At the beginning of this century only two African countries, Liberia and Ethiopia, were recognised as independent states which could be fully involved in international law. Both participated in the activities of the League of Nations. Today, with the exception of Namibia, the face of Africa is covered by sovereign states.

This paper investigates gendered patterns of corruption and access to illicit networks among female cross-border traders near the Senegambian border. Despite a discourse of generosity and solidarity, access to corrupt networks is mediated by class and gender, furthering social differentiation, especially insofar as it depends on geographic and socio-economic affinity with customs officers, state representatives and well-connected transporters. Issues of organisational culture, occupational identity and interpersonal negotiations of power represent important sources of corruption that require an understanding of the actual dynamics of public administration. While smuggling depends on contesting legal and social boundaries, the most successful traders (and transporters) strive to fulfil ideal gender roles as closely as possible. Ironically, trading on poverty and feminine vulnerability only works for relatively affluent women.

Zambia has faced an economic crisis since 1975. Living standards for most of the population have deteriorated sharply, with falling real wages and a drop in G.D.P. per capita by about a quarter. At the same time, the gap between the high- and low-income groups has probably widened.

Zambia's economic difficulties originated in international factors. In the two decades of independence, and unusually high degree of external dependency, inherited from the colonial era, continued to chatacterise the economy. Imported inputs accounted for at least one-third of all costs in mining and manufacturing, as may be seen from Table I. Meanwhile, the production of copper and relate minerals contributed a steady nine-tenths of export revenues. But in 1975, the terms of trade for copper plummeted by nearly 50 per cent, and merchandise imports promptly contracted by almost one-quarter, seriously affecting production. Since then the price of copper has stagnated.

A year after the establishment of the Transitional National Government (TNG), Somalia and in particular the southern part of the country remained fragmented and riven by armed confrontations between clans and faction leaders. The TNG succeeded in re-assuming Somalia's seat in the United Nations and all relevant regional organisations, while the breakaway north-western region of ‘Somaliland’ failed to gain any international recognition, despite the widely acknowledged establishment of a relatively stable administration. This paper tries to explain this apparent discrepancy by arguing that state or government recognition is an instrument of international relations, designed to influence rather than passively acknowledge political reality. In Somalia, granting or withholding recognition to one or other political leadership has been driven by specific interests, thus complicating the process of political stabilisation and national reconciliation.

When would politicians reduce or eliminate their own discretion in the distribution of valued benefits to voters? I argue that the answer lies in the extent of partisan attachments among voters: politicians would be more likely to adopt non-discretionary or self-binding resource allocation rules in contexts where voters evince weak attachment to political parties. Non-discretionary distributive rules allow politicians to reach unattached voters with benefits without angering their loyal supporters who might otherwise expect to be favoured. They also signal politicians’ commitment to unbiased distribution of public resources, which, research shows, attracts unattached voters. Analysis of data on allocations of legislators’ development funds in Ghana provides strong support for this argument. This result is robust to controls for alternative explanations and thus advances understanding of when politicians in new democracies would pursue reforms designed to reduce or eliminate political discretion.

Since 1949–53, when the Nigerian élite was first consulted by the British in a constitutional review, the peoples of Nigeria have engaged in a continual regional, communal, and class struggle for a share in the economic benefits resulting from decolonisation and independence, and the accompanying modernisation. The two coups d'état of 1966 and the civil war of 1967–70 were the most virulent of these struggles. This article analyses economic factors contributing to the Nigeria–Biafra conflict and the interrelated coups. Except for a brief discussion of the colonial economic legacy, the emphasis is upon the decade or two prior to the war.

The world economy is now in intense agony — sharper than ever experienced since the War. The international monetary order, carefully constructed with gold as its lynchpin and fixed exchange rates, is in shambles. Trade patterns laboriously built up since 1945 are facing their biggest challenge. The entire framework of domestic policies constructed on the assumption of steady growth — or only minor recessions — is now being questioned. Expectations of decline in industrial output ranging over io per cent are no longer restricted to whispers at cocktails — they are officially pronounced. Unemployment in the developed countries, some say, could swell nearly anywhere up to io per cent — a level which only a year ago was thought to be impossible. The identification of economic power with international liquidity has been all but destroyed in the wake of the oil price rise. Prices of other primary commodities are falling rapidly.

State/civil society interaction in Botswana displays patterns characterised by mutual criticism in each other's presence, the willingness of state officials to meet and exchange views with non-state leaders, and the media's role of reminding the contestants to meet and exchange views. The Botswana political culture compels/constrains contestants to meet and exchange views rather than to disengage and resort to the trading of unpleasant remarks in the media and to industrial action on the street. The theoretical implication is that political culture vitally shapes state/civil society interaction and should not be ignored by researchers who seek to define/characterise strong/weak civil societies.

The purpose of this article is not only to explain an African constitution, but also to examine, in that context, certain general ideas about constitutions and politics. The Ivory Coast, a former French West African colony, gained full independence as late as 1960. As a newly independent state, with a population of under four million, the Ivory Coast is participating in a nation-building experiment which the flood of new countries has made a widespread phenomenon of our times. The experiment is doubly meaningful for other countries. First, its results will weigh significantly in the balance of world power; secondly, as Ivorians look to the western example in pursuing their experiment, the West can see, reflected in Ivorians' words and deeds, a new and different image of itself.

The abundant health enjoyed by these people [the Xhosa] must undoubtedly be principally ascribed to the simple food on which they live: milk, the principal dish, which is supplied in abundance by numerous herds of cows; meat, mostly roasted; corn, millet and watermelons, prepared in different ways, appease hunger… —Ludwig Alberti (1807)1 The tuberculosis scourge is undoubtedly on the upgrade in the Native Territories and especially in this district with its high rainfall and congested population. Unsatisfactory conditions of living and nutrition are amongst the chief factors in spreading malnutrition… the former accounted, I'm afraid, for a considerable infant mortality and pellagralike conditions among the adults.

South Africa faces interconnected challenges of developing and diversifying its economy and adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change. A green policy tilt is ascendant in the country, manifest in a cascading array of policies and special initiatives. Utilising concepts from the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions, we assess Africa's first designated Green Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Atlantis SEZ (ASEZ) in the Western Cape, a niche innovation aimed at transforming the Province's industrial base. This initiative is very ambitious in four respects: (1) it links green SEZ development in a deprived metropolitan area to the broader regional economy; (2) it utilises an innovative governance structure; (3) it promises localization economies and export potential; and (4) it connects SEZ niche experimentation with emergent renewable energy regimes. While elements are in place which might seed a sociotechnical transition, societal and political forces (i.e. landscape features) continue to limit its realisation, highlighting the immanent, structural realities shaping South Africa's economic futures.

Our understanding of educational processes is often obscured by ideological considerations. This is very well illustrated in the common term, ‘assimilation’, used to characterise European colonial policy towards Africa. Thus it is often asserted that French authorities promoted the emergence of a class of ‘black Frenchmen’, with values, aspirations, and cognitive styles analogous to those of European educational institutions. In contrast, the British have been viewed as repudiating such a notion in their system of indirect rule, which attempted accommodation with Africa and aimed at perpetuating African existing social organisations.

By the mid-1990s, it had become almost a truism in certain circles that the democratic system of government, with its accompanying protections of individual rights and its facilitation of private economic activity and political pluralism, was in the ascendancy in many areas of the world hitherto not thought of as amenable to that model. But although various achievements and setbacks in democratisation have been extensively and even painstakingly documented in all continents, one intriguing experiment in Africa has gone nearly unnoticed.

Focusing on one of the most targeted areas for land investments in Tanzania (Rufiji district), this article compares the involvement of two Tanzanian state agencies in land acquisition, in the context of the central government's new strategy on productive investors. Given the fragmented and contentious authority of many African states, I investigate the impact of state intermediaries on the relationships between investors and local populations and consider bureaucrats as a group of actors to analyse flows of power within the state. I make two main points. First, the central state's weak infrastructural power and resulting lack of local knowledge, and, conversely, local bureaucrats’ possession of these valuable resources, reverses the flow of power from local to central. Second, a central monitoring process might have a negative effect. Instead of protecting vulnerable populations, it fosters institutional innovations that protect local bureaucrats’ opportunities for accumulation with investors, to the detriment of local populations.

Of the 21 members of the Arab League, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has received perhaps the least attention, ranking far behind other North African states, much less those closer to the Arab—Israeli fault-line or the recent Gulf conflict. Mauritania's desperate economic condition (a G.N.P. per capita of only $446 in 1984) has been occasionally publicised, as well as advancing desertification (reaching even into the centre of the capital, Nouakchott), and the tensions between the ruling Beydane (‘white’) Arabs, supported by their cultural/political allies, and the black African tribes concentrated in the Senegal River valley that erupted into violence in April 1989, and which led to a near-war between Senegal and Mauritania.

The Somalis, who almost exclusively inhabit the Horn of Africa, form one of the most uniformly homogeneous populations of the continent. They speak one language, adhere to a single faith, and share a common cultural heritage which is an integral part of their nomadic way of life. The very name So maal, when spoken in the imperative, means ‘Go and milk a beast for yourself’, welcome words of hospitality in a wandering stranger's ears. The Somali's self-conception is inseparable from his flocks and his historical grazing lands. Yet, the Somalis have watched helplessly for the past generation or two as their pasturelands were dismembered by colonising European powers and neighbouring potentates.

Today, a majority of citizens of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, participate in suburban and exurban growth and development much like urbanites throughout the world. Unlike the garden suburbs of North America or Europe, Dar es Salaam's suburban residents often engage in multiple income-generating activities, the most common and conspicuous of which are cultivation and animal husbandry. The presence of urban farming has suggested that Dar es Salaam's residents represent peasants incrementally transitioning to urban life. This article however, contends that everything from the varieties of cultivation, access to land and water, to the definition of what it means to be a farmer is shaped by decentralised private interests controlling access to land and resources in suburban neighbourhoods. The varieties of cultivation and animal husbandry instead reflect socioeconomic class distinctions emerging from a new suburban political economy, enabling a clearer perspective on the prospects of cultivators as these suburban districts transform.

In early 2012, South Africa's Western Cape Province enacted new alcohol control legislation amid mounting concern with the costs of alcohol-related harms. This has focused on urban shebeen closure to control the informal, unlicensed trade and the harms it generates through crime, violence and injury. In contrast to policy discourse, this paper contends that rather than existing outside regulation, the city's shebeeners embrace multiple (self and collective) regulatory strategies to manage the inherent risks of their own informality. Drawing on novel empirical data including a ‘business census’ and interviews with the police and liquor traders across four Cape Town case study sites, the paper adds new depth to contemporary engagements with the appropriate and equitable regulation of the South African informal liquor trade.

While a Research Associate attached to the Ministry of Community Development and Women's Affairs, Zimbabwe, in 1984, I studied the relation between gender and class in six Resettlement Areas (R.A.s) during an eight-month period in there north-eastern Provinces: Central and East Mashonaland, and Manicaland. The country is divided into five agro-ecological ‘Natural Regions’, numbered I to V, indicating decreasing rainfall and soil fertility, and the R.A.s studied were all in II or III, albeit in a year of drought.

It is commonly claimed by critics both within Nigeria and outside that, while the present Government preaches political non-alignment, it does not practise it, and indeed cannot because of Nigeria's economic alignment with the west. The present article seeks to assess the validity of this thesis. Three separate propositions are involved: first, that Nigeria professes but does not pursue a policy of non-alignment; secondly, that Nigeria is economically tied to the west; and finally, and most important, that there is a causal connexion between the two.