Relations between the United States of America and Africa have important historical, economic, and political dimensions which are by no means confined to the United Nations. The historical ties predate the creation of international organisations, but it was the emergence of the United Nations from the ashes of World War II that provided the greatest opportunity for close bonds by creating an institutional framework within which the common goals and interests of Americans and Africans could be pursued.

Niccolo Machiavelli and Frantz Fanon are in the tradition of political philosophy. Do they not address themselves to the notion of freedom, the concept of legitimacy, and the moral basis of political action? This article will further argue that there exists a notable correspondence of thought between them.

The political thought of Machiavelli enjoys ubiquitous fame. Its pristine vigour is attested to by the fact that, through the past four and a half centuries, dictators and democrats have embraced its values.1 Yet there is no patent contradiction in this if one realises that Machiavelli deals compellingly with what is while not rejecting what ultimately ought to be; his prince is a sort of political Everyman concerned with realising the kingdom of earth.

Mon travail c'est pour former et encadrer la jeunesse dans le bon chemin et dans la fidélité au Guide; à l'attachement inconditionnel au PrésidentFondateur. Pour leur apprendre à être responsable, être productif. Pour leur préparer à leur vie future comme l'élite du pays. – a J.M.P.R. leader1

For some time, the general enthusiasm for viewing organisations as ‘open systems’ subject to a wide number of influences has had something of a hollow ring. This is shown by the way in which many scholars continue to concentrate their attention on certain selected parts of an organisation and its environment, and to ignore others.1 In 1970 this tendency was described as follows:

It is now generally acknowledged that Tanzania's policy of rural collectivisation has been abandoned as a failure. By most accounts, systematic efforts to bring about collective production ceased altogether during 1975 and may have halted, informally, as early as the end of 1974. According to the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act of 1975, one or another form of block farming is considered sufficient for a village to become officially identified as an ujamaa village. Thus, ujamaa as a concept once intended to convey a social ideal of collective ownership, labour, and sharing is reduced to describing a state of affairs in which individual farming is intermittently supplemented by occasional cooperation in such tasks as planting and harvesting. Villagisation without socialism is, in effect, the current policy.

In the last few years, there has been a sharp upsurge in the popularity of Marxism among intellectuals in African countries. The earlier African ideologies - ujamaa, humanism, négritude – with their softer, reconciliatory attitudes, and their stress on brotherhood rather than class struggle, have lost some of their appeal for progressive or radical African intellectuals. The reasons for this decline are fairly obvious. The early progressive ideologies are all now associated with governments in power, thus with the status quo, and cannot become the motivating force for those desiring change.

Following the useful distinction made by Marc J. Swartz this is a study in ‘local-level’ rather than ‘local’ politics, because of the fundamental fact that ‘actors and groups outside the range of the local multiplex relationships are vitally and directly involved in the political processes of the local group’.1 The political process is therefore not discrete. My focus is on the interrelationships existing between political forces within and outside the Kgatleng District of Botswana, and my analysis deals with the situation as it existed during the early 1970s; changes in certain key variables – most crucially the attitude of the Chief to the Government – could radically alter the configuration of alliances, as may be seen from my postscript.

It is widely believed that old soldiers are a problem. At least since the beginning of this century, western governments have been concerned with the issue of ‘helping’ veterans to readjust to civilian life upon their return from campaigning. It is assumed that these men would, if left to their own devices, find it difficult or impossible to ‘pick up from where they had left off’, and might, therefore, become a subversive element in the general population. Hence, one of the largest bureaucracies in the United States is the Veterans Administration which is charged with fitting ex-soldiers back into society. To a certain extent the concerns over whether they would be satisfied after their demobilisation have proved to be justified. The dislocations experienced by returned American servicemen after World War II were illustrated by popular films like ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’. More recently, the American press paid considerable attention to the rôle of the black veterans of Vietnam in the violence which destroyed much of Newark, Detroit, and Watts in the late 1960s.