“Development” has become a magic word throughout Africa in this decade. And, in a great rush disturbingly reminiscent of the early days of European colonialism, national and foreign agencies are scrambling for a role in this or that project. “Consultant” and “management” offices are appearing in former storefronts in many of the larger cities; these, for a fee, will magically produce plans for any conceivable development scheme. (In 1976 I saw one thick and lavishly bound and illustrated plan for a new industrial town produced by one such firm for a project in a rural area in Nigeria; the volume envisioned in minute detail a plan for living, and for dying—several pages were devoted to plans for the town cemetery, even listing the projected costs of variously located and appointed burial plots!) A great many are playing the development game. The overall result is something like a Hydra, but the heads of the Development serpent often seem to grow randomly and independently of each other. “Development” has become a magic word, but like all things magical, no one is quite certain how it works.

Projects are being undertaken and completed, to be sure, and many of them successfully. But nearly all of them are executed quite rapidly, if not precipitously; time, after all, is money. And in the process, people are being affected.

Development problems, to paraphrase Lerner (1958: viii), are people problems, and this is the level at which social scientists should be able to play a role. From our training in social and cultural systems we think we are uniquely equipped to assess the social impact and implications of projects which seem likely to precipitate rapid social change. But social scientists, even those with extensive African field experience, most often play minor roles in African development. Why?

The African press of colonial British West Africa has been recognized for the role it played in moving the area toward independence (Crowder, 1968: 424-25). On the other side of the continent, however, the African press of former British East Africa–Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania–has largely been ignored by scholars. One accepted view has been that the African press of East Africa, while contributing little to the independence movement, thrived on subversive attacks on government and irresponsible publications in general (Hatchen, 1971: 202). Some recent research has suggested that in Kenya and Uganda there was an important African press in the pre-independence period, a press that helped to spread social and political ideas and to mobilize the African population (Scotton, 1973: 1975). Almost totally ignored, however, have been the African newspapers of pre-independence Tanzania, and more specifically those of mainland Tanganyika.

This paper will examine the role of the African press of Tanganyika before that United Nations territory under British administration achieved self-government in 1961. This African press, perhaps on a more limited scale, played a role similar to that of the African newspapers of neighboring Kenya and Uganda. In all three areas, the African press provided an outlet for specific African grievances, challenged accepted social and political patterns, and helped to mobilize the African population in support of proposed new patterns and their African spokesmen.

Early African spokesmen such as Harry Thuku in Kenya, Sefanio Sentongo in Uganda, and Erica Fiah in Tanganyika also saw the need for some kind of news sheet or newspaper to help legitimatize their arguments for equal treatment and eventually even self-government for Africans.

Between 1900 and 1940 the establishment of French colonial administration and the introduction of cash crop agriculture led to far-reaching social and economic changes among the Diola of Boulouf, in southwestern Senegal. Also during this period, the Muslim religion began to attract converts in Boulouf. The growth of urban migration and trade, together with the sale of peanuts as a cash crop, brought a degree of financial autonomy to the young men who participated in these activities. Many of these individuals converted to Islam to achieve status not accessible to them in the traditional social structure.

During the 1930s a series of natural calamities afflicted Diola society. The cumulative effect of these disasters and of continuing social and economic change, was to promote a sense of loss of power over their world among the Diola. This led, in turn, to a great acceleration in the rate of religious conversion. By the beginning of World War II, a majority of the Diola of Boulouf had become Muslim.

The 220 thousand Diola are the largest ethnic group in the Lower Casamance region of southwestern Senegal. Sedentary rice farmers, they have a social organization comprising shallow patrilineages three or four generations deep. The 40 thousand people of Boulouf, the region north of the Casamance River, west of the administrative center of Bignona, and south of the Diouloulou marigot, are a subgroup with distinctive dialect and cultural traits. They inhabit twenty-one villages numbering from six hundred to six thousand persons; each community in turn contains two or more semi-autonomous wards. In southern Boulouf there is a sizeable Catholic population; northern Boulouf is, however, 95 percent Muslim. The Islamic area constitutes the subject of this study.

African Studies, as a body of knowledge, is continental in its geographical focus, multi-disciplinary in structure, and interdisciplinary in its intellectual pursuits. The materials which inform this body of knowledge are so vast in time, space, and scope, and almost unlimited in detail, that Africanists are compelled to specialize either in terms of African regions or in terms of problem areas. Although our interests are divergent within one geographical area, we are all nourished by an interdisciplinary frame of reference which governs our training and our research. Our membership is increasing. Most Africanists are in the social sciences; but the challenge of African development is attracting various technical-science based disciplines into African Studies.

African Studies defies the usual criteria for isolating the traditional disciplines. This particular attribute has often raised the question as to whether this body of new knowledge can be usefully applied. This question is not new. It has been asked of every new body of knowledge. In attempting an answer, we must make our assumptions clear. First, African Studies is not just a body of knowledge; it is a body of useful knowledge which must be shared. Second, Africa is no longer the “laboratory” for the world, but rather a consumer of useful knowledge. She consumes the knowledge required in her development process and demands knowledge that can help her avoid costly mistakes. As an active participant and consumer of useful knowledge, Africa will continue to demand an increased output of. Africanist research in the future. Third, there is no neutral African Studies. African Studies has relevance beyond the continent of Africa which nourishes it. It is the duty of the Africanist to make African Studies the relevant body of knowledge which we claim it to be. Finally, African Studies is nothing if it provides no service to the world. It served the interests of the colonial government; it serves the professional growth and development of its adherents, and it has a responsibility to serve the world, the ultimate consumer and audience of African Studies.

In early 1976 the Ethiopian Amharic language daily, Addis Zemen, opened its columns to a surprisingly free political debate. Through a series of so-called letters to the editor, two political factions, one violently opposed to the military government, the other reluctantly in favor of it, exchanged daily barbs. Both groups considered themselves Marxists-Leninists, both wanted people's government and a socialist revolution. Both, it should be added, used a complex, abstract, highly intellectual and, in addition, not too clear language which rather belied their claims to represent the broad masses. Here, however, the similarity between the two groups stopped. The anti-government faction, initially known as the “Democracia” group, accused the military council and its supporters of fascism. The pro-government group, known as “The Voice of the Masses”, called its rivals anarchists.

This debate was the first and most visible step in an attempt to heal the rift between the military and civilian left in Ethiopia, the major unresolved internal issue of the Ethiopian revolution. From the time of the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974, the military council, or Derg, was faced with the opposition of one or another faction of the radical intelligentsia, a large section of the student body, the old labor confederation, and, in general, most civilian organized groups. Such opposition was not directed against the policies enacted by the Derg–a sweeping land reform, the nationalization of major industrial concerns, and the organization of the population into peasant associations and urban neighborhood associations whose powers have become quite considerable. Rather, the opposition was directed against the military government per se, dubbed as fascist irrespective of the radical policies it enacted.

The inability of most African states to find a political norm compatible with the exigencies of independence is by now a truism. The inherent lack of political order on the continent and the common recourse to political violence have been the subject of much debate among scholars and observers of African political events. Within the general framework of instability, it is apparent that there are many differences in political occurrences in seemingly colonial-inherited and weak frameworks, and a proliferation of internal variations within each state which derive from the differential impact of values and norms nurtured on the sub-national or the traditional level. These phenomena have pointed forcefully to the need to approach the study of African political processes in African terms. Indeed, the Africanization of the study of politics on the continent may perhaps be a vital precondition for the understanding of the contemporary African political scene.

The quest for African explanations for political events has, unlike parallel efforts in other disciplines, been far from smooth. Justifiably, attention was first focused on the examination of continuities and discontinuities in the political history of given areas. Such essentially micro-research efforts, while exciting in that they have uncovered new empirical data and provided important insights into the complexity of traditional African political life, are nevertheless problematic because the patterns of political thought and organization that they trace are not easily transferred to the macro level. The purpose of this paper is to isolate basic political culture constructs prevalent in the pre-colonial period in an attempt to conceptualize, in African terms, some contemporary political occurrences on the macro as well as the micro level. Two basic assumptions lie at the core of this undertaking: first, that traditional political culture models (herein defined as those general political orientations and specific political values that dictate patterns of political behavior and institutional growth) provide paradigms for political organization and action in Africa today; and second, that by examining the interaction of the concrete articulators of the various political culture models, it is possible to determine some of the main factors underlying the dynamics of political behavior in independent Africa.

The history of industrial education in the European-initiated educational systems of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Africa has been and remains controversial. Some scholars maintain that in the late 1800s both the government and missionaries favored, and indeed established, industrial training (Berman, 1974: 530; Foster, 1965). Others insist that, contrary to government wishes, missionaries resisted the establishment of industrial education until the beginning of the twentieth century, when industrial training came into vogue only as a result of “doubts regarding the mental ability of the Black African.” (Lyons, 1975: 148-49).

These conflicting observations about industrial education (here meaning both pre-industrial and industrial skills taught for personal as well as occupational use) are based primarily upon the British Protestant experience in West Africa. Experience in Belgian Africa was quite different. This paper will argue that there were two distinct phases in the development of industrial education in the Congo during the Leopoldian era: (1) the late nineteenth century, characterized by the training of a limited few highly skilled craftsmen for missionary service and (2) the early twentieth century, when the skill component of industrial education declined to the teaching of a bit of carpentry as an adjunct to general education, especially for prospective evangelists and catechists. In the second phase, even those missions which originally had prepared skilled craftsmen for their own use now eagerly accepted the watered-down version of industrial education.

Primary among the criticisms that third-world scholars and “radical” social scientists have directed against applied social sciences in general and social anthropology in particular has been their alleged failures to study the colonial context in which much of its field work has been carried out (Cf. Asad, 1975; Lewis, 1973, for examples.) Although these critics usually exaggerate their arguments and typically do not prove that early scholars were either overt or covert racists, it is true, nonetheless, that social scientists have paid relatively little attention to the colonial milieu, Condominas's (1973) preterrain.

A number of scholars, including Pitt (1976) and Stavenhagen (1971), have urged that social scientists “study upwards” in order to discover the social and cultural foundations of the colonizing agency in the contact situation which determine its motivations and constrain its actions. Failure to do so entails serious theoretical and methodological consequences because it both narrows the range of societies among which we are able to make comparisons and masks a course of systematic bias. Although I have been deeply concerned with the problem of systematic bias (Salamone, 1976a, b), in this paper I address the issue of describing and analyzing a colonial society, of “studying up.” The reason is quite simple. It is necessary to know the nature of a systematic source of bias before deciding on whether and how to control it.

Water must be rationed in the chronically overcrowded hospital because there is insufficient pressure in the inner-city system. A few blocks away, local elites cavort around an azure swimming pool, its olympian form brimming with thousands of gallons of water. … A key person in a planning ministry reports to his town planning consultants that a decision must be made regarding the site of a major development project. He gives them a few days to make the decision in spite of their protests that it will require several weeks of study to produce a recommendation that will fit with the needs of all who will be affected by the decision. The ministry official is under pressure from others further up in the government hierarchy and insists on a quick decision. After many hours of overtime work, the town planners provide a site, complete with justifications which include such diverse factors as soil conditions and basic principles of the master plan which they were hired to develop for the area in question. Later, the town planners are told that the project has been sited by others superior to the ministry in a way that runs counter to virtually every factor noted by the planners when they justified their decision. … Small change is hoarded for months by people as they seek to accumulate enough money to buy one of the few modern technical necessities the average peasant family can afford-a portable radio.

Non-western peoples are often portrayed as extremely conservative, tradition-bound, and either apathetic or hostile toward change agents and their efforts. This picture of the conservative peasant appears in both social scientific analyses and journalistic accounts, and springs in part from the frustrations that many external change agents have felt when confronted with what seemed to be implacable resistance.

In the African context, particularly in East Africa, the “conservative native” par excellence has been the pastoralist. Ogling tourists are fascinated by the “noble savagery” of the Maasai, the Karimojong, and the Samburu, while African governments pass laws prohibiting the carrying of spears, requiring school attendance, banning transhumance, setting minimum quotas for livestock sales, establishing destocking policies and programs, and demanding increased agricultural production.

From the government's point of view, this pastoral conservatism has been particularly annoying and costly in its manifestations in economic behavior. Pastoralists are said to be emotionally attached to their livestock to a degree that makes it impossible for them to operate as rational economic actors. They are accused of being both lazy and spend-thrifts. A European economist, who was chiefly responsible for the creation of a development plan for Karamoja District, Uganda, told me that the Karimojong “don't have the sagacity of a squirrel.”

Countering this stereotyping is a growing awareness among some social scientists that the label of “conservatism” applied by analysts is myopic and ethnocentric (Ortiz, 1971) or, in the case of some officials, self-serving (Erasmus, 1968).

This article focuses upon the history of the Lambya kingdom, a small polity in Chitipa District, which forms the northernmost tip of the modern Republic of Malawi. It was a small political unit but nevertheless historically important because its inhabitants belong to a larger cluster of peoples hereafter referred to as the Ngulube group, which comprises Safwa, Bena, Kinga, Nyakyusa and Ndali of southern Tanzania and the Sukwa and Ngonde of Malawi. Ideally the traditions of all these peoples should be correlated for a fuller understanding of what constitutes one historical area. The article discusses four main themes: the problem of sources, the establishment of the Lambya state, its relations with its neighbors and its early territorial expansion.

Ulambya, as the country of the Lambya is called, covers an area of 367 square miles and has a population of roughly 20 thousand people with an average density of 36 persons per square mile, the largest concentration being in the more fertile valleys of Kaseye, and the Songwe (Stobbs and Young, 1972: 40; Young and Brown, 1972: 30). The Lambya share a border to the north with the Ndali of Tanzania and the Nyiha on the west with the Namwanga of Zambia, on the south with the Fungwe, Tambo and the Tumbuka-speaking peoples of Mwenewenya, and on the east with the Sukwa. The Lambya are worthy of attention for a number of reasons. Ulambya is one of the oldest states in the area and the dating of its regnal list should assist in the problem of working out a chronology of the Ngulube group. A study of the Lambya should also contribute to an understanding of the problems that attended the early development of small polities and give the Lambya a proper place in the early history of the wider zone.

This paper reviews the appropriateness of a development intervention celebrated for its direct benefits to the rural poor: small farmer credit. It will focus on the degree of inappropriateness that results from a contradiction between the convenience of directing the credit to discrete compound units and the dependence of small farmers' success on the coordination of production activities among larger groupings. The case to be looked at is from the West African savannah of Central Mali.

The economic posture of Malian savannah farmers develops within the context of these larger groups of producers. Unlike peasant coalitions in Latin America (Ortiz, 1972), the Malian groupings have not arisen to provide mutual security by spreading market risk among a wider group. This occurs where peasants are dependent on returns from a commercial crop the demand for which leaves them uncertain about how much to produce at any given time. If this were the case, subsidized credit inasmuch as it improved the peasant's marketing options might be able to circumvent such coalitions in attracting the small farmer. But the Malian peasant's coalitions are organized to confront production rather than marketing constraints. As long as these production constraints remain, his loyalty will be to his coalitions rather than to a marketing opportunity should these conflict.

The Malian peasant is not limited by land scarcity in the amount he cultivates. Therefore, he is not dependent on income from commercial crops to buy food; he will increase cash crop production only when its marketing situation is stable. Dry season migrant labor opportunities have long been available to him as an alternative for raising money for the colonial and post-colonial head taxes. Migrant laborers come home to grow unmarketed, subsistence crops. The money uses of their labor are often better served elsewhere.

The majority of East African pastoralists, unlike the pastoral societies of the Middle East which have been exposed to and have dealt with central state organizations for millennia, have fallen sway to centralized governments only at the beginning of this century. The process of integration and encapsulation of nomadic pastoralists in centralized polities and economies is now well under way in Africa and is given much attention by the local African governments.

Historical evidence is showing that, prior to colonial encroachment, East African pastoral societies, commonly depicted as highly resistant to change and strictly bound to tradition and culture, have at times undergone drastic and swift transformations in response to altered ecological conditions and/or to new opportunities. The Turkana, for instance, separated from the Jie to become nearly pure pastoralists; the Maasai, at Njiemps and Arusha, settled down to become farmers; the Pokot and Kamba developed a dual economic sector with heavy reliance on both agriculture and pastoralism (Goldschmidt, 1974: 298). The Nilo-Hamitic Samburu entered an intimate symbiotic (socio-political and economic) relationship with the contiguous Cushitic Rendille (Spencer, 1973).

From the beginning of this century, colonial powers by elaborating particular policies and measures and introducing certain development projects have often struck at the very core of pastoral subsistence without regard to or appreciation of the pastoralists' mode of life. In so doing, they have laid down the foundation of far reaching changes in the economic sector, in the social fabric and in the political organization of East African pastoralists.

Although philosophers do not accept that education has intrinsic values or that it serves instrumental ends (Dewey, 1966; Peters, 1967; Gribble, 1969), most people would readily agree that it can be put to several uses and that it fulfills diverse functions. If by education we mean the aggregate of skills, values, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for the self-perpetuation of a society, it is easy to see its instrumental extensions, philosophers notwithstanding. Hence in every society that we know of today—under whatever form of government—much faith is placed on education as a panacea of all social evils. One of the tasks that education has been assigned in Africa is to forge national consciousness out of a myriad of ethnic particularities. From all indications, it has not been a success.

Statistical studies of the relationship between formal education and political integration in Africa have generally painted a grim picture. In their study of six nations—involving university students from Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Zaire (then the Congo)—Klineberg and Zavalloni (1965) found that national consciousness was very low, particularly in Nigeria. To the question “What are you?” 56 percent of the Igbos and 60 percent of the Yorubas replied in terms of ethnic references. The Yorubas disliked the Igbos more than the Igbos disliked them (74 percent Yorubas as opposed to 59 percent Igbos), and a Yoruba in Nigeria felt closer to a Yoruba in Benin (then Dahomey) than to a non-Yoruba in Nigeria.

The General Assembly of the United Nations passed two conflicting resolutions on the Korean question at its thirtieth session in 1975. One was sponsored by the United States, Japan, and 24 pro-western countries, and the other by the Soviet Union, China, and 41 pro-eastern countries. The pro-eastern proposal demanded the dismantling of the United Nations Command and the withdrawal of all foreign forces under the United Nations flag by 1 January, 1976. The pro-western proposal concurred, on the condition that the parties directly concerned came to a new agreement which will replace the existing truce agreement before the withdrawal of the United Nations forces. The pro-western proposal was supported by eight black African countries, and the pro-eastern proposal by 26 black African countries.

The Korean question is the oldest cold war issue debated in the United Nations. Since it was brought to the United Nations in the wake of the Korean war in 1950, it has been debated and voted on in the General Assembly almost every year (see Goodrich, 1956; U. S. Department of State, 1960; Cho, 1967).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, through a case study approach, the nature of African non-alignment and the African perception of the cold war, especially as related to divided countries. I will first review how the diplomatic relations between newly independent African states and North and South Korea have developed, and next explore how African countries have been voting on the Korean question in the United Nations. Finally, I will discuss the implications of the relationships between the two Koreas and African countries, both in and out of the United Nations.

In the summer of 1833, the British Parliament passed into law a bill designed to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. The Abolition Act conferred freedom on all slave children in the plantation colonies, who were not over six years of age, and declared as free persons children born after the passage of the act. All persons over six years of age became free but were required to work for their former owners as “apprentices” for a limited period: the domestics were to serve for four years, while the agricultural slaves were to work for six years. The act also provided for twenty million pounds sterling to be given as compensation to the owners of the slaves. As the title of the act states, the “apprenticeship” system was designed to promote the “industry of the manumitted slaves …” (Great Britain, Public Record Office [PRO], C.O. 167/205, Glenelg to Nicolay, 6 November 1838). The apprenticeship system was inaugurated in the British West Indies in 1834, and in Mauritius and her dependent colonies on 1 February 1835. Following the examples of Antigua and Barbados, the British West Indian colonies aborted the system in 1838; in Mauritius and its dependencies the system came to an end in 1839.

The assessments of the apprenticeship system are varied. The framers of the Abolition Act pronounced the system as one in which “manumitted” slaves performed compulsory labor for a limited period and in their own interests. Some contemporary observers (Baker and Blackhouse, 1838) were inclined to think that the apprenticeship system was a prolongation of slavery.

The goal of improving the economic lot of the poorest (the “worst-off”) has become important both in public discussions of the Third World development and in technical discussions among economists. In this essay, I shall focus upon the difficulties of implementing such concerns as they are expressed in two major documents on the economy of Kenya. The first of the two was prepared by the International Labour Office and financed by the United Nations Development Programme (and will henceforth be called the ILO/UNDP Report): ILO/UNDP, Employment, Incomes and Equality (Geneva: ILO, 1972). The second study was prepared by the World Bank as part of its series of country economic reports (and will henceforth be called the World Bank Report): International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Kenya: Into the Second Decade (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1975). That the two reports largely agree on formulation of goals is evidenced by the following lines from the World Bank's 1975 report:

There is considerable evidence that induced abortions account for a great deal of the decline in birth rate or slowing down of the growth in birth rate in a number of countries such as Japan, the USSR, Hungary, the other East European countries, Korea, Taiwan, Chile, and Uruguay. Tietze and Lewit (1969: 21) wrote: “Abortion is still the most wide-spread, and the most clandestine method of fertility control in the modern world.” In Ghana public opinion also suggests that induced abortion is the most widespread method of fertility control. Whether this is true is difficult to ascertain, because induced abortion in Ghana is certainly, as Tietze and Lewit wrote, “the most clandestine method.” It is forbidden by law and is generally condemned by the people. Usually, therefore, abortions are performed in secret, which renders research extremely difficult. Ironically, however, the secret character of abortion makes the need of investigation even more urgent, because illegally performed abortions tend to cause the gravest medical complications.

To my knowledge, no one has yet made a scientific estimate concerning how often and under what circumstances induced abortion occurs in Ghana, and what its consequences are. I do not intend to make such an attempt either. My sole intention is to look at induced abortion in the context of a single Akan matrilineage in order to gain a more realistic insight into the conditions that lead to abortion, the ways it is practiced, and the reaction to it by the people concerned. This paper will, therefore, have little value for demographers who require statistical evidence. At best it may suggest a number of hypotheses about the incidence of induced abortion in Ghana and thus encourage further research.

Recent literature on rural development planning emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in the preparation, formulation, and execution of development plans (Chambers, 1974; Whyte, 1975). This argument has been based on the assumption that for development planning to be successful, there needs to be an integrated knowledge of ideas of various disciplines, such as the physical and biological sciences (agriculture, engineering, etc.) and the social sciences (sociology, political science, economics, anthropology).

However, for the last few years, social scientists, with the exception of economists, have played a peripheral role in agricultural development planning. Program design and the implementation of development plans have been conducted mainly by technical scientists. In most cases, social scientists have been invited to justify the decisions of the technical scientists after the selection and the designing of the projects.

Such development projects have usually had unanticipated consequences because of this lack of input from social scientists. At present there is a growing concern by international funding agencies and other research institutes to involve social scientists not only in the evaluation and appraisal of development projects, but also in the planning and formulation of these projects. The rationale behind this is that social scientists can contribute to the understanding of social, political, and economic problems in a society and help to plan development projects in such a way that they address basic developmental needs.