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Modern African Studies: Problems and Prospects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert I. Rotberg
Robert I. Rotberg
Affiliation:
History at Harvard
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Extract

AS the revived study of the politics of tropical Africa by Americans enters its second decade,1 scholars have on the whole tempered youthful enthusiasm with an adolescent awareness of the complexity of their subject.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , April 1966 , pp. 565 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1966

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References

1 For practical purposes, the publication of Apter, David, The Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton 1955)Google Scholar, inaugurated a decade of intense American inspection of the politics of modern tropical Africa. A few important articles and collections of articles appeared before then, and some theses had already been written, but nothing of monographic or synthetic substance appeared anterior to Apter.

2 This is an impressionistic view, shared by others but unsupported by carefully gathered statistics.

3 Among the exceptions, Buell, Raymond Leslie, The Native Problem in Africa, 2 vols. (New York 1928)Google Scholar; Dilley, Marjorie Ruth, British Policy in Kenya Colony (New York 1937)Google Scholar; Rudin, Harry R., Germans in the Cameroons, 1884–1914 (London 1938)Google Scholar; Cook, Arthur Norton, British Enterprise in Nigeria (Philadelphia 1943).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See the persuasive argument in Huntington, Samuel P., “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics, XVII (April 1965), 393–405.Google Scholar

5 See especially Zolberg, Aristide R., One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton 1963)Google Scholar; Morgenthau, Ruth Schachter, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (Oxford 1964).Google Scholar

6 In East Africa, there is some evidence that independence need not mean institutional atrophy for parties. A forthcoming paper by Joseph S. Nye, “The Impact of Independence on Two Nationalist Parties [The Uganda People's Congress and the Tanganyika African National Union],” makes this point, as do two recent articles: Leys, Colin and Valentine, Malcolm, “The Party After Independence: The Case of the Uganda People's Congress,” Proceedings of the East African Institute of Social Research (January 1965)Google Scholar; and Bienen, Henry, “The Party and the No-Party State: Tanganyika and the Soviet Union,” Transition, XIII (March-April 1964), 25–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Two recent books have lessened the importance of Young's historical resumes. For a more complete understanding of the emergence of Congolese self-expression, the careful reader should consult Lemarchand, Rene, Political Awakening in the Belgian Congo (Berkeley 1964).Google ScholarHoskyns, Catherine, The Congo Since Independence: January 1960-December 1961 (London 1965)Google Scholar, contains a careful, detached analysis of the first year of independence, together with an especially valuable critique of the role of the United Nations. Beside her work, the tendentiousness of Lefever, Ernest W., Crisis in the Congo (Washington 1965)Google Scholar, provides a glaring example of an earlier kind of American writing on tropical Africa.

8 Crawford Young's more recent article on the civil war (“The Congo Rebellion,” Africa Report, X [April 1965], 6–11Google Scholar) supersedes the epilogue because of its perceptive analytical insights as well as its relevant timeliness.

9 The reader should also consult the illuminating discussion of single parties in Kilson, Martin L., “Authoritarian and Single-Party Tendencies in African Politics,” World Politics, XV (January 1963), 262–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar