The novels of an area tell a tale: Obi Okonkwo's career as a civil servant in Lagos, Kamara's political life in Sierra Leone, and Baako's return to a changed Ghana. But they also say more in that they depict much of the reality of the countries and their peoples, their ideas and goals, and the historical and contemporary forces which influence them. In this way, therefore, the literature contains both fictive and factual essences.

The establishment of the Union du Maghreb arabe (U.M.A.) at the 1989 summit held in Marrakech is the culmination of over three decades of pan-Maghreb rhetoric. As claimed recently, there have been plenty of joint agreements on paper, but ‘unfortunately the importance given to these events is inversely proportional to their real application and effectiveness’.

After yet another period of unrest and spreading resistance among the black majority, the Pretoria régime struck back in February 1988. Seventeen organisations that had manoeuvred precariously on the margins of legal toleration were summarily banned – that is, prohibited from ‘carrying on or performing any activities or act whatever’–many of their leaders were detained, while the survivors were harried underground.

There is evidence of a new trend in recent scholarship on African political economy: an effort to tip the scale towards the latter end of the so-called state-society balance. This nascent movement portends to serve as a corrective to past academic work devoted to defining and delineating the form and nature of the African state. The statist literature has traditionally formed two camps, one based on liberal, neo-classical theory, and the other informed by the neo-Marxist dependencia model. No matter what the approach, in these studies the state is the central locus of macro-economic and political processes: as the centre of resource extraction and distribution, and the determinant of the nature of national politics, the state is fixated upon as the source of, and/or solution to, the economic status of African societies.

Whilst the so-called ‘new right’ shrilly proclaims victory for capitalism and liberal democracy in the cold war, quieter voices see in the death agonies of European Stalinism the seeds of socialism more as it was meant to be. I refer not any triumphal Trotskyist depiction of the popular overthrow of bureaucratised ruling classes, but rather to wide-spread searchings throughout Eastern Europe for ‘a third – and better – way’. From this perspective, however much the electoral thaw may give rise to stridently anti-communist, anti-central planning, pro free-market parties, the dynamics of the new situation will virtually require pursuit of a mixed economy featuring selective state intervention.

It was in 1960, the year of independence and therefore a time of celebration and festivities in Nigeria, that Wole Soyinka, after just over five years in Britain (three at the University of Leeds and two at the Royal Court Theatre, London), returned to his native land. This was moreover, according to some sources, a period in which he undertook empirical research into festivities of a different kind, which subsequently supplied a specific input into the ritualism of his early plays.

For a long time, women's work has not been valued very highly, mainly because of the belief in many cultures that whatever is undertaken in the house is a natural duty and/or act of love for the husband and the family. Indeed, in many parts of subsistence Africa, the heavy duties performed by women in preparing, planting, weeding, and harvesting crops are regarded as ‘domestic’ commitments and hence not serious labour. This situation can hardly be said to be characteristic of only ‘non-developed’ societies, in which patriarchal attitudes are still dominant, since according to a 1985 study, although women make up more than half of the world's population and do two-thirds of the world's working hours, they receive only one-hundredth of the worl'ds property. This state of affairs, however, is now changing, because as women everywhere unite in order to achieve legal, social, and economic equality, the value attached to their work naturally increases.

Alfredo Fierro was probably going too far when he characterised modern political theology as ‘operating under the sign of Marx’. Nevertheless, ever since Gustavo Gutierrez dropped the bombshell of ‘Liberation Theology’ on the playground of western theologians, it is clear that Marxism cannot be ignored in any relevant twentieth-century explication of the Christian faith. Gutierrez focused in particular upon two aspects of Marx's thought: the action of man in human history, and the transformation of the world in the interests of the oppressed. These are perhaps also the most important aspects of Marxism for an understanding of recent developments in South African theology today.