The straightforward logic of experience and the long route along the highways and byways of ethnography and theory have brought me to the same point: a conviction that in Africa in the centuries before its conquest social and cultural life was far more inventive from day to day than we can now easily imagine, steeped as old intellectual frameworks are in the equation between non-literacy and a repetitive “tradition,” and framed as our own social life has been by the organized repositories, routinized access and incremental growth patterns that ensure order and longevity to our own legacies of knowledge. Alongside the kinship, kingship and cult of classic social organizational analysis, attentive reading of African sources suggests another and different social project: the creation of variety amongst people in their skills and intellectual reach, not only reproducing a finite set of known roles and functions with respect to a “system of thought” but also endorsing a constant and volatile engagement on its boundless frontiers.

Population growth and the high levels of fertility in sub-Saharan Africa remain a significant impediment to development in the region. After nearly three decades of family planning programming in the region, fertility levels remain, for the most part, unchanged although substantial numbers of women continue to indicate a preference toward lowering their levels of childbearing. Some estimates indicate that almost 30 percent of married women in sub-Saharan Africa do not use family planning although they express a desire to stop, or delay, having children (Bongaarts 1994; Westoff and Bankole 1995).

Most African countries now have explicit population targets, a response to the exacerbating effect population growth has had on social, economic, and environmental resources. Population should not be held solely responsible for the economic quagmire in which many developing countries find themselves, although it is widely acknowledged that lower rates of population growth would ease the development burden in these societies.

Beyond the concern with sheer numbers and rates of growth, another perspective on population as a problem in the region relates to the gap between reproductive preferences and actual fertility, alluded to earlier, which affects one-half of the population's (the female half) inability to determine what happens to, or issues from, their own bodies.

This gap, referred to variously as the KAP-gap, or unmet need (Westoff 1988; Bongaarts 1991) has constituted the cornerstone of, or basis for, family planning programming. After all, if women say they want no more children, but are not using contraception (the fundamental conditions for inclusion in the KAP-gap/unmet need measure), then providing family planning services should serve to satisfy this apparent unmet need for contraception. Conceptually, then, unmet need can be represented as a demand for contraception which can be “met” by family planning programs.

Postwar development discourse has been governed by two principal preoccupations. First, the will to knowledge, that is, a concern with expanding scientific understanding of the social structures and processes of so-called third world societies and the extrapolation of generalizable rules of the dynamics of their transformation. Second, the will to change, that is, a powerful impulse to engage accumulated knowledge to transform for the better the material conditions of “the wretched of the earth.” Together, these concerns account for the social engineering ethos of development discourse and the penchant for prescriptive, problem-solving theory. As a result, the contending post-war paradigms (modernization and dependency) have functioned as models of analysis and ideologies—normatively ordered proclamations of preferred pathways to social systems that are congruent with western-style modernity (Banuri 1990; Berman 1994, 235-36; Grendzier 1985, 1–21; Ferguson 1990; Manor 1991, 2-3).

Mirroring these attributes of development discourse, the study of political development has been guided by a preoccupation with two projects that are considered emblematic of political modernity: The nurturing of political communities coincident with the territorial boundaries inherited from colonialism (nation-building), and the elaboration of institutions and technologies for the effective governance of evolving political communities (state-building). For both dominant postwar paradigms, ruling elites who inherited colonial states were the primary “enablers” of these projects (Doornbos 1990, 180). Analysis of politics in developing societies has therefore been foremost concerned with explication of how the unfolding of both projects was determined by the political practices of these ruling elites.

War, drought and the failure of centrally planned economic policies have resulted in a reorientation of government priorities in Mozambique. Since the late 1980s, agricultural policy regarding food and cash crop production has shifted away from a dependence on state farms towards a reliance on commercial enterprises and the family sector. The government also has applied market principles to the purchase and processing of cash crops and allowed private companies to replace inefficient and poorly managed state enterprises. These decisions have not been adopted hastily; they have been accompanied by numerous studies that try to anticipate the possible impact of these changes at the micro and macro economic level.

Several of these studies are noteworthy in their attention to the position of rural women in Mozambique. They acknowledge the significant role played by women and they detail the numerous productive activities that rural women engage in, from planting and weeding to childcare and collecting firewood (Liberman 1988,1989,1992; Casimiro, Laforte, and Pessoa 1991; Andrade, Cardoso, Casimiro, and Louro 1992; UEM 1993). In light of the tremendous economic changes that the country is undertaking, many of the studies warn the government against policies that will marginalize women and urge officials to incorporate a gender component into projects and policies (Casimiro, Laforte, and Pessoa 1991; Liberman 1992).

This article explores the role that teachers in the Côte d'Ivoire played in the democratization process in the early 1990s. More specifically, it looks at the socio-economic and ideological factors that placed teachers at the helm of the contestation movements that contributed to the end of nearly three decades of autocratic one-party rule. While this is a case study, its implications are, mutatis muntantis, more general. The principal argument developed in this article is that teachers occupy a strategic but precarious position in many African societies (Diop and Diouf 1990). They, more than any other social group, with the possible exception of students, embody the contradictory dimensions of post-colonial African politics and society. On the one hand, as Robert Fatton (1987, 63–64) notes, they are connected to the ruling class in so far as those in power often turn to them as a way to legitimate their rule. On other hand, teachers are part of Africa's fragile middle class, since they benefit from the relatively high expenditures of African governments on education. Nevertheless, they, particularly secondary and university teachers saw themselves as an alternative elite to those in power (Oyediran 1993, 221).

A decade and a half ago Chambers (1979) referred to African rural refugees as “What the Eye Does not See.” This was, inter alia, due to the remoteness of their inhabited areas and the urban bias which then characterized the responses of the international assistance regime. If rural refugees were, in the 1970s, “what the eye did not see,” today refugees in many of the African urban centers are what the eye “refuses to see.” One of the most dramatic and far-reaching impacts of war, drought and economic hardship in the 1980s in many sub-Saharan African countries has been the immense population shift from rural areas to the cities. This population shift is taking place in the absence of any structural transformation in the economies concerned. Structural transformation here refers to increases in labor productivity, a declining share of agriculture in total output, technological progress and industrialization. African host-governments see the situation in their urban centers being exacerbated by the presence of refugees who are said to compete with nationals for scarce employment opportunities and social services such as health, education, housing, water and transportation. In many African host countries where the public sector is the main employer, refugees are excluded from employment in this sector; in other countries such as Egypt and Djibouti, refugees are not allowed to take any paid employment (Wallace 1985). The policies of many African governments toward skilled urban refugees are succinctly described by Brydon and Gould (1984,4):