For the past three years or so, the world has been witnessing momentous changes. The world watched as the Berlin Wall came crashing to the ground; as the Solidarity Movement in Poland completed its methodical, relentless dismantlement of Polish Communism; and as the people of Czechoslovakia fashioned their velvet revolution. Even as this was happening, no one expected that it was just a matter of months before the entire Soviet Bloc would be in pieces. We were unprepared for such dramatic social changes. We had come to assume unquestioningly that the Cold War, East and West, Communism and Capitalism in ominous tension would always be with us. But, today we live in what is being called a unipolar world, as the United States and what is left of the former Soviet Bloc have decided to cooperate rather than compete on the world stage (Blight and Weiss 1992). President George Bush once dubbed this the “Era of the New World Order.”

One of the primary defining features of the “New World Order” is the resurgence of nationalism among large ethnic groups heretofore incorporated into multi-ethnic states. Moreover, the conflicts which grow from such developments have a high propensity to be internationalized. Take, for examples, the rebellion of the Baltic states against the former Soviet Union, or the breakup of Yugoslavia, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. In Africa domestic conflicts in Sudan, Somalia and Mozambique, to name only a few places, have created refugee flows and the flow of armed rebels across national borders, thus internationalizing what were domestic conflicts (Weiner 1992).

Understanding how Westerners have been perceived by the African cultures they are ostensibly studying constitutes an instructive reversal of the classical subject-object relationship in Africanist research. By examining the perception of the White Man as embodied in Hausa folklore pertaining to the colonial era we gain a firmer grasp of the indigenous perspective on this period of Nigérien and Nigerian history and better appreciate the significance of clientship as a factor in the colonial relationship. We also find confirmation for the contrast school of colonial historiography which argues that the differences between French and British modes of administration were substantively important for the Africans directly affected by them. While specifically related to African-European relations during the colonial era, the lessons gleaned from an investigation of Hausa ethno-ethnohistory may be generally applicable to the even more ambivalent relationship between social scientist and host community in contemporary Africa.

Western treatment of African history has evolved through several distinct phases. The first phase can be characterized as outright denial: Bereft of textual references to, or other corroborative documents from, the dark continent, the West generally denied that Africa had a history. This myth of a static, timeless, ahistorical Africa eventually gave way to the second, more substantive phase in which precolonial empire formation and dissolution was documented and archaeologically verified. African scholars, such as Diop, were instrumental in this renaissance of African historicism in the West.

Since its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has emerged as one of the principal forces in African international relations. Harare, the capital, has emerged as a major diplomatic center and Zimbabwe has served in major leadership positions, both at the United Nations, where, only two years after independence it was unanimously elected to the Security Council, and in the Non-Aligned Movement, which Zimbabwe was selected to chair in 1986. In this capacity, and as a member of the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe actively participated in the decolonization of Namibia and has actively lobbied the international community for comprehensive sanctions against South Africa.

Unlike other newly independent states in Africa, the government of Robert Mugabe brought with it a long heritage of activity in international affairs. This pattern of international activity by Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front)— commonly referred to as ZANU(PF)—grew out of its pursuit of a protracted, mass-based, and internationally supported armed struggle for independence. Thus, to understand the foreign policy of Zimbabwe, it is necessary to examine the international activities of ZANU prior to independence, when it was a liberation movement. It is precisely this link between liberation movements, sovereignty and foreign policy which is the focus of this study. Such an approach not only enables us to expand our notion of sovereignty, but also enables us to develop new approaches to the comparative study of African and third world foreign policy.

Trying to avoid lending authority to any one culture over others, current advocates of multiculturalism generally emphasize the appreciation of difference among cultures. Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina today provide horrifying evidence that difference can have precisely the opposite impact. On the one hand, difference can be necessary to national self-confidence, but, on the other, it can stir destructive tribal or national pride. Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart represents the cultural roots of the Igbos in order to provide self-confidence, but at the same time he refers them to universal principles which vitiate their destructive potential. Seeing his duty as a writer in a new nation as showing his people the dignity that they lost during the colonial period, he sets out to illustrate that before the European colonial powers entered Africa, the Igbos “had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity” (1973, 8). Achebe, however, cannot achieve his goal merely by representing difference; rather he must depict an Igbo society which moderns can see as having dignity. What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they have achieved the foundations of what most people seek today—democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, a viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art. Achebe apppears to have tested Igbo culture against the goals of modern liberal democracy and to have set out to show how the Igbo meet those standards.

The debate about the state in the Third World has led to the emergence of different paradigms. Although still in use, the bureaucratic-authoritarian and the inherited postcolonial state theses have been superseded in recent years by new models. There has been a resurgence of Weberian analyses of the state in third world studies, especially those dealing with Africa. The African state has been referred to as weak, soft, declined, absent, decayed, juridical, or normative. Many of the writings define and explain the problem the same way. One can say these studies are based on the soft state or declined state paradigm, even though some of them rely more explicitly on Max Weber's notion of patrimonialism. Even those writings in which soft state terminology is not explicit are, in fact, linked to the soft state paradigm (see Osaghae 1989). As Robert Fatten, Jr. correctly points out, since the 1950s, all the different ideological currents in African studies have been unable to “move beyond the talismatic concept of the ‘soft’ or non-institutionalized state” (1989, 170). In the 1980s and 1990s, the concept has been even more closely identified with Africa. Although Gunnar Myrdal was the first to use the term soft state to characterize the states in South Asia (Myrdal 1968, 66, 277, 895-900) and others have recently applied it to the state in the Third World in general (see Migdal, 1988), the concept has been given a particularly African flavor by those writing about Africa. Consistent with the prevailing view that Asian and Latin American countries are different and better off than African countries, Myrdal's initial use of the concept—questionable as it was even in his hands—has been removed from Asia and almost exclusively applied to Africa. Even those writers who attempt to apply the concept to the Third World in general acknowledge this almost exclusive use of the term but still tend to reinforce it. Because of its pervasive influence through modernization theory's notion of institutionalization, the soft state paradigm and its sui generis, particularistic assumptions and explanations about Africa frame the debate on today's democratization process in Africa.