The growth of exploration for oil in Africa has been phenomenal. Until the late 1950s the continent was considered to be devoid of any large hydrocarbon deposits; indeed, in 1957 the total production of oil amounted to only 2·7 million metric tons, or 0·3 per cent of the entire world output. Since then, however, the rate of growth has been very rapid, and by 1976 had reached 279·5 million metric tons, accounting for 9·8 per cent of world production.

In a recent article, Heribert Adam argued that the ‘prevalent view of South Africa combines conceptual errors with false methodological emphasis and, often, wishful thinking’, and that the ‘popular perspective represents a gross over-simplification of a far more complex situation.’1 The analysis to which he was objecting views South Africa as an outdated colonial society, in which white settlers enforce a racially defined domination upon an exploited mass of the black population, which is reduced to serving primarily as a source of cheap labour for white capital by an immense battery of totalitarian controls. Linked to this view - and now fuelled by the widespread riots during mid-1976 throughout African urban areas - is the assumption that substantive political change will necessarily come about by violent revolution, motivated by the growing determination of a burgeoning black population to force a redistribution of power and wealth. However, as Adam further pointed out, analysis of South Africa purely in terms of racial conflict leaves important questions unanswered, for there is need to explore how the differential distribution of wealth and resources - political and economic - originated, and how they are maintained.

This article is an exploratory attempt to understand the state of underdevelopment in contemporary Zaïre through a study of bureaucratic decision-making process at the local level. It is based on a series of investigations which the author and a group of colleagues carried out in 13 zones in Shaba Region during 1975 and 1976, but our reflections have evolved considerably since then and, to a large extent, have outstripped the reach of the research data, so that the present article should be considered as a report on work-in-progress.

Algeria is important for its wealth, for its size and location, for the dynamism and austerity of its leadership, and for its pretensions to socialism and leadership of the Third World. Clearly, an imposing list. Yet the Algerian approach to development is little known and insufficiently understood, at least in the English-speaking world. In France, on the contrary, and throughout la francophonie, Algerian movements and events are closely watched and intensely debated. Much of the controversy has concentrated on the question as to whether or not Algeria deserves its self-proclaimed status as a socialist state; 1 the celebrated autogestion effort of the 1960s has been thoroughly and carefully analysed,2 and the nationalisations of foreign oil companies – as well as a few other salient economic enterprises – have received considerable attention.3 It should be noted that the extensive French literature on post-1962 Algeria has focused on events up to 1971, though a few materials on more recent developments are beginning to emerge,4 and that a small number of articles in English on major Algerian programmes, such as la révolution agraire, have recently been published.5

It has become increasingly apparent over the last decade that rural development is one of the most significant, complex, and intractable problems facing the newly-independent states of Africa. Colonialism left a legacy of unbalanced and vulnerable economies in which the impoverishment of the rural areas made rational planning for growth and self-sufficiency difficult if not impossible. Rural poverty also exacerbated the problems of urban migration and political hostility between the privileged towns and the deprived rural areas. Many African leaders recognised the seriousness of these problems, and most governments announced a commitment to rural development soon after achieving independence.

The dynamics of world neutralism, either as an international doctrine or as a state policy,1 have witnessed variable responses from African states since the inception of the ideology known as peaceful coexistence. Between 1920, when Lenin talked of a ‘peaceful cohabitation with the peoples of all nations’, and 1961 when the Communist Party defined peaceful coexistence – by an official imprimatur – as ‘an objective necessity for the development of human society’, and denounced ‘war as a means of settling inter-national disputes’, the chrysalis of classical neutralism could be said to have spanned the decade between the close of World War II and the Bandung Conference of 1955.2

Employment in the modern sector in Africa is often employment by government. Control of the state apparatus brings the ability to reward and to coerce. Private wealth is scattered in most countries, and power and status frequently stem from a place in or access to the state apparatus. Élites in Africa derive their power from control of the state, not from private property or private large-scale organisations. Yet, while public servants and civil services have been studied in Africa, there have been relatively few analyses of the state, and the relationship of state power to social classes and groups.

In contrast with the study of pre-colonial societies characterised by well- established traditions, the writing on contemporary Africa seems to be in the stage of infancy. Thus it has largely avoided assessing the performance of ‘revolutionary’leaders in an objective manner, and has often exhibited paternalism, idolisation, or dogmatism. If the study of modern history and politics aims at what actually is, rather than at what might be or ought to be, a more balanced view of political mobilisation and performance should result. An attempt will be made from this perspective realistically to appraise Guinea under the Parti démocratique de Guinée in terms of its internal consistency.

Over the first U.N. development decade the Third World has made rather faster progress, as measured by the growth in national incomes, than had been expected. Nevertheless, though the average income per capita has risen by about 50 per cent since 1960 (with total income having almost doubled), these increases have been very unequally distributed both between and within countries. This has led to the conclusion, now widely held, that growth-oriented development strataegies are alone unlidely to solve the problem of poverty. Similarly, there has been a move away from the confidence placed upon the growth of national income per capita as an effective index of social welfare. There has therefore been a quickening interest, particularly on the part of multilateral and bilataeral donor agencies – notably the World Bank, I.L.O., O.D.M., and S.I.D.A. – in promoting changes in domestic policies within the Third World which would focus more upon increasing the welfare of the poorest groups.

Over the past decade a pervasive concern of African political leaders, development planners, and social scientists has been to find ways and means of improving the lot of those in the rural areas: they comprise the bulk of the population of the tropical African states and continue in the 1970S to be socially and economically the most deprived social group.1 Despite the ‘highest priority’ assigned to rural development in the policy documents of many African governments, neither the allocation of public funds nor the implementation of development strategies have been energetically directed towards improving the living standards of the rural masses. Equally, the recognition of the need for a new development model by an increasing number of scholars has yet to produce adequate guidance for those African régimes which are seeking to transform the rural areas.

The implementation of the principle of legality in public administration depends upon the existence of a number of factors. Most important among these are a government which is more or less committed to upholding the principle, a citizenry which is both aware of its legal rights and prepared to resist attempts at infringing them, and institutions through which such challenges can be prosecuted.

Each dry season many Um Borroro or nomadic Fulani set off eastwards to Mecca. They are some of the 5,000 or so West Africans who make the pilgrimage (the haj) each year by travelling along the savannas through Cameroun, Chad, and the Sudan.1 About four-fifths of them come from what is generally called Hausaland and Bornu in Nigeria and Niger, but some pilgrims from all the West African savanna countries travel overland.2 Although they comprise only about six per cent of the total arriving in Mecca from West Africa (the majority come by air and sea), they represent an important relict movement which earlier this century involved more than 15,000 migrants per annum.3

The Objective of this article is to reassess the influence of the Muslim brotherhoods on politics in Senegal. In 1965–6 I undertook a study of the subject, but the resultant publication was not the first, nor indeed the most in-depth, research on the topic which has attracted the attention of scholars for many years.1 Beginning with the colonial administrator Paul Marty, and including the noted scholar Vincent Monteil, French observers have documented the peculiar organisation, power, and influence of the Muslim confrérie2 – the tariqa or sufi order introduced from North Africa to Senegal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 Since independence in 1960, interest in the brotherhoods has intensified as the pattern of relationships became clear between modern African politicians and traditional Muslim leaders. Most notable were the marabouts heading the Murddiyya or Mouride order, 4 centred among the Wolof in the productive agricultural zone of central Senegal where most of the major crop, groundnuts, is produced.

In recent years the housing problems of Africa's burgeoning cities have become a primary concern of governments, international agencies, and scholars, but there appears to be a marked distinction between the approach contained in many national development plans and the focus of much academic research. A central feature of plan documents is the assessment of accommodation needs and the elimination of established deficits which are based, in the main, on conventional demographic data from the national census together with various cost estimates.1

In 1967, the Portuguese Foreign Minister spoke of relations with Malawi as ‘that kind of mutual respect which ensures good neighbourliness, cordial relations and constructive cooperation’1. Yet, throughout the ten-year period from July 1964 to September 1974, the dominant political issue in Southern Africa had been the armed struggle for political rights between African liberation movements and the white-minority régimes. Within this context, the boundary between Malawi and Portuguese East Africa became part of the dividing line where the independent black African states met the white-dominated régimes. This article seeks to explore the pressures for both conflict and cooperation which were continuously being felt by Malawi and Portugal. Despite their substantial ideological differences over where political power should reside, both countries were drawn together because of their geography, Malawi being dependent upon the transportation facilities in Mozambique for an outlet to the Indian Ocean.

When the details of the ‘Kissinger proposals for the transition to majority rule in Zimbabwe were made public in October 1976, containing generous proposals for the compensation of white Rhodesian settlers, a chord was struck among observers of African politics that the history of decolonisation in Kenya was about to repeat itself. There the British Government and international monetary agencies lent funds to the new African Government to compensate white settlers for the expropriation of their farms in the highland regions. The similarity between the Kenyan and Rhodesian colonial situations goes far deeper than the willingness of the western powers to bail out white settlers in a time of adversity. External financial assistance in Kenya ensured a smooth transition to a neo-colonial economy in which international capital was permitted expanded access to the resources and markets of Kenya and the East African region. Similarly the sudden concern of the western bloc for majority rule in Rhodesia and for the establishment of a ‘Zimbabwe Development Fund’ has been motivated by the prospect of the removal from the western sphere of economic control of the rich resources and markets of Southern Africa.

The great upheavals that Africa has witnessed since the turn of the century have stimulated a flourishing variety of historical writings on revolution, rebellion, guerrilla warfare, conflict, and various other forms of collective political action. It would, therefore, be both useless and presumptuous for me to attempt to rewrite the history of these great turmoils in the light of a number of new studies, some of which are excellent. However, it is in order to recall that this ‘tearing and battering’ happened while the new states were fast transforming themselves from a ‘traditional’ to a ‘modern’ political life, when commercial expansion began to draw Africans into national and international markets, and when communal groupings gradually began to give way to broader associations.

In the literature of both comparative politics and international relations there exist two broad theoretical orientations towards the concept of development: capitalist and Marxist or neo-Marxist. The first emphasises the nation as the basic unit of analysis, and assumes that development is a matter of accepting and implementing western forms of political and economic organisation, and of the masses internalising ‘modern’ attitudes and values.1 The second identifies world capitalism as the key unit of analysis, and is convinced that underdevelopment is both created and maintained by this international economic system.2

The study of settlement geography in Africa has not only to consider rural–urban and traditional–modern contrasts, but also to place on the appropriate continuum the various communities which have been relocated since World War II. However, the lack of a general theory in this field has led to much wasted effort on the ground, and to the frequent replication of studies in the literature. Some recent contributions endeavour to draw meaningful generalisations from the disparate literature on settlement and resettlement schemes.1 Perhaps because the subject constitutes ‘an academic no man's land’ wherein ‘no single science or study has yet established its claims and each has its limitations’,2 attempts at an overview have inevitably focused on the individual author's specialist orientation. Whatever the methodological paradigm of these overviews, or of the numerous case-studies, they frequently, if regretfully, arrive at a critical conclusion vis-à-vis the limited results of settlement schemes.

It was possible in this Journal more than a decade ago to attempt a fairly comprehensive assessment of contemporary development literature.1 That review article referred to a number of emerging themes, associated with such major figures as Prebisch, Myrdal, Hirschmann, Nurske, Singer, Perroux, de Bernis, and others, including relations between the centre and the periphery, ‘backwash’ effects, regional cooperation, growth points, balanced and unbalanced growth, linkage effects, and the strategy for industrialisation. These themes continue to be discussed during the 1970s, and if there seem to be fewer new ‘concepts’ there has been a significant shift in emphasis. The sheer number of works written, more and more by those with first-hand knowledge of the developing world, now demands a highly selective approach. But equally important it is appropriate to concentrate mainly on those recent publications which dwell upon the major topics being debated by Third-World leaders and economists. Accordingly the present article reviews a selection of the literature which has appeared during the last five or six years concerned with two important interrelated areas: (i) growth, equality, and employment, including rural development, and (ii) the transfer and development of technology.