The anti-colonial revolution was a great event in the lives of the Congolese people, and both the masses and their bourgeois leaders expected a lot from it. The masses had accepted the leadership of the clerks and other educated groups, who presented themselves as their spokesmen and representatives to the colonial Government. Their hope was that their living conditions would be changed after independence, and this was in fact what their leaders promised them. But this promise was not honoured after independence, for many reasons, one of which was the fact that the anti-colonial revolution had masked the conflicts of interest opposing the bourgeois leaders to the people. These conflicts became open after independence, when, instead of fulfiffing their promises, the leaders responded to popular demands either with more promises or with repression. This situation ultimately led to the emergence of the ‘second independence’ movement in the Kwilu region and in the eastern part of the new Republic.

It seems that one of the major fallacies today is that of generalisation. We have all had our fill of the writer or speaker who refers to ‘the African and his animistic religion’, ‘the Zulu and his impi-membership’, or the ‘military syndrome’ in African politics. Every intelligent reader and student is conscious of the danger of generalisation and the tendency to lump under some uniform heading ‘the African’, ‘the Negro’, and ‘the Afrikaner’. While animism, the impi, or military coups may mark or may have marked particular groups of people at a particular time, it is as dangerous to use such generalisations as it is to use the sweeping term ‘the Afrikaner’.

In the Third World the need to find solutions to the growing problem of unemployment is becoming increasingly urgent, as reflected in many recent economic development plans:

The current tempo of economic activity is insufficient to provide productive employment to all…A major objective of the Plan is to create more employment opportunities in the rural and urban sectors on an increasing scale.1

During the 1960s, Nigeria's stability was so severely threatened by such factors as reckless politics, military coups d'etat, refugee problems, and secessionist movements that foreign observers predicted the failure of a hitherto glorified model of a newly independent, democratic, multinational state in West Africa. In February 1966 pessimism about Nigeria's political future was so great that some observers inside and outside Nigeria believed that such a British-created federation as Nigeria's could not survive after the failure of the similarly launched Central African Federation, the West Indian Federation, and Malaysia (after Singapore's separation) 1.

Namibia, formerly South-West Africa, continues from the point of view ofinternational law to represent the symbol of violated right. Even though the United Nations has been seized of the matter for many years and the International Court of Justice has been given the opportunity to adjudicate, the problem appears to be as intractable as ever. South Africa has established her administrative and military presence and means to defend what she considers to be her right with all the forces at her command. The country does not lack friends whose direct or indirect support it counts upon. Yet the fundamental issue remains: Are the people of Namibia entitled to self-determination and how may they exercise that right? It will be necessary to refer back to the history of Namibia from the time of the mandate.

In a recent article in this Journal, J. F. Rweyemamu argues that existing trade relations between the developed and less developed countries are a major cause of the latter's poverty. In fact, he asserts that ‘the U.N. General Assembly emphasis on trade under the existing international division of labour is not only misplaced but may be regarded as a calculated strategy by the capitalist countries to mislead the developing countries’. Since trade is supposed to impoverish the developing world, Rweyemamu recommends measures leading to less reliance on the external sector and, more specifically, a programme of heavy industrialisation, in which ‘it can hardly be over-emphasised that import substitution and export promotion are not relevant as basic selection techniques’. I feel not only that Rweyemamu's policy proposals are detrimental to the interests of the developing world, but that the statistical findings and theoretical discussion from which they are derived contain both errors and omissions.

This article is an attempt to explore the frames of reference of two disciplines—political science and social anthropology—as they affect the study of relations between the national ‘centre’ and the local ‘periphery’ in African countries. It is exploratory, in that it reviews the assumptions and concepts characteristic of the disciplines, instead of trying to crystallise a new model. In the light of this comparison it then considers the status of what Clifford Geertz has called ‘the clichés of commonsense sociology’.1 It examines particularly one item in this collection of clichés, the notion of ‘tribalism’.