In a recent theoretical essay I tried to demonstrate, among other things, the crucial importance of politics in any effort to overcome the underdevelopment of our own historical period; and I hope I have also shown how different kinds of political systems may be assumed to interact with various kinds of development strategies.1 The most hopeful combination is where a dynamic political interaction is established between the developmental needs and aspirations of the masses, and a consciously applied strategy of challenge to the social, political, and economic status quo of underdevelopment. It is surely an important task of political science to attempt to define the conditions under which such a mobilising interaction may be established and sustained. They are probably minimal conditions of development for any Third-World nation in the predominantly capitalist international system.

The purpose of this article is largely methodological, in that it aims to sketch an analytical approach to the question of differentiation rather than to provide an empirical analysis. There are clear reasons for approaching the issue in this way. We need to know what the term ‘working class’ means, whether there are divisions within it which significantly influence the behaviour of those affected by them, and the forms which these divisions take. In other words we want to know whether it is stratified. To assume that it is so is to take as given the answers to questions which should be asked. We need to know whether social relationships in any situation are arranged into strata and, if they are, whether they have consistent relationships and are ranked in terms of superiority according to some pre-selected criterion. It is because these questions are not usually asked that studies of social stratification largely consist of fitting empirical data into a predetermined mould. To start by questioning the existence of differentiation is a very modest, cautious approach.

During the first decade of independence for the tropical African states, economic planning has moved through several stages. Before and at the time of independence the development literature still featured debates as to whether or not to plan, and what the role of the government should be in economic development. In Africa these debates were won, hands down, by the planners and by ‘African socialists’ of various types. Within a few years there appeared a host of plan documents responding to the perceived requirements, leading one analyst even to characterise Africa as ‘the continent of economic plans’1 articles on ‘comprehensive economic planning’ and simple econometric models were at that time in fashion. These plans were typically prepared by foreigners with relatively little experience of the countries concerned, and were based upon the scrappiest of data and analysis. While not as elaborate in their technique, or as far removed from reality, as many of their counterparts of the period in Asia and Latin America, these plans tended to be just as lacking in real content, political support, or potential for implementation. Their authors usually departed for home shortly afterwards, leaving the hardpressed decision-makers on the scene (many of whom were themselves expatriates newly arrived in the country) little the wiser.

Contemporary Black Africa can be divided into wide regions which are clearly different from one another. But it is more difficult to analyse these differences – and to study their nature, origin, and effects – than to see them.

There will undoubtedly be many interpretations of the Uganda coup. The purpose of this article is merely to suggest one and, on the basis of available, though admittedly incomplete evidence, to outline a case for its plausibility. The central argument is as follows. The Uganda army can be best understood as a kind of economic class, an élite stratum with a set of economic interests to protect. The coup of January 1971 was the army's political response to an increasingly socialist régime whose equalitarian domestic policies posed more and more of a threat to the military's economic privileges.

There are a wide variety of relationships binding together the states of the modern international community. They are all, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent upon the exchange of various kinds of resources between themselves. These resources include merchandise goods, capital, technology, labour and information. Such exchanges imply a certain amount of reciprocal influence.

In the years that have elapsed since the ending of colonial rule, the newly independent states of Africa have been understandably preoccupied with a general resolve to achieve rapid and sustained economic growth. Certain countries have attached especial importance to investment in agriculture, others have devoted high proportions of their resources to material infrastructure, to the exploitation of minerals, or to education and training; whatever the immediate policy pursued, however, there has been general unanimity that at the far end of the development process each African state hopes to possess a growing number of economically viable manufacturing industries.1 Apart from the material benefits that industrialisation can bring there is a general belief, as Pierre Moussa has put it, that ‘the factory chimney has mythical value; it expresses a people's success on earth, their ability to cope with the modern world’.2

Certain problems and prospects of economic development are common to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Any discussion of the Maghreb must consider the restrictive influence of the limited size of the national markets. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Libya with its population of only about 1, 800,000. Naturally, it is the spending or consuming capacity of that population rather than its actual size which is the limiting factor. Studies by Chenery, amongst others, suggested a national product of $30,000 million as the minimum optimal market size for an economy, with a $300 income per capita.1 Furthermore, the lower the average income per person, the higher the total national product needed to support efficient manufacturing plants and, particularly, an industry producing capital goods. By the mid- 1960s the independent countries of Africa together had a ‘continental product’ of about $40,000 million, and a population of about 300 million, often with extremely low income per capita. In short, the entire independent continent provides market conditions of just about the minimum optimal size for rapid development; the market of any subcontinental group, and obviously of any individual economy, is less than a quarter of the optimum size. When one considers countries like Chad, Malawi, and Togo, it is a case of national market sizes smaller than those of medium-sized European cities.

Within five years, some of the cadets to whom these remarks were addressed helped overthrow Kwame Nkrumah. Despite the warning, ‘Politics are not for soldiers’, the armed forces in Ghana – as in 14 other African states – assumed full political control. The military thus changed in Africa from relatively insignificant relics of colonial administration into prime arbiters of political disputes – settling arguments, in many instances, by the direct seizure of power. Praetorianism had reached south of the Sahara.

Malawi has her origins, as a separate state, in the British Central Africa Protectorate, declared in 1891 to prevent the Portuguese from claiming the Lake Malawi region. In 1907 the Protectorate was renamed Nyasaland, a title which was retained until independence in 1964. It is with the few years before independence, and the eight years since, that this article is concerned, and it deals with the Africanisation of the Administrative Service during this period.

The traditional and basic economic philosophy of private investment is best expressed by Adam Smith: Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command…every individual…endeavours so [to employ his capital]…that its produce may be of the greatest possible value…He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.1

In the lives of nations, as of men, reputations all too often achieve their widest currency when they are already out of date. The Somali Republic is no exception to this general rule. Although the real circumstances had already significantly altered before the military brusquely seized power in October 1969, Somalia was still generally known for democracy at home and trouble abroad. The first of these characterisations referred to the striking persistance of a vigorous and effective multi-party parliamentary system, and the second to the seemingly uniquely intractable nature of the ‘Somali Dispute’ which committed the Republic to supporting the secessionist claims of the contiguous Somali populations of Kenya, Ethiopia, and French Somaliland, at the price of severely strained relations with these neighbouring states. These and other attributes unusual amongst the new states of sub-Saharan Africa appeared to be closely connected with the Republic's exuberant sense of national identity, a quality all the more remarkable in being firmly grounded in a long-standing and entirely traditional cultural nationalism.

Guinea and the Ivory Coast are neighbouring, former French colonies in West Africa. Both gained their independence about the same time – Guinea in 1958 and the Ivory Coast in 1960. The contrast in the subsequent economic performance of these two countries with closely corresponding resource endowments is remarkable. The Ivory Coast's gross domestic product has grown at an annual rate of about 8 per cent in real terms. The Guinean economy has stagnated. A review of the economic record of both since independence suggests that three factors were mainly responsible for their strikingly unequal performance: (1) differences in governmental philosophies of mobilisation and organisation of resources; (2) differences in the extent to which foreign markets shaped domestic economic expansion; and (3) differences in the role of foreign entrepreneurs in the national development effort.

Since World War II anthropological research in the new nations has come under increasing criticism on both ideological and pragmatic grounds. To those who regard the creation of a modern life-style and cultural integration as urgent national goals, the concern with traditional institutions seems conservative, if not reactionary, and any interest in ethnicity seems divisive. To those responsible for planning rural development, the anthropologist's detailed report on a single community all too often seems unnecessarily obscured by professional quibbles, devoid of concrete policy recommendations, and of unknown representativeness.

Few events alter the socio-economic structure of a country as radically as the convulsions and displacements concomitant with war and political upheaval. In Nigeria the two coups d'état of 1966 and the civil war of 1967–1970 have had a profound effect on economic activity, and in turn have been affected by economic variables. In this study the political variable will generally be treated as independent and the economic variable as dependent, despite the fact that in the period after independence in 1960, tendencies towards political and economic disintegration reinforced each other.1

Tanzania is engaged in a struggle to become a democratic socialist and developed nation. The implications of socialist ideology for actual policy planning and implementation still have not been fully clarified. Certain questions concerning the economic base are especially important, in particular the desirable relationship of every citizen to the production processes of the country. The possibility of further alienation of the worker from the process of production in the context of nationalisation and state-controlled industrialisation has already been identified by several observers.1 The pervasive nature of the dual economy in the ‘development of under-development’ has also been analysed with respect to Tanzania.2 What is consistently disregarded, however, is the peculiar place of women in the midst of change and counter-change.

The only official United States contact with the liberation movements of Southern Africa has been the educational programmes administered by the African–American Institute under contract to the U.S. Government. In addition to providing education and scholarships to refugee students in Africa, the A.A.I. has since 1962 administered the Southern African Student Program (S.A.S.P.) for refugees in the United States at the college and graduate levels.

The politically effervescent Frene Ginwalla has had to relinquish the editorship of The Standard in Tanzania, sacked by President Nyerere. The revolutionary wing of the student body of the University of Dar es Salaam has had its political claws blunted. Militantly zealous expatriates in Dar es Salaam have declined in influence. And those who used Uganda's problems following the January 1971 coup as an additional excuse for radical slogans have now been forced to cool down following the official rapprochement between the Governments of Tanzania and Uganda.

In March 1970 Mr Justice P. D. Anin was named by the Ghanaian Presidential Commission, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister, to head a five-man Commission of Enquiry into Bribery and Corruption. Not only was it authorised ‘to study the area, prevalence, and methods of bribery and corruption in Ghanaian society’, but also to determine whether there were factors in the society which contributed to this. ’As a people, do we frown upon and resist bribery and corruption or do we tend to regard them as natural and inevitable?’, asked Anin at the first meeting of the Commission of Enquiry on 29 June 1970, adding: ‘Do we draw a line between the ‘customary drink’ under our traditional practices, and bribery and corruption of public officers and others holding positions of trust?“ The answers to these questions, it was hoped, would lead to recommendations for the eradication of these ‘social evils’.

On 24 November 1971 the British and Rhodesian Governments agreed on a set of proposals designed to bring to an end the constitutional dispute between their two countries.1 A final endorsement of the proposals by ‘the people of Rhodesia as a whole’ would result in the lifting of British economic sanctions,2 and the recognition of Rhodesia as an independent state and the present régime as the legal Government. The terms of this settlement have been widely publicised and will therefore not be reproduced here. However, the essential features of the constitutional mechanism as far as they may have been affected by economic trends are as follows: