MOST economists agree that industrialisation should help to increase agricultural productivity and raise the living standards of rural producers. In the 1970s, however, manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa, even including South Africa, grew at a slower rate than in any other region except South-East Asia. Furthermore, far from promoting the anticipated outcome, industrialisation in Southern Africa undermined peasant farm cultivation and contributed to the present crisis in African agriculture.

THE Federal Republic of Germany is one of the major pillars of the group of western industrialised capitalist countries, and this largely determines its rôle in international financial institutions, and its attitudes to the global economic system and market structures. The F.R.G. is second in the world, behind the United States, expressed by its share of the monetary volume of total international trade, but the proportion of exports relative to G.N.P. is much higher than in America and slightly more than in Japan.

IT is widely acknowledged that the origins of Africa's hunger crisis lie only partly in weather patterns. A growing number of studies have emphasised the rôle which the state plays in creating a policy environment which either undermines or promotes commercial agriculture.1 Much of the fault for the latter's poor performance in many areas of the continent is assigned to short-sighted government policies of excessive intervention in agricultural markets. The cardinal sins are considered to be price controls, food subsidies, and state-run marketing boards. As the external debt of African states grows, foreign lenders and aid donors impose economic reforms deemed necessary to address the long-run structural problems. The austerity packages of the International Monetary Fund, for example, aim to reduce demand in the borrowing country by cutting government spending on subsidies, while the World Bank focuses on stimulating agricultural production through a mixture of targeted investments and advice on how to change the pricing and tax structure so as to improve incentives for farmers.2

THIS article aims to clarify the national political culture of Tanzania through an analysis of one important institution — the Cabinet. Although attention to the norms and rules that regulate political behaviour in formal and informal ways can reveal insights that are not disclosed by other approaches, political culture has been a neglected field in the study of African politics.

By way of contrast, class analysis has been a popular approach to African politics in past decades.1 It has been shown, for instance, that those in government positions siphon off surplus from the peasantry through the marketing of agricultural produce. This has happended in countries as diverse as Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Malawi, and Tanzania, 2 where there are enormous differences in economic performance, as well as with respect to the way in which political conflicts are handled. People n similar class positions can act in a variety of ways – this is a matter of culture – because there is more than one possible logic with which to perceive and defend interests.

The resettlement of nomads recently has become a renewed topic of interest within the literature on development. The general purpose of most schemes is to sedentarise nomadic peoples through farm or manufacturing co-operatives to be able systematically to provide them with the necessities of existence, including health services and education, and to reduce their vulnerability to the vagaries of their day-to-day search for green pastures and water. Nomadism has been defined as ‘the movement of the household during the annual round of productive activities’, while its polar opposite, sedentism, is ‘the immobile location of the household during the annual round of productive activities’.1

Decolonisation in British and French West Africa presents some interesting parallers and contrasts. The pressures facing the most important colonial systems during and after World War 11 came from the two new superpowers — particularly the United States — nationalist movements, and internal dissensions. The war Seriously undermined the power of Britain and France and brought into question the moral right of one nation to rule over another. Initially both remained unconvinced about the merits of independence, and in fact the evidence suggests that considerable efforts were made to thwart the process of decolonisation. By the mid-1950s, however, Britain and France succumbed to the three pressures mentioned above, and rather than wait until the situation was uncontainable they chose to guide their colonies along an ‘approved’ path to independence.

The work of Frantz Fanon, who died 25 years ago, was the locus of many clashing contradictions. There were many Fanons, living uneasily together. The prophet of a cleansing revolutionary violence, which would re-unite what lethargic white self-interest had put asunder, found strange company in the psychiatrist whose case-histories recorded its traumatic effects: violence was both socially regenerative and personally degenerative, a renovating healer and a destructive sickness, a mystical release and a dehumanising barbarity. The devotee of French culture reviled French colonialism, and the humanitarian realist who acknowledged the revolutionary sacrifices of Algeria's Europeans was no doubt uncomfortable about the partisan propagandist whose necessary racism could not afford concessions to white altruism. Most relevant to the situation and prospects of independent Africa, however, was the deadlocked struggle fought between the committed nationalist in Fanon and the pan-Africanist who sought to make the nation the magical springboard into continental unity.