Modern African life has been profoundly affected by the brief period of European colonial domination during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the past is prologue for all states, the ramifications of Africa's colonial past have been felt with particular acuity in the current era due to the speed of Africa's transition from colonial status to that of independence. Many aspects of contemporary Africa reflect the residual effects of colonialism, but few do so with the clarity of the boundary situation. This study will focus on one particularly important aspect of that boundary situation—boundary conflict. In particular, it will define the explanations for boundary conflict offered most often in the traditional literature and test their validity using empirical methods.

The boundaries of modern Africa were the creation of European diplomats who partitioned Africa among themselves with little regard for, or knowledge of, the socio-cultural characteristics of the continent. As a result of the capriciousness of the European partition, a typical African boundary may group together many ethnic groups in one state, it may cut across many ethnic or national boundaries of the past, or it may create a state whose physical characteristics hinder political, social, or economic stability. Since the colonial boundaries were used, with few exceptions, as the basis for the devolution of sovereignty in Africa, the current leaders of the continent have had to deal with the effects of this boundary situation.

African international relations have also been influenced by the presence of externally defined, artificial boundaries. Political boundaries mark sharp discontinuities in political jurisdiction, but in Africa few of those discontinuities correspond to the patterns of the socio-cultural environment. It has, therefore, been frequently charged that the artificial boundaries of Africa form the basis for conflict between the African states (Emerson, 1963: 105). In order to make their boundaries more congruent with the ethnic landscape, some states might attempt to adjust their boundaries at the expense of a neighbor. If Africa's modern boundaries had been allowed to evolve in a more natural manner, or if the colonial powers had based their partition upon a more thorough appreciation of the ethnic contours of the continent, it is assumed that the states of Africa would be less prone to boundary conflict.

With the increasingly rapid urban growth in Nigeria in recent decades, and with its consequent multiplication and complication of the urban problems of traffic and transport, housing, health, and sanitation, the need for a more purposeful planning and management of cities has come to attract increased public policy attention. The institutional and organizational setting for city planning and management, particularly the role of municipal governments in these activities, still remain colonial and therefore ill-suited to the demands of present urban developments. City planning and management responsibilities are so fragmented among so many institutions and organizations that the municipal local governments have had very little authority over what happens in the city.

The overlapping responsibilities of the various institutions make for conflicts and the net result is general inefficiency in the planning and management of many cities. The recent (1976) Local Government Reforms which aimed at decentralizing some functions from the state and federal governments to local governments do not seem to have altered the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and city management matters.

The aim of this paper is to put the origin of the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and management into political and historical perspective. It also seeks to argue that until city planning and management responsibilities are centralized on strong, autonomous municipal governments, headed by popularly elected urban chief executives, the present chaos in Nigerian cities is likely to continue.

This paper is an attempt to examine the development of a profession on a western model in a developing, non-western society. It attempts to examine the relationship of the colonial social and political environment to the development of the legal profession in Kenya; and also the relationship of the post-colonial social and political environment to the changes occurring in that development. The paper proceeds on the assumption that like any occupation, the legal profession in Kenya has a history and that history, specifically the history of change from the colonial to the post-colonial social and political environment, has determined some aspects of the profession's structure (Stinchcombe, 1965: 153-54).

The literature of occupational sociology is especially rich in its treatment of one prominent category—the professions. The central theme in this literature has come to be the professional model, conceived as an ideal-type that permits comparisons between the abstract model and actual professions. The model is said to consist of a series of attributes which are deemed important in distinguishing professions from non-professional occupations. The attributes are conveniently categorized into two basic types: those that are part of the structure of the occupation and those which reflect the attitudes of the practitioners about their work (Hall, 1968). Wilensky (1964: 194) identified the structural attributes as: the creation of a full-time occupation out of the work done, the establishment of a training model reflecting the knowledge base of a profession, the formation of a professional association, and the formation of a code of ethics. The attitudinal attributes have been identified as belief in self-regulation (Greenwood, 1957: 44-55). the belief in autonomy (Scott, 1965), the use of a professional association as a major reference (Goode, 1957: 194), and the possession of a sense of calling to the field (Gross, 1958: 77-82). Although criticized (Johnson, 1972: 1973; Roth, 1974: 7-25), the professional model has come to gain some acceptance in the literature of occupational sociology as the ideal type measuring tool used to determine how far along the professionalization path a particular occupation has moved. Movement toward correspondence with the model is what is generally considered to constitute the process of professionalization (Vollmer and Mills, 1966).

Multiple meanings are attached to the ideology of African socialism in post-socialist Ghana. The range and complexity of these meanings are best understood through experimental techniques. In this article Q analysis sheds new light on earlier findings regarding the subjective, affective, and cognitive elements of thinking about African socialism in Ghana. Subtle ideological differences are explored among a homogeneous group of Ghanaians. Ten years after the exile of Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, and after two military regimes and an intervening civilian regime, Ghanaians are celebrating a renaissance of Nkrumaism. For ten years following Ghana's independence in 1957, Ghanaians were subject to Nkrumah's prolific verbal output concerning “scientific socialism,” consciencism, and Pan-Africanism. The meanings attached to these concepts by Nkrumah and by his followers remain clearly ambiguous.

This ambiguity is understandable given the fact that Nkrumah's often contradictory writings on the subject of scientific socialism were devoid of the rigor which scholars often associate with that term. It could be argued that Nkrumah was more interested in political mobilization and constructive myth-making than ideological rigor. The routinization of the new order involves the transmission of the myths and folklore of the culture over time. The myths of a communal and ancestral heritage, for example, are important for cultural maintenance. This mythology contributes a unique dimension to Ghanaian culture which distinguishes it from others in the minds of natives. The literal applicability of Nkrumah's scientific socialism to any given situation is not as important as the Ghanaian belief that society is, for example, egalitarian or anti-colonial, and contains certain implicit rules circumscribing wealth and exploitation. In the end, the maintenance of cultural order is more dependent on these rules and distinguishing features than on rabbit farms and bicycle plants. While political regimes must provide the latter, they must engage in the transmission of the cultural norms and myths through continuing processes of socialization. Perhaps it is within the context of constructive myth-making that Nkrumah's ideological contributions can be best understood.

A series of some two hundred questions on farmers' opinions, behavior, and attitudes were asked during the course of a traditional cost route farm management survey of one hundred Nigerian smallholders. The answers illuminated the following:

1. farmers' tendency to make significant changes in their allocation of resources from one season to the next, reflecting the inherent flexibility of the farming system practiced;

2. farmers' ability to distinguish clearly between the characteristics of different crops, including variability of physical yield levels;

3. the distinct uses to which different crops were put;

4. satisfaction with the nutritional value of their diet;

5. reasons for practicing intercropping;

6. farmers' planning capability;

7. assessment of some types of risk;

8. imperfect knowledge of factor prices; and

9. the extensive intra- and inter-family monetary relationships.

The sample of one hundred smallholders were located at three different villages in the former Western Region of Nigeria. All farmers were Yoruba and therefore had similar ethnic characteristics. Cropping patterns in each village were markedly different as each village was in a different ecological zone. Cocoa dominated the cropping patterns of Akinlalu village in the low rainfall forest region, yam and cocoa dominated at Idi-Emi in the derived savannah region; and maize and yam dominated at Hero village in the southern Guinea savannah region. The survey was carried out during the 1970-71 crop season. The sample size was 33 at both Akinlalu and Idi-Emi, and 34 at Ilero (see Zuckerman, 1979, for details).

In the wake of revelations concerning the activities of foreign lobbyists in the United States, and especially the Koreagate scandal, increasing attention has been given in the press and on Capitol Hill to the effect on American policy-making. The most explosive instance of foreign influence peddling is the massive campaign of South African officials to improve that country's image in the western world. The most recent phase of South Africa's propaganda war, unleashed in 1972, has not only raised questions about official U.S. relations with South Africa but has provoked the worst political scandal in South African history. For several years there had been assertions by investigative journalists that the South African government was behind a variety of schemes designed to win friends and influence policy among its western allies. By 1979 it had become clear that many of the allegations were true. The South African Department of Information had spent $100 million on unconventional methods for this purpose in a seven year period.

The man at the center of the scandal was Dr. Eschel Rhoodie, former secretary of the Department of Information, who revealed in some detail the secret projects his government had undertaken to buy influence. In an interview with BBC television in March 1979, Rhoodie made no pretense about the ruthlessness of the methods employed by his department to assure South Africa's survival in a world hostile to its apartheid policies. The intellectual underpinnings of the propaganda campaign are found in the book written by Rhoodie in 1969 entitled The Paper Curtain, a kind of Afrikaner version of Mein Kampf. The book has subsequently been withdrawn from circulation. The Paper Curtain told how a curtain of lies and communist propaganda had isolated South Africa from the west and argued the necessity of mounting a counterattack through unorthodox methods. The book attracted the attention of the Minister of Information, Connie Mulder, who appointed Rhoodie to his post and gave him responsibility for telling the country's story abroad. In that capacity Rhoodie was the architect of an ambitious program which ranged from engaging the services of legal and public relations firms to wooing black African heads of state and subsidizing various publications. In all, Rhoodie claimed that his department financed over one hundred secret projects.

The geographical context of this article is the Sudanese Three Town agglomeration embracing Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman. The main social content is that of the socio-historical process of class formation and urbanization. In an effort to measure effects of this process in this region a focus is made on changing patterns in the institutions of marriage as barometers of wider social change. The basic hypothesis to be tested is that the rise of more complex systems of class stratification is associated with a decline of former patterns of endogamy.

The data presented here are analyzed within the epistemology of dialectical and historical materialism which assumes, inter alia, that (1) there is an integration of the component parts of society, (2) that changes in the material (empirical) basis of the organization of society will have effects in other social spheres, and (3) that the cumulative effects of social change eventually lead to qualitative changes in social relations. Another theoretical assumption unifying this research and analysis is (4) that data must be viewed in a processual rather than in a mechanical, synchronic, or ahistorical functionalist manner. Nevertheless the empirical studies of the urban anthropologist only permit the researcher to segment a portion of social reality for closer scrutiny taking maximum care that the living, changing society is kept in the fertile medium of history and in the context of changing political and economic relations. Finally it is assumed that (5) a measure of class differentiation is essential inasmuch as urban patterns of socio-cultural variation have a class content.