The use of mercenaries in Africa has been almost universally condemned. Africans in particular loathe foreign mercenaries. Small wonder, with the memory and reality of the Congo experience still fresh. So pejorative has the label ‘mercenary’ become in Africa that at one point in August 1962, when United Nations troops had been occupying a none-too-quiescent Katanga, the Katangan Minister of the Interior passed a U.N. road-block manned by Indian troops and cursed them by shouting across the barrier, ‘Mercenaries, mercenaries!’1 And this came from a member of the very Government that had hired the first contingent of mercenaries in the independent Congo.

The subject-matter of African politics has always presented a special challenge and a special problem to political scientists, namely to develop a theory which would make sense of a vast, inchoate, and unfamiliar body of material. This problem has become particularly acute in the last year or two. The rapid deterioration of African political parties, a series of military coups, recurrent crises of national unity, and heightened tendencies towards anomic and violent behaviour have not only cast doubt on previous assumptions as to the nature of African political life but have also led to a heightened mood of theoretical uncertainty among political scientists.

A noted economist (Perroux) has defined socialism as ‘le développement de tout l'homme et de tous les hommes’. Providing the motor for a drive towards socialism there is generally to be found a conviction that man's creative potential can only be fully realised in a society which transcends the cultural centrality of “possessive individualism’ and in which a signal measure of economic and social equality, the preconditions for genuine political democracy, are guaranteed. In the best of socialist intellectual work, however, socialists have been equally interested in economic development and in the full release of the potential for growth of the productive forces in a society. Within this tradition it was perhaps Marx who most dramatically fused the concern for economic development and the concern for the elimination of class inequalities in his presentation of the socialist case. He argued that the inequalities of the bourgeois society of his day increasingly meant that the potential of the available industrial machine would not be realised: inequality and muffled productive forces thus went hand in hand’.1

That the distinction between myth and history is a tenuous one hardly requires elaborate documentation. Anthropologists have recorded the way in which accounts of the tribal past, recorded in genealogies, change with the organisation of the social groups to which they refer. In Malinowski's phrase, they serve as the ‘mythical charters’ of the social system. But this is a feature not only of non-literate societies.

There has been an extended discussion in universities, governments, and international organisations throughout the post-war years of the potential and the means for increasing the flow of private long-term capital into the under-developed areas. This flow has been intended to ease the immediate constraints, principally those of capital and foreign exchange, upon development in these areas. Yet, in 1966, private foreign investment in the under-developed areas fell by 12 per cent, and by an absolute amount greater than the increase in official aid. This investment is, in any case, highly concentrated in a very few under-developed countries. Since 1964, income payments on earlier private investments have probably exceeded the total inflow of private capital which the developing areas have received.1 What prospects exist for gaining more private capital for the use of the under-developed world?

Agriculture is the mainstay of the African economy. The well-being and even the lives of hundreds of millions of peasants, farmers, and farm- workers depend on the state of agricultural production. Exports of farm products are the principal source of foreign exchange for African countries.

The newly independent countries of Africa are now in the second stage of their anti-imperialist revolution. This stage is characterised by their struggle to overcome cultural and economic backwardness, to achieve economic independence, to raise the living standards of vast masses of their peoples. These problems are closely related to the nature, rate, and scope of the social transformation taking place in these countries, which in turn depends to a great degree on economic development.

In this article, I try to translate what America means to a MuKongo, the ordinary inhabitant of the province of Kongo Central in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The subject has the advantage of being to some extent marginal among Kongo beliefs, and therefore more readily isolable, but it is not without relevance to international affairs.

Viewed from the higher echelons of government in the new nations, the rural leader is an insignificant individual who goes about managing his local affairs and carrying out—with varying degrees of success—the policies and hopes of the government. Viewed from below, from the inner recesses of the village, the leader is a man of authority; a man who has used wealth, heredity, or personal magnetism to gain a position of influence. As seen by nation builders and development experts, the rural leader is tacitly pointed to as the key to success. It is he who can mobilise the people. It is through him that more energy will be expended, more muscles used, and more attitudes changed. Conversely, it is the leader's lack of initiative that will entrench the status quo and doom the modernisation schemes before they begin.

Writing in a previous issue of this Journal, A. F. Ewing has stated that ‘it is fortunately no longer necessary to argue in favour of industrialisation in opposition to another approach to economic development’, although ‘the doctrine that industry is the key to economic development is of comparatively recent origin’. The article is entitled ‘Industrialisation and the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa’.1

Economic integration in East Africa has been discussed throughout the past 50 years or more, although—until recently—only in terms of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Almost as soon as Kenya and Uganda became established as political entities, close economic links were established between them, and when British administration was extended to Tanganyika after 1918 that country was brought into close relationship with its two northern neighbours. Thus a customs union between Kenya and Uganda was established in 1917, and Tanganyika was gradually incorporated within it between 1922 and 1927. The links were strengthened as economic development advanced, and were formalised under the East Africa High Commission from 1948 onwards: so they became an important part of the inheritance of the three states as they gained political independence in the years 1961–1963.1

In foreign affairs, Kenya presents various faces to the international community. In global terms external policy has been markedly radical in nature and characterised by a strong sense of morality and idealism. Rarely does a major Kenyan foreign policy statement fail to contain some allusion to the inequalities of the present international order or some reassertion of both the desirability and the attainability of a peaceful and just international community of nations. In East African affairs, however, Kenya's policy has often been governed by rather more conservative and legitimist thinking, notably where any radical departure from the status quo is contemplated. It would appear that where foreign policy issues touch directly on primary Kenyan interests—say, national security, national development—the overt radicalism of Kenya's broad international policy is subject to considerable restraint. This ambivalence in Kenya's foreign relations can probably be best explained by examining separately the basically domestic pressures towards a broadly radical policy internationally and towards a more cautious conservatism within East Africa. One further aspect of Kenya's foreign relations is in the field of inter-African affairs, where tentatively one may suggest that Kenya has come to play the role of a prestigious neutral between two amorphous, but often distinct, groupings of what have been termed ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ states.1 Here, foreign policy is far less a product of domestic pressures, and contingencies of history and factors of personality reassert their importance in foreign policy analysis.

The emergence of the new states of Africa into world politics not only influenced the traditional balance of power in the international system, but also created a response among the older African states to restore the equilibrium of order maintained on the continent and fill the vacuum created by the departure of the colonial powers without clashing with the new nationalist movements. Henceforth, the search for influence had to take an ideological overtone. The activities of Egypt in Africa are a reflection of this. Since the mid-fifties, her African policy has aimed at creating a sense of community, cultural loyalty, and political integration. An attempt was made to reinforce the existing culture created by Islam and to transform it into what Pye and Verba call ‘political culture’.1 Thus, Egypt turned gradually toward the employment of religion on the African continent as an instrument of its foreign policy.

This admirable analysis of the role of traditional leaders among the Nyamwezi in Tanzania throws light on some of the most intriguing problems of government in contemporary Africa. Recent reports from African societies confirm Dr Miller's finding that the traditional rulers are not withering away, but on the contrary have survived and are helping their people to adapt to the modern state. This would not be surprising had not many of the revolutionary and non-revolutionary leaders of the modern African states shown such hostility to the traditional leaders. Many politicians felt that the chiefs were reactionary and should be eliminated so that the African states could modernise and develop. Other modern leaders favoured retaining the chiefs while encouraging or coercing them to help modernise their societies. A few modern leaders felt that the chiefs should be honoured as custodians of the cherished values of their respective societies. But even here the hope was that the chief would help in a dialectical process of change by providing a secure base from which the society could take off.

Few of the new nations of Africa lack, as part of their colonial heritage, their potential Biafras—hence the reluctance of most African states to recognise the secessionist Eastern Region of Nigeria. This article is concerned with one of them, the Barotse Province of Zambia, and attempts to illuminate the historical background of the situation, the motives of the Lozi ruling class in demanding secession, and the methods by which successive colonial and independent governments have met this challenge.

By contrast with many other African states, the Ethiopian Government has in recent decades been almost monotonously stable. The Emperor Haile Selassie reigns and rules through a political system which remains in essentials the direct descendant of the imperial Government as it has existed down the centuries.1 In the last quarter-century, only the attempted coup d'état of December 1960 has seriously challenged his régime. The purpose of this article is to disentangle the various elements present in the coup, in order to illuminate the themes of rebellion and attempted revolution in an indigenous African polity.

The modern military development of the British East and West African territories reached its highest level during World War II. Great Britain at that time put aside her standing policy of maintaining establishments sufficient only for colonial domestic needs and recruited forces for general use against Germany, Italy, and Japan.1 Building on a base provided by the Royal West African Frontier Force and the King's African Rifles of East and Central Africa, Britain recruited approximately 470,000 Africans during the war, including over 65,000 from the Gold Coast and 77,000 from Uganda; about 80 per cent of these were serving when the war ended. Although the majority enlisted in army infantry or service corps, tens of thousands served as artisans and technicians, and others in small naval and air establishments. Modern war requirements caused not only a restructuring of African colonial forces, but also forced considerable changes in military recruitment. The 'martial races' traditionally favoured by British officers had to be supplemented by large numbers of skilled and literate recruits from other African peoples; for example, the Ibo, Baganda, and Kikuyu. This rapid expansion of the forces also meant an increased need for British commissioned and non-commissioned officers, who were recruited from Great Britain as well as locally. The many different languages spoken by the new forces meant that simple English displaced Hausa in the west and, to a lesser degree, Swahili in the east, as the standard military language.

The sombre picture of the economic situation in most developing countries, and not least in Africa, has become increasingly familiar in the last two or three years. Foreign aid is at best not increasing and the terms on which it is offered are hardening. There has been little or no relaxation of the obstacles to increased trade between the developed and the under-developed world. The growth of many poor countries has been limited; and, indeed, within the developing world, the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom is growing, as is that between the developed and the under-developed world as a whole.

Economic progress in many developing African countries depends mainly on raising productivity. Agricultural development is required to free resources—especially labour—for the expansion of industry and the creation of the infrastructure of a modern state. At the same time the physical volume of output must rise, both to provide food and raw materials for the expanding urban areas, and to earn foreign exchange.

A major problem encountered by the builders of many of the new states in Africa has been that of defining a satisfactory position for the traditional tribal authorities in a more integrated and democratic political system. In Botswana a solution has been sought not only at the level of local government, where much of the Chiefs' power has been transferred to elected district councils, but also at the national level, where a House of Chiefs has been created to advise Government and Parliament. This body merits examination as a constructive effort to synthesise indigenous and imported institutions, and to accommodate the interests and demands of the hereditary rulers and their more conservative subjects, who remain deeply rooted in the tribal structure, in a manner which is acceptable to the new élite and their supporters, who are eager to modernise quickly.