bates, in particular, has been influential in disseminating the view that these policies are chosen because they have a political rationality, even if they are economically irrational.3 His central contention has been that state allocations in Africa have favoured urban at the expense of rural constituencies because the former are able to exert more influence on decision-makers.

Political, social, and economic development take place in space as well as time, but all too often they are written about and studied as though they existed at a point, which, it will be recalled, has position and no magnitude. In a sense, all social scientists are historians, and use the temporal dimension as a framework within which to examine the political, social, and economic behaviour of men. But few feel comfortable trying on the geographer's spatial shoes, and, beyond an occasional location map, hesitate to examine the developments in the dimension that is his particular concern. Part of the trouble, of course, is that the map imposes a stricter discipline upon us than we care to admit: to map anything beyond the merely trivial we have to measure it, while fuzzy but intuitively valid ideas such as economic development, political power, and social integration make us coy, or evoke surprisingly emotional responses that such things are incapable of being measured in any meaningful fashion. But, whether we like it or not, developments of all kinds do take place in space; what, then, can the geographer, with his spatial perspective, contribute to our knowledge of these things?

Chinese involvement in Africa may be conveniently dated from the Bandung conference of April 1955, which marked the initiation of a policy of Chinese Communist co-operation with the states of Afro-Asia. Inasmuch as the movement in Africa which resulted in the independence of many states in the next decade had hardly begun at that time, the most significant African contact made by China at Bandung was with President Nasser. The development of contacts between the two states led Egypt in May 1956 to become the first African country to give its official recognition to the Chinese People's Republic (C.P.R.). Thereafter the Suez crisis served to bring the two countries still closer together.

In 1954 several hundred Hai//om San were evicted from their homes in Etosha National Park in the former South West Africa. As a result they joined the legions of landless generational farm-labourers who sustained an uneconomic and heavily subsidised white-owned commercial agricultural sector. This paper explores the predicament of this community vis-à-vis land rights in post-apartheid Namibia. It draws on recent historical research to contextualise Hai//om demands for land, and discusses the emergence of history as a dominant paradigm for the articulation of contemporary Hai//om identity. Likewise it explores the Hai//om's invocation of history to justify their demands for greater parity in land access. In doing so, it queries the usefulness of invoking an indigenous rights model as a justification for Hai//om land claims.

National governments, politicians, policy-makers, and planners have become increasingly concerned with the manner in which human populations have been distributed among the component parts of many nations in the Third World, and especially with the three key processes of mobility, fertility, and mortality. As alterations in birth and death rates tend to have far stronger national than regional components, and as such changes can only affect relative population distribution over a very long period of time – in the absence of catastrophic wars and famines – the regulation or influencing of migration is the most effective way of changing the distribution of people between regions or between rural and urban sectors. Such alterations may be seen as desirable for a variety of reasons, including the need to overcome present (or future) imbalances between the distribution of population and resources, and to assist in the implementation of certain national socio-economic goals.1

While public attention has focused on the stature of Nelson Mandela, there has been at a deeper level in South Africa since 1990 a steep decline in state capacity, and a marked deterioration in democratic practice. The participatory democracy which had so characterised the decade of the 1980s was brought to a sharp end after the return of the nationalist leaders, and the workings of even a liberal, representative democracy have also suffered under the rise since 1994 of a predominant party system and élitism. The latter features are present too in Namibia, with similar consequences. Democracy which is understood merely as electoralism, as Botswana earlier had shown, has few defences against predominance. The voters' brief electoral act is wide open to manipulation and containment. Power is shared by élites, while popular participation is rendered moribund, and concern for justice and equality ceases.

How do government policies and practices affect struggles over collective identity and struggles over land? Examining the interconnections among collective identity struggles, land struggles and state policies and practices in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper argues that the government's contradictory policies and ambivalent practices have aggravated collective struggles over the boundaries of belonging. Specifically, the differing definitions of community set forth in traditional leadership, land tenure and land restitution policies exacerbate existing divisions among ‘communities’ concurrently subject to these policies and create practical policy dilemmas for decision-makers. This paper illustrates the interplay between public policies and collective identity struggles through close examination of struggles among the Barokologadi ba ga Maotwe, a so-called traditional community. The Barokologadi case underscores the necessity of attending to these interactions.

The devaluation of the Communauté financière africaine (CFA) franc occurred on 12 January 1994. Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal were immediately affected as the value of their currency decreased by 50 per cent. One French franc now became worth 100 instead of 50 CFA – in reality a 100 per cent increase in the cost of goods purchased on the international market with the CFA franc.

A notable imbalance exists in the literature on the rôle of soldiers in politics – far less attention is given to their rule than to their intervention. This is particularly true for the African continent, where scant effort has been made to relate patterns of military rule to patterns of demilitarisation. The policy objectives of officers are often dealt with as two opposing ideal types: broadly ideological, leaning towards ‘anticommunism’, ‘modernisation’, or ‘Arab socialism’; or fundamentally apolitical and unable to formulate reasonable policy objectives because of their narrow corporate perspectives. The logic of these two ideal positions leads to the alleged dichotomy that juntas with broad political ambitions will tend to stay in power indefinitely, while those with limited corporate interests will find it easy to turn power over to civilians who will ‘grant autonomy to the armed forces’.1

There are two remarkable features of post-independence economic policy-making in Zimbabwe: the very limited nature of the changes made by the new government in 1980, and the complete reversal of policy announced in 1990. It was surprising that a more radical transformation had not been introduced soon after independence, since this had been achieved by a civil war prompted not only by the denial of even basic rights to the majority of the population, but also by an extremely inequitable distribution of economic resources. The volte-face in 1990 was also unexpected, because it required a repudiation of governmental rhetoric at a time when the economy was by no means in a state of crisis, even though under stress. This article attempts to understand these policy shifts.

One of the more popular topics in the social science literature of the late 1960s was coups d'état in Africa. Authors developed sophisticated social, political, and economic measurements that were meant to be of explanatory, if not predictive, value. Military coups often succeed because of conditions that are universal to African countries: poor institutionalisation, over-dampening of demands, economic shortfalls, failure of political leadership, competition among élites including army officers, as well as dissatisfaction specific to the military. With no long-standing indigenous and successful tradition of legitimate civilian national government, African countries are particularly vulnerable to abrupt successions of leadership.