The transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev era was truly seismic in nature. Re-evaluations were effected in all areas of policy, resulting, most visibly, in the fundamental reordering of relations with the United States and fellow N.A.T.O. countries, and the demise of the Warsaw Pact and communist régimes in Eastern Europe. Equally sweeping were alterations in approach to the Third World and, more specifically, sub-saharan Africa, where changes in policy Soviet retreat.

It is generally agreed that the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in March 1988 marked the final attempt to secure a military solution to the Angolan conflict. Thereafter, in December 1988, South Africa, Cuba, and Angola signed the so-called ‘New York accord’ that included a timetable for the phased withdrawal of the South Africans and the Cubans from Namibia and Angola, respectively; in June 1989, the Gbadolite agreement initiated African attempts to end the continuing armed struggle in Angola; and in March 1990, Namibia achieved its long-awaited independence. But despite these efforts and developments, the war continued between the Government that had been established in Luanda by the Movimento Popular de Libertacão de Angola (M.P.L.A.) in November 1975 and the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (Unita), with devastating implications for the country's estimated ten million inhabitants. Not before May 1991 was a final peace agreement signed in Portugal, and then with considerably poorer options for political stability and economic recovery than would have been the case after the original accord in New York.

International economics and global politics are unfamiliar territory for many. However, the operations of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) have profound impacts upon the countries with which they treat, and these extend beyond financial issues and geo-politics. This article indicates how the I.M.F. has imposed ‘conditionalities’ in sub-Saharan Africa as integral elements of Structural Adjustment Programmes (S.A.P.s) that affect not only the lives of all the inhabitants, but also the nature and landscapes of the nations concerned — their very geographical composition.

Botswana has achieved rapid growth with stability since independence in 1966, largely through the supportive interrelations between an open market economy and a system of élite democracy, successfully blending ‘traditional’ and modern elements, and offering a range of fairly free and meaningful political choices. But growth, and the policies of a selectively interventionist state, have produced increasingly deep inequalities of property and incomes, posing problems for the stability of the political economy in future.

The emergence of a consensus that the performance of the public sector in Ghana had been poor, and that there were limits as to what it could achieve in terms of economic growth, led the Provisional National Defence Council (P.N.D.C.) to implement various policy reforms. As the Governor of the Bank of Ghana argued in 1984: ‘Given the dismal performance of the public sector, there is need for greater reliance on private investment in the Government's efforts to resuscitate the economy’. At the same time, the P.N.D.C. began to reassess the economic role of the public sector. According to a recent document prepared by the National Commission for Democracy, ‘changed national policies’ in Ghana include ‘the reduction of the state's rôle in the economic life of the nation through shifting of more responsibility to the private sector.

In Zambia's first multi-party elections for two decades, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (M.M.D.) won a landslide victory over Kenneth Kaunda's United Independence Party (U.N.I.P) on 31 October 1991. Many observers believe that the sweeping 80 per cent majority gained by Frederick Chiluba and his M.M.D. in both urban and rural areas was to a large degree due to the increasing economic hardships most Zambians have been subjected to over the last years. The opposition's slogan ‘The Hour Has Come’ captured the mood of many who had lost patience with the gross economic mismanagement and wastefulness that characterised the Government.

There has been a long controversy over the likely impact of population dynamics on economic growth and development. As long ago as 1789 the Reverend Thomas Malthus argued in his famous ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ that food production would not keep pace with the population's natural proclivity to grow in an unchecked fashion. In the absence of prudential checks, the result would be starvation, vice, and misery, with a tendency for economies to stagnate at a subsistence or poverty level of income.

Is the ‘economy of affection’, as suggested by Goran Hyden, the key factor determining social relations in East Africa and elsewhere? According to this thesis, both villagers and city-dwellers are tied together in webs of kinship and tribal obligation that mitigate against the accumulation of wealth or capital necessary for the formation of either industrial modes of production or class-based societies. Hyden claims that the high values placed on personal relationships are dependent upon ‘a peasant mode of production’, and that, in the case of Tanzania, their persistence and perseverance has been the most significant factor inhibiting economic development. In short, the ‘smallness’ of the peasantry is a source of power.