Introduction

For the most part, in formulating and evaluating ‘theories’ of race and ethnic relations, Western scholars rely disproportionately on descriptive analyses of relevant situations in Western societies provided by other Western scholars, thereby entrenching the myopia and ethnocentric bias from which scholarly studies of these questions have perennially suffered. In an effort to open a small window on the wider world and to persuade colleagues to devote more time to the systematic study of foreign situations, I present here a comparative analysis of data from twenty-seven contemporary African states in an attempt to determine the relative significance of pluralism, race and ethnicity for social order and political stability in these societies. I do so in the belief that better understanding of the ways in which these three sets of variables affect conditions of social order and political stability in the emergent ‘nation-states’ of post-colonial Africa may provide a sound base for general theories of race and ethnicity in modern societies. To that end I shall outline the social bases and developments of these twenty-seven countries up to the end of 1982, as that was the latest date for which such information was readily available at the time of writing.

In this paper I use data drawn from the following states: Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, the Ivory Coast, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Sāo Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and Upper Volta.