Soviet African Policy is currently in a consolidation phase. It is true that the 1970's brought the Soviet Union great military and political successes in Angola and Ethiopia — successes which signaled not only a new stage in Soviet strategic capabilities but also a new ability and willingness to influence events far from its borders. However, these triumphs should not blind us to the constraints under which the USSR has labored, the resulting limits on its influence, and the ensuing move away from interventionist activism.

To help European peoples begin to recognize the tremendous consequences of centuries of slavery and colonization for the world today, I offer this brief exercise. If Africans had colonized Europeans, what would be different?

The year 1977 was a good one for Marxism-Leninism in Africa, for in the space of a few months, three important countries officially embraced that ideology. Ethiopia did so after three years of revolutionary upheaval, and in the wake of a shoot-out in the old imperial palace, during which Mengistu Haile Mariam managed to eliminate the more moderate members of the ruling military committee. In Angola and Mozambique, which had gained independence from Portugal less than two years earlier, Marxism-Leninism was officially adopted at party congresses which decided to transform the pre-independence liberation movements into orthodox vanguard parties.

As the decade of the 1970’s drew to a close, Africa’s leaders were becoming concerned over the economic stagnation visibly creeping across the Continent. The dramatic escalation in energy prices, combined with the general world inflation, had palpably shifted the terms of trade against the African petroleum importers, effectively neutralizing the higher commodity prices which African exports had enjoyed in the earlier years of the decade. Per capita GDP figures, which in most of Africa had been rising since independence, had begun to slip. In some countries the physical and social infrastructure was clearly detriorating.

Since the enforcement of 1983 constitution, several years have passed. The 1983 constitution is the third constitution since the founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910. By observing the history of the constitutional development in more than seventy years in South Africa and the content of the current South African constitution, it is not difficult to find out that the constitution, as a fundamental state law, is an important weapon of racism. South Africa's white regime consistandy upholds and consolidates its racist rule by adopting and implementing constitutions. The aim of this article is to analyze and expose the essence of the South African racist system in mis aspect.

Since the middle of the 1970s Sub-Saharan African states have focused increasingly on their severe economic and fiscal crises. These involve wrestling with the burdens of debt service and the rigors of rescheduling, conducting difficult negotiations with bilateral and private creditors, bargaining over conditionality packages with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or fending them off, distributing the painful costs of adjustment, coping with import strangulation and devising new development policies and strategies. Already highly dependent on the outside world, the intensity, stakes and levels of conditionality of these relations with external actors have increased substantially.

Recent reports of famine again devastating Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique have focused world-wide attention once more on Africa’s precarious plight. The pictures of emaciated bodies crowded into emergency feeding centers, documenting the grim statistics of declining production, are now painfully familiar. It was only three years ago that high media coverage and an active international fundraising campaign for the victims of drought brought the crisis to nightly news. However, despite the unprecedented success of efforts such as BANDAID, U.S.A. for Africa and others in raising public consciousness and contributions, the fundamental problems plaguing Africa remain unchanged and unsolved.

The impassioned debate between those who support sanctions in order to bring about change in South Africa and those who favor “constructive engagement” misses the point. Each side assumes that the problem is to exercise U.S. leverage and pressure on the South African government. It is not. Instead the opportunity is for the U.S. to assist in human investment to help South Africans to acquire the education, skills and training to build their own future. Pressure may or may not contribute to the South African government changing its policies and practices. Investment in human resources has a more reliable payoff in terms of individuals capable of participating in building a new South Africa.

Few phenomena in recent years have sparked as much fervent support and militant opposition as “privatization.” Narrowly defined, privatization means selling state owned assets to private buyers. Its proponents insist that privatization improves micro-economic efficiency and enhances macro-economic growth. Its opponents counter that privatization is a non-starter politically and impractical economically. One side tends to see privatization as a private sector panacea; the other an imperialist curse.

Every year statistics seem to demonstrate another decline in the quality of life in Southern Africa. The annual growth rate per capita of agricultural production in the region deteriorated to -1.04 percent from 1978-85. In March 1987, UNICEF reported that every four minutes a child under 5 years dies in Angola and Mozambique, the highest death rate among children in the world. International agencies like UNICEF now cite the major cause of this devastation: war waged by South Africa against its neighbors.

The United Nations Special Session on the Critical Ecnomic Situation in Africa concluded in June 1986 with the Adoption of a Programme of Action which included an explicit recognition of African policy failures and the need for reform:

The African food crisis of 1983-85 galvanized political commitment both among African governments and in industrialized states to alleviate the chronic problem of hunger in Africa. One result is the 13th General Assembly Special Session on the economic crisis of Africa in May-June, 1986. This step, following considerable preparation, paralleled steps by African states to allocate greater resources to agriculture and food production and by the World Bank and other donors to help increase their assistance targeted toward the relief of hunger and the establishment of food security. After years of lip service about priorities to agriculture or the pursuit of agriculture development through investments that were biased toward both large-scale and production-oriented projects, African governments, in preparing for the 1986 Special Session of the UN that focused on Africa’s economic crisis, exhibited genuine shifts in their policies toward agriculture.

An underlying assumption that ocurs in both conventional wisdom and in many academic analyses of political behavior is the notion that a critical linkage exists between political change and economic performance. The assumption is that economic growth is either a precondition or a correlate of democracy and political stability. Little empirical research has been done to test the validity of this widely held assumption as it applies to multicultural societies. Moreover, in the African environment, the assumption seems to operate only in selected cases or in ways that defy categorization. Jerry Rawlings, for example, said he led his first coup d’etat in Ghana because the government was going to devalue the currency; he led his second coup, in part, because the next government was going to devalue; and, during his own tenure in office, he has presided over a 1000 percent devaluation.