Although many African countries have had to address pressures for democratisation and are undergoing some form of transition, Mali is an especially interesting case which could provide useful insights into the durability of democracy on the continent and elsewhere. Mali has experienced extraordinary changes in the past two years leading to the almost total transformation of the political system from a highly authoritarian régime to one which has all the trappings of a liberal democracy. Unlike most other nations, Mali was fortunate in being able to write a new constitution and hold elections without the burden of continued participation in the process by a ruling party and head of state. Therefore, the more open procedures offer a better indication of the degree to which, given the opportunity, a modern democratic system can take root in the African milieu.

Land-Locked Burundi in the Great Lakes area of East-Central Africa, while very small in size (slightly under 28,000 sq. kilometres, roughly the size of Belgium), is after neighbouring Rwanda the most densely populated country in the continent, with about six million inhabitants of whom it is commonly admitted that Hutu and Tutsi constitute about 85 and 15 per cent, respectively.

The Government of Zimbabwe has only recently begun to implement the commitment of the liberation movements to give land to poor ‘communal’ farmers, especially those dispossessed by the whiteminority régime after Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. It needs to be recalled that by virtue of the Land Tenure Act of 1969 almost half of the country's agricultural land was allocated to Europeans, who had ‘greater access to the regions considered suited to intensive crop and livestock production’, and that ‘On average, each of the nearly 7,000 European farms was roughly 100 times the size of any of the 700,000 or so holdings in the Tribal Trust Lands’. The fact that much of this land was under-utilised only served to increase African resentment.

Several African countries have found that the road towards the reintroduction of multi-party politics is not easy. This short article examines aspects of constitutional developments in the Seychelles, and argues that three fundamental criteria are necessary for a genuine return to democratic pluralism: the implementation of a proper and fairly organised electoral process, the drafting of a new constitution which represents the wishes of the people, and the effective de-linking of ruling party and government.

The observation and monitoring of elections and referenda has become a ‘growth business’ in Africa since external and internal pressures have forced the leaders of one-party states to test their political legitimacy. The closely monitored 1991 presidential and parliamentary elections in Zambia heralded the first peaceful transition from a single to a multi-party system of governance with a change of leadership in English-speaking Africa. It marked the beginning of an era of confidence in the possibilities of democratic change, and confirmed the positive influence that international observers can have on such processes. Their presence was henceforth considered an essential pre-condition for acceptable transitional multi-party elections. The hopes that Zambia would indeed ‘set a standard for Africa’, and offer encouragement to nascent democratic movements on the continent have, however, remained elusive. More recent elections have been replete with controversy, intimidations, and violence. Despite being certified to varying degrees as free and fair by observers, the losers have contested the results—in Angola with arms, in Kenya and Ghana with threatened and actual boycotts.

The wealth of ethno-linguistic units in Nigeria has been the object of anthropological, linguistic, historical, and political study since the country was first so named at the beginning of this century. But since independence in 1960, the federal motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ has raised a central principle of language use which has been gradually articulated in successive constitutions and white papers on national policy in the educational and cultural spheres.

To be a political leader in many parts of the world is to follow an extremely hazardous and insecure occupation. In addition, in sub-Saharan Africa, but elsewhere as well, the element of personal danger exists in a particularly acute form. Althought the extent to which this is true varies considerably not only from place to place but also over time, the evidence of the past 30 years clearly suggests that there are remarkably few states in which an individual could contemplate embarking on a career in politics free from the dauger of incurring severe personal penalties at some stage.

When Dag Hammarskjöld flew to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) on 17 September 1961 it was to meet Moïse Tshombe, the self-styled President of secessionist Katanga, in order to bring about a ceasefire to the fighting that was going on between his soldiers and those of the United Nations, especially in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi). One of the more spectacular components of diese hostilities was a French-built Fouga Magister, which had strafed some unprotected U.N. positions from the air, and journalists quickly located the Belgian pilot as a ‘Major’ Delin, depicted as a kind of modern ‘Lone Ranger’ defying the world community. The importance of ‘the little Fouga’ soon got blown out of all proportions, and when Hammarskjöld's DC-6B, nicknamed ‘Albertina’, took off from Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) it was decided to take a roundabout route in order to avoid being attacked by the Fouga. After the Secretary-General's plane had crashed, the press jumped to the conclusion that it had been shot down by the Fouga, and U.N. spokesmen confirmed that Ndola was within its range.

Gurage is a cover-term for a dozen south Ethiopian-Semitic tongues spoken by some half-a-million people in a small and compact area about 70 miles south-southwest of Addis Ababa bounded to the north by the Awash River, to the east by Lake Zway, and to the south and west by the Omo River. Completely surrounded by Cushitic languages, especially Galla and Sidamo, Gurage forms, as it were, a tiny Semitic island floating in a vast Cushitic sea. The variety, diversity, and fragmentation of tongues in such a small area, 100 miles at its broadest and widest, is puzzling and problematic, not least because Gurage represents the highest concentration of linguistic diversity attested in the Semitic world. A satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon has not yet been offered, and unless and until further data, both synchronic and diachronic, becomes available, this short note will have to suffice, for better or for worse.

The number of ethno-regional conflicts in the world has grown in intensity during the last few decades as a result of political and economic crises, and one of the unsolved paradoxes of this world-wide trend is that there seems to be a basic contradiction between the two core concepts of ‘democratisation’ and ‘ethnic self-determination’.