Black politics in South Africa changed dramatically after 1976. It spread far and fast, with black organisations multiplying at all kinds of levels. The African National Congress (A.N.C.) returned and the United Democratic Front (U.D.F.) emerged. The trade unions strengthened considerably and black youths demonstrated their power. Ideologies changed and evolved. Yet at the same time as the movement broadened and deepened its hold on black people, internal divisions grew more intense. Organisational, ideological, and strategic differences became more bitter, and leaders continued to accuse each other of betraying the struggle.

Questions about the rôle and position of the African state are not new, but today they are being asked with increased emphasis. The reasons for this vary with the position and perspective of the questioner, but they often include a concern about capacity and performance, about styles and orientations of leadership, and about the measure of representativeness and legitimacy which African governments enjoy within the society at large. In short, a strong current of opinion believes that there is a problem with the African state, and this concern has recently led to much discussion as to what its proper rôle is or should be, as well as fostering a variety of proposed and actual interventions by international organisations and consultants to help ‘solve’ the problem.

Are human rights a western invention? Is their very conception, and the accompanying notion of a legal process that sets definite limits on the exercise of political power, an invention of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, and an ideological product of the French and the American Revolutions? And thus, is any talk of human rights in Africa tantamount to a mechanical importation of a western bourgeois ideological conception without the struggles and the relations that gave rise to it in the first place?

During the last few years, Mikhail Gorbachev's new thinking has stimulated a number of dramatic and largely unexpected shifts in Soviet foreign policy. In Southern Africa, its effects have been both immediate and quite profound. The two most publicised changes have been Moscow's growing support for negotiations as a method of resolving the region's conflicts, and the related reduction of its commitments to the régimes in Angola and Mozambique. In fact, there is evidence that the Kremlin has been putting pressure on both its allies to engage in a process of ‘national reconciliation’ with the armed movements trying to overthrow them. At the rhetorical level, at least, there has also been a marked decline in Moscow's enthusiasm for revolutionary upheavals in Southern Africa.

In 1985 the Zimbabwean national election presented voters with a drama of pretence. The Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front), known as Z.A.N.U. (P.F.), the party in power, issued a manifesto for ‘unity of the working people in the advance of a just Socialist Society’; meanwhile its candidates routinely cast aspersions on (working) people who supported the major rival party, the Patriotic Front–Zimbabwe African People's Union (P.F.-Z.A.P.U.). The latter defensively called for a unified effort to ensure that multi-party liberalism would prevail in Zimbabwe; it then implicitly endorsed most of the principles of social balance through growth with equity which its alleged ‘Marxist–Leninist’ opponents had instituted.

Whether he is called Le Sage (the Wise Man), Le Vieux (the Old Man), or more recently Nana (a Baule term for grandfather), the veneration implied by these words is unequalled by any other leader in West Africa today. It is clear that after over 50 years of political activism, the President of Côte d'Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, has brought together a combination of elements that has allowed him to gain and maintain the respect of western leaders, his African counterparts, and until recently, almost every Ivoirian.

This article discusses the political situation in the Sudan in the aftermath of the 1985 popular uprising which reinstated parliamentary democracy, and focuses on the major challenges which confronted the civilian leaders before their downfall, notably the economic crisis, the issue of Sharia law, the agonising war in the South, and the corrupt and inefficient party system.

The year 1989 will in future generations be known as the annus mirabilis, not only as far as developments in Eastern Europe are concerned, but also within the context of South African politics. The September general elections for the tricameral Parliament marked a turning point in the direction of governmental policies. Nowhere has the changing mood been more clearly demonstrated than in the streets of the cities and towns. A countrywide spate of protest marches has occurred since the historic first government-approved peaceful anti-apartheid march in Cape Town on 13 September 1989, and these have become the most visible symptom of the advance to the so-called ‘new South Africa’.

King Hassan II of Morocco informed the French press in December 1988 that he was willing to talk to the Frente Popular para la Liberación de Saguia el-Hamra y Río de Oro, known as the Polisario Front, which had been waging a war of national independence during the previous 15 years. Although the Moroccan Sovereign insisted that the subsequent meetings which took place on 4–5 January 1989 in Marrakesh constituted ‘discussions’ rather than ‘negotiations’, they undoubtedly represented a breakthrough in what has been dubbed by many as the ‘forgotten war’, not least because the mere acknowledgement of the Front's existence was in itself a de facto recognition of the Sahrawi liberation movement.

The security services of every state are determined by two overlapping imperatives: a functional one flowing from actual or perceived threats to the country's safety, and a societal one stemming from the dominant ideologies, structures, and institutions prevailing within the state. Thus defence policy is not produced in a vacuum but in the context of a set of circumstances – historical and contemporary, external and domestic – which influence the policy-makers and their advisers. Decisions regarding the appropriate levels, patterns, and time-frame of security spending are not purely political, since they are also about the allocation of resources and about competing claims on public expenditure.

Recent developments on the South African political scene have raised some hopes about bringing an end to the war in Mozambique. The change of direction initiated by President F. W. de Klerk, the unbanning of the African National Congress (A.N.C.) and other previously prohibited organisations, and the progress made towards negotiations have pointed to a possible change of heart by the Government, and a relaxation of its previously hostile regional policy. There can be little doubt, given Pretoria's rôle in the whole area, and the history of its involvement in the Mozambican crisis, that changes within South Africa will be felt beyond its borders. However, it would be unwise to ignore the part played by internal factors in explaining the growth in both the scale and severity of the conflict in Mozambique over the past decade.

One of the more perplexing problems of democracy in developing countries has to do with their potential for breakdown. In retrospect, at least three dynamics appear relevant in any consideration of how most come to atrophy: first, flaws in the pattern of instauration, involving the design and setting up of the modalities of the régime; secondly, a political process that tends to exacerbate entrenched cleavages such as class, ethnicity, and religion, given their relationship to the distribution of scarce economic and political resources; and thirdly, the events, internal and external, that lead to the onset of an ‘unsolvable’ crisis.

There has been an armed struggle for independence in Eritrea since the dismantling of its ‘federation’ with Ethiopia in 1962. Particularly since the fall of the imperial régime in 1974, the war has claimed many lives, and continues to cause economic and social dislocation in the region. Despite what has happened during the past three decades, however, the so-called ‘Eritrean question’ remains a widely misunderstood phenomenon, not least because there is no authoritative and scholarly modern political history of this part of Africa.

In this increasingly bloc-competitive world, small countries are generally overlooked. Unless, by dint of fortune, they have some strategic resource, or have leaders who are globally vocal and visible, or are able to link themselves to the fortunes of larger political units, they may very well stand to be economically disadvantaged. Located in the drought-prone Sudano-Sahelian region of West Africa, with a land area that spans only 4,361 square miles (11,295 sq km) and a population currently estimated at about 797,000, The Gambia represents the classic case of a small country. It is surrounded on all sides by Senagal, except for its short Atlantic coastline, and extends 484 km inland, varying in width between 24 and 48 km along the River Gambia. Apart from being a geographical Lilliput, it has few natural resources and lacks the type of controversial leadership that commands world attention.

The term ‘Ibadan School’ is used here in two senses, locational and generic, and refers to studies on, and students of, federal finance that have employed a distinctive approach. Some of the most dominant figures in this group are (or used to be) on the staff of the University of Ibadan, and when it was decided after independence in 1960 that Nigerians themselves should handle the recurrent problems of federal finance, the task fall on the laps of a number of western-trained, liberal, and orthodox economists.

Much has been written and said concerning the implications for Soviet policy towards Southern African of President Gorbachev's novoye myshlenie or ‘new thinking’, and its repercussions throughout Eastern Europe. On the other hand, comparatively little attention has been paid to the governmental and societal responses to these developments within Southern Africa. In part, this neglect reflects the fact that, until recently, the reaction has been rather muted, especially in comparison with the eruptionsin francophone Africa, notably in Algeria, Benin, and Gabon, but also Côte d'Ivoire, Madagascar, and even Zaïre. The reluctance to recognise the relevance for the region of the astonishing changes in Eastern Europe can largely be explained by an understandable preoccupation with more pressing domestic problems.

The situation of African states as they enter the 1990s is generally considered to be desperate. Extreme weakness in a number of forms characterises their politics, while their economies are either stagnant or deteriorating. It is not clear what resources are relevant to solving these problems, nor how they will be acquired, although increased external assistance obviously will be needed.

Economists using a narrowly defined neo-classical model have derived the hypothesis, often treated as an empirically demonstrated proposition, that traditional African systems of ‘communal’ land tenure are inefficient when land has scarcity value. By way of contrast, individualised tenure, typically defined as demarcation and registration of freehold title, is viewed as superior because owners are given incentives to use land most efficiently and thereby maximise agriculture's contribution to social well-being.

It is, no doubt, a journalistic cliché to assert that Côte d'Ivoire is ‘in crisis’. It is both undeniable and obvious that the world's largest cocoa producer, dependent for the majority of its foreign-exchange earnings and for the livelihood of the majority of its working population on the export of cocoa and coffee, is severely affected by the collapse in commodity prices which has occurred since 1980. With the exception of the false boomlet of 1986, cocoa prices have fallen throughout the decade, from a peak of £3,500 per ton in 1977 to the £670–750 range of the 1989–90 season. In real terms the dollar price of cocoa is now only 25 per cent of its 1977–8 value.

Eritrea is the site of Africa's longest war, the 29-year struggle for self-determination and liberation from Ethiopian occupation. Its people have the lowest income per capita in the world; but under conditions of great privation, they have built up a society that could prove to be a model for development. Almost all visitors to the areas under the control of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (E.P.L.F.) – land freed from Ethiopian rule for varying periods since 1970 – have commented on the egalitarian, fraternal, and sometimes libertarian nature of Eritrean society.