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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have come to the conclusion that General Haji Idi Amin Dada is not a bizarre or maverick intrusion upon the Uganda political scene,1 but deeply and significantly entwined in it. I wish to present what appear to me to be the most important interrelated factors in the conventional functional sense, but to do so diachronically, so that they become continuous themes or forces,2 in which successive events have causative effect on one another.3 This raises all kinds of interesting theoretical and epistemological questions which I shall not be able to dispose of at the same time. I shall also be forced to be selective, without being able to justify each choice and step of the argument as it deserves. Central to my interpretation is the fact that General Amin is a Nubi, and that the history of the Nubi is important for the understanding of contemporary events. The present régime is more and more dominantly a Nubi régime, and its core strength is a Nubi strength.

In recent years African literature has-at last-been receiving the serious treatment it has long deserved, largely as a result of the efforts of the literary critics who have demanded strict attention to texture and structure.1 Although there are still a few old-time missionary critics, such as G. D. Killam and Ernest Emenyonu, who pass off environmental commentaries under the shibboleths of literary criticism, the general thrust appears to be towards more formal textual consideration: the examination of how the content of a work is satisfactorily shaped into a perceivable Gestalt.

The theme I have chosen for my address is what seems to me to be the overriding issue of the moment: change and what it signifies for the peoples of this country, and especially the young people like many of you who are completing your studies, or at least an important stage in those studies, and are naturally thinking about what lies ahead. For it is clear from all that has happened lately that you are part of the first batch of students to graduate in a new era of change that has opened this year in Southern Africa, with all that this means for your futures.

‘The general guide should be to transfer power to the smallest unit consistent with the scale of the problem.’ This quotation is based on the experience of the United States, but should be even more applicable to less-developed countries, because of their poor system of communications. In this article I shall examine the attempts to decentralise planning and economic decision-making in Ghana, analyse the rationale for such moves away from centralisation, and evaluate the Ghanaian experience against the existing body of knowledge on this subject and the special local conditions that are relevant.

‘Chad should follow a genuine policy of authenticity and should unite behind this national movement for its cultural and social revolution.’1 This suggestion was not made by President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre, the founder and chief proponent of authenticity, but by President Mouammar El Kadhafi of Libya in an address to the party leaders of Chad. It illustrates the increasing influence of authenticity as a guiding ideology in Africa, and perhaps in other continents as well. Not only are a number of nations using the phrase, but they are taking steps to make it a reality. Before describing these measures, let us examine the recourse to authenticity and compare it to its predecessor, négritude.

The ever-increasing African aspirations for development have been reflected in the many plan documents produced during the last decade. But the growth of government resources – or public savings, defined as the excess of current revenue over current expenditure ’ has lagged very much behind. In consequence, resort is increasingly being made to other sources of funds.

Let it be said that African history and politics are not among the ‘overblown’ disciplines in Australian universities. Compared with America or Britain, Australia lacks profound historic connections with Africa, while as yet domestic pressures in the direction of black studies are few and, with rare exceptions, uninfluential. A glance at the consolidated index to Australian Outlook (Melbourne), the journal of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, shows that from 1947 to 1972 it carried only 27 articles on African countries and international relations. Apart from the annual gatherings of the All-African Students' Union of Australia, only one conference concerned exclusively with contemporary African politics has yet been held: at the Flinders University of South Australia, in May 1971.