Contemporary Black Africa can be divided into wide regions which are clearly different from one another. But it is more difficult to analyse these differences – and to study their nature, origin, and effects – than to see them.

There are a wide variety of relationships binding together the states of the modern international community. They are all, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent upon the exchange of various kinds of resources between themselves. These resources include merchandise goods, capital, technology, labour and information. Such exchanges imply a certain amount of reciprocal influence.

Malawi has her origins, as a separate state, in the British Central Africa Protectorate, declared in 1891 to prevent the Portuguese from claiming the Lake Malawi region. In 1907 the Protectorate was renamed Nyasaland, a title which was retained until independence in 1964. It is with the few years before independence, and the eight years since, that this article is concerned, and it deals with the Africanisation of the Administrative Service during this period.

Since World War II anthropological research in the new nations has come under increasing criticism on both ideological and pragmatic grounds. To those who regard the creation of a modern life-style and cultural integration as urgent national goals, the concern with traditional institutions seems conservative, if not reactionary, and any interest in ethnicity seems divisive. To those responsible for planning rural development, the anthropologist's detailed report on a single community all too often seems unnecessarily obscured by professional quibbles, devoid of concrete policy recommendations, and of unknown representativeness.

On 24 November 1971 the British and Rhodesian Governments agreed on a set of proposals designed to bring to an end the constitutional dispute between their two countries.1 A final endorsement of the proposals by ‘the people of Rhodesia as a whole’ would result in the lifting of British economic sanctions,2 and the recognition of Rhodesia as an independent state and the present régime as the legal Government. The terms of this settlement have been widely publicised and will therefore not be reproduced here. However, the essential features of the constitutional mechanism as far as they may have been affected by economic trends are as follows:

The first substantive point raised in the 1972 communiqué issued by Premier Chou En-Lai and President Richard Nixon at the conclusion of their meetings in Peking, was that ‘extensive, earnest and frank discussions were held… on the normalisation of relations' between their two countries.1 In other words, after more than 20 years of non-recognition and hostility, it was agreed to accept areas of disagreement, and to move towards co-operation in matters of mutual interest. There was an implicit acknowledgement of the futility of efforts, either to initiate instant revolution, or to prevent basic changes inside the nation-state system, and of the inevitable need to work within the realities of international power.

Botswana, a country of some 648,000 people unevenly distributed over more than 600,000 square kilometres, is an extremely poor nation whose estimated income per capita is less than $100 per annum. It is land-locked and dependent upon transport routes through neighbouring South Africa and Rhodesia. Frequent droughts cause major losses in Botswana's cattle herds, whose meat provides the country with its major export earnings. According to the 1964 census, almost 228,000 of the 250,000 workers were in agriculture, forestry, hunting, and fishing, and a 1967–8 survey found only 28,148 in salaried employment. During 1967 an additional 22,735 Batswana were working in the mines of South Africa. Of the present number of jobs (estimated at 2,000) requiring the minimum educational standard of School Certificate, less than one-quarter are currently filled by Botswana citizens. In 1967 some 258 students – 55 per cent of those who sat for the examination – received the Junior Certificate (after three years of secondary education) and 66 students - 80 per cent of those who sat – received the Cambridge School Certificate (after five years of secondary education).

A recent article in this Journal, X, I, May 1972, by Robert E. Miller and Peter R. Carter on ‘A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Liberia’, examined the general cost pattern inherent in concession agreements based upon her ‘Open-Door Policy’, and noted that ‘officials of the Government of Liberia who are responsible for negotiating foreign concessionaire agreements… now recognise this pattern and hopefully plan better bargains in the future’. I wish to focus attention on Liberia's external debts, a particular cost largely resulting from that policy.

As a member of the franc zone, the devaluation of the Ivory Coast currency – the C.F.A. franc – was automatic upon the French devaluation of August 1969. The purpose of this short article is to analyse the implications and consequences of the French action for the Ivory Coast, in the hope that this will throw some light on the pros and cons of such a centre–periphery monetary union.

In his recent article on ‘The Uganda Coup – class action by the military’ in this Journal, x, 1, May 1972, Dr Michael F. Lofchie points to two apparent paradoxes in the military takeover: Why did the army move against a regime to which it had previously been loyal? And why, in doing so, did it ally itself with the Ganda ‘civil service and coffee growing elite’ towards which it had shown nothing but hostility in the past? The only adequate explanation, we are told, is that these privileged groups were drawn together by a determination to defend their status against the threat implicit in President Obote's commitment to socialism. Confronted by egalitarian pressures they discovered a basis for common action in a class interest which transcended tribal rivalries.

In his recent article in this Journal, X, I, May 1972, Dr Michael F. Lofchie catalogued what he considers to be the major factors contributing to the Uganda coup. In his analysis, Lofchie emphasises President Obote's ‘Move to the Left’ ideology for its threat to the privileged position of the military: ‘The coup of January 1971 was the army's political response to an increasingly socialist régime whose qualitariar, domestic policies posed more and more of a threat to the military's economic privileges.’