Development does not occur at the same rate everywhere. The resultant unequal distribution of development concerns planners throughout the world. A variety of spatial investment strategies which affect the development pattern have been proposed. They range from the dispersed, equality oriented investment of Tanzania's ujamaa to the primate city concentration of Ivory Coast's efficiency oriented “African Riviera” project in Abidjan. Most countries throughout the world have sought a middle course—one of “deconcentrated concentration”—in an attempt to balance efficiency and equality considerations. Specifically they have chosen to invest their development capital in “growth centers”—urban areas that have a high potential for generating development in their immediate area and throughout their region. This policy prescription is based on the optimistic belief that development generated in the urban center will spread to the hinterlands of the region.

Kenya has explicitly incorporated a policy of growth centers into their Development Plans. That the country's planners subscribe to the belief of positive spread effects is evident in the following Plan statements:

The interdependence between rural and urban areas grows in the process of development and with it comes the enhancement of the role of the town as the producer of goods and services and the consumer of agricultural production. This interaction leads to cumulative self-sustaining growth (Kenya, 1974a: 114).

Rural life cannot be complete without towns any more than towns can be complete without access to the countryside, and it will be an objective of Government policy to promote the growth of a number of towns to a size where they are large enough to provide the people of the surrounding districts with many of the facilities and amenities available in a modern city (Kenya, 1969: 15).

A curious state of uncertainty existed, still exists, and may never be wholly removed, as to the extent of land alienated by the chiefs of the Gold Coast during the concessions scramble which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The degree of uncertainty is at once brought out by the following two views on the matter. On the one hand, it is said (Belfield's Report, 1912: paras. 38-50) that the area of land alienated was only a fractional proportion of the total area of the Gold Coast, amounting to no more than one twenty-seventh of the area. On the other hand, it is said (WALC Draft Report, 1916: paras. 157 and 161) that the chiefs of the Gold Coast alienated an area which actually exceeded the total area of the territory itself. The objects of this article are three: first, to describe the nature and character of the concessions scramble which occurred in the Gold Coast during the period under consideration; secondly, to examine critically the opposing views as to the extent of land alienated and show where the truth is likely to be; and thirdly, to describe the interesting social and economic problems which resulted from indiscriminate alienation of land in the Gold Coast during the period, and the reaction of British officials to such problems.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gold Coast received great publicity in Europe as a great producer of gold. Prospectors and concession hunters flocked to the area. They entered negotiations with the chiefs and elders, who were induced by offers of “big money” to execute documents granting mining and other rights over vast territories of stool land, in which all the stool subjects had an interest.

This article will identify some of the problems in technical education during the first decade of independence and then attempt to assess critically official attempts to solve these. Suggestions will also be made to indicate what future trends ought to be in national interests.

One problem is that the term “technical” as used in Kenyan education embraces a wide range of meaning. At one end of the spectrum, any consultant from abroad, be he a football coach or a tax specialist, is referred to as a technical adviser. At the other extreme “technical education” refers to the training of craftsmen, technicians, business administrators, secretaries, agriculturists and the like, personnel who are involved in production in industry. Generally most official reports allude to craftsmen and technicians, without drawing a distinction between the two, when they refer to technical training; yet others make a distinction between the types trained.

Another problem which confronted administrators was raising the quality of technical education given in specialized secondary schools run by the Ministry of Education. The four secondary technical schools located in Nairobi, Nakuru, Mombasa, and Sigalagala are well equipped. In 1973 these had a total enrollment of 2,215 students. The Wamalwa Commission (1972), however, had cause to complain about the standards of the eight secondary vocational schools which had a total enrollment of 3,718 students in 1973; most of these students left school “with no terminal qualifications of marketable value.” These eight schools which were located at Kabete, Kaiboi, Machakos, Mawengo, Meru, Kisumu, and Nakuru offered only pre-craft training in masonry, carpentry, and the allied trades.

It is a common belief, both within and without Nigeria, that in 1967 there was a sharp reversal in Nigerian foreign relations. That year, it is claimed, marked the end of Nigeria's pro-western and anti-Soviet stances. At the extreme, proponents of this view seek to ridicule Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the first prime minister, as essentially a Western stooge and, conversely though unwittingly, to laud the post-1967 Gowon regime as a veritable independent actor, guided solely by objective requirements of the national interest. This claim (and stereotype-creating) is based on asymmetirc evidence and unsystematic analysis: asymmetric, because it relies on Nigeria's image of and attitude towards the Soviet Union to the exclusion of the corresponding Soviet image and attitudes which might have conditioned Nigeria's Soviet policy in the first place; and unsystematic, because it eschews the political, economic and ideological milieu in which Nigerian-Soviet relations operate. One danger, especially for policy making and policy outcome, is the possible exaggeration of superficial and ephemeral changes to obscure fundamental and enduring continuity in relations. This paper aims to put Nigerian-Soviet relations in a perspective that avoids this failing and, in the process, to underscore the factors of continuity which, it is believed, will determine the future prospects.

Nigerian-Soviet relations, Douglas Anglin (1964: 257) once observed, are determined by “the images which each country has of the other.” Before Nigeria's independence on October 1, 1960, these images were far from flattering. All evidence indicates that Nigerian leaders, like their counterparts in other developing countries, had a morbid fear of communism and communist infiltration and subversion (see indications in House of Representatives Debates, henceforth HRD, August 1, 1958: 85; February 12, 1959: 210; and March 1959: 46-48).

The political climate of the post-war world did not permit the United States to embark on a new era of isolationism in 1945, but few Americans demonstrated much awareness of Asian or African developments. French North Africa was more familiar than many colonial areas because American military operations during the war had acquainted the public with Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. When demonstrations against French control erupted throughout the Maghrib after VE Day, a minority of Americans recognized that this region of French rule, but of intensely nationalist feelings, could become a serious trouble spot. With the subsiding of the riots, however, even the largest newspapers in the United States offered only limited information on North African events.

During the next decade, leaders of the independence movements waged a campaign to familiarize Americans with the situation in their countries and gain support for their views on how Franco-Maghribi problems could best be resolved. In outlining that campaign and discussing its strategy, this essay attempts to asses the importance which North Africans attached to American sympathy, the methods which they utilized to attain it, and the results which they achieved.

Late in 1946, a spokesman for the Committee for the Liberation of North Africa called the public's attention to the inadequacy of the coverage of the American press. In a lengthy letter to the New York Times, M. Aboul Ahrass accused France of denying foreign newsmen access to North Africa because of the fear that their reports would discredit the French administrations (December 30, 1946: 18).

A radical change in an educational system, as well as being the result of a social revolution, is a means of consolidating it. In a developing nation like Ethiopia which is undergoing a social upheaval, education has a vital role to play. It permits the articulation of the aspirations of the masses as a subject fit for knowledge. It helps to associate knowledge with the critique of the oppressive conditions of life and commits it to the transformation of society and the development of human potentialities.

It is a truism that education, as a conveyer belt of human values, skills, ideas, and facts, is an integral aspect of a society's reproduction of itself. The conflicts and tensions that germinate in a given society, the solutions, both functional and dysfunctional, that the political system generates to resolve them find their way into the educational system and condition its structure and content.

The educational system and the education imparted therein could even be in certain situations, the expression, indeed the embodiment of one of society's tensions, and as such, is transformed into a catalyst—if not of social change, at least of social awareness that leads to the development of an action oriented ideology. The study presented here will attempt to elaborate on these different aspects of education through an empirical investigation of the relationship between traditional education and socio-political processes in Ethiopia in the course of this millenium.

The pioneering book The Negro, by W.E.B. Du Bois (1915), more than fifty years ago claimed a place for Africa in world history and opened the whole field of black historiography. It is fair to say that until its publication in 1915 the serious study of Africans at home and abroad had been neglected. Aspects of African and black American history had been surveyed but no synoptic view of Africans and people of African descent throughout the world had been undertaken, nor had the black man's right to be considered an integral part of human history been established. The originality of the book lies in its attempt “to pull together into one succinct but comprehensive whole the different elements of African history.” What we now frequently refer to as the “African Diaspora” still challenges historians, and it seems that there has not yet appeared a general history of the black race that goes much further than The Negro. It is equally important to note here that not much has been done in terms of the development of comprehensive African studies centers. As a matter of fact, I believe—although many Africanists, I know, would disagree with me—that the failure of African area studies centers to develop programs which embrace “The Black Diaspora” was partly responsible for the birth of separate Afro-American studies departments and Afro-Caribbean studies departments in the 1960s. This apparent lack of a Pan-Africanist perspective in African studies programs has created problems yet to be dealt with by American academia.