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.

Reform and the transformation of authoritarian régimes in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Horn of Africa have been associated with rampant nationalism, secession of component units, and ultimately, demands for the return of lost territories. By contrast, within supposedly ‘tribal’ Southern Africa, the African National Congress (A.N.C.) and its Africanist opponents are agreed that any settlement must apply to the whole of the Republic of South Africa, including the so-called ‘independent Homelands’.

Of the 21 members of the Arab League, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has received perhaps the least attention, ranking far behind other North African states, much less those closer to the Arab—Israeli fault-line or the recent Gulf conflict. Mauritania's desperate economic condition (a G.N.P. per capita of only $446 in 1984) has been occasionally publicised, as well as advancing desertification (reaching even into the centre of the capital, Nouakchott), and the tensions between the ruling Beydane (‘white’) Arabs, supported by their cultural/political allies, and the black African tribes concentrated in the Senegal River valley that erupted into violence in April 1989, and which led to a near-war between Senegal and Mauritania.

Probably no other aspect of the South African conflict has elicited more divergent explanations and misinterpretations than the ongoing political violence. It is variously attributed to (1) de Klerk's double agenda and unreformed police; (2) a ‘third force’ of right-wing elements in the security establishment, bent on derailing the Government's negotiation agenda; (3) Inkatha–A.N.C. rivalry, engineered by ambitious Buthelezi in danger of being sidelined as an equal third party; (4) the A.N.C.'s campaign of armed struggle, ungovernability, and revolutionary intolerance; (5) ingrained tribalism, unleashed by the lessening of white repression that merely resulted in ‘black-on-black’ violence formerly held in check; (6) the legacy of apartheid in general, a ‘lost youth’ generation. Helen Suzman, for example, singled out sanctions for at least ‘part of the blame’ in her 1991 presidential address to the Institute of Race Relations, while its director, John Kane-Berman, lists all parties as having ‘bloody hands’.

Few can doubt the proposition that there is an important difference between information and knowledge, and that more of the former does not necessarily lead to the latter. Whereas a great deal has been written from all manner of perspectives about the situation in Africa both before and since independence, the resulting corpus of literature has seldom yielded a mainstream understanding of basic aspects of state politics. Doubtless many feel that the more they read about the continent, the less they known about what is going on and why.

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.

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.

The 1980s were a terrible time for Africa. The decade began auspiciously enough — Nigeria had returned to civilian rule, the Tanzania People's Defence Force had sent Idi Amin packing, and the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe was about to win independence. But this promising beginning was quickly transformed and Africa sunk into its ‘lost decade’.

Aviation in Southern Africa was subject throughout the 1980s to increasingly intense political pressures. As ever, the cause was protests about apartheid. The severe blow that black African countries dealt to South African Airways (S.A.A.), the Republic's state-owned national airline, in the 1960s by withdrawing overflying rights was magnified by similar action from a wider spectrum of non-African governments. In the mid-1980s, Australia and the United States of America, for example, revoked S.A.A.'s landing rights, and forbad airlines registered in their countries from flying to South Africa. Other carriers, such as Air Canada, closed their offices and then terminated representation in South Africa.

In Monrovia, the capital of the West African state of Liberia, Richard K. Sleboe, a Kru tribesman from Sinoe County and previously a Jehovah's Witness, founded in June 1970 the Kingdom Assembly Church of Africa. This came to be popularly known as the ‘Never—Die Church’ from its most distinguishing belief, namely that a true believer will never physically die but will live on this earth forever.