Our country [Nigeria] is the largest single unit in Africa… we are not going to abdicate the position in which God Almighty has placed us… The whole black continent is looking up to this country to liberate it from thralldom.

The inter-state boundaries of Africa have changed remarkably little since the end of colonial rule, despite their lack of contiguity with the economic, ethnic, and political realities of African societies. In the few cases where attempts have been made to reject, in principle, the boundaries which were inherited at the time of independence, the demands for change have emerged in three major forms: as irredentist claims by established states based mainly on assertions of pre-colonial hegemony; as calls for the re-establishment of early colonial states which had been either partitioned or integrated into a larger state by the time of decolonisation; or as ethnic nationalist demands by partitioned communities.1

Does Zimbabwe provide the model for the likely transformation of white minority rule in the industrial heart of Southern Africa? With their morale boosted, the expectations of many black South Africans have been raised. Likewise many outside commentators predict the inevitable downfall of the white bastion along similar lines of escalating military confrontation after the last buffer state but Namibia has gone. Even Nationalist newspapers draw the lessons by admonishing the Government to pay attention to the ‘real leaders’ of the subordinates instead of unrepresentative collaborators. The Afrikaner political leadership uses the Rhodesian example to drum home its message of ‘adapt or die’ to a bewildered electorate.

The defeat of Amin and the liberation of Uganda by Nyerere's Tanzania is the most significant African event of the last decade. With it Africa came of age, able to criticise itself, no longer determined to support the honour of corrupt rulers against the world simply because they are black. Amin's buffoonery at last grew tiresome with surfeit. He was a clown who lived his life of power, self-indulgence, and tyranny to the utterance, making himself and his country a total jest, so that all the world must recognise the basic absurdity and iniquity of post-uhuru military régimes in Africa.

In 1968, Guenther Roth perceptively argued the utility of using the concept of patrimonialism to analyse rulership in developing states.1 Roth described two principal types: ‘the historical survival of traditionalist regimes’, of which he saw Ethiopia as the foremost example; and the ‘personal rulership on the basis of loyalties that do not require any belief in the ruler's unique personal qualifications, but are inextricably linked to material incentives and rewards’.2. His distinction remains apt and serves to focus our attention on two modal political forms that continue to find expression in post-independence Africa. However, these useful categories are not mutually exclusive, and need further amplification if they are to provide much insight into the rich variety of political experimentation that still goes on throughout the continent. Moreover, since the terminology is self-consciously borrowed from Max Weber, both the traditional and modern matrices of African patrimonialism need to be explored briefly lest the reference to the Weberian connection constricts rather than enlarges the analysis.

In the making of a post-independence Namibian society, there are few areas of agreement between the contending parties in the contemporary struggle for power. Nevertheless, both the South-West Africa People's Organisation and the South African-backed Turnhalle groups have expressed the need to establish tertiary-level education in Namibia. The absence of a university and an associated intellectual community means that, in Richard Moorsom's words, ‘Namibian society lacks the essential means either of attracting social concern or transmitting basic information’. The ramifications of this are both sharply apparent and regrettable:

The fascinating events of the Ethiopian revolution have led to an explosion of papers, articles, and books.1 However, only a few studies published since 1974 are underpinned with original field work. Most are based largely on combinations of deductive logic and newspaper reports, discussions with foreign-service officers, interviews with political exiles and academic visitors, and close reading of officially released government documents. Such methodological approaches have a rational, factual content which should be approached with caution, for lack of access to data may lead to the reification of incorrect facts by subsequent authors who footnote the reports of others. Since there is increasing evidence that Ethiopia will be closed to field research for some time, and that academic involution will occur as scholars convince themselves of the validity of data reported by others, it seems useful for Ethiopianists to remind themselves how close they are to the early commentators on Lenin's Russia, or the China watchers of the 1950s,2 by considering only one of several cautionary tales about facts reported in the increasing number of articles on the Ethiopian revolution.3