The purpose of my December 1980 Africana note was to identify two major problems in the rapidly growing literature on the Ethiopian revolution: (1) the failure to honour the academic obligation to be exhaustive in the research enterprise; and (2) the tendency of students of the revolution to draw doubtful long-term conclustions on the basis of a brief time-horizon. To illustrate these points I used Peter Koehn's citations on food production and the conclusions he drew from them. Briefly, I noted that he had overlooked at least one important set of data and reached a conclusion that did not hold up over time. The references to new sources in both my note and the reply by Koehn and Brian D'Silva support my argument, for we have now located important, additional studies on production and rainfall, and Koehn has now altered and expanded his conclusions in the face of evidence from a longer time-perspective.

Few English-speaking scholars realise that a francophone network of scholars has powerfully developed the study of contact between French and African languages over the past decade, and that this is currently being synthesised in the form of an Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire. This corporate work, sponsored by the Association des universités partiellement ou entièrement de langue française (A.U.P.E.L.F.) and the Agence de coopération culturelle et technique (A.C.C.T.),1 is of considerable linguistic, educational, and sociopolitical significance, and deserves to be widely known in Africa. Indeed, it will be remembered that at the founding of the West African Linguistic Society in 1961 two surveys were mooted: West African languages and, later, English in West Africa, of which the former was accomplished with the help of the International African Institute and the Ford Foundation, while the latter was forgotten. With the ‘Inventory of French in Africa’, the francophone network of scholars has certainly stolen a march on English-speaking Africa.