By 1967, when the water level reaches its maximum, the Volta dam will have created one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, thereby completing a scheme which has fascinated government officials, business men, and politicians since the early years of the century. The purpose of the symposium, which was sponsored jointly by the Volta River Authority and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, was to consider the progress made so far on one aspect of this complex project, namely the resettlement programme. Building the Volta dam has meant flooding some 3,275 square miles, or approximately 4 per cent of Ghana's land surface. In human terms it has meant disrupting the lives of more than 80,000 people, whose homes are being flooded by the rising waters of the Volta lake. The Volta River Authority has been charged with the responsibility of resettling these displaced persons, taking as its guiding principle the ruling laid down by President Nkrumah that ‘nobody should be worse off than before’. Ultimately, of course, the hope is that living standards will be improved very considerably.

In the course of several field studies carried out during 1978–9 on behalf of the Working Group on Recurrent Costs established by the Comité Inter-états de Lutte contre la Sécheresse dans le Sahel and the Club du Sahel, it became clear that imperfect functioning of domestic capital markets hampers the efforts of Sahelian governments to raise domestic non-tax resources for budget finance. Inasmuch as the operation and maintenance of development projects compete for a severely limited pool of uncommitted government revenues – that is, revenues not committed to debt service, meeting the civil service payroll, and other inflexible obligations – reforms that augment this pool are of particular interest from the viewpoint of ensuring that these projects function properly once established.

Since independence from colonial rule, there have been considerable changes in the legal systems of new African nations, reflecting – at least in part – the need to re-establish the position of indigenous customary law in relation to received European law. For many modern Africans, customary law has equivocal significance: all too often, this represents a traditional order, now out of keeping with contemporary social conditions and economic demands, and in addition is imbued with political connotations.

Bang in the middle of a dialogue now going on about African culture—its roots, its contemporary values and relevance, and its future—Chemchemi Creative Centre has been born. This has come into our midst as a sister to the three Mbari writers' and artists' clubs in Nigeria; it will be inspired by the same aims, although the methods of achieving them will obviously be guided by local national conditions.

On 11 November 1965, the Government of Rhodesia, firm in its resolve to maintain minority racial rule by persons of European descent, abrogated the colonial constitution then in effect and declared its independence of Great Britain. The works under review in this essay examine the dilemmas of Zambian leaders, on the one hand, and loyalist members of the Rhodesian judiciary as well as the loyalist governor of Rhodesia, on the other.

It would seem that one of Africa's few growth industries in recent years has been the stampede of scholarship attempting to account for the failure of the state to generate meaningful economic development. While academics argue over whether the primary culprits are kleptocratic governing élites, Western imperialist forces, or unfair market conditions in the global economy, the realities of African political life show an increasing reactionary trend away from the political integration of the state. Some criticise the integrity of state structures as being Western inventions that have little capacity to respond to African needs, and note the rise of pre-colonial traditional structures organised around ethnic or tribal considerations. Some argue that capitalism in the African context is not able to generate capital accumulation sufficient to improve living standards. Still others suggest that anti-democratic patriarchal forces prevent capitalism from effectively generating maximum growth.

This study examines the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) through the lens of Upendra Baxi's germinal theory on the emergence in our time of a ‘trade-related, market-friendly human rights’ (TREMF) thesis that is challenging the specific understandings of ‘people-centric’ human rights that are predicated in the letter and spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDH). Baxi contends, instead, that the dominant strands of the contemporary understandings of human rights are – for the most part – designed to protect the interests of global capital. That said, human rights frameworks in low-income countries need to be studied with a view to what they say and don't say about global capital. Despite its attempt to facilitate a progressive realisation of human rights in Africa, the AHRAP does not rise far enough above the TREMF paradigm to re-locate itself within the UDH one. This is due to the AHRAP not adequately theorising and analysing the role of capital in the (non)realisation of human rights in Africa. By allowing trade and market practices to slip to a significant extent beyond its purview, the AHRAP privileges – to a significant degree – the needs/interests of capital over the human rights of ordinary Africans. That is, the victims of the excesses of capital in Africa are reincarnated in the AHRAP document by the fact of their exclusion from it.