When the B.B.C. began its special service in English to Africa over 20 years ago, it was the first broadcasting organisation outside Africa to do so. Today the B.B.C. African Service provides, in addition to the daily programmes in English, daily broadcasts in Swahili to East Africa, in Somali to the Horn of Africa, and in Hausa to West Africa. Audiences in East, Central, and West Africa thus receive a total of over o hours of daily broadcasting, with many repeat broadcasts on relay stations.

Southern Sudan's past crises have mobilised consistent flows of humanitarian assistance. Recalling the humanitarian catastrophes and international interventions of the 1990s–2000s, the war that exploded in South Sudan in 2013 has been no exception. This paper shows that the SPLM/A political elite promptly incorporated these flows of external resources into its extraverted strategies of state-building. Similar to the current situation, it did so by appropriating not only material assets but also discourses, playing the ‘fragile state’ card and raising fears of governance failure and state collapse. This paper analyses two specific aspects of international support to Southern Sudan in the 1990s–2000s: the political legitimisation of the movement through the negotiation of relief delivery, and direct support to rebel local government structures. These two aspects contributed to the creation of a state that substantially overlapped with the SPLM/A structure, thanks to the movement's capacity to capitalise on external resources, a subject worth analysing in future research.

When the Centre of African Studies came into being three years ago, the lack of specialists in many branches of African studies in Poland and the resulting scarcity of teachers made it seem likely that development might be initially rather slow. Nevertheless, some evaluation of the Centre's work is already possible.

There were four practical objectives in establishing the Centre: (1) to build up a collection of books and other printed materials for African research; (2) to offer a two-year diploma course in African problems for holders of Master's degrees of various departments and faculties (for example, the M.A. of the Oriental Institute of the University of Warsaw, a five-year course which can include specialisation in African philology/linguistics); (3) to organise a centre of advanced research; and (4) to issue our own publications.

Global climate change is now firmly on the international agenda. Although the heady days of the 1992 Earth Summit have been replaced by an atmosphere of greater caution, events in 1995 have nevertheless revealed that climate change is set to be one of the key international issues during the coming decades. Indeed, it is inevitable that global climate change – as both a physical phenomenon and a social institution – will have a tremendous impact on every nation's future.

The Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife is an interdisciplinary research institute now primarily concerned with research into traditional and modern African culture. Originally, at its foundation in 1962, under the direction of Dr S. O. Biobaku, now vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos, it was concerned with all aspects of African studies in the field of the humanities. However, in the past two years its role has been redefined and the policy now is that research in the Institute should be concerned with those areas of African Studies not catered for by the teaching departments of the University.

A growing literature has begun to more closely examine African legislatures. However, most of this research has been attentive to emerging democratic settings, and particularly the experiences of a select number of English-speaking countries. By contrast, Cameroon is a Francophone majority country that reintroduced multiparty politics in the early 1990s but continues to exhibit significant authoritarian tendencies. This article provides a longitudinal analysis of Cameroon's National Assembly and builds on a unique biographical dataset of over 900 members of parliament between 1973 and 2019. The article describes changes in the structure and orientation of the legislature as well as the social profile of its members, in particular following the transition to multipartyism. While the legislature in Cameroon remains primarily a tool of political control, it is more dynamic, and the mechanisms used to manage elites within the context of complex multiethnic politics have evolved.