The attitudes of ordinary people in Africa towards the liberalisation of politics and economies are not well known. Are there popular constituencies for reform? Which specific reform measures do different social groups accept or reject? And does popular support for structural adjustment, if any, go together with support for democracy? In an effort to find answers, this article reports results of a national sample survey in Ghana conducted in July 1999 as part of the Afrobarometer. The survey finds that the constituency for democracy is broader than the constituency for market reform, which is concentrated among educated male elites. In addition, while most Ghanaians are patient with democracy and want to retain this political regime, most Ghanaians are fatigued with adjustment and want the government to ‘change its policies now’. Given this distribution of popular preferences, one can surmise that democracy will be easier to consolidate than a market-based economy.

The study of the military as an agent of societal change began to attract the serious attention of western social scientists after World War II. Since then the independence of the African states has given rise to many coups d'état, thereby awakening the concern of Africanist scholars in the rôle of the military in contemporary society. Predictably, this interest has largely been confined to recent military developments, including the liberation movements in Southern Africa and Guinea–Bissau.

In the early 1960s, three pilot agricultural and settlement schemes were set up along the shores of Lake Victoria in the north-western region of Tanzania with the involvement of Israeli development agency Agridev. One of these sites was Mbarika, where the experimental project ran for three years and had mixed results before being discontinued by the young Tanzanian government. This article explores the story of that scheme and its long-term legacies some 50 years on. Unpacking the representational and material ruinations that outlived the project's official timeline, we examine the memories and rumours that continue to haunt the site to this day and their entanglement with successive development experiences and shifting political ideologies. Through interviews, ethnographic observations and archival research, we shed light on the complex, deeply ambiguous legacies and ‘afterlives’ of a development intervention set between expectations of modernity and a sense of exclusion.

More than ten years after the turn from non-violence to organised violence by the African opposition in South African the white Nationalist régime remains firmlly entrenched in power. Its security forces have successfully suppressed sabotage campaigns initiated in the early 1960s, unco-ordinated terrorist attacks mounted during the same period, and incipient guerrilla action in South-West Africa in 1966. At the call of the authorities in Salisbury they joined their northern neighbours to defeat armed incursions in Rhodesia during 1967–8, and more recently they have contained sporadic attacks in the Caprivi Strip along the Zambian border. The South African Government appears confident that its forces can continue to thwart any future attempts at domestic insurgency.

The article analyses Russia's recent return to Africa. It attempts to answer the question to what extent Russia has abandoned its traditional tools of cooperation such as nuclear energy and military cooperation and engaged in new ‘smart’ ones as indicated by former Foreign Minister Ivanov in 2011. The paper builds on three case studies of African countries having the largest trade volume with Russia in 2018, i.e. Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, and analyses their changing relationship with Russia over the last decade. The results show that Russia has not abandoned its traditional tools but has intensified the use of new ones. The North African region as such has regained significance in Russia's foreign policy. Bilateral relations with all three North African countries have increased at both political and economic levels recently.

Scholars have long puzzled over strong nationalism in weak African states. Existing theories suggest that (a) incumbent leaders use nationalistic appeals to distract people from state weakness; or (b) citizens use nationalistic claims to exclude rival groups from accessing patronage and public goods. But what explains robust nationalism in places where politicians seldom visit and where the state under-provides resources, as is true across much of Africa? We propose a theory of familial nationalism, arguing that people profess attachment to a nation-family instead of to a nation-state under conditions where the family, and not the state, is the main lifeline. We substantiate it using surveys from the border between Niger and Burkina Faso, where an international court ruling allowed people to choose their citizenship, thus providing a test for nationalism in marginalised communities. We supplement the border data with surveys and focus groups from the capitals of both countries.

The British Protectorate of Zanzibar, comprising the two islands of Zanzibar and Pemba and a number of small adjacent islands, is progressing from Protectorate status towards self-government. In strict constitutional terms, Zanzibar is a multi-racial state with an Arab Sultan under the protection of the Government of Great Britain. Though the concept of protectorate implies a limited domestic role on the part of the protecting power, Great Britain has—through usage, agreement, and concession—come to occupy a position of decisive ascendancy within Zanzibar. The present policy of the British administration is to devolve full political power into local hands through a process of constitutional development which will result in a fully representative system of government. This policy has expressed itself in Zanzibar, as elsewhere in the British African territories, in the expansion of the unofficial side of the Legislative Council, in the gradual replacement of nominated and ex-officio members of the Legislative Council by members chosen on the basis of nation-wide common roll elections, and in the introduction of a ministerial system, which is now to be followed by internal self-government.

During the past 25 years, there have been several efforts by developing countries to establish regional economic institutions to address their poverty, underdevelopment, and external dependency. Although the economic imperatives and rationales for their creation intuitively seemed sufficient to ensure that the national political leaderships would choose to engage in whatever give-and-take was necessary to achieve their stated goals, the historical record reveals that these regional organisations have experienced uneven results at best. Several are now defunct. Why is this the case?

The oil boom that lasted from the early 1970s until about 1983 spawned a phenomenal expansion of the Nigerian economy. Within a few years, oil revenues rose from 1·4 billion naira in 1973 to 12·86 billion naira by 1980. The oil boom led to the assigning of substantial sums of money to the cocoa industry of southwestern Nigeria. In spite of these investments, the cocoa industry stagnated during the oil boom years. Using oral interviews and archival documents, this paper examines structural change in the cocoa industry before the oil boom, and analyses the failure of government rehabilitation programmes during the oil boom years.

Representative institutions are a feature of political systems everywhere. The political systems of the new states that have emerged since World War II are no exception. Despite the far-reaching changes made by them in the institutions bequeathed by their colonial masters, they have almost everywhere retained, albeit with significant modifications, the representative assembly.

Political systems of every description continuously confront a problem crucial to their survival: how to prepare the younger members of the system for the political responsibilities they must one day assume. This problem is quite general; it exists in all societies in every historical epoch, and it embodies a learning process that stretches back to a child's first perceptions of the larger social world. How children learn the values that will guide their future behaviour in politics, and what it is they learn, are questions with answers that vary from society to society.

While many analysts assume that the autocratic regime of Paul Biya is deeply unpopular amongst ordinary Cameroonians, there is almost no existing analysis of public opinion in Cameroon. In fact, Cameroonians are deeply divided in their beliefs about politics; while many view the government as democratic and legitimate, others see the regime as entirely autocratic. What explains these fundamental divides in beliefs? While existing theories point to demographic factors as the most important predictors of political opinions, this article argues that in autocratic regimes, political geography is even more important to understanding these divides. Political parties in autocratic regimes develop opposite narratives about the legitimacy of the state, and regardless of education, partisanship, age, or ethnicity, citizens living in party strongholds are far more likely to adopt these narratives than citizens outside of strongholds. Understanding these divides is critical to explaining regime legitimisation in Cameroon, and African autocracies more broadly.

In 1967, the Portuguese Foreign Minister spoke of relations with Malawi as ‘that kind of mutual respect which ensures good neighbourliness, cordial relations and constructive cooperation’1. Yet, throughout the ten-year period from July 1964 to September 1974, the dominant political issue in Southern Africa had been the armed struggle for political rights between African liberation movements and the white-minority régimes. Within this context, the boundary between Malawi and Portuguese East Africa became part of the dividing line where the independent black African states met the white-dominated régimes. This article seeks to explore the pressures for both conflict and cooperation which were continuously being felt by Malawi and Portugal. Despite their substantial ideological differences over where political power should reside, both countries were drawn together because of their geography, Malawi being dependent upon the transportation facilities in Mozambique for an outlet to the Indian Ocean.

‘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.

Since the 1979 oil shock and in the course of the subsequent world recession, many African governments have dramatically altered the orientation of their economic policies. States previously committed to various brands of ‘African socialism’ have been ending subsidies, reducing de facto taxes on agricultural producers, ‘privatising’ previously state-run activities, adopting more liberal exchange-rate policies, and implementing numerous other ‘market-oriented’ reforms.

This article is concerned with the rebellion in Darfur as a way to illustrate the politics of insurgency in the era of globalisation. We first show how the Darfur rebels have projected their struggle onto the world stage, before examining the effects that this has engendered. On the one hand, Darfur's global profile solidified the rebels' cause and co-opted international actors in support of it. This translated into real leverage for the rebels, and it constrained the Sudanese government by reducing its ability to use brute force. At the same time, internationalisation encouraged the Darfur rebels to make maximalist demands at the expense of articulating a broader political vision addressing the root causes of conflict. Moreover, the substitution of local legitimacy for international connections lowered the barriers of entry for new groups and thus promoted fragmentation. The combination of these effects makes for intractable conflict scenarios, the current situation in Darfur being a case in point.

This article attempts to understand why ethnic-regional civil war has challenged the national unity of Côte d'Ivoire and not Ghana, two neighbouring countries with nearly identical ethnic, religious and regional divisions, by examining politics at the grassroots. Based on a carefully controlled comparison of two similar regions of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, the study investigates how participation in local voluntary associations reinforces the local experience of the state to shape the ongoing development of political values and affect the prospects for ethnic peace and democracy. The article finds that participation in ethnically heterogeneous voluntary associations does not necessarily promote democratic values and practice. In fact, in Côte d'Ivoire, participation in ethnically heterogeneous cocoa producer and mutual assistance organisations reinforces vertical patronage networks based on narrower ethnic identities. In contrast, in Ghana, participation in more ethnically homogeneous local church groups encourages the development of democratic values and practices at the local level that mediate the potential for ethnic conflict and support the consolidation of a democratic regime.

The rapidly deteriorating social and economic situation in sub-Saharan Africa, and the need for large-scale action to reverse that ominous trend, are captured well in the following paragraph:

It is becoming evident that Africa is in a state of breathtaking and grievous crisis whose… likes may not have been seen anywhere in the West since the 14th century Plague. Twenty-nine of the world's 36 poorest nations are to be found south of the Sahara desert… and 24 of them are now appealing for emergency aid to ward off famine… The percentage of Africans living in absolute poverty rose from 82 percent to 91 percent through the 1970s. In 1983 per capita food production was down by 14 percent from 1981. Five million Africans are currently refugees. Five million African children died this year; another five million were crippled by malnutrition and disease.

Lesotho has long had the distinction of being one of the more anomalous states not only in Southern Africa, but in the world. It is entirely surrounded by another country, the Republic of South Africa. It is ethnically and linguistically very homogeneous. It is a monarchy. Physically, the lowest point in Lesotho is higher, in vertical distance above sea level, that that in any other country. Its economy is marked by some extraordinary paradoxes, such as agriculture being the main economic activity of the bulk of the labour force albeit the origin of a small fraction of total income, imports enomously exceeding exports and being larger than domestic output, and fewer citizens working for cash inside the country than outside.

There are few objectives considered more compelling by developing countries than the need to attain their economic freedom. Throughout the Third World, from Bolivia and Botswana to Burma, few themes arouse such mass enthusiasm as the clarion call to economic independence. However, despite its potency in shaping many national goals and policies, very little intellectual effort has been expended in analysing the concept and exploring its ramifications in the realms of politics, economics, or sociology.