To the European outsider the achievement of political independence in the last few years by most of the countries of Africa may appear as the ending of a story: the story of European colonisation and overseas rule, and the story of the nationalist struggle for freedom. As these are now over, it is presumed that conditions of stability must have been established, and that an era of uneventful development is about to ensue. When there is instead a revolution or other disturbance, one easily concludes that the country in question was not after all ready for independence. In the hands of a John Biggs Davison or a Patrick Wall every apparent deviation from western normality becomes one more item in a terrible catalogue of the sins of independent Africa: a ghastly warning which the white leadership of Rhodesia and the South are only too right to heed. This view does, of course, work on the curious supposition that a people not possessing economic and political stability should, ipso facto, be ruled by someone else. It seems to me that approaches of this kind to what is going on in Africa today present us with a dangerously false focus, implying as they do that the acquiring of independence should have marked the term rather than be the condition for the great process of building the new society. In fact it is that process which is going on now and I find it far more interesting than what happened before independence, but it is of its nature something which involves instability, tension and the immaturity which is inevitable when people are just beginning to face, collectively and individually, a wide range of new situations and problems.