The purpose of this article is to explore the pattern of South African responses to external pressures. My study grows out of a concern with the regional conflict situation in Southern Africa, whose dimensions have become relatively clear only since the coup in Portugal in April 1974. Whatever the specific details of the policies and actions of the rest of the world; these should not rest on a misperception of the basic motivation and dynamics of South African decision-making vis-à-vis external pressures.

In the making of a post-independence Namibian society, there are few areas of agreement between the contending parties in the contemporary struggle for power. Nevertheless, both the South-West Africa People's Organisation and the South African-backed Turnhalle groups have expressed the need to establish tertiary-level education in Namibia. The absence of a university and an associated intellectual community means that, in Richard Moorsom's words, ‘Namibian society lacks the essential means either of attracting social concern or transmitting basic information’. The ramifications of this are both sharply apparent and regrettable:

Africa's dismal economic performance in recent years has spawned a rather vigorous debate over where to lay the blame for the contonuing crisis. The United Nations and assoviated agencies cite factors outside the control of indivedual fovernlents, and stress the detrimental inpact if the poor condition of the world economy, notably the decline in commodity prices and foreign aid. By way of contrast, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund favour the school of thought that lays blame more directly on internal policy-making. Here the actions taken by government to distort, for example, exchange rates and agricultural prices, and to expand unprofitable state enterprises, are seen as the main reasons for the continent's economic decline.

Until the late 1950s it was conventional wisdom in East Africa that the major problem of manpower development was one of attracting and retaining sufficient numbers of workers into the European-controlled labour force. Strategies, however, differed radically between plantation agriculture and industry. In Kenya the Government published two reports in 1955 on wages which well illustrate the contrast, and provide valuable insight into the interests involved in the formation of employment policies in a colonial economy.

This article is an exploratory attempt to understand the state of underdevelopment in contemporary Zaïre through a study of bureaucratic decision-making process at the local level. It is based on a series of investigations which the author and a group of colleagues carried out in 13 zones in Shaba Region during 1975 and 1976, but our reflections have evolved considerably since then and, to a large extent, have outstripped the reach of the research data, so that the present article should be considered as a report on work-in-progress.

Population movements across the African continent form a major theme in African history, having usually occurred in response to natural diasters or pressures from a neighbouring community. Today, political and ecological forces still produce massive migrations, albeit with a new dimension: their growing concentration in urban areas.

Third-World co-operation on human rights has manifested itself in many forms during the past two decades, but never more consistently and vigorously than on the South African policy of apartheid. This policy of separate development for each of the four racial groups – African, European, Asian, and Coloured – involves measures to effect a degree of purely local or spatial separation, e.g. with respect to residential zones, public utilities, education, transport, entertainments and public activities, and measures concerning political rights, e.g. separate representative councils; and also territorial separation, i.e. the reservation of specific areas for the exclusive use of one population group.1

The post-colonial evolution of the Tanzanian economy has been strongly influenced by public policy, notably since the adoption of the Arusha Declaration in 1967,1 which established the following guidelines:

1. Self-reliance, albeit not self-sufficiency or autarky, since, at least in theory, selected foreign assistance may be the catalyst rather than the basis of development.

2. General social equality, aimed at regional, inter-personal, and rural—urban equity.

3. Socialist and co-operative economic activities, emphasising priority for rural development per se, with a bias towards co-operative work through communal ujamaa villages.

4. Public ownership and control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.

The major problem of agriculture in Africa has been the low productivity of the traditional sector. The general thrust of development strategies to this point has been towards providing opportunities to small-holders and ‘encouraging agricultural development within existing peasant production units’. This essentially laissez-faire approach has emphasised the need to improve producer incentives and the necessary infrastructure, as well as to provide new crop varieties and modern agricultural inputs in general. Social scientists, in turn, have studied the general question of how farmers respond to changes in incentives and, especially, to the availability of technological innovations.

The presence of large numbers of refugees in independent African countries is one of their gravest problems. These refugees do not normally come into the countries of asylum in manageable numbers, but enter in tens of thousands, usually totally destitute, into regions poor in communications and social services—even for the local inhabitants—and with little if anything in the way of surplus local food supplies. The logistics and finance of providing immediate succour have presented enormous difficulties, intensified by the need to remove them as far as possible from the frontiers of their countries of origin, in order to avoid political tensions between the countries concerned and to observe the Organisation for African Unity's recommendation of 1964. Their settlement, among people who are only just self-sufficient in subsistence foods, places great strains on the technical resources of countries struggling for a decent standard of living for their own inhabitants, and deeply committed to their own development plans.

In spite of the predilections of some development economists, the spate of programmes for industrialisation in develop countries – some times supported or sponsored by technologically advanced countries and international organisations – attests to the current widespread belief that industrialisation is a sine qua non for rapid economic growth of most developing countries. However, unlike Japan's industrialisation, which was achieved mostly by internal reorganisation and the acquisition of knowledge and techniques from abroad, Nigeria's industrial progress has so far been charted largely by foreign capital and expertise, so that planners, although imbued with a religious faith in industrialisation, begin to entertain fears about the country's over-dependence on external sources of capital, high-level manpower, and enterprise.1 These fears found expression in the National Development Plan, 1962–68, thus:

It can be suggested that the ‘economic development’ of most Third-World nations today will be reflected in two distinct but interrelated processes: (1) a rise in economic productivity and in real incomes, and (2) a reduction in fertility and a corresponding slowing down in the rate of population growth.1 Historically, an increase in both the number of cities in a country and the number and proportion of the population living there, has been closely associated with both these processes. Accordingly, as urbanisation proceeds in Africa it might logically be assumed that economic growth and demographic modernisation are also taking place. It is our purpose in this brief article to offer a partial explanation for the fact that this historical association has not characterised recent trends in the continent.

The Sudan, Africa's largest country, not much smaller than Western Europe, is caught up once more in the convulsions of a civil war pitting the Northern against the Southern Sudanese. Inevitably the present conflict is associated with the older civil war which began in the early 1960s and dragged on for ten years, claiming the lives of around one million, and bringing about a famine and devastation little known to the outside world. There are obvious communalities, but the contemporary struggle is hardly a replay of that smouldering little war that had been fought by the Southern Sudanese with the most meagre of means and but a trifle of external aid. I shall deal in some length with what can now be called the first Sudanese civil war, in order to provide the background for an understanding of the real issues at stake today, and to place this second Sudanese civil war in perspective. More generally, the ‘Southern Problem’ provides insights into communal conflicts and their international dimensions, important though overlooked and often unacknowledged problems of today's world.

This is an exploratory approach to the question of what universities have to do with nation-building in Africa, and to the more general question of how people learn to behave like nationals.

Disappointed with the development performance of most Third-World countries during the past two decades, many scholars and public officials have looked for a more effective strategy. They are concerned not merely with the extent of growth, but where it has occurred, with evidence that relatively little of the benefits of increased productivity has ‘trickled down’ to the poorer half of the populations of these lands. Capital-intensive methods have raised expectations in both the urban and the rural areas without generating adequate employment opportunities or distributing the benefits of growth equitably. As a consequence, the many poor remain as desperately disadvantaged as they ever were, making a re-evaluation of development priorities, within as well as outside of Africa, of the utmost importance at this juncture.

The rise of the feminist movement in the West has served to stimulate serious research on sex rôles and inequalities, and the recent growth in the number of African and female researchers has had an invigorating effect on various arguments about the status of women in Africa. So far, however, the controversy has generated more heat than light, as a result of both the relative paucity of sound research findings and the combined effects of the sex, race, and ideology of researchers.

This short article analyses the demand for and the use of educational indicators with reference to Swaziland. The data requirements are considered as well as the policy implications of establishing a fixed series, and an educational input-output table is constructed in an attempt to derive an all-embracing set of indicators. The Markov model presented here was initially created in order to help forecast what might happen to the Swaziland education system rather than to describe it. As the discussion of the data requirements below suggests, however, this can be considered a fortunate birth.

The classical school regards international trade as the main engine of growth. But modern empirical studies have failed to show any simple and generally consistent correlation between foreign trade statistics and macro-economic aggregates such as savings, investment, consumption, and growth. The more generally accepted view is that development through trade — where it occurred — was partly the consequence of favourable internal factors, and partly the result of a conducive external environment.

When Zambia introduced weekly foreign-exchange auctions in October 1985 in order to determine the value of the kwacha vis-à-vis the dollar, together with other measures aiming at liberalising external and internal trade and at restructuring the pattern of production, they were widely acclaimed as a model for reforms elsewhere in the continent. The Economist praised Zambia for ‘taking one of the bravest economic gambles that any African country has taken’,1 implying that even in the view of liberal commentators the Government ran a considerable risk in trying to implement this reform programme. The new measures enabled Zambia to reach a fresh stand-by agreement with the International Monetary Fund in early 1986, the previous one having broken down in 1985 because the authorities failed to meet the I.M.F.'s economic targets.