This case history, based on fieldwork carried out in 1968, traces the development of two governing élites in the provincial town of Lira, which is located in northern Uganda and has a population of about 5,000 people. It is the administrative and commercial centre for the 353,000 people, primarily members of the Lango tribe, who live in Lango District. The town's population is about 73 per cent African (80 per cent of them Langi), 23 per cent Asian (Indian, Pakistani, and Goan) and 2 per cent European. In 1968 it was the ‘home town’ of the President of Uganda, where the interrelations between local, regional, and national systems of government were particularly transparent.

The Centre of West African Studies has been in full operation since October 1964. Its staff is as follows: J. D. Fage, M.A., Ph.D. (Director and Professor of African History); P. C. Lloyd, M.A., B.Sc., D.Phil. (Senior Lecturer in Sociology); D. Rimmer, B.A. (Lecturer in Economics); R. E. Bradbury, B.A., Ph.D. (Lecturer in Social Anthropology); K. W. J. Post, M.A. (Lecturer in Political Science); A. G. Hopkins, B.A., Ph.D. (Assistant Lecturer in Economic History). A number of other members of the University of Birmingham are closely associated with the work of the Centre, including D. W. J. Johnson, M.A., B.Litt. (History); R. E. Wraith, C.B.E., B.Com. (Local Government); W. B. Morgan, M.A., Ph.D., and R. P. Moss, B.Sc., Ph.D. (Geography); and R. H. F. Dalton, B.A. (Education).

In this 1971 novel by Charles Mangua, and in his sequel 15 years later, Son of Woman in Mombasa (Nairobi, 1986), Dodge Kiunyu is a self-made man, ‘son of woman’. He believes that he was ‘conceived on a quid’ by ‘one of the scores of men who took [his mother] for a bed-ride’ (1971, p. 7). Raised first by his prostitute mother until her death and then by her prostitute friend, Dodge is sent away to the countryside as an 11-year-old orphan, educated by a mission, and eventually graduated from Makerere University College. His adult life has been spent working ‘with Ministry of Labour, Kenya Shell, Ministry of Lands and Settlement and lastly with the Ministry of Home Affairs as an insider of Kamiti prison–blast them cops!’ (1986, p. 2).

One of the most important developments in the last decade has been the movement by Africans to recover control of their own economy. A recent article in this Journal, XVI, 3, September 1976, gave a factual account of the extent to which foreign-owned industry in black Africa has been nationalised and indigenised, and discussed the inability of international law to provide guidelines for the settlement of this ongoing struggle between alien owners and host countries. Predictably, it was written by a lawyer because this field has been captured by lawyers almost to the exclusion of all others. But there is much that economists, sociologists, and political scientists could contribute concerning nationalisation, particularly in analysing its causes and effects, although up to now they have had little to say.1 This note makes a start on the question of the impact of nationalisation upon Africa and Africans, in the hope that the tentative conclusions reached here will lead to treatment of the subject by those with the tools for a deeper appraisal.

This conference was sponsored by the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (founded in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre) and the convenor was Ronald Segal, now editor of the Penguin African Library. What was intended initially as a small expert conference snowballed suddenly, and in the end 30 official government delegations (mainly from African, Asian, and socialist countries) and over 200 delegates attended. The conference chairman was Mongi Slim, the Foreign Minister of Tunisia, and others present included Diallo Telli, the chairman of the U.N. Special Committee on Apartheid, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, the vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, and Tom Mboya and Mainza Chona, the Ministers ofJustice of Kenya and Northern Rhodesia.

F.A.O.'s Indicative World Plan for Agricultural Development is an effort to analyse the major problems which will confront agriculture in the developing countries in the 1970s and early 1980s, and to suggest the most important ways in which national and international action can solve them.

During the last four decades, few attempts to establish democracy have succeeded. Many new states in the 1950s and 1960s adopted democratic structures as they decolonised but soon shifted to civilian or military dictatorships. As the decade of the 1990s begins, there is a world-wide demand for democracy because of the poor record of all forms of authoritarian régimes.

Thirty years ago, Sir Godfrey Huggins retired as Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The Queen raised him to the peerage as Viscount Malvern of Rhodesia and of Bexley in the county of Kent – his choice of title characteristically giving expression first of all to his old public school, then his country of adoption, and finally his birthplace in England. Great universities showered him with honorary doctorates and, quite surprisingly, David Low, the most distinguished of Labour political artists, creator of the archetypal figure Colonel Blimp, published a cartoon that showed Huggins proudly stepping into the pages of history, together with Sir Robert Walpole and Mackenzie King, the only English-speaking Prime Ministers to have shared his political longevity.

Ten years ago Kenneth Robinson published ‘A Survey of the Background Material for the Study of Government in French Tropical Africa’, in The American Political Science Review (Washington), L, 1956, pp. 179–98. In the absence of published studies dealing directly with government and politics in French African colonies, his survey was necessarily limited largely to official publications and to studies of French colonial policy, legal and constitutional developments, and ethnography. At the same time Thomas Hodgkin's Nationalism in Colonial Africa (London, Muller, 1956), the first and perhaps the most successful attempt to analyse and compare postwar political and social developments, had to rely on a few sociological studies for relevant material on French colonies. At that time, Hodgkin's own articles in West Africa (London) and a few articles by Robinson were the only available pieces of published research on politics in this area.

Legislation in the former British colonial territories exhibited a pair of paradoxes. First, it spoke in legalese, a patois that only judges and lawyers can read easily. Many laws concerning development, however, addressed ordinary citizens. Second, drafters invented and used a specialised style to reduce official and judicial discretion by making legislation more precise, but this frequently endowed officials with discretion as broad as the unbroken sky. In Africa, the uses of legalese seemed to war with the purposes for which it was developed.

The ever-increasing African aspirations for development have been reflected in the many plan documents produced during the last decade. But the growth of government resources – or public savings, defined as the excess of current revenue over current expenditure ’ has lagged very much behind. In consequence, resort is increasingly being made to other sources of funds.

An increasing tendency in recent years has been to encourage small-scale industries as an important part of development programmes in the Third World. There has been a general emphasis on the rural sector, and a specific concern with job creation and income distribution, from which stem, for instance, the recent I.L.O. reports on the employment problems of various countries.1 In the case of Kenya and the Philippines, the promotion of small scale and rural industries has been elevated to the status of a component in a new ‘strategy’ for development. A great many countries adopted such programmes some time ago, mainly because they satisfy several of the obvious criteria for industry choice, such as labour intensity, use of local materials, and geographical dispersability, but it cannot be said that they have so far met with a great deal of success. An evaluation of Kenya's experience to date has recently been carried out by the author.2

Lagos, the capital of Nigeria since 1914, was in 1954 declared Federal Territory under the direct administration of the central Government, in order to satisfy demands that it should not, like some other federal capitals, be controlled by any of the constituent units. But, when new States were created in 1967, this Federal Territory was merged with neighbouring areas to become Lagos State, with headquarters in Lagos, which was retained as the Federal capital. This development raises again the issue of protecting Nigeria's capital from control by any of the constituent units of the Federation; should this be done by declaring Lagos Federal Territory again? or by choosing another site? These questions involve a consideration of the process by which Lagos was chosen as the Federal capital, of its effectiveness under present conditions, and of the location of a possible alternative, neutral capital of Nigeria.

This conference was sponsored by the University College Nairobi, with the generous assistance of the Dulverton Trust and the Ford Foundation. The 82 participants included academic staff from the University Colleges of Nairobi, Makerere, and Dar es Salaam, and their associated research institutes, ministers and senior civil servants from the three East African governments, representatives of F.A.O., I.L.O., and a number of national and international aid agencies, and officials concerned with rural development programmes in East Africa, Nigeria, France, Denmark, and West Germany.

Certain problems and prospects of economic development are common to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Any discussion of the Maghreb must consider the restrictive influence of the limited size of the national markets. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Libya with its population of only about 1, 800,000. Naturally, it is the spending or consuming capacity of that population rather than its actual size which is the limiting factor. Studies by Chenery, amongst others, suggested a national product of $30,000 million as the minimum optimal market size for an economy, with a $300 income per capita.1 Furthermore, the lower the average income per person, the higher the total national product needed to support efficient manufacturing plants and, particularly, an industry producing capital goods. By the mid- 1960s the independent countries of Africa together had a ‘continental product’ of about $40,000 million, and a population of about 300 million, often with extremely low income per capita. In short, the entire independent continent provides market conditions of just about the minimum optimal size for rapid development; the market of any subcontinental group, and obviously of any individual economy, is less than a quarter of the optimum size. When one considers countries like Chad, Malawi, and Togo, it is a case of national market sizes smaller than those of medium-sized European cities.

Recent articles by André Simmons and K. M. Barbour have analysed the various advantages of, and strategies for, regional economic integration in West Africa.1 This note focuses on the technical obstacles of full integration, and then on sub-regional economic co-operation as a more practical alternative.

How can one agree upon an accepted distribution of the benefits from regional economic integration? How could this be implemented among the West African countries ? These are the most difficult and contentious problems associated with forming and operating any customs union and free trade area among the developing countries. If an acceptable distribution of benefits does not come about, then ‘the operation of existing groupings may easily be rendered ineffective or, in extreme cases, they may collapse. The experience of the last few years demonstrates that this is not a remote possibility.’2