What is ‘essence’ and what is ‘appearance’ in African politics? Does class or interest-group analysis describe and explain the various realities? These questions are unanswerable without an examination of the methods by which claims to correct understanding are made. All claims to knowledge are arbitrary until the methods of enquiry and the justification for their validity are made explicit.

Amílcar Cabral was primarily a man of action. His political leadership is best understood by looking at what he did rather than at what he said. More importantly, his writings were essentially analyses of the events in which he was involved; they were not theories about, or inquiries into, abstract social or political questions. He did not view himself as a political theorist although his writings obviously have theoretical relevance. He was loath to commit himself to any ideology or theory. The majority of his writings are party documents, and they reflect the very specific purpose and audience for which they were intended.

In the course of several field studies carried out during 1978–9 on behalf of the Working Group on Recurrent Costs established by the Comité Inter-états de Lutte contre la Sécheresse dans le Sahel and the Club du Sahel, it became clear that imperfect functioning of domestic capital markets hampers the efforts of Sahelian governments to raise domestic non-tax resources for budget finance. Inasmuch as the operation and maintenance of development projects compete for a severely limited pool of uncommitted government revenues – that is, revenues not committed to debt service, meeting the civil service payroll, and other inflexible obligations – reforms that augment this pool are of particular interest from the viewpoint of ensuring that these projects function properly once established.

Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968, and was then said to be the paradigm of the small isolated, poor, dependent country, only emerging from the colonial era to fall immediately into neocolonialism – the Third World's Third World.

In 1955 the South African Government began to demolish a black freehold suburb in Johannesburg, and to relocate its inhabitants in a state-controlled township. Resistance to these moves by the leading black political organisation of the time, the African National Congress (A.N.C.), was short-lived and unsuccessful. Despite its abortive nature, the attempt to oppose the destruction of Sophiatown was historically significant for several reasons.

Legislation in the former British colonial territories exhibited a pair of paradoxes. First, it spoke in legalese, a patois that only judges and lawyers can read easily. Many laws concerning development, however, addressed ordinary citizens. Second, drafters invented and used a specialised style to reduce official and judicial discretion by making legislation more precise, but this frequently endowed officials with discretion as broad as the unbroken sky. In Africa, the uses of legalese seemed to war with the purposes for which it was developed.

The 1977–8 war in the Horn of Africa and its traumatic aftermath has brought Somalia to a critical junction. The expulsion of the Soviets in November 1977, following their overtures to Ethiopia, and the subsequent rout of the Somali army, along with Ogadeni guerrillas, by a combined Cuban–Ethiopian–Yemini force led by Russian generals, has left this nation demoralised, isolated, and ideologically sundered. A fluid and somewhat confused socio-economic and political situation, only made less chaotic by President Mohamed Siad Barre's powerful personality and will to survive, characterises this post-war Somalia.

Corruption is a wide-spread phenomenon in the developing world. The term is usually reserved for ‘the practice of using the power of office for making private gain in breach of laws and regulations nominally in force’, or as more flamboyantly defined by M. McMullan, ‘a public official is corrupt if he accepts money…for doing something that he is under duty to do anyway, that he is under duty not to do, or to exercise a legitimate discretion for improper reasons’.1 Corruption is thus a description of activites emanating from and related to officialdom. Irregular activities among private individuals are a matter of private enterprise. They are not usually classified as corruption, but as straightforward theft, fraud, embezzlement, and the like.