In July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its armed wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA),1 entered Kigali after routing the former régime and putting an end to months of genocide in which upwards of 500,000 had lost their lives. By August, another one to two million had fled from Rwanda. All in all, nearly half of the population had been killed, displaced inside the country, or was in exile.

The years that Gandhi spent in South Africa have been admirably described by several scholars. This articles traces the development of a philosophy which became uniquely identified with Gandhi, and then looks at his legacy in South Africa, especially his influence in the social, religious, and political spheres. How is it possible that the shadow of so apparently frail a figure was cast so widely over events during most of this century?

The Ethiopian transition, that began with the overthrow of military dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1991, formally ended with the swearing in of the newly elected Government of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia in August 1995. The intervening four years were a contentious time of clashes among rival political forces to determine the rules under which the transition would be conducted and hence which forces would be favoured. The first act of the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) after deposing Mengistu was to convene a National Conference and establish a Council of Representatives that initially included a wide array of political groups. The EPRDF led throughout this transitional period and capitalised on its commanding position to consolidate its power. The party dominated the political landscape by virtue of its military power, effective organisation and leadership, and control of the agenda and rules of competition. It structured the transition around new ethnically defined regions, a constitution that emphasised self-determination, and a series of largely uncontested elections.

The phenomenon of state breakdown in the post-cold war era has significantly increased the demand for peacekeeping operations around the world. The United Nations has stepped boldly into the breach, considerably expanding its interventions in hotspots on all continents. Yet the capacity of the UN to respond is often uncertain, and this has sparked interest in the concept of regional peacekeeping as an alternative, especially since the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) deployed the Cease-fire Monitoring Group (Ecomog) to stem the ravages of civil war in Liberia.

The right to organise is of the greatest importance because of our need to come together in order to pursue common interests and goals. It goes hand in hand with the right to associate and to assemble freely, covers all sections of society, and its highest manifestation is normally the creation and continuing significance of political parties, trade unions, and other non-governmental organisations.

The signing in Mauritius on 4 November 1995 of the amended fourth Lomé Convention, the aid and trade co-operation agreement between the European Union (EU) and the ACP Group of 70 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries, brought the Mid-Term Review to its formal completion after protracted negotiations. Established in 1975, Lomé has long been the centre-piece of EU development assistance. In quantitative terms, the European Development Fund, the financial instrument of Lomé, has comprised the largest single portion of EU aid, averaging almost 45 per cent of all disbursements in recent years.1 Qualitatively, Lomé has been regarded as a model of North—South cooperation, mainly due to three special features: it was founded on the principles of equality, mutual respect, and interdependence; it is a legally binding contract negotiated between two sets of countries; and it involves ongoing dialogue through three joint institutions, the ACP—EU Council of Ministers, the Committee of Ambassadors, and the ‘parliamentary’ Joint Assembly.

In April 1992, after nearly 11 years of military rule in Ghana, a draft democratic constitution of the Fourth Republic was overwhelmingly approved in a national referendum.1 The ban on multi-party politics was lifted by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) Government in the following month. An independent interim National Electoral Commission was established, and a hotly contested presidential election in 200 constituencies monitored by teams of international observers was held in November 1992. After multi-party parliamentary elections to the National Assembly, boycotted unfortunately by opposition groups, the democratically elected Government of Ghana's Fourth Republic was inaugurated in January 1993.2

The growth of business classes in Africa has attracted much interest since the 1980s when, in the context of severe economic malaise, the impact of the state on development was subjected to critical reappraisal.1 Out of this emerged a consensus that the abysmal economic record of the 1960s and 1970s could, to a large degree, be ascribed to the debilitating effect of an overstretched and swollen state. Official development thinking took this argument the furthest: at the core of the problem, it was asserted, was the expansion of the state's rôle from the preferred minimalist function of providing the legal and macro-economic regulatory framework for capital accumulation, to a more profound intervention in the productive process. As a remedy, the state would have to be restrained from usurping the primary rôle which the market's invisible hand ought to be playing.2

Africa has had more than its share of catastrophes. While the causes of its contemporary dilemmas are debated at many fora, its people continue to suffer at an ever-accelerating rate. To make matters worse, the dismal decline in so many aspects of African life over the past decade has led to numbness and cynicism within and without the continent, causing people to lump separable problems and their solutions into the all-embracing notion of ‘disaster’.

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.

Ghanaian novelists are notorious for their long absences from fiction, and the 1990s have seen the long-awaited return of some major talents. Kofi Awoonor and Ama Ata Aidoo allowed, respectively, 21 and 14 years to pass between the publication of their first and second novels, while 17 years separated the fifth and sixth works of Ayi Kwei Armah, the best-established writer of the three. Meanwhile, each has been active in other genres during the long intervals — poetry, short stories, essays – and none of them have fallen silent. Awoonor indicated, shortly after his experimental poetic first novel, This Earth, My Brother (1971), that he was at work on another, from which a lengthy extract was actually published in a journal in 1975,1 and advance notices of the full version continued apace, even though it did not appear until 1992. Armah allowed it to be known in 1989, in a rare interview, that since The Healers (1978) he had completed three more novels which, for want of a suitable African publishing house, remained in manuscript form.2 In the foreword to her 1991 novel, Aidoo refers to an interview in 1967 in which she stated that she ‘could never write about lovers in Accra because surely in our environment there are more important things to write about’. The very vehemence of the protest suggested at the time, however, that the author's mind was already running along the lines of this subject, which might at some future date receive full fictional treatment.

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.