Physically, culturally, and ethnically the Republic of the Sudan is a microcosm of Africa. Its achievements, problems, and potentialities are in many respects typical of those of other African or Afro-Asian countries—particularly the belt of ‘Sudanic’ states which runs across the continent from the Horn and the Red Sea in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. Thus, like the great majority of Afro-Asian countries, the Sudan has been subjected to alien rule for considerable periods during its modern history; its existing boundaries, administrative institutions, and cultural outlook have been largely moulded by its colonial masters; it developed a nationalist movement whose primary objective was the achievement of independence; and, since the fulfilment of that objective, it has been faced with a host of problems, chief amongst which is the erosion of nationalism, in the sense of loyalty to the homeland as a whole, and the resurgence or development of a variety of particularistic tendencies, loyalty to which has in some cases equalled or even surpassed loyalty to the nationalism under whose banner independence was won.

In sub-Saharan Africa, commercial bioenergy production has been hailed as a new form of ‘green capitalism’ that will deliver ‘win-win’ outcomes and ‘pro poor’ development. Yet in an era of global economic recession and soaring food prices, biofuel ‘sustainability’ has been at the centre of controversy. This paper focuses on the case of post-war Sierra Leone, a country that has over the last decade been consistently ranked as one of the poorest in the world, facing food insecurity, high unemployment and entrenched poverty. Following a recent government strategy to secure foreign direct investment in biofuels production in agriculturally rich regions of the country, the largest foreign investment in Sierra Leone since the end of its civil war has been secured: a Swiss company is to invest US$368 million into a large-scale biofuels project over the course of 3 years, and promises to simultaneously stimulate an enabling environment for investment, provide job opportunities for youth and increase food production. For multiple actors involved in the project, the concept of ‘sustainability’ is crucial but accordingly there are varying interpretations of its meaning. Such differences in interpretation and the complex contradictions within discourses of sustainability are in turn framed by the various scales within which these actors are situated. While attempts have been made to manage these contradictions through global sustainability standards, the unequal power relations between different actors will ultimately determine the ways in which they are likely to be resolved. The paper concludes by reflecting on how these processes may be contributing to a changing governance landscape and wider global political economy within which bioenergy is being produced, processed and consumed.

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.

On 8 and 9 April 1995, Zimbabweans turned out for an election that mostly was not. As many as 55 of the 120 parliamentary seats open for contestation had already been decided for the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front), because the six opposition parties of the moment did not put up candidates for them. ZANU PF could also count on another 30 parliamentarians: 12 non-constituency members, to be appointed by the President of Zimbabwe, as well as the eight provincial governors; and ten chiefs elected by local chiefs, all beholden to the ruling party for carrying forward traditional powers to the post- independence era. In other words, ZANU PF was sure of obtaining 85 of the 150 seats in the House of Assembly before a single ballot was cast in the 1995 elections.

It is, no doubt, a journalistic cliché to assert that Côte d'Ivoire is ‘in crisis’. It is both undeniable and obvious that the world's largest cocoa producer, dependent for the majority of its foreign-exchange earnings and for the livelihood of the majority of its working population on the export of cocoa and coffee, is severely affected by the collapse in commodity prices which has occurred since 1980. With the exception of the false boomlet of 1986, cocoa prices have fallen throughout the decade, from a peak of £3,500 per ton in 1977 to the £670–750 range of the 1989–90 season. In real terms the dollar price of cocoa is now only 25 per cent of its 1977–8 value.

On 11 November 1965 the Rhodesian Front Government of Mr Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesia to be independent of the residual jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.

The British Government understandably regarded U.D.I, as illegal and unacceptable, and sought ways to terminate the rule of Smith's party. In the absence of an internal uprising, the British Government, having eschewed the use of force, resorted to a policy of economic sanctions to effect the desired political and social changes. These were intended to affect incomes, employment, and economic activity generally, so as to generate dissent and disaffection among the white population, who, it was hoped, would either emigrate or force a return to legality, the negotiating table, and progress towards a mutually acceptable form of independence.

Recent studies of indigeneity in Africa have highlighted the problematic nature of the concept in a continent where it is difficult to determine which groups have temporal priority in a given location. These studies have suggested, with varying degrees of criticism, that indigeneity in Africa is a strategic identity deployed to attain a special status and associated benefits, often to remedy past harms. This article agrees that indigeneity is an act of positioning, but suggests that in the Kenyan context it can be deployed in another way as well, that is, as an act that seeks equal rather than special positioning within the dominant population. In this case indigeneity is not a special ‘slot’ but rather the norm. The article illustrates this by drawing on research with the Nubian community of Nairobi who seek to shed their ethnic stranger status and instead position themselves as indigenous to Nairobi in order to access the same quality of citizenship as that enjoyed by Kenya's ‘42 tribes’.

There is general agreement that sports are used for political purposes. The controversy over whether this should or should not be the case is really a struggle about how they should be used. Those who argue for the separation of sports and politics tend to be satisfied with the existing use, while those against the separation tend to be dissatisfied with the present situation. The positions are rational: each group seeks to use this arena to achieve its own political objectives. Although some involvement of politics in sports appears universal, the degree varies considerably from country to country.

Focusing on events in a rural village in Tanzania during 2001–02, this paper examines the changing nature of state/society relations in Tanzania. Drawing on experience from previous years of fieldwork in the early 1990s, it becomes apparent that villagers are beginning to change the way they engage with the state. These new approaches are framed in part by the discourse of democracy, with which Tanzanians have become familiar since the economic and political liberalisation policies of the 1990s. These events reveal a new sense of the right to participate in decision-making on how to use key development resources. They also illustrate how local elites can threaten to capture benefits for their own gain. As Tanzanians begin to demand more rights to participate in the public sphere, their achievements enlarge our understanding of what might constitute civil society.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are sensitive issues in relations between donor agencies and recipient governments, especially in a time when the responsibility for implementing aid activities is shifting towards recipients. This paper deplores that, so far, donors and recipients have adopted an overly technocratic approach to M&E, largely disregarding broader institutional and systemic issues. Using case study material from Rwanda, we illustrate that assessments regarding the quality of a country's M&E efforts may differ sharply depending upon one's perspective. At the core of the matter is ‘the denial of politics’, one of the most serious flaws in the new aid paradigm promoted in the OECD's 2005 ‘Paris Declaration’. We argue that while a narrowly defined technocratic vision of M&E may seem ‘politically neutral’, in fact it may jeopardise M&E's functions of ‘accountability’ and ‘feedback’. This can eventually undermine the effective implementation of some of the key principles of the ‘new aid approach’.

The number of ethno-regional conflicts in the world has grown in intensity during the last few decades as a result of political and economic crises, and one of the unsolved paradoxes of this world-wide trend is that there seems to be a basic contradiction between the two core concepts of ‘democratisation’ and ‘ethnic self-determination’.

There is a well-known story that is regularly acted out in many countries of the world. An individual suddenly wins a large fortune – from a lottery or horse race – and is catapulted from rags to riches. After a few years of dissipation, the money has been squandered, the physical and mental health of the nouveau riche broken, and the glorious future of unlimited possibilities constricted into a bleak vista of regret and recrimination. At the moment of exhilaration, what the person concerned – understandably enough – failed to recognise was that the danger such sudden wealth represented was no less great than the dazzling promise.

This article considers the distributional consequences of seasonality by analysing the links between non-farm incomes, commercialisation within agriculture, and variations in consumption burdens and expenditures at the household level. The common focus in the literature on non-farm incomes as levellers of seasonality and sources of risk minimisation is complemented by perspectives which consider how seasonality affects and is handled by households depending on their broader livelihood situations. To this perspective is also added a consideration of in-kind transfers and transactions. The article uses a mixed methods approach, drawing on data from two villages in Western Kenya. The lack of non-farm sources of income and the variation over time in consumption burdens aggravate the seasonal aspects of the agricultural production cycle for poorer households. By contrast, the interaction between farm and non-farm sources of income enables wealthier households to profit from seasonality in relation to agricultural markets, while providing the basis for meeting both farm and non-farm expenditures.

Research carried out in two densely populated wards of Kampala in 2012 shows that food-insecure households dropped, or significantly decreased, their consumption of matoke, the plantain staple, soon after its availability declined and the market price rose. They shifted to a diet for which the base was a stiff maize porridge (posho), eating just one meal a day. Many such households were headed by grandparents, single grandmothers especially. For the full set of household heads interviewed (118), access to rural family land (kibanja) stood out as critical for achieving year-round urban food security. With few exceptions, households that farmed ‘at home’ – about half the sample – saw themselves as food secure. Access negotiations, however, could be difficult, especially for women. The growing number of grandparents responsible for raising grandchildren and nieces/nephews, many of whom were orphaned, has given rise to a new discourse whereby care is increasingly given to maternal grandchildren.

The study of settlement geography in Africa has not only to consider rural–urban and traditional–modern contrasts, but also to place on the appropriate continuum the various communities which have been relocated since World War II. However, the lack of a general theory in this field has led to much wasted effort on the ground, and to the frequent replication of studies in the literature. Some recent contributions endeavour to draw meaningful generalisations from the disparate literature on settlement and resettlement schemes.1 Perhaps because the subject constitutes ‘an academic no man's land’ wherein ‘no single science or study has yet established its claims and each has its limitations’,2 attempts at an overview have inevitably focused on the individual author's specialist orientation. Whatever the methodological paradigm of these overviews, or of the numerous case-studies, they frequently, if regretfully, arrive at a critical conclusion vis-à-vis the limited results of settlement schemes.

KENYA became the 34th independent state in Africa on 12 December 1963, after perhaps the longest drawn-out campaign between nationalism and immigrant interests yet seen in British colonial history in Africa. If this bitter struggle has left deep and permanent scars on the body politic, in the form of racial hatred, entrenched tribalism, and a climate of violence, it bodes ill for Kenya's future. In the belief that an observer may most satisfactorily take a country's temperature, and gauge the condition of such scars, at election time, we have written the following brief study of the elections for the Senate (41 seats), the House of Representatives (129 seats), and six of the seven Regional Assemblies,1 held in Kenya between 18 and 26 May 1963. We hope that our varied experience in Kenya may help give readers a taste of the real flavour of the country at this important juncture, in a way that undiluted tables of statistics could not possibly do.

In less than two centuries the process of industrialisation has spread from a tiny triangle in Britain to nearly 25 per cent of the world population. But it has so far largely by-passed the Third World, including China and socialist East Asia, and the southern periphery of Europe from Portugal to Bulgaria. These developing countries account for almost 75 per cent of the world population, but for only 20 per cent of the world income. On the other hand, the developed countries, with only 25 per cent of the population, have an average income per capita about ten times as high, and account for as much as 80 per cent of the real world output.

Few events alter the socio-economic structure of a country as radically as the convulsions and displacements concomitant with war and political upheaval. In Nigeria the two coups d'état of 1966 and the civil war of 1967–1970 have had a profound effect on economic activity, and in turn have been affected by economic variables. In this study the political variable will generally be treated as independent and the economic variable as dependent, despite the fact that in the period after independence in 1960, tendencies towards political and economic disintegration reinforced each other.1

Since independence most sub-Saharan African countries have retrogressed from an early period of rising expectations and optimism to growing difficulties in the 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a painful era of stabilisation and structural adjustment measures. A large part of the blame for so many unfavourable developments, notably stagnating growth and untenable domestic and external account imbalances, can be attributed to the nature of the African state.

In February 1967, Tanzania, formed from the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, declared its intention to purpue a policy of ‘socialism’ and self-reliance. In the famous Arusha Declaration, the Tanganyika African National Union called for the Government to exercise control over the means of production and move away from over-reliance on foreign assistance in development. It stressed the need to strengthen agriculture and thereby improve the lives of the majority of the population which earned their livelihood in this sector. Finally, T.A.N.U. called for changes in the party to ensure that it contained only committed socialists. Closely linked to this was a leadership code for senior officals in ministries and parastatals which prohibited them from owing stock or holding directorships in private corporations. Renting out house was also declared impermissible.