A world conference on agrarian reform and rural development came to the conclusion a decade ago that since real progress could only be achieved in these fields if the peasants participated in both the necessary planning and practical work, the prerequisites were democratic organisations for local self-administration and self-reliance.

The last decade has witnessed a rapid development of economic relations between the Soviet Union and independent African countries. In examining certain economic and geographical aspects of this development, it should be borne in mind that Soviet–African economic relations are a quite new trend in world affairs. Before World War II the Soviet Union's foreign trade was conducted mainly with the advanced capitalist countries. Since the majority of the under-developed countries were very limited. Egypt was the only African country trading with the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. But Great Britain, then dominating Egypt, blocked any trade agreement between the two states. The volume of trade between them was very small, and at the beginning of World War II it ceased almost completely.

The 55 countries and territories of Africa can be classified today from the monetary point of view into six major groups. Of these, four are monetary areas based on the currency of the former or actual metropolitan country: the French franc, the pound sterling, the Portuguese escudo, and the Spanish peseta. The sterling area includes the area of the South African rand; and finally there is a group of independent countries, some with very new central banks and others with a longer tradition of monetary independence.

The Poets' conference held under the auspices of the Berlin Festival had the same theme as that of the entire festival this year, Africa's contribution and relation to the arts and culture of Europe. It is at once debatable whether a conference can decide what culture is: whether culture can be talked about across a table among 70 men and women from different parts of the world via tri-lingual instantaneous translations and other kinds of static that fill the air at such times. To appreciate the even subtler intervention of Africa into western culture, in these circumstances, might prove to be impossible. Fortunately conferences have a way of finding their working levels, even though these may not always coincide with the subject assigned them.

The People's Republic of Mozambique is a very new member of the international community of independent and sovereign states, having gained its independence… on 25 June 1975. We have much to learn, which is what we hope to do at this Conference, and have many new challenges to face. But at the same time we have the benefit of ten years of armed liberation struggle, and the wide experience of organising and administering vast areas of our country which were gradually freed from Portuguese colonial domination.

Although the oldest independent African republic, Liberia ranks among the continent's poorest states,1 despite the existence of a small but prosperous foreign enclave dominated by iron ore and rubber plantation companies. Prior to 1950, even this sector was non-existent, with the exception of the Firestone rubber plantation at Harbel which was started in 1926.

This brief note will argue the case for certain lines of investigation, both empirical and theoretical, in African cities. It is increasingly recognised that the constellation of issues revolving around urbanisation and its effects will be a major factor in development for the rest of the century: witness the convocation of the Habitat Conference in Vancouver, June 1976, and the World Bank's new Urban Policy Task Force. Yet, as always, comprehension trails behind actual developments.

‘The artist has always functioned in African society’, he said, ‘the record of mores and experiences of his society and … the voice of vision in his own time. It is time’, he concluded, ‘for [the artist] to respond to this essence of himself.’ The words appeared in mid-1967; their author Wole Soyinka, already celebrated as a leading poet and dramatist, representing the younger generation of writers among Africa's newly independent nations.

The Epistemological status of their own consciousness is the core contradiction of Marxist thought. This difficulty has not been acknowledged by African Marxists, nor do they explicitly admit to the varieties of radical scholarship which form their intellectual heritage, and which their own worl seeks to modify and elaborate. Marxist scholars have been unable to develop a cogent, persuasive justification for radical theorising as an alternative to positivist social science, largely because of their unwillingness to confront and affir, their own historical specificity. As argued by Bogumil Jewsiewicki:

To think of the planting of Christianity in Africa and the work of missions and churches is to think of schools, of these agencies ‘throwing across tropical Africa their gigantic fishing net of primary and secondary schools’. And to think of the African peoples themselves over the past century is to recall the swelling demand for education above almost everything else. Back in 1902 this was well expressed in the exhortation of King Lewanika to his Lozi council: ‘Marotse, leave your shades, abandon our paganism. Send your children to school so that we also can become a nation.’ The school has undoubtedly been the most universally appreciated Christian contribution to black Africa over the past century and more.

This short article has two themes: it is prompted first by a feeling that many African countries, in their natural impatience for maximum economic development in the shortest possible time, are in some danger of getting their strategy and priorities not quite right in regard to the rural—urban, agricultural—industrial balance. More specifically, a plea is made for greater attention being given to traditional food farming (for subsistence or cash), which has been somewhat neglected in research, in spite of the fact that it must inevitably continue for a long time to support increasing numbers.

The University introduced area courses on the Middle East and North Africa into its regular offerings in the academic year 1960–1. This Program is a part of the School of International Relations, and focuses on contemporary area problems, in contrast to the more traditional approach of oriental studies. It also differs by concentrating on both the Mashriq (East) and the Maghreb (North Africa), rather than solely on the eastern Mediterranean. The community of interests, language, and culture of these two regions, plus the increasing importance of North Africa in world affairs, emphasises the practicality of this treatment.

Twelve years ago, the present writer made an embarrassingly inaccurate forecast. The Portuguese, he wrote in a paperback, cannot hold out for long in Angola; the country is hard to pacify, the insurgents enjoy many advantages, the metropole is poor and incapable of sustaining a long Indonesian-type conflict.1 At the time, this assessment seemed quite realistic, even to many Portuguese. The left-wing historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho argued that their society lacked ‘social efficiency’; Portugal was a backward country, a land of labour migrants incapable of true development at home, much less of developing an empire.2 Even some conservatives agreed: the metropole was poverty- stricken, and the colonies were but millstones around Portugal's neck.

A common problem in primary-producing countries is that commodity price instability causes substantial variation in government revenues. A conceptually simple yet rarely used domestic policy measure intended to smooth annual fiscal receipts is the establishment of a development stabilisation fund. The need for such a fund in Zambia and its modus operandi are discussed in the context of a review of budgetary performance since 1965. A simulation suggests that substantial smoothing could be achieved, but that the fund could not overcome a prolonged depression of copper prices such as occurred in the years after 1975.