Twelve years ago, the present writer made an embarrassingly inaccurate forecast. The Portuguese, he wrote in a paperback, cannot hold out for long in Angola; the country is hard to pacify, the insurgents enjoy many advantages, the metropole is poor and incapable of sustaining a long Indonesian-type conflict.1 At the time, this assessment seemed quite realistic, even to many Portuguese. The left-wing historian Vitorino Magalhães Godinho argued that their society lacked ‘social efficiency’; Portugal was a backward country, a land of labour migrants incapable of true development at home, much less of developing an empire.2 Even some conservatives agreed: the metropole was poverty- stricken, and the colonies were but millstones around Portugal's neck.

Drought and famine have become so inextricably linked in both popular and academic analyses of Africa's food problems in the 1970s that the relationship between the two is now taken almost axiomatically as cause and effect. The logic is simple and persuasive. Drought produces crop failure and crop failure, just as inevitably, leads to human starvation. This reasoning and the colour photography of starving children in the world press have proved so irresistible that social scientists have had surprisingly little rôle in scholarly discussions of the causes of the recent African famine. The subject has been left almost entirely to climatologists, physical geographers, water experts, and agronomists. Social scientists have so taken it for granted that the causes of African famine are natural and climatic that most of their literature on the subject falls into the genre of‘impact’ studies which omit the issue of causality and deal almost entirely with the social and political after effects.

Policy research involves two acts of translation: translation of the problem from the world of reality and policy into the world of scientific method, and then a translation of the research results back into the world of reality and policy.1

Since the political scientist, David Easton, commented critically in 1959 on the state of the study of politics by anthropologists,2 many interesting changes have taken place in the analyses of African politics – in fact, of politics of non-western societies in general.

What is Africa doing wrong? Africans as well as others are increasingly asking this question. We are, in effect, invited to consider that there are, perhaps, negative as well as positive aspects to the nation-building process in post-colonial Africa. To the layman, indeed, the image of Africa has tended to accentuate the negative. The strife in the Congo during the early 1960s, the civil war in Nigeria, numerous military coups d'etat and political assassinations, bureaucratic corruption, disappointing progress in the economic field, and more recently famine and drought, all could lead to the conclusion that efforts at nationbuilding have been less than successful.

In the early hours of Easter Sunday, 14 April 1974, the army, led by Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché, overthrew the Government which had held power in Niger since independence. President Hamani Diori's régime became the twenty-fifth in Africa to fall to a coup d'état in eleven years, and Niger the eighth republic of former French Africa to come under the control of the military.

The modern, albeit fragmentary, elements of a social security structure exist in each independent nation of the tropical African sub-region, and largely constitute a legacy from a departed metropolitan power. The legacy has become expensive, expansive, complex, even controversial; it is an administratively burdensome method to alleviate human suffering arising out of the realisation of selected risks to economic security. Thus, social security, since its introduction in three stages in Bismarkian Germany between 1883 and 1889, has spread throughout the world, but its continued growth in tropical Africa – even before the pre-conditions of industrialisation have obtained – is meeting many obstacles: financial, political, philosophical, administrative, and otherwise.

The world economy is now in intense agony — sharper than ever experienced since the War. The international monetary order, carefully constructed with gold as its lynchpin and fixed exchange rates, is in shambles. Trade patterns laboriously built up since 1945 are facing their biggest challenge. The entire framework of domestic policies constructed on the assumption of steady growth — or only minor recessions — is now being questioned. Expectations of decline in industrial output ranging over io per cent are no longer restricted to whispers at cocktails — they are officially pronounced. Unemployment in the developed countries, some say, could swell nearly anywhere up to io per cent — a level which only a year ago was thought to be impossible. The identification of economic power with international liquidity has been all but destroyed in the wake of the oil price rise. Prices of other primary commodities are falling rapidly.

The multi-national corporations see in the developing countries of black Africa a potentially large market where they would like to have a foothold. The host governments, while welcoming foreign investment, are concerned about outside exploitation. The tension between this quest for markets and the move for greater control by Africans is but one more version of the old love-hate relationship between foreign investors and underdeveloped countries.

Those with an interest in developing a predictive theory of social revolution cannot afford to ignore the numerous corpses in what I shall call the Graveyard of Marxist Executives. For many this is a cemetery of aspirations, while in a small number of instances counter-revolutionary terror has occasioned a veritable bloodbath. What makes this study worth-while is that in all cases the right to a decent life for future generations has been aborted. And given the diffusion of nuclear weapons capabilities to many Third-World régimes that cannot cope with the obstacles to development, it is not farfetched to suggest that many of our children's lives too may be forfeited eventually to nuclear pollution or worse! During the interim, increasing numbers of desperate Third-World régimes will endeavour to buy time by challenging the price structure of raw materials. Even if they fail for the most part, the quality of the international human and physical environment will almost certainly deteriorate.

In his Path to Nigerian Freedom – the blueprint for the nation-state he had envisioned – Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the man who later came to be one of the leading figures on the Nigerian political scene, stated categorically in 1947:

Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no ‘Nigerians’ in the same sense as there are ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ or ‘French’. The word ‘Nigeria’ is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not.

In order to depict adequately the significance of political and economic interaction in tropical Africa, it is necessary to sketch the background of recent changes in that area lying south of the Sahara and north of Angola, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. Here are some 30 states ranging in size from over 2.5 million sq.km. in the Sudan to less than 00.1 million sq.km. in the Gambia; in population from almost 80 million in Nigeria to about 400,000 in the Gambia; in density from over 120 per sq.km. in Burundi to less than one per sq.km. in Mauritania; in income per capita from over $400 in Gabon to less than $50 in Burundi, Somalia, and Upper Volta; and in G.N.P. from over $4.5 billion in Nigeria to less than $30 million in Gambia.

The contemporary involvement of the armed forces in African politics seems to prove Mosca's maxim: ‘the class that bears the lance or holds the musket regularly forces its rule upon the class that handles the spade or pushes the shuttle’.1 Explanations for coups d'etat are myriad. The eruption of social conflicts into the armed services; personal and corporate greed; abridgement of military institutional prerogatives; weaknesses of the political system as a whole; increased emphasis on coercion: all figure among the reasons for intervention.

A notable imbalance exists in the literature on the rôle of soldiers in politics – far less attention is given to their rule than to their intervention. This is particularly true for the African continent, where scant effort has been made to relate patterns of military rule to patterns of demilitarisation. The policy objectives of officers are often dealt with as two opposing ideal types: broadly ideological, leaning towards ‘anticommunism’, ‘modernisation’, or ‘Arab socialism’; or fundamentally apolitical and unable to formulate reasonable policy objectives because of their narrow corporate perspectives. The logic of these two ideal positions leads to the alleged dichotomy that juntas with broad political ambitions will tend to stay in power indefinitely, while those with limited corporate interests will find it easy to turn power over to civilians who will ‘grant autonomy to the armed forces’.1

In the light of lively and widespread interest in developing-country technology it is not surprising that the search for what is ‘appropriate’ should be bedevilled by semantic confusion. This is, nevertheless, a nuisance which imposes on those who participate in the search and related discussion a tiresome obligation to try to make more than usually clear the meaning of the terms they use. In this regard, it comes naturally to economists to take as ‘appropriate’ that technology (set of inputs and processes) which would minimise the cost of production of a given volume of a given good in any particular location. This minimum cost can, of course, be calculated either at market or social prices, and the application of the latter — if they accurately reflected the real opportunity costs to the economy of the various factor inputs — would for many identify the optimum technology.

Of all the instances of European conquest, indignant world opinion views the legalised racism of white settlers in South Africa as the worst case. As the last remnant of traditional colonialism, the inevitable doom of the whites is predicted, and only the time span of an outdated racial domination is in question. The main reason for this outcome of a polarising racial confrontation is seen in the intransigence of prejudiced settlers who stubbornly refuse to share their immense privileges with one of the most exploited and oppressed populations in the world. Socialised in a traditional ‘frontier mentality’ of cultural isolation and religiously-sanctioned racial superiority, South African whites are considered typical fascists, who use a vast police force to crush all opposition, and enforce a battery of outrageous laws to ensure a cheap labour force as the basis of their huge profits and accumulated wealth.

While conducting research on the occupational and educational aspirations and expectations of secondary-school students in Kenya during 1972, I obtained quantitative and qualitative data from a sample of 699 African students indicating that the problem of crime among unemployed school leavers is likely to substantially worsen in the coming years. The purpose of this article is to present that data within the context of a discussion of secondary education, unemployment, and crime in Kenya.

Over the past ten years, African governments have wrestled with the problems of designing and implementing comprehensive rural development policies. In an overwhelmingly rural continent with, for most areas, only a recent history of urbanisation, such an emphasis is understandable. But if African cities are for the most part young, and small by world standards, they are also growing faster than cities in any other major world region. This rapid growth, superimposed on a meagre resource base, will put increasing pressure on planners to devise solutions for the adequate and equitable distribution of urban services. The solutions that emerge, however, will be heavily conditioned by two sets of factors: the immediate demands of urban growth, and the wider political/administrative and social context within which policy-making takes place.

A Central question in African education, almost since the time the first schools were established by missionaries and colonial governments, has been the importance of making education relevant to the needs of the developing areas, rather than offering only an academic education transplanted from Europe. As early as 1847, for example, the British Colonial Office received a comprehensive memorandum on education which included a number of suggestions for providing practical training in schools in the colonies. Among the specific steps proposed were the establishment of industrial and farm schools, with the inclusion of agriculture, stock management, and land surveying in the curricula of teacher-training institutions.1

The manifold torments of the Third World press themselves upon all of us for solution. Poverty, disease, oppression, early death: this is the fate of most of mankind. Today all the world plucks at the sleeves of the academy, asking, What do you know? What are you good for?1 Any answer must include a statement of the discipline's response to the troubles that beset the less-developed countries. How lawyers respond ought to define the domain of the study of law and development.

Increased attention has recently been paid to the phase of ‘primary resistance’ when Africa first had to confront western intrusion. The arguments of scholars like Terence Ranger for Eastern Africa and Michael Crowder for Western Africa identify those early armed challenges by Africans against colonial rule as the very origins of modern nationalism in the continent. By this argument, Tanzania's ruling party and its function as a liberating force has for its ancestry both the Maji Maji and earlier rebellions against German rule from the 1880s onwards. African struggles against colonial rule did not begin with modern political parties and western trained intellectuals, but originated in those early ‘primary resisters’ with their spears poised against western military technology.1