The death of a colonial official in the early days of colonial rule in Africa was always a matter of grave concern to the imperial powers. Trained manpower was scarce and the sense of isolation and vulnerability must have been intense when the entire white establishment numbered a few dozen men. When that death was not from disease or accident, but was the result of an act of violence by an African subject, the concern felt by the colonial authorities was comparable to that caused by a local rebellion or armed insurrection. Such was clearly the case when a senior officer was murdered in the Ankole District of Uganda in 1905, only six years after the first British officer took up a post in the district. The result of the murder was a political crisis and a far reaching probe into the crime and its circumstances which serves to lay bare the political intrigues, divisions and motives of the entire collaborating elite of the Ankole Kingdom.

Like a rebellion, the crime of assassination offers us not only a story of intrigue and drama, but an avenue into the workings of the colonial regime and the African political systems which it encompassed. The complicated new structures of factional competition which were uncovered in the course of the murder investigation were fundamentally the same political structures that persisted during the entire colonial era in Ankole. It is for this reason that the murder of a single colonial officer deserves careful scrutiny.

Recent studies of development in Africa reflect the broad ideological gulf between the perspectives of classical capitalist developmentalists and neo-Marxist dependency theorists. In the capitalist view, development is seen as a problem of modernization (i.e., westernization). Marxists, on the other hand, perceive the underdevelopment of the third world as a product of western development and the emergence of the world capitalist system. In an effort to inject an empirical element into this ideological debate several analysts have undertaken comparative examinations of the merits of the alternative approaches (Kaufman et al., 1975; McGowan, 1975; 1976; Vengroff, 1975; 1976; Walleri, 1975; Stallings, 1973; Chase-Dunn, 1975).

A general examination of the relative merits of the developmental and dependency approaches is beyond the scope of this brief paper. Here die author will attempt to assess the utility of these conflicting approaches as explanations of the particular phenomenon of domestic inequality in black Africa. The question of domestic inequality and development in Africa has unfortunately received only limited empirical consideration (Vengroff, 1976) and then usually from a national rather than a cross-national perspective (Leys, 1973; Harris, 1975).

Proponents of capitalist theory suggest that inequality is a natural, short run outcome of the development process. As the level of development increases, there is a broad expansion of the middle class, and hence a decline in inequality (Adelman and Morris, 1973; Paukert, 1973).

The point has been made about the dangers inherent in attempts to analyze the underdeveloped world's problems purely in terms of the experiences or models of the industrialized, developed countries of the world. It is often warned that nations and cultures differ; and that what may have worked for one society may not necessarily work for another. Consequently, these critics caution against a blind transplantation of foreign tools or models to the distinctive conditions of the contemporary developing nations. Akeredolu-Ale (1972: 119-20) put it rather sharply in the Nigerian context:

… economic process cannot be studied in isolation but only in their social, political, and demographic setting…. Purely economic interpretations of the economic development process as it is going on in the less developed countries are bound to be incomplete. One striking feature of economic life in such countries, is the greater role which political factors (domestic and international) are playing in the determination of the process of economic evolution… Any investigation of the economic process in a contemporary underdeveloped country such as Nigeria, if it is to avoid superfidalism, must begin with an analytical framework that is much less restricted than that derived from orthodox Western economic theory. The transfer of Western theories, models and concepts to the study of economic problems… is not harmful per se, but it could be a source of great bias and distortion… when new facts require that they be seriously modified.

Some scholars feel that an African, or, more properly, Pan-African literature is developing in Africa. This literature is seen as continent wide and is written in the various colonial languages. It is seen as a unified literature responsive to a simultaneously emerging African society (Roscoe 1971: 252; Joyaux 1972: 313-14). Adrian Roscoe, who holds this view, feels that given such a continental literature, it is unlikely that Africa will see the development of independent national literatures (1971: 252). Whether or not one subscribes to this view, it is the thesis of this paper that there is another kind of literature emerging in Africa—an East African regional literature. East African literature in Swahili, as it is developing, appears to differ from what is being referred to as African literature in both non-vernacular and other vernacular languages. It is a regional literature in an African language with a character which is neither tribal, national, nor continental.

In East Africa, unlike the rest of the continent, literature in the colonial languages has never flourished as much as that in Swahili. Swahili has been spoken and written on the coast since the thirteenth century. At first, Swahili literature was written in the Arabic script employing Arabic genres and now it employs the Roman script adapting and modifying western genres.

The emerging regional Swahili literature is receiving added impetus from conscious efforts being made in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya to promote Swahili literacy in the Roman script and to encourage Swahili as a national and and official language.

In assessing the patterns of conflict in southern Africa, it is commonplace to stress the theme of South Africa's overwhelming strengths against the threat of black nationalist forces. Most observers support this thesis of South African invulnerability by citing the country's enormous mineral resources, impressive military capabilities, continuing strategic importance and economic links with the west. Leonard Thompson (in Thompson and Butler, 1975: 408) ably summarized this popular view, citing other noteworthy domestic and international variables to buttress the point:

In resisting “terrorists” South Africa's government has the ardent support of four million Whites who consider their very survival is at stake. South Africa has a far more powerful industrial base and far more formidable military equipment than any government that has been overthrown by guerrilla forces. It has the capacity to produce atomic weapons; the terrain in the vicinity of its borders is treeless or sparsely wooded savanna, which affords guerrillas scant opportunity for concealment. Moreover, the South African revolutionaries in exile are divided into rival factions; the capacity of Black African states to launch military expeditions against the Republic is limited by domestic economic and political weaknesses, interstate rivalries, and serious logistic problems; and neither the Soviet Union nor the People's Republic of China seems prepared to make a major commitment in southern Africa in the near future. Consequently, although guerrilla groups launched across South Africa's land frontiers may become a continual irritant to the regime, they do not seem likely to be able to overthrow it.

Reluctantly and sporadically college and university instructors of African history surveys are discovering that effective teaching is not guaranteed solely by the excellence of our research. Like historians in other specialties we are also discovering that student and administrator evaluation of our teaching, particularly at the lower division survey level, is growing more critical. Unfortunately few of us are prepared to bridge the gap between the specialized approach engendered by our graduate school training and the pedagogical needs of the increasingly heterogeneous audiences we meet in our undergraduate history surveys. This essay is directed toward bridging this gap. Rather than simply presenting a theoretical discussion on the relative merits of this particular approach to undergraduate education, a single sample unit is offered for critical evaluation.

There is a danger that PSI, like many other classroom innovations, might be rejected as simply another fad. Therefore it is necessary to define clearly this teaching/learning technique before demonstrating its direct applicability to undergraduate instruction in African history. PSI applies the principles of behavioral psychology to the college academic environment. This new method of teaching was originally developed in the 1960s by Fred S. Keller, a creative and innovative teacher and researcher in the psychology of learning. Retired from Columbia University, Keller and some colleagues created the system in response to specific needs at the University of Brazilia. Later at Arizona State University and the Center for Personalized Instruction at Georgetown University, Keller continued, enlarged, and improved the system.