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Contemporary West African States
  • Edited by Donal Cruise O'Brien, John Dunn, Richard Rathbone
  • Published online:
    10 December 2009
    Print publication:
    26 January 1990
  • The West African states have reached maturity. This new volume - appearing a decade after the successful West African States: Failure and Promise - provides up-to-date studies of nine states, including Chad, Burkina Faso and Cameroon, which were neglected in the earlier volume, and introduces contemporary theories of West African politics. The book reflects changes on the ground and also in academic debate, notably the remarkable retreat of dependency theory and Marxian analysis and the rise of free-market theorising by both governments and scholars. The volume also contains important observations on the political importance of religious fundamentalism in the region, and the growth of sub-national forms of political activity. The writers are well-known scholars in the field, and include contributors to the influential journal Politique Africaine. This will be a useful textbook for everyone interested in African politics, but it is also a provocative contribution to the debate on the nature of the state and political processes in Africa.

  • World War I and Africa: Introduction

  • Richard Rathbone
  • Journal:
    The Journal of African History / Volume 19 / Issue 1 / January 1978
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 January 2009, pp. 1-9

  • The study of the history of Africa during World War I raises two major problems of synthesis and a host of smaller problems. First of all, the sheer diversity of the continent and the extremely uneven nature of its precolonial development, let alone the patchy and differentiated modes of imperial and colonial penetration, make it difficult to see its experience, even of so ostensibly cataclysmic an event as World War I, as a unified whole. Indeed, the diversity of the continent was mirrored in the diversity of its experience of the war, which combined the actual agony of the battlefield for many thousands of black troops both in Africa and in Europe at one extreme, with the undoubted uneventfulness of those same years for many others.

  • A Murder in the Colonial Gold Coast: Law and Politics in the 1940s*

  • Richard Rathbone
  • Journal:
    The Journal of African History / Volume 30 / Issue 3 / November 1989
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 January 2009, pp. 445-461

  • This article looks at a murder case which resulted from allegations of ‘ritual murder’ in the course of Nana Sir Ofori Atta's final funeral rites in Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana, in 1944. At the level of the Akyem state, the accusations came from an affronted section within the polity, the Amantow Mmiensa, who had been defeated by the Stool in the course of the 1932–3 disturbances arising from the Native Administration Revenue Ordinance but whose grievances against the Okyenhene were of greater antiquity. The accused were all descendants of past kings of Akyem. At the level of the Gold Coast state, the case provided an arena for some of the best lawyers in the country to use their mastery of colonial law to challenge the legal and hence colonial establishment both in Accra and in London. At the imperial level, opponents of the Labour Government both from the right and the left were able to use the case to belabour a weak Secretary of State for the Colonies both within and outside the House of Commons. The Governor, Sir Alan Burns, was ultimately confronted with an entirely legal if eccentric challenge to his authority in the Gold Coast, and serious assaults on his competence in London. The article argues that the case poisoned relations between Dr J. B. Danquah, the inspiration behind the defence case, and the colonial establishment in Accra so much that the constructive relationship between some of the intelligentsia and the Governor before 1944 was destroyed. This in turn influenced the nationalists' reception of the reformed 1946 constitution and the attitude of the administration to the United Gold Coast Convention.

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