The 55 countries and territories of Africa can be classified today from the monetary point of view into six major groups. Of these, four are monetary areas based on the currency of the former or actual metropolitan country: the French franc, the pound sterling, the Portuguese escudo, and the Spanish peseta. The sterling area includes the area of the South African rand; and finally there is a group of independent countries, some with very new central banks and others with a longer tradition of monetary independence.

The anti-colonial revolution was a great event in the lives of the Congolese people, and both the masses and their bourgeois leaders expected a lot from it. The masses had accepted the leadership of the clerks and other educated groups, who presented themselves as their spokesmen and representatives to the colonial Government. Their hope was that their living conditions would be changed after independence, and this was in fact what their leaders promised them. But this promise was not honoured after independence, for many reasons, one of which was the fact that the anti-colonial revolution had masked the conflicts of interest opposing the bourgeois leaders to the people. These conflicts became open after independence, when, instead of fulfiffing their promises, the leaders responded to popular demands either with more promises or with repression. This situation ultimately led to the emergence of the ‘second independence’ movement in the Kwilu region and in the eastern part of the new Republic.

The political ideas put forward by the leaders of the new states provide one of the most popular entrées to African politics, and they have now received a good deal of attention. This is understandable enough. Many African leaders are highly articulate, and their views, embodied in frequent speeches and writings by those who control the information media, are—unlike so much other information—easily accessible. The value and significance of these ideas may well have been exaggerated, but even so they cannot simply be ignored.

Since the original draft of this article was completed during the early summer of 1969, the attempt at radical co-operative agricultural reform initiated in Tunisia in January 1969 has been abandoned, and its main promoter, the former Minister of Planning and of the National Economy, Ahmed Ben Salah, has been deprived of all political influence, excluded from the party, and finally arrested in March 1970.

Among the states of Africa, Algeria has been one of the most active participants in international politics. Its leaders have defended their considerable concern with foreign policy by arguing that the distribution of world power is a major variable in the success of the country's development objectives. Aware that many Third-World states have not attributed the same importance to the international situation, Algerians have insisted that it is in the general interest of the Third World to increase its influence in world politics. In the absence of economic and military strength, Algeria has emphasised political consciousness as an instrument to defend the interests of the developing countries. This approach has been particularly important in Algeria's relations with black Africa. This article is intended as a study in inter-African politics, examining the impact of Algeria's African policy upon the inter- African system and, to some extent, upon the Algerian political system.

It seems that one of the major fallacies today is that of generalisation. We have all had our fill of the writer or speaker who refers to ‘the African and his animistic religion’, ‘the Zulu and his impi-membership’, or the ‘military syndrome’ in African politics. Every intelligent reader and student is conscious of the danger of generalisation and the tendency to lump under some uniform heading ‘the African’, ‘the Negro’, and ‘the Afrikaner’. While animism, the impi, or military coups may mark or may have marked particular groups of people at a particular time, it is as dangerous to use such generalisations as it is to use the sweeping term ‘the Afrikaner’.

What many prominent Afrikaners heralded as a new era of independence began on 6 October 1960, when a referendum was held to determine whether or not the populace wished South Africa to become a republic. As in virtually all other aspects of national political action, only Whites could voice their opinion via the ballot. Supported by the largely Afrikaner Nationalist Party and opposed by the predominantly English-stock United Party, the referendum, passed by approximately 850,000 to 776,000 votes, probably constituted one of the best indices of the relative strength of Afrikaner and non-Afrikaner elements among South Africa's ruling White polity.1 This dichotomy within the White elite and the friction which still sustains it have their roots in the late nineteenth century, when the Briton vanquished the Boer. Now, the situation has largely reversed itself while the animosities remain.

To try to summarise in a few pages the present situation in ‘Portuguese’ Africa is at best a difficult task. Briefly, the three ‘Overseas Provinces’ (since the Portuguese constitutional revision of 1951 they are no longer called ‘colonies’) are in rebellion against continued Portuguese rule. Or, rather, elements in these territories are in rebellion. Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau are the sites of increasingly violent conflict as African nationalists intensify their guerrilla campaigns against a hardening Portuguese military resistance.

The last decade has witnessed a rapid development of economic relations between the Soviet Union and independent African countries. In examining certain economic and geographical aspects of this development, it should be borne in mind that Soviet–African economic relations are a quite new trend in world affairs. Before World War II the Soviet Union's foreign trade was conducted mainly with the advanced capitalist countries. Since the majority of the under-developed countries were very limited. Egypt was the only African country trading with the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. But Great Britain, then dominating Egypt, blocked any trade agreement between the two states. The volume of trade between them was very small, and at the beginning of World War II it ceased almost completely.

In 1966 two military coups were executed in Nigeria, upsetting a tenuous political balance between ethnically different regions and unleashing bitter tribal antagonism. In the first coup, in January, politicians and soldiers primarily of Northern origin lost their lives, and Major-Gen. J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Ibo from the Eastern Region, acceded to power. In the second coup, in July, mainly Eastern officers and soldiers died, and Lt.-Col. (now Major-Gen.) Yakubu Gowon, a minority-tribe Northerner, became Head of State. Because the years before and after independence in 1960 had witnessed scarring interregional rivalries for dominion over Nigeria, the coups were regarded as a continuation of these struggles.1

In the Third World the need to find solutions to the growing problem of unemployment is becoming increasingly urgent, as reflected in many recent economic development plans:

The current tempo of economic activity is insufficient to provide productive employment to all…A major objective of the Plan is to create more employment opportunities in the rural and urban sectors on an increasing scale.1

The need for regional economic integration in Africa was appreciated by most African leaders soon after their countries had become independent sovereign states early in the 1960s. Although they did not always make enough distinction between economic integration and political unity (indeed some, particularly the leaders of the so-called Casablanca group of countries, held the doctrinaire view that political unity and the formation of a United States of Africa must precede economic integration), and although very little has been achieved in either field, yet the past decade is likely to go down in African history as the decade of economic and political integration rather than the development decade.1 However, if positive results are to be achieved in the 1970s, the old doctrinaire attitude must give way to a more pragmatic approach, which neither demands political union as a precondition for economic integration nor takes an all-or-nothing attitude to the latter.

During the 1960s, Nigeria's stability was so severely threatened by such factors as reckless politics, military coups d'etat, refugee problems, and secessionist movements that foreign observers predicted the failure of a hitherto glorified model of a newly independent, democratic, multinational state in West Africa. In February 1966 pessimism about Nigeria's political future was so great that some observers inside and outside Nigeria believed that such a British-created federation as Nigeria's could not survive after the failure of the similarly launched Central African Federation, the West Indian Federation, and Malaysia (after Singapore's separation) 1.

This article has as its theme the organisation of an African urban revolt in South Africa from 1960 to 1965. Reference is made mainly to events in Port Elizabeth and its near neighbour, East London; it need hardly be added that there were similar developments in other parts of the country. The way in which the revolt was organised was little reported at the time, and the details emerged only in the verbatim court records of the trials of both leaders and followers. Press reports of these trials are scattered over a number of South African newspapers, whose reporting—while good—is not as detailed as the documents; and a few items appear in the overseas press. The importance of this revolt, which is still being waged from outside South Africa's borders, might justify an analysis of what took place in the country itself, even if the research on which it is based remains incomplete.

Physically, culturally, and ethnically the Republic of the Sudan is a microcosm of Africa. Its achievements, problems, and potentialities are in many respects typical of those of other African or Afro-Asian countries—particularly the belt of ‘Sudanic’ states which runs across the continent from the Horn and the Red Sea in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. Thus, like the great majority of Afro-Asian countries, the Sudan has been subjected to alien rule for considerable periods during its modern history; its existing boundaries, administrative institutions, and cultural outlook have been largely moulded by its colonial masters; it developed a nationalist movement whose primary objective was the achievement of independence; and, since the fulfilment of that objective, it has been faced with a host of problems, chief amongst which is the erosion of nationalism, in the sense of loyalty to the homeland as a whole, and the resurgence or development of a variety of particularistic tendencies, loyalty to which has in some cases equalled or even surpassed loyalty to the nationalism under whose banner independence was won.

In the 1958 referendum on the constitution of the Fifth Republic, General de Gaulle asked the French West African territories whether they wanted continued association with France in the Community; if they voted ‘No’, this meant immediate independence, which was chosen by Guinea alone.

There was widespread sentiment, in those territories which voted ‘Yes’, in favour of some type of federation for the former A.O.F. (L'Afrique occidentale française). Long an advocate of this idea, Leopold Senghor of Senegal presented a constitution for a West African federation to the other A.O.F. leaders in October 1958. Senegal, Dahomey, Upper Volta, and Soudan all empowered their governments to enter into the proposed federation; Niger, Mauretania, and Ivory Coast said nothing. The four territories which responded to the call for unity sent delegations to meetings of federalists, in Bamako in December 1958, and then in Dakar, at which time a constituent assembly met and drafted a constitution. The work was finished and approved without discussion in three days.

Traditional social structures in new African states have not withered away according to the plans of modernising African leaders or the projections of western social scientists. Leaders and social interests of long ancestry continue to count, and often determine the policies of so-called modern governments. Many chiefs and religious figures have succeeded in maintaining their relative positions of power vis-à-vis their former subjects.

The political status of strangers in African societies, particularly in urban areas, has been insufficiently analysed.1 This may be partly because studies of African politics and political development have been dominated by a conceptual framework which contrasts two types of society, the ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ and the ‘modern’ or ‘developed’. The former usually implies a rural community with a relatively self- sufficient political system.2 In such a society, the traditional leaders are usually associated with a particular ethnic group and territory; and their authority may be derived from sacred sources, such as tradition itself, ties to land, or genealogical links to ancestors. In the ‘modern’ society, leadership is assumed to be ‘rational’ and ‘secular’, oriented towards western rather than traditional values.3 Political development has often been somewhat vaguely conceived as the transformation of a society from the traditional to the modern type.

Namibia, formerly South-West Africa, continues from the point of view ofinternational law to represent the symbol of violated right. Even though the United Nations has been seized of the matter for many years and the International Court of Justice has been given the opportunity to adjudicate, the problem appears to be as intractable as ever. South Africa has established her administrative and military presence and means to defend what she considers to be her right with all the forces at her command. The country does not lack friends whose direct or indirect support it counts upon. Yet the fundamental issue remains: Are the people of Namibia entitled to self-determination and how may they exercise that right? It will be necessary to refer back to the history of Namibia from the time of the mandate.

Our understanding of educational processes is often obscured by ideological considerations. This is very well illustrated in the common term, ‘assimilation’, used to characterise European colonial policy towards Africa. Thus it is often asserted that French authorities promoted the emergence of a class of ‘black Frenchmen’, with values, aspirations, and cognitive styles analogous to those of European educational institutions. In contrast, the British have been viewed as repudiating such a notion in their system of indirect rule, which attempted accommodation with Africa and aimed at perpetuating African existing social organisations.