The study of tropical Africa's politics has passed through a number of phases since shortly before independence came to the greater part of the continent in the early 1960s. To begin with, a great deal of pioneering work was done on the emergence of African nationalism, party formation, charismatic leadership, and the like. This was later to be much criticised for advancing too simplistic a ‘modernisation’ thesis, but it remains an invaluable source of important data. There was then a great spurt of neo-marxist analysis, with its accompanying ‘dependency’ theory. At its best, in Colin Leys' study of Kenya, it could be very illuminating. Its empirical work was not always, however, solidly based; its implicit, and sometimes explicit, prescriptive notions were frequently falsified by events; and there came a stage when it was difficult to keep track of the scholarly internecine feuding which it soon provoked. Intertwined with some of this and parallel with most of it were a number of studies of Africa's military coups. A good deal of the empirical work here has stood the test of time, and remains of particular importance. There were then some very important studies, especially by Hyden, Bates and Hart, of state–peasant relations in Africa, a matter which still warrants further elaboration by others. Twenty years after independence there came a further sheaf of studies, of Ghana, Zaire, Cameroon, Nigeria, the Horn etc., which often centred on accounts of state patrimonialism in its various guises. These were as solidly informative as anything which had been produced previously.