Hunger is the most immediate, visible, and compelling symptom of a continent-wide agricultural breakdown in tropical Africa. The crisis of food deficits has now become so perennial and so widespread that it can no longer be understood as the outcome of particular political or climatic occurrences such as wars, ethnic strife, or drought. SubSaharan Africa is the only region in the world where food production per capita has declined during the past two decades. As a result, the average calorie intake per capita has now fallen below minimal nutritional standards in a majority of African countries. By current estimates, approximately 150 million out of Africa's 450 million people suffer from some form of malnutrition originating in an inadequate supply of foodstuffs. This abysmal picture is further highlighted by the fact that the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations recently indicated that no fewer than 28 African countries were faced with food shortages so critical that further famine might occur imminently. This stark reality challenges fundamentally our earlier assumptions about the possibility of economic devlopment.

In a recent study of 90 developing countries by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, 52 of them were found to have more than 15 per cent of their populations undernourished. This figure was determined using the F.A.O. minimum intake of 1,600 calories per day, only about half of that of the average diet of citizens in the ‘First World’. In Black Africa, 29 of the 33 independent nations included in the F.A.O. study fall into the category of undernourished. Contributions of aid in the form of food and food-production technology are therefore extremely important to this region. Obtaining an adequate supply of food for their people must be high on the priority list for governments in sub-Saharan Africa, and is the focus of this article.

A 1980 World Bank study paints a bleak picture of the current economic situation in sub-Saharan Africa, where most countries are at the bottom of the development pyramid. They have low incomes per capita, and their rates of economic growth have fallen behind Asian countries of comparable low income. Moreover, population growth in Africa is accelerating while trends in other developing regions suggest a slowing down.

It is still frequently asserted that the economic sluggishness plaguing most Third-World countries stems from a general lack of resources. The scarcity of capital in both the public and private sectors, it is claimed, prevents the investment needed to achieve development. On the other hand, a fewdeveloping countries with highly profitable exports – notably those that export oil – reap large financial surpluses, including foreign exchange, but do not invest them locally in productive activities. The problem here is supposed to be insufficient ‘absorptive capacity’ due to the absence of skilled personnel and inadequate physical and social infrastructure, restricting the translation of financial resources into real investment. The situation in Botswana provides a test for both these hypotheses, making possible a deeper understanding of the potential rôle of financial resources in the development process.

National integration continues to be a matter of considerable debate and experiment among those concerned with the administration of Zaïre, but has attracted little attention elsewhere, even within the country. It is not to be confused with another policy – or alleged policy – that of suppressing tribalism in favour of national solidarity. Although ‘tribalism’ and ‘regionalism’ are constantly denounced by President Mobutu Sese Seko and other officials, they are major sources of corruption which the Government, by its practice, actively encourages by frequently reassigning all personnel in the higher ranks of the public service, and making sure that an ethnic mix is maintained in every agency. Officers commonly complain that the only thing that matters is one's tribal designation, not one's ability or performance. Engineered ‘tribalism’ of this sort has nothing to do with ancestral traditions and communal habits.

This article seeks to relate a biographical case-study to some ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ ways of thinking about ethnicity. The Kenyan political leader Tom Mboya, who was active in labour and political affairs from 1951 until his death in 1969, was widely regarded as genuinely non-tribalist in his politics. Yet he exercised successful leadership within a political system characterised very strongly, according to a great many observers and participants, by the play of ethnic forces. His would appear to be a strikingly deviant case, and hence may be seen as a useful point of departure for a reconsideration of ideas about ethnic factors in political leadership.

The distribution of personal incomes in contemporary African societies is powerfully influenced by public-sector salary and wage structures. Even where capitalist and hence pro private-enterprise development strategies have been openly pursued, as in Kenya, the public service accounts for over 40 per cent of total employment in the modern sector. Where more statist, quasi-socialist strategies have been abopted, as in Ghana and Tanzania, this percentage rises to over 70. Clearly, then, any discussion of income distribution and the potential rôle of incomes policy hinges on an adequate understanding of the processes that determine remuneration in the public sector. And this in turn requires a comprehensive historical analysis of the political economy of each society – in particular, the process of class formation and the rôle of the state.

Although it has been estimated that women produce more than 60 per cent of the food crops in many African countries, less than one in five has found employment in wage-earning occupations as development has occurred. Why has this happened? Our hypothesis is that there are two primary constraints on their improved economic status in addition to tradition and culture, namely: lack of access to education and to capital. Access to land and to information may be important handicaps in some areas, but are assumed to be of less general significance.

The rise of the feminist movement in the West has served to stimulate serious research on sex rôles and inequalities, and the recent growth in the number of African and female researchers has had an invigorating effect on various arguments about the status of women in Africa. So far, however, the controversy has generated more heat than light, as a result of both the relative paucity of sound research findings and the combined effects of the sex, race, and ideology of researchers.