One inevitable result of successful insurgencies is the myth of their uniformity. Certainly, contemporary guerrillas have drawn upon the pioneering.Chinese model of a people's war and the widely-publicised military thought of Mao Tse-tung. This application has led some observers to conclude that there is imitation rather than selection by guerrilla cadres

Providing a good standard of living for all the peoples of Africa means that there must be more than simple economic growth. The alleviation of tremendous poverty requires special measures to ensure that those at the bottom of the social structure benefit by receiving part of the product of growth. Two problems of equal importance involve: first, the necessity for changing the life-styles of peoples and the economic forces of production of centuries; and secondly, the creation of the appropriate political apparatus to guarantee a more suitable distribution of the new goods that are produced. Francophone planners soon after the end of World War II used the word encadrement to convey a sense of the processes and institutions involved in coping with these problems.

I Want to indicate how the political economy of contemporary Africa is to be explained, and what might reasonably be conjectured about its development. I am mainly interested in the salient features, namely: intense ethnic conflict, the single-party system, the high incidence of efficiency norms in political competition, the recurrence of military coups, political repression, and the poor performance at economic development.

A Large volume of transactions between states goes through bilateral channels associated with traditional diplomacy. Accordingly, each independent African state has established its network of formal contacts with those members of the international community it considers friendly, and who similarly reciprocate this gesture of good will. Indeed, a noticeable world-wide trend in the last decade has been to diversify and intensify such diplomatic contacts because of the increasing complexity and interdependence of the contemporary international system. But bilateral relations between states, pervasive as they are, by no means constitute the totality of channels of international transactions.

The virtuousness of the intentions conveyed by David Newsom's homily is indeed difficult to reconcile with the staggering evidence to the contrary recently disclosed through senatorial investigations, press reports, and various other sources. In the context of the post-Watergate era – when Americans have been told of the massive and direct involvement of the C.I.A. in the Angolan civil war, of the assassination plans against the late Patrice Lumumba, and of clandestine activities in Gabon and Madagascar – the least that one can say of such a statement is that it strains credulity.

Samir Amin has recently argued that black African countries are all characterised by extreme forms of underdevelopment. In his view, this situation is produced by the dependency of African states on more developed countries that is a consequence of the continent's common historical experience of economic exploitation by European-organised mercantilism, the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. Moreover, via the mechanisms of western-based neo-colonialism, African under-development has been perpetuated, and perhaps even increased, during the achievement of political independence over the past 25 years.

The interdependence between art and society, and the subsequent question of the function of art, belong to the old debate which has divided the artistic world into two broad factions. Radical writers and critics, sometimes labelled as ‘revolutionary’, think that the artistic universe is intimately connected with the socio-political context in which creativity takes place, and hence that art must play an active rôle in the society. The ‘conservatives’, while not necessarily opposing the active involvement of individual artists in politics, cleave to the view of art for its own sake and truth.

Although it has long been realised that ‘developing’ countries do not have to follow the example of ‘developed’ nations, the mere use of the terms ‘nation-building’ and ‘national integration’ implies a straight line of ‘progress’ from dispersed sub-national communities towards the integrated entity of the nation-state. Add the eagerness of political leaders in the Third World to exert effective control over the population in the absence of established institutions, if possible by becoming the focus of popular solidarity, and the reasons for this emphasis on the notion of national integration become more apparent.

Decolonisation is the great revolution of the twentieth century. Since the opening of the first U.N. General Assembly in 1946, over one billion people inhabiting 76 new states – nearly one-third of the human race – have attained political independence as of 1974. But until the final demise of external domination is achieved, the tasks of decolonisation are not yet complete. There remain the intractable problems of Southern Africa, as well as a variety of small territories still under alien rule. Given recent indications of the politicisation of blacks in the white redoubt, as well as the independence of Mozambique and Angola, it is a particularly appropriate time to take stock of the decolonisation movement.

The rise and fall of the settler societies in Africa – in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa – is to be understood in relation to the global expansion and limited contraction of European capitalism, and in the light of the notions of underdevelopment and dependency. In strong contrast with the general experience of the Third World, settler societies show a capacity for independent capitalist development, built upon the heavy exploitation of African land and labour, and policies of economic nationalism externally. They thereby avoid relegation to the periphery of the world system as perpetual suppliers of raw materials, and as providers of dependent domestic markets for the manufactures of the metropole. In the process, the colon state assumes an ambivalent position in relation to imperialism in that it co-operates with the metropole, providing a secure and cheap occupation of a strategic area in return for political support and military aid.

In the last decade the states of black Africa have taken over a score of large industries owned by multi-national corporations and thousands of small enterprises owned by non-African residents. The methods of takeover, the targets, and the stated justifications vary from country to country, and yet there is a pattern throughout it all. Africans want control in their own house. This article reviews the facts of the takings in black Africa, considers the changing international law of nationalisation, and looks into the future of this confrontation between Africans and foreigners.

This article grew out of a more detailed study of all tried cases of homicide in Western Nigeria from 1966 to 1972. While reading more than I00 court transcripts and trial opinions, I was struck by what seemed an inordinately large number of accused with symptoms which westerners associate with mental or emotional illness. I was also conscious of judges being forced to apply an awkward, and at best difficult, standard for the determination of criminal insanity with sparse direct evidence and, in many cases, without the help of expert testimony.

The frustrated aspirations of most Africans for a significantly better life following independence have evoked considerable attention. A growing number of scholars are accounting for the situation in terms of a set of loosely connected propositions contained in the ‘underdevelopment theory’,, at the core of which is the idea that colonialist/neocolonialist countries have created the conditions of underdevelopment by:

(i) encouraging the entry of foreign investment which extracted/extracts a significant proportion of the surplus produced;

(ii) fostering a commercial bourgeoisie which failed/fails to use its profits for productive investment purposes; and

(iii) promoting an indigenous class which acted/acts in the interest of the imperial power to perpetuate the condition of underdevelopment.

On 21 October 1969 the duly elected civilian Government of Somalia was overthrown by the armed forces. General Maxamed Siyad Barre took the helm of the Supreme Revolutionary Council, which proclaimed itself the ‘guardian and saviour of the nation’. The coup has been seen by some as the breakdown of a true democracy, and by others as the foundation of a ‘socialist progressive society’. The egalitarian Somalis have now experienced both a parliamentary democracy and a military oligarchy. Under which have they fared better? Now that President Siyad and the S.R.C. have been ruling Somalia for seven years, perhaps a sober assessment of their performance, in contrast to that of the civilian régime, is in order.

In February 1975, following a major cabinet reshuffle, General Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri reaffirmed his Government's basic commitment to the pursuit of an Afro-Arab foreign policy, and noted that this was not tied to particular personalities. For just as the appointment of the distinguished diplomat, Mansour Khalid, as Foreign Minister in August 1971, had prompted charges that the Sudan's Arab ties were to be sacrificed to African interests, so his departure from office to become Minister of Education aroused speculation that greater Arab involvement, if not actual African disengagement, would now follow.

For a long time ‘emancipation’ in Africa meant solely liberation from European rule. But when 17 African states became independent in 1960 and when from 1956 to 1966 32 countries finally attained national sovereignty, the continent, in part, emancipated itself from this type of colonial rule. Only in Southern Africa is it impossible to speak of emancipation in international legal terms. This state of affairs has engendered a strong sense of solidarity among independent African nations vis-à-vis the ‘unresolved’ area of the continent, as reflected in every conference of the Organisation of African Unity, as well as in many United Nations resolutions. However, it soon became clear to those who equated emancipation with legal sovereignty, with governments run by Africans with national flags and national anthems, that true emancipation must mean something else.

In February 1974, Ethiopia entered a period of deep and occasionally violent political and social change, the result of the breakdown of a semi-feudal system under the impact of economic modernisation. Despite the fact that the army played, and is still playing, the central rôle, it would be wrong to regard the change simply as a coup d'état which replaced one authoritarian régime with another. The political movement that started then was the result of significant social and economic changes which took place during the last 15–20 years of the Emperor's reign.

Several years ago A. O. Hirschman wrote an article entitled ‘The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding’ in which he attempted to ‘delineate various areas in which an impatience for theoretical formulation leads to serious pitfalls’ He reviewed two books which used opposite ‘cognitive styles’ in seeking to elucidate Latin American political development. One author was eager to set forth a paradigm of Columbian politics, and to show that all events–past, present, and future–are explained by the model (which is reducible to 34 stated hypotheses); the other wrote a study of Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution in which he was extremely reluctant to explain, moralise, or draw conclusions, but whose book is such that ‘whoever reads through [it] will have gained immeasurably in his understanding not only of the Mexican Revolution, but of peasant revolutions everywhere’.

The attention of the world was briefly focused on Ethiopia when Emperor Haile Selassie I, once considered the inviolable descendant of Solomon and Sheba, and the Elect of God, was deposed on 12 September 1974, and when two months later 60 public and military officials were executed without trial. The ‘creeping coup’ began in March 1974, and was undertaken by the military Co-ordinating Committee (commonly called the Dirgue, the Amharic word for ‘committee’) in the name of the peasants. Until the Nationalisation of Rural Lands Proclamation of 4 March 1975, however, the activities of the Dirgue were designed to secure an urban power base, and the peasants and the politics of numbers were tacitly irrelevant to a continuing paternal, factional, and urbanised political style. As the prologue to the Proclamation indicates, the Dirgue recognises the centrality of land reform to a broadly-based rural development:

The foreign policy of any country contains a variety of values and goals, and advances several interests and concerns. This article examines the continuities and discontinuities, compatibilities and contradictions in the foreign policy of Zambia. In particular, it focuses on the emerging debate over the direction of the Zambian society and state, and over the definition of the national ideology of Humanism.