Africa is a vast continent. It embraces nearly one-fourth of the land surface of the earth. The last decade has witnessed a profound transformation of its political landscape. Thirty-four countries have attained their independence. The rest of the continent will soon be governed by its people. The broad sweep of the surge towards independence has belied those predictions of only a decade ago that the political transition to independence in Africa would take a long time. This has already come about. But the continent yet remains mostly ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-housed, and illiterate. The popular pressure to overcome the age-old afflictions of mankind—poverty, disease, and lack of knowledge—is mounting. The new African governments are beginning their first faltering steps towards the economic transition from poverty to relative affluence.

There has been a marked change in recent years in the climate of ideas about industrialisation in developing economies and it is fortunately no longer necessary to argue in favour of industrialisation in opposition to another approach to economic development. Yet it is still necessary to continue to state the basic case, particularly since Africa is industrially the least developed of all the continents. The doctrine that industry is the key to economic development is of comparatively recent origin. Its antecedents are the writings of Professor G. Myrdal and Dr R. Prebisch and the practical achievements of the U.S.S.R. and Japan.

There is an understandable tendency to think that the first overt action taken by the British Government in respect of colonial education in Africa was the setting up of an Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African Dependencies in 1923. This is not in fact true. There was for instance a Privy Council memorandum of 1847 on ‘industrial schools for coloured races’, in many ways a remarkable document, setting forth a number of ideas that were to be later accepted in colonial provision for education in Africa—ideas such as the interdependence of moral and physical training, the need for the school to make an impact on the local community in respect of agricultural development and improved sanitation, the need to adapt the content of the curriculum to local needs, and the advisability of the teacher being familiar with the local culture. And of course British experience in education in India provided some terms of reference for educationists in other parts of the world ruled by Britain. Often they tended to treat the Indian experience as a warning of what to avoid: for instance, it was believed that the use of English as a medium of instruction, as recommended in Macaulay's minute of 1833, might have contributed to the Mutiny of 1857; and also the structure of Indian education was considered rather top-heavy, following the establishment of universities whose students became leaders in the movements of political discontent. These “lessons’ were to be incorporated in British thinking about education in Africa in the following century.

Well over 50 years ago, John Mensah Sarbah, a Gold Coast lawyer, romantically described the traditional social order in these terms: ‘In the African social system the formation of a pauper class is unknown, nor is there antagonism of class against class.’1 Similar views still prevail throughout most of Africa and the western world. Moreover, a rationale based on this ostensible ‘classlessness’ is employed by Africa's leaders to justify single-party rule and the repression of dissident elements in society, and to explain and defend policies of African socialism.

Numerous writers—ethnologists, linguists, educators, and lately literary critics and African creative writers themselves—have called attention to the problems of communication either from African to European or vice versa. The problems range from purely linguistic inequivalence in literal translations to the inequivalence between words and their referents in the cultures described, and further to the manifold difficulties of educators or writers wishing to develop successful communication between themselves and their audiences.

Boys shook their heads a number of times while girls covered their faces with white handkerchiefs as the pathetic story of Congolese first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was read out to a crowded audience by PYC dramatic group at the Lagos City College, Yaba, last Sunday.

This notice, describing the staging of a play by a youth club run by a Lagos newspaper, the West African Pilot, appeared in that newspaper on 31 March 1962.1 All over Africa Patrice Lumumba's meteoric rise and tragic death caught the imagination of men and women in all walks of life, and more especially that of the young. In Nigeria, however, this reaction is of particular interest. First of all, the news of Lumumba's murder in February 1961 provoked 'anti-white' rioting in a country where race relations had not been an overt issue for a decade. Demonstrations outside the United States Embassy in Lagos, the Federal capital, led to indiscriminate attacks on Europeans resulting in much damage to cars and serious injury to several individuals.2

Cuba's revolution is one of the genuine revolutions of our century. By the scope, depth, and irreversibility of the changes wrought, it has ushered in a new era in the history of the Americas and is as epochal an event as the American declaration of independence. Two outstanding works, the first by two British academics and two Latin Americans,1 the other by a distinguished French agronomist, Africanist, and adviser to the Cuban Government,2 have done much to illuminate the past, immediate, and future problems of the first American nation to embark on the lines of socialist development. These authors have for the first time assembled and synthesised dispassionately a prodigious amount of data concerning the economic life of this controversial nation; and they have managed to avoid the passions of the cold war. The two works are harmoniously dovetailed; the first treats its subject historically and analytically since the turn of the century, the second deals with the institutional strengths and weaknesses that have emerged since the revolution, and takes the story up to the end of 1963 and the appearance of ‘socialist monoculture’.

After the last war the Office of Scientific and Technical Research Overseas (O.R.S.T.O.M.), an official French organisation in Paris, set up a network of polyvalent institutes and research centres in French-speaking Africa, in Madagascar, New Caledonia, Tahiti, and Guiana. At the same time it organised a number of centres for specialised training in tropical research to supply its overseas institutes with staff, and asked the university and the French technical services to pay their salaries. This was how the Institut d'études centrafricaines (I.E.C.) came to be set up in 1946, under the direction of Professor L. J. Trochain, its aim being to cover the whole of the former French Equatorial Africa.

Until a few years ago, applied economic research in Germany was mainly concerned with the industrial countries and their economic growth. Then the problems of the developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America moved into the forefront of economic research programmes conducted both in the universities and by independent institutes. In 1961, the I.F.O. Institut für Writschaftsforschung (Institute for Economic Research) in Munich, the largest institute of its kind in Germany, which has more than 80 scientifically trained collaborators, set up the Afrika-Studienstelle to investigate the problems of economic development in tropical Africa.

This seminar was organised by the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, in collaboration with the Government of Northern Nigeria, and was held at the Institute of Administration, Zaria. It was the second of a series of U.N. regional seminars on Central Services to Local Authorities. The first was held in Delhi about a year age. A third, in Latin America, will follow next year.

The purpose of the seminar was to study the central agencies and institutions needed at the national level (or in a federal system at the state or provincial level) for the improvement of local government, and to assist local authorities by equipping their senior officers to contribute more effectively to local—and national—development.

The main theme of this Congress, held in the cité universitaire in Dijon, was the impact of agricultural changes on society in developed and developing countries. The modernisation of agriculture (industrialisation, commercialisation, decrease of manpower, increase of production per capita) is accompanied by a set of changes which affects not only the rural population itself; but also human society as a whole. Technological and economic changes have an influence on cultural and social structure. The Congress aimed to study this influence with emphasis on the effects on society as a whole, and to compare the experiences of developed and developing countries.

This conference, under the direction of Dr A. N. Allott of the University of London, was an outstanding success and marked a real development in the consideration of the subject. About half the participants, who numbered just under 40, were from universities in Africa, U.S.A., and Europe; the others were mainly from the government or the judiciary of various African countries. The annual general meeting of the International African Law Association also took place during the week.

Closer international co-operation at the national level—this was the basic idea behind the resolutions passed by this conference, where overseas volunteers from seven different organisations operating in the United Republic met government officials to discuss the possibilities of more detailed collaboration. The seven were: Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke, the British United Nations Association, Voluntary Service Overseas, Harvard—Project Tanzania, the American Friends Service Committee, Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst, and the United States Peace Corps, which alone has 180 volunteers at work.

At the fourth Cambridge conference on development problems, the role of industry was discussed by ministers, senior officials, economic advisers, and business executives, from 22 African, Asian, and Caribbean countries, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Have some, if not all, of Africa's new nations now reached the stage when it would pay them to put their biggest bets on quick industrialisation? Or must they go on putting most of their money and brains into bringing about an agricultural revolution first, before striving for industrial take-off? These questions started the conference off on one of its big themes.

The idea of setting up an all-African Development Bank was first expressed in a resolution passed at the All-African Peoples' Conference held in Tunis in January 1960. This was followed in 1961 by a unanimous resolution of the Economic Commission for Africa, requesting the Executive Secretary ‘to undertake a thorough study of the possibilities of establishing an African development bank’. The following year, E.C.A. established a committee of nine member states (Cameroun, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanganyika, and Tunisia), who were enjoined ‘to make all the necessary governmental and other contacts…to make complete and comprehensive studies into the financial and administrative structure of the proposed bank and into the nature and extent of its operations; to draft a charter… and to make recommendations on its location’.

Those interested in the progress of African socialism will welcome the recent decision of the Parti démocratique de Guinée (P.D.G.) to turn the official party organ, Horoya, into a daily newspaper instead of a weekly. This enables Africanists outside the Republic of Guinea to make a closer study of party activities and the evolution of party doctrine. The Government printing press, Imprimerie Patrice Lumumba, began the first daily issues in March 1964.

I was attending a conference sponsored by the University of East Africa in Dar es Salaam when the sad news of the death of Professor Potekhin came through. The world community of Africanists has suffered a great loss. The people of Africa have lost one of their most devoted friends.

Ivan Potekhin was born of a family of farmers in a small village in Siberia in 1903. No one can say what the destiny of this young Siberian peasant would have been had it not been for the Socialist revolution in Russia in October 1917. He was pulled into the revolutionary whirl and fought with arms to promote its ideals. This period in his life had a decisive role in shaping his political outlook and determining his future. From this time on, the idea of liberating man from political and social injustice became his creed. He devoted all his life to this.