This article develops the concept of ‘mediating bureaucrats’ by exploring their role during liberal reforms that led to rehabilitation of the sugar industry in Mozambique. By focusing on how relations between the state, government and business are mediated by a group of cadres who have occupied positions in different social domains, the article argues that these ‘mediating bureaucrats’ cannot easily be identified in one-dimensional terms as belonging to either the public or private sector, the state or the market. It is argued that as ‘socially embedded actors’, the group of ‘mediating bureaucrats’ are in a position to translate and mediate between diverse and sometimes conflicting interests and aspirations of the state, the government and business. We use the rehabilitation of the sugar industry in Mozambique to show how mediating bureaucrats adopted two practices – muddling through and translation – in order to straddle conflicting interests during different reform initiatives in post-independence Mozambique.

Stefano Ponte's article in the first JMAS issue of 2001 brings good news: previous pessimistic accounts of the dynamics of economic life in the Uluguru Mountains, especially mine, have to be revised (Ponte 2001; van Donge 1993c). There may have been economic decline in the area, but economic liberalisation has turned that around and raised incomes. Ponte collected rich material, especially in his household survey. Whereas I found it difficult to get precise estimates of money, land, and so on from people there, he collected precise quantitative insights. This information covers not only their present situation: people recalled with considerable precision their situation back to the mid eighties when I did research there. His critique touches, however, not only changes over time, but also the assumptions about how actors behave: people are much more resourceful than I portrayed them.

Most of the co-operative societies registered up to s 964, the year of Zambia's constitutional independence, were producer marketing organisations. By that date, 220 societies of all types were on the official register, claiming a total of 43,697 members and a paid-up share capital of K1.7 million.1

After independence the ruling United National Independence Party made it clear that the majority of Zambians should be involved more fully in economic and social development than they had been hitherto. Co-operative organisation was seen as a strategic way of bringing more Africans into industry, commerce, and non-subsistence farming; ten or more people could apply for registration as a society, and thus qualify for financial assistance from the Government. President Kaunda launched this ‘revitalised’ postindependence co-operative movement personally in January 1965, and called on the unemployed to put their various skills to work on planned agricultural and construction projects: ‘The money is there and the know-how…You an form these co-operative societies anywhere in Zambia and we shall assist you in getting on’.2 He specifically encouraged the formation of vegetable, egg, beef, milk, and road-making co-operatives.

In order to depict adequately the significance of political and economic interaction in tropical Africa, it is necessary to sketch the background of recent changes in that area lying south of the Sahara and north of Angola, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. Here are some 30 states ranging in size from over 2.5 million sq.km. in the Sudan to less than 00.1 million sq.km. in the Gambia; in population from almost 80 million in Nigeria to about 400,000 in the Gambia; in density from over 120 per sq.km. in Burundi to less than one per sq.km. in Mauritania; in income per capita from over $400 in Gabon to less than $50 in Burundi, Somalia, and Upper Volta; and in G.N.P. from over $4.5 billion in Nigeria to less than $30 million in Gambia.

UNTIL recently the tendency has been to look at African population largely in terms of crude density. From this standpoint tropical Africa was often rated as ‘underpopulated’, and even the recent and prestigious Pearson Commission, although noting the overall effect of population growth on development, stated blandly: ‘In Africa and Latin America…settlement is so sparse that it is impossible to speak of overpopulation.’1 Yet two years before, by synthesising a number of land-use studies and by demonstrating that, in terms of available land suitable for agriculture and pastoralism, there was pressure on rural resources, a prominent geographer had attacked, and one would have thought, had laid to rest, this argument. I do not wish to reiterate his case.2 Instead, using his article as a base, I will attempt here to make very crude prognoses and predictions and then to look at their policy implications, both for the sector discussed by him and for other sectors of social and economic development.

‘Blackness is not absence, but refusal’ said Aimé Césaire. The only trouble with refusal as a literary posture is that it is inclined to produce writing which is concerned with public gesture rather than with private and particular observation. Until recently, the great bulk of French writing by Africans could be fairly labelled as romantic, rhetorical, and directed at general rather than individual situations. That is to say, there was a preference for romantically revolutionary statements about ‘the situation of the negro’, rather than exploratory statements about the situation of the individual writer at a particular moment in space and time.

The Institute was founded in January 1963 as a department of the Haile Selassie I University, for research in all fields relating to Ethiopia. It is at present organised in three main sections, the Amharic collection, the library, and the museum. The Amharic collection, a unique assortment of books, pamphlets, and periodicals published in this language, is under the charge of Mr Stephen Wright, a life-long specialist in Ethiopian affairs. Mr. S. Chojnacki is responsible for the Institute's valuable library of books on Ethiopia, and for an ethnological and a small but growing historical museum.

There is a cancer in the body politic of South Africa that may not be cured in the foreseeable future but cannot be ignored. The Prime Minister, Pieter Willem Botha, is currently attempting to again support for a modified form of apartheid or multinational development. More land and resources must be assigned to Blacks, and a great deal more capital and recurrent funds must be spent if the Homelands are to be built up and made viable and attractive. Meanwhile, some concessions to Indians and Coloureds are being made to get them to acquiesce to a modified system of government and administration. They have not, however, satisfied Blacks, who want nothing less than majority rule, and the constitutional changes are strongly opposed by the right-wing faction of the ruling National Party. This short article will review prevailing attitudes and recommendations concerning current developments in South Africa, and then offer a possible solution to the seemingly insolvable dilemma.

The latest annual session of E.C.A. was also a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the organisation, in the presence of H. I. M. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, and U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations. Only those who were there can hope to evaluate fully the proceedings, but the reflections of one who attended the five previous sessions in a working capacity, and is now able to view E.C.A. from a more distant perspective, may be not without interest.

The idea of taking free drama to the masses of people who have no local theatre and in any case could not afford expensive seats is becoming an established custom for the Dramatic Society of Makerere University College. The 1966 Travelling Theatre visited many towns in Uganda and Kenya. We journeyed in a very crowded Land-Rover, another being used for the luggage. An immense framework had to be carried to hold the curtains that formed the background of our stage in all performances; on top of this had to be put suitcases, spears and shields, and big boxes for our costumes.

Nigeria's Third National Development Plan is based on the proposition that judicious use of current oil revenues to build social and economic infrastructures, and to radically transform the nature of economic activity, represents the quickest and most effective means of development.1 Top priority is to be given during the period 1975 to 1980 to manufacturing in the belief that an industrial base is the firmest foundation for self-sustained growth.

A 1980 World Bank study paints a bleak picture of the current economic situation in sub-Saharan Africa, where most countries are at the bottom of the development pyramid. They have low incomes per capita, and their rates of economic growth have fallen behind Asian countries of comparable low income. Moreover, population growth in Africa is accelerating while trends in other developing regions suggest a slowing down.

Few English-speaking scholars realise that a francophone network of scholars has powerfully developed the study of contact between French and African languages over the past decade, and that this is currently being synthesised in the form of an Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire. This corporate work, sponsored by the Association des universités partiellement ou entièrement de langue française (A.U.P.E.L.F.) and the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique (A.C.C.T.),1 is of considerable linguistic, educational, and sociopolitical significance, and deserves to be widely known in Africa. Indeed, it will be remembered that at the founding of the West African Linguistic Society in 1961 two surveys were mooted: West African languages and, later, English in West Africa, of which the former was accomplished with the help of the International African Institute and the Ford Foundation, while the latter was forgotten. With the ‘Inventory of French in Africa’, the francophone network of scholars has certainly stolen a march on English-speaking Africa.

In the past decade Africa has experienced a dramatic decrease in the number of national democratic institutions. Parliaments have not met, parties have declined or been outlawed, and elections have not been held in many states. The situation appears to be similar at the local level. Commenting on this state of affairs, Fred G. Burke observed in 1969: ‘One wonders whether there is to be any future for democratic local government in Africa. One might also wonder whether there should be any future.’2