The establishment and functioning of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights challenges a basic principle of positivist international law on which the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U.) has long based its policies: the sovereign domestic control of member-states.

After two decades of poor economic performance in most of the countries of the region, and with the recent political and prospective economic changes in Eastern Europe, as well as the European Community's forthcoming ‘single market’ in 1992, debates in African circles have intensified on political democracy, structural adjustment, and economic integration. The last of these topics is the concern of this article, which discusses the major factors behind the slow progress, and sometimes failure, of integration attempts in Africa, and then, inter alia, proposes ways in which the chances of success can be enhanced, and progress towards regional integration thereby accelerated.

The listing of the African elephant in Appendix I to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in late 1989 provided a dramatic indicator of the overwhelming pressures threatening the natural heritage of a number of states in Africa. While both their leaders and international organisations express concern about the longterm environmental stability of many areas, the more immediate economic difficulties in producing enough food and obtaining sufficient foreign exchange to finance essential imports and service debts mean that effective conservation measures have been largely neglected.

African states and studies are in a profound period of revisionism as the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s yields to the ‘adjustment reforms’ of the 1990s. The relative optimism and expansion of the initial years of independence have long since been superseded by pessimism and contraction as successive energy, drought, debt, and devaluation shocks have resulted in impoverishment and inequalities. The former has affected ‘vulnerable groups’ in particular – women, children, elderly and peripheral communities1 – while the latter has occurred both within and between states. A few classes and countries have thrived despite or because of the continental crisis – more bourgeois fractions and more informal sectors on the one hand and, on the other, Botswana, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe. Africa at the end of the 1990s will likely be more marginal, vulnerable, and unequal than ever, as indicated in the final section, hardly the revolutionary, nationalist scenario anticipated after World War II, but more realistic and realisable none the less.2

The term Falasha is derived from the Ge'ez or Amharic word maflas, ‘to remove’, and denotes people without land or roots, strangers, and will be used in this article because of its wide international recognition, although most Ethiopian Jews now prefer to be known as Beta Israel. According to their tradition, the Falasha have lived in Africa for more than two-and-a-half millennia, for the most part unaware of the existence of other Jews in the world. In recent years, an increasing number have felt impelled to seek a permanent home in Israel, and by June 1991 as many as 43,000 had managed to achieve this goal. Although most of these Ethiopian Jews must have anticipated that emigration would not be easy, it is very unlikely that they, or anyone else, could have known just how difficult would be their ordeal.

After coming to power in 1985 via what might be described as a ‘palace coup’, General Ibrahim Babangida quickly earned himself the sobriquet of the ‘Maradona’ of Nigerian politics. In October 1989 the President surpassed his own record of unpredictability and unorthodoxy, and surprised even the closest watchers of his military régime by announcing that two parties would be established by fiat and provided with initial funding in the context of the agreed programme of transition to democratic civilian rule, laid out between 1986 and 1987, and scheduled to terminate with the inauguration of the Third Republic in 1992.

The story of the blind men and the elephant is universally known. Each…concluded that the elephant had the appearance of the part he had touched. Hence, the blind man who felt the animal's trunk concluded that an elephant must be tall and slender…Others of course reached different conclusions. The total result was that no man arrived at a very accurate description of the elephant. Yet, each man had gained enough evidence from his own experience to disbelieve his fellows and to maintain a lively debate about the nature of the beast.

The struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa, as many have argued, is theological as well as political. This is so, in the words of Ben Marais, because ‘Apartheid erodes the very basis of humanity’. It is also because the great majority of South Africans have some Christian identity and church affiliation, yet their faith commitments are heavily conditioned by class interests and particular ideologies. Consequently, prophetic Christianity, in relating biblical values to the analysis of society and the search for justice, has divided Christian communities by confronting the established churches as well as the state.

This is an account of the early life of a widely regarded hero of resistance in South Africa who constantly betrayed the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the staggering human frailty of the modern leader. In later years Potlako Kitchener Leballo also gained renown as a mesmerising orator who lived to dramatise, to command the centre of attention, to captivate listeners with impassioned stories. Having grown up in a world of oral culture it is not surprising that he expressed himself best in the spoken rather than the written word. Leballo's autobiographical sketches, which have been recorded piecemeal by numerous authors, are festooned with exaggerations, illusions, and ambiguities. However, he was an intelligent fabricator of information, with a talent for fitting a story into its appropriate context. This alone makes him an exciting subject for a biography, since the reconstruction of his life and its links to the social structure provide stiff tests for the sleuthing and analytical skills of the researcher.

Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings has presided over two distinct types of régime as far as economic policy is concerned since the overthrow of the Third Republic at the end of 1981. The first was characterised by the extensive intrusion of the state, or by those claiming to act on its behalf, in directing economic activity, notably the sale of goods and services. The other, since 1983, has witnessed greater reliance on the market freedom of individuals in both production and exchange, largely consistent with the economic liberalism prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.). Most analysts familiar with the evidence have concluded that the experiment during 1982–3 was an unmitigated disaster for the wellbeing of Ghanaians, and that since then the Economic Recovery Programme (E.R.P.) has successfully reversed the downward spiral and created the conditions for real income growth.

South African scholars writing about the end of apartheid have been unanimous in the contention that it is useless to seek parallels and learn lessons from what has happened elsewhere in the continent in the process of decolonisation. South Africa was not a colony but an independent country, they argued. No metropolitan power had the ultimate say concerning its future, let alone the ability to impose a settlement on the white minority that meant handing over power to a new black government. Rather than decolonisation, the end of apartheid meant a transition from authoritarianism to democracy like that experienced in Latin America during the 1980s.

The idea of Black Consciousness heralded an era of alternative political awareness in the late 1960s. A self-empowering, vibrant, reconstructionist world-view emphasised the potential rôle of black initiatives and responsibility in articulating the power of the powerless. Between 1968–76, the Black Consciousness Movement (B.C.M.), as it became known, was one of the most important developments in South Africa, not only as the result of the self-confident protest and rebellion that it unleashed, but also ‘because of the questions it posed about the nature of oppositional politics in South Africa and its relation to the nature of South African society’.1

Analyses of the South African state during the 1970s and 1980s all tried to come to grips with the rôle of the Security forces.1 Research justifiably ran in different directions, but the National Security Management System soon became an essential part of recent work,2 albeit remaining very much of a mystery.3 Since we need to know how it originated, developed, and operated in practice, as well as its legacy, this article attempts to describe the N.S.M.S. and offers avenues of interpretation.

Of the dozens of conflicts in the Third World which have occurred in the post-war era, few have been of greater duration and bloodshed or have attracted the attention of as many outside actors, including the superpowers, as Angola. It has only been since the mid-1980s that the conflict began moving towards eventual settlement, with the prospects for peace often seeming to depend largely on the attitudes of Cuba, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Further affecting the overall environment was the state of East–West relations, the internal situation in Angola, and South Africa's occupation of Namibia. A short historical background will serve as prelude to an extensive examination of the dynamics which fuelled the war in Angola for such a long period of time.

The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall not be governed, nor shall any person or group of persons take control of the government of Nigeria or any part thereof, except in accordance with the provisions of this constitution.

Cameroon like most formerly colonised countries in African has, since independence and re-unification, grappled with a Danaidean task in attempting to develop a modern legal system that takes account of its heritage and present conditions, as well as its socio-economic and political needs. If the history of African legal systems reflects the difficulties encountered in framing national laws derived from customary and foreign laws introduced during the colonial era, these are even more serious in Cameroon where, because of its complicated colonial past, two potentially divergent foreign legal systems have struggled for supremacy in determining the nature and content of its new uniformised laws. Now in its third decade of independence, and with the two former British and French parts united politically, the goal of legal unity seems to be regarded as a logical sequitur.

Afrikaner consciousness and identification have a tradition of very clear ethnic roots. Derived from a common ancestral stock that gives biological, historical, and linguistic characteristics to their identity, Afrikaners also share a Protestant religion tradition, with a major theme of Calvinistic predestination and being in South Africa due to divine providence. While opposing parties may vie for their support, the sentiment of favouring Afrikaners and whites – in that order – is shared by all.

At a time when most African countries are characterised as ‘strong societies and weak states’, the tendency to afford the state ‘ontological primacy’ in explaining the nature of African political economy is being challenged. One manifestation of this has been a shift in scholarly attention to those intermediary and autonomous organisations which function and sometimes flourish in the space that exists between the state and the household – namely, the various groups which comprise ‘civil society’.

There 15 increasing evidence that social movements constitute an important repository of Africa's political practice. Émile Durkheim reminds us that although social facts, expressed in thought, feeling, or action, are derived from an environment external to the individual, they impose on him a route that he is obliged to follow. He suggests, therefore, that we study the public law that codifies existing political values and the sanctions that oblige obedience. The problem, however, is that formal institutions are sometimes unable to penetrate and impose their logic on social movements.

Many African states have been operating under tight structural-adjustment restrictions for close to ten years. The policies of the International Monetary Fund make heavy demands on public-sector capability and political leadership, particularly as regards pricing and trade practices, banking and finance, economic monitoring and data analysis, macro and sectoral planning, as well as policy formulation, initiation, and implementation. The aim is to create a very strong private sector operating under market conditions, and an effective, though not necessarily large, public sector committed to rational, strategic economic growth. For many African régimes there also will be increasing motivation towards both decentralisation and pluralism. In short, the post-structural adjustment state, rather than withering away, needs to be selectively strengthened and to have an increasingly sophisticated capacity to manage development activities at both the national and local levels.1