The story of the blind men and the elephant is universally known. Each…concluded that the elephant had the appearance of the part he had touched. Hence, the blind man who felt the animal's trunk concluded that an elephant must be tall and slender…Others of course reached different conclusions. The total result was that no man arrived at a very accurate description of the elephant. Yet, each man had gained enough evidence from his own experience to disbelieve his fellows and to maintain a lively debate about the nature of the beast.

The past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the attention paid to the African military by scholars, journalists, and policy-makers. This trend is the direct result of the orgy of coup d'états, beginning in 1965, which have toppled governments of all political hues in every major region except white-dominated Southern Africa. As this article is written, well over one-third of the O.A.U.'s membership is under military rule, and there is little reason to believe that army officers will lose interest or effectiveness in the political arena.

What constraints have so far prevented the full emergence in subSaharan Africa of strong and effective local capitalist classes capable of playing a leading rôle in the economic transformation of their societies?

Over the last two decades, developing countries have lowered trade barriers considerably. As a result, they have experienced a surge in food commodity imports. In Ghana, Senegal and Cameroon, a flood of frozen poultry imports in the late 1990s and early 2000s threatened domestic poultry producers. In response, they organised to demand protectionist measures. This article examines why the Cameroonian and Senegalese governments responded to these demands while the Ghanaian government did not. Employing data from interviews in Senegal, newspaper coverage in all three countries, and documentation from non-governmental organisations, it argues that Cameroonian, and to a lesser extent Senegalese, producers were able to influence government policy because they faced few barriers to collective action and built alliances with consumers before lobbying government. The findings suggest that a public choice, interest group-focused approach is still useful for explaining policy outcomes in West Africa.

The foreign policy of any country contains a variety of values and goals, and advances several interests and concerns. This article examines the continuities and discontinuities, compatibilities and contradictions in the foreign policy of Zambia. In particular, it focuses on the emerging debate over the direction of the Zambian society and state, and over the definition of the national ideology of Humanism.

The emergence of medium-scale farms is having important consequences for agricultural commercialisation across Africa. This article examines the role of medium-scale A2 farms allocated following Zimbabwe's land reform after 2000. While the existing literature focuses on changing farm size distributions, this article investigates processes of social differentiation across medium-scale farms, based on qualitative-quantitative studies in two contrasting sites (Mvurwi and Masvingo-Gutu). Diverse processes of accumulation are identified across commercial, aspiring and struggling farmers, and linked to contrasting patterns of agricultural production and sale, asset ownership, employment and finance. The ability to mobilise finance, influenced by the state of the macro-economy, as well as forms of political patronage, is identified as a crucial driver. Contrary to assertions that A2 farms are largely occupied by ‘cronies’ and that they are unproductive and under-utilised, a more differentiated picture emerges, with important implications for policy and the wider politics of Zimbabwe's countryside following land reform.

Probably no other aspect of the South African conflict has elicited more divergent explanations and misinterpretations than the ongoing political violence. It is variously attributed to (1) de Klerk's double agenda and unreformed police; (2) a ‘third force’ of right-wing elements in the security establishment, bent on derailing the Government's negotiation agenda; (3) Inkatha–A.N.C. rivalry, engineered by ambitious Buthelezi in danger of being sidelined as an equal third party; (4) the A.N.C.'s campaign of armed struggle, ungovernability, and revolutionary intolerance; (5) ingrained tribalism, unleashed by the lessening of white repression that merely resulted in ‘black-on-black’ violence formerly held in check; (6) the legacy of apartheid in general, a ‘lost youth’ generation. Helen Suzman, for example, singled out sanctions for at least ‘part of the blame’ in her 1991 presidential address to the Institute of Race Relations, while its director, John Kane-Berman, lists all parties as having ‘bloody hands’.

The multi-national corporations see in the developing countries of black Africa a potentially large market where they would like to have a foothold. The host governments, while welcoming foreign investment, are concerned about outside exploitation. The tension between this quest for markets and the move for greater control by Africans is but one more version of the old love-hate relationship between foreign investors and underdeveloped countries.

The idea has gained ground in recent years that, as conflicts in the countries of the Great Lakes Region are strongly interlinked, regional approaches are necessary to resolve them. This interest in regional dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding also gains currency in other parts of the world. Attention to regional approaches is reflected in the efforts of international organisations and donors to promote civil society peacebuilding. They assume that regional cooperation and exchange between civil society organisations contribute to peace, and provide an alternative to single-country interventions or regional diplomatic initiatives. This paper explores how such assumptions work out in practice. Experiences in the Great Lakes Region show that local and international organisations have difficulty in analysing the regional character of conflict and arriving at collaborative regional strategies. Moreover, local civil society organisations are deeply embedded in the politics of regional conflict. Consequently, the shift to regional peacebuilding approaches remains more theoretical than practical. This paper suggests that international supporting organisations need to adjust their ambitions in regional peacebuilding, but nonetheless have roles in fostering regional identification among civil society organisations.

In 1959 the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London received a grant from the Nuffield Foundation to finance a comprehensive plan for the systematic recording and restatement of African customary law. The Project was an ambitious one, aiming to cover 16 countries in Anglophonic Africa, containing several hundred different bodies of customary law. Although limited in the first instance to the law relating to marriage, the family, land tenure, and succession, this is still an enormous undertaking. After a rather slow start, the Project is now well under way, and the appearance in print of its first major publication1 affords a convenient opportunity for an assessment of its methods, aims, and progress to date.

In the lives of nations, as of men, reputations all too often achieve their widest currency when they are already out of date. The Somali Republic is no exception to this general rule. Although the real circumstances had already significantly altered before the military brusquely seized power in October 1969, Somalia was still generally known for democracy at home and trouble abroad. The first of these characterisations referred to the striking persistance of a vigorous and effective multi-party parliamentary system, and the second to the seemingly uniquely intractable nature of the ‘Somali Dispute’ which committed the Republic to supporting the secessionist claims of the contiguous Somali populations of Kenya, Ethiopia, and French Somaliland, at the price of severely strained relations with these neighbouring states. These and other attributes unusual amongst the new states of sub-Saharan Africa appeared to be closely connected with the Republic's exuberant sense of national identity, a quality all the more remarkable in being firmly grounded in a long-standing and entirely traditional cultural nationalism.

The Approach of the Reagan Administration towards the Third World was criticised as too simply anti-communist: a growing ‘predisposition toward globalism’,1 so it was claimed, led to a ‘Sovietcentric orientation’,2 an ‘obsession with the Soviet Union’,3 which obscured regional complexities.4 But American decisions about what actions to take in Southern Africa during the 1980s were part of a surprisingly effective strategy that often ignored Reagan's doctrine of aid to anti-communist resistance. That strategy was shaped by several hands, and the President's were not even the most important.

This paper analyses the role of cattle in the entwined dynamics of conflict and violence in the Fizi and Itombwe region of South Kivu province, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the one hand, agropastoral conflict intensifies armed mobilisation, allowing armed groups to draw upon particular conflict narratives that generate popular and elite support. It also creates incentives for armed actors to engage in cattle-looting, or the defence against it, for both symbolic and material reasons. On the other hand, the presence of armed forces and the use of violence profoundly shape agropastoral conflicts. Importantly, they change the perceived stakes of these conflicts, and hamper their resolution. By showing that the relations between cattle-related conflict and armed activity are indirect, complex and mutual, the paper refines both theories on agropastoral conflict and those highlighting the role of local conflicts in fuelling violence in the eastern Congo.

In contrast with the study of pre-colonial societies characterised by well- established traditions, the writing on contemporary Africa seems to be in the stage of infancy. Thus it has largely avoided assessing the performance of ‘revolutionary’leaders in an objective manner, and has often exhibited paternalism, idolisation, or dogmatism. If the study of modern history and politics aims at what actually is, rather than at what might be or ought to be, a more balanced view of political mobilisation and performance should result. An attempt will be made from this perspective realistically to appraise Guinea under the Parti démocratique de Guinée in terms of its internal consistency.

By contrast with many other African states, the Ethiopian Government has in recent decades been almost monotonously stable. The Emperor Haile Selassie reigns and rules through a political system which remains in essentials the direct descendant of the imperial Government as it has existed down the centuries.1 In the last quarter-century, only the attempted coup d'état of December 1960 has seriously challenged his régime. The purpose of this article is to disentangle the various elements present in the coup, in order to illuminate the themes of rebellion and attempted revolution in an indigenous African polity.

Analyses of the South African state during the 1970s and 1980s all tried to come to grips with the rôle of the Security forces.1 Research justifiably ran in different directions, but the National Security Management System soon became an essential part of recent work,2 albeit remaining very much of a mystery.3 Since we need to know how it originated, developed, and operated in practice, as well as its legacy, this article attempts to describe the N.S.M.S. and offers avenues of interpretation.

This is indeed a momentous and historic day for Africa and for all Africans. We stand today on the stage of world affairs, before the audience of world opinion. We have come together to assert our role in the direction of world affairs and to discharge our duty to the great continent whose 250 million people we led. Africa is today at midcourse, in transition from the Africa of Yesterday to the Africa of Tomorrow. Even as we stand here, we move from the past into the future. The task on which we have embarked, the making of Africa, will not wait. We must act, to shape and mould the future and leave our imprint on events as they slip past into history.

Despite stipulations in the Sudan's 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that all ‘other armed groups’ be demobilised by January 2006, the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) continued to maintain a significant armed presence in South Sudan. This paper analyses the dynamics of the organisation, the impact of its ongoing presence on the security situation and reconstruction efforts, and attempts by the government of South Sudan to counteract the SSDF from January to August 2006. It argues that the strategies implemented by the government to counter the SSDF were fairly successful in that there was no major return to conflict. However, it concludes that the SSDF's continued presence, while hindered, has the potential to spark a return to civil war.

Migrant labour from external sources has been exploited by South Africa during the past century for obvious economic reasons: it is cheap, easily available, and largely controllable. Short-run fluctuations may arise for a variety of reasons, but in the long run, as W. G. Martin has attempted to demonstrate, demand patterns for foreign migrant workers, particularly on the mines, have generally reflected prevailing economic conditions.1. Events over the past decade or so have, however, made it difficult to distinguish between the effects of economic and political influences which have so dramatically altered the face of migration in Southern Africa.

Post-World War II French colonial reforms, most notably those of the 1956 loi-cadre, began the process of decentralising political authority to the territorial components of the Fédération d'Afrique occidentale française (A.O.F.),1 and the Fédération d'Afrique equatoriale française (A.E.F.).2 By 1958 most of these French colonies had become autonomous Republics within the Communauté franco-africaine. Although only Guinea had opted for complete political independence in the Gaullist referendum held that year, pressures were clearly mounting in that direction for other members of the now defunct Federations.