At the important forum for debate of the current state of African-American relations provided by the African-American Institute meetings in Harare, Zimbabwe, in January 1983, two apparently contradictory themes emerged in the public and private assessments of American-African policy by the African delegates. On the one hand, they observed—to their disappointment and dismay—that American policy appeared to remain essentially unchanged over the last quarter-century. On the other, and in the next breath, they angrily denounced the theory of “constructive engagement” in southern Africa, and in particular its corollary of “linkage” of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola to South African acquiescence in a Namibia settlement.

Is it possible that Chester Crocker is simply Richard Moose by another name? Senator Jesse Helms evidently thinks so, but should we? Or, to put the matter more graphically, is it plausible that, despite the apparent rhetorical contrasts, United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick holds essentially the same views concerning Africa as did her predecessors Andrew Young and Donald McHenry? Perhaps this is a timely moment to explore this seeming paradox. Within the foreign policy machinery of the United States government, Africa was accorded bureaucratic recognition in 1958, a quarter-century ago, through the creation of the Bureau of African Affairs. This organizational innovation symbolized the birth of an African policy, even though episodic connections with sundry African states extend far back to the early days of the Republic: Liberia, Morocco, Zanzibar, Egypt, Ethiopia.

The classical realist school exemplified by Morgenthau, Kennan, and Kissinger has long dominated the study of international politics. In conceptualizing national interest, this school thinks predominantly in geopolitical, military/strategic terms. Economic power constitutes a source of military capability, but it is a subsidiary variable in analyzing the balance of power, which stands as the central concept in this mode of analysis.

Africanists have increasingly questioned the utility of this approach for the analysis of African foreign policy. Economic power is not a subsidiary factor in the diplomacy of African states—on the contrary, it is a central but yet essentially negative variable. African states themselves lack economic power. In other words, they must function in a world system dominated by the economic power of others. Global economic structures, elaborated during the colonial era, greatly affect the options open to African states. In the context of an established international division of labor, there are enormous constraints on African choices. Foreign policy is shaped by, but is also potentially an instrument to shape, the external economic environment. In studying African foreign policy, scholars must take into consideration international economic structures. How are states in practice confronting or accommodating, the external economic environment? Case studies that seek to answer this question are now beginning to appear.

A number of international agencies (as well as other prominent institutions and individuals) have issued reports assessing the “crises” now perceived to afflict “development” in Africa. The Organization of African Unity's Lagos Plan of Action (OAU, 1980) emphasized historical legacies, deteriorating terms of trade, and Africa's dependence on foreign markets, and set out elements for a general strategy to escape these constraints by building self-reliant, local, and regional economies. Various Food and Agriculture Organization documents (e.g., FAO, 1983) and UNICEF's State of the Children Report (UNICEF, 1983) provide particularly grim pictures of food and nutritional deficiencies. The Economic Commission for Africa, in its “silver jubilee report,” analyzing recent history, emphasized that, if present trends continue, the “scenario” after the next twenty-five years will be a “nightmare” of “poverty” and “degradation” of life (UN ECA 1983).

The World Bank's 1981 report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (hereafter Accelerated Development) also portrayed a “crisis” situation in food and agricultural production and called for some major policy changes in response. This document has probably attracted the lion's share of attention, certainly controversy. There are several reasons why the report deserves careful study and concerned discussion: it is readable, provocative, and comprehensive; it focuses on what are perceived to be “immediate problems” which “must be addressed if the widespread decline in per capita output” is to be “reverse”; it sets out an “agenda” of new “policies and programs to bring about this essential improvement” in the “production base” (World Bank, 1983: 1).

No subject has in recent years so intruded into the scholarly literature on Africa as the African worker. Labor has become a fundamental issue to those who seek to develop African economies or to revolutionize African polities. The elucidation and debate about the relationship of labor to historical and social issues is currently under way over an impressive range of places and in a number of languages. It is thus highly appropriate at this juncture to assemble some of the themes that emerge most sharply in contemporary writing on Africa.

A broad range of opinion would concede that the worker, when organized in the pursuit of specific objectives or as a class, necessarily takes on a special political importance. One aspect of the literature on African labor is thus political, studying in particular the organizations workers have created, their significance and direction. Whether or not such organization exists, labor has a fundamental economic role to play. In bourgeois economics, labor is generally categorized as a factor whose productivity, contribution, and wages need to be assessed to understand the broader picture. Marxist economics gives labor a fundamental position; it is from the surplus extracted from the worker that the ruling class ultimately lives while the form of extraction determines more than purely economic relationships. In particular, Marxists thus emphasize as well the broader social significance of labor. They have been responsible for introducing laborrelated questions to a broad range of historical and societal discussions typical of much recent literature on Africa.

Some events and settings stand out as important symbols of a historical period. Versailles, in my opinion, is such a symbol. Constructed at great cost by order of Louis XIV, Versailles symbolizes the isolation of the court of Louis XVI and the insensitivity of Marie Antoinette as expressed in the unforgettable lines: “The poor have no bread? Then let them eat cake.” More recently, in June of 1982, Versailles was the setting for the summit gathering of the heads-of-state of seven major industrialized countries. The response of these “guardians” of the present world order (or disorder) to the cries of the world's poor was an echo of Marie Antoinette: “The poor countries have no foreign exchange? Then let them eat monetarism.”

I could not escape this reflection and this symbolism as I re-read the World Bank Report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (1981), and its recent follow-up, Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress Report on Development Prospects and Programs (1983, hereafter Progress Report). Scapegoating the victims seems to be a popular pastime in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. These World Bank reports, supported by country and sectoral studies of many African nations, manifest this same tendency of “blaming the victims.” They are classical expositions of “horse and sparrow economics,” patronizingly instructing the sparrows to improve their techniques so that they might more completely pick out the oats in the horses' droppings. But they are deadly serious, as the geography of hunger and hunger-related deaths again expands.

Recent assessments of the performance and prospects of African economies portray a deepening economic crisis centered on the problem of food supplies. During the last ten years, a rapidly rising number of Africans have had an increasingly difficult time getting enough to eat. By all accounts, domestic food supplies are falling further and further behind domestic needs; both governments and consumers face serious problems in procuring the kinds and quantities of food they want at prices they can afford to pay. Chronic hunger and malnutrition are spreading, escalating quickly into famine at times of environmental or financial crisis. Covering food deficits from foreign sources has also become more difficult in the last decade. World prices of grains have risen; soaring petroleum prices have put heavy strains on many African countries' balances of payments and worsened their terms of trade; and agricultural exports have not increased sufficiently to cover rising import bills. Food aid to Africa has grown at unprecedented rates in the last decade, but it is neither adequate to meet shortterm needs, nor is it a solution to the crisis in the long run.

The question to which this review will be primarily addressed is whether the food crisis in Africa is mainly a result of lagging or insufficient agricultural production or whether it is part of a larger crisis of economic management, reflected in chronic balance of payments deficits, rising foreign indebtedness, inflation, low productivity, corruption, waste, and deteriorating standards of living for all but a privileged few. For the most part international agencies, from the OAU to the World Bank, have attributed the crisis to declining or stagnant agricultural production brought about by government policies which discourage or inhibit agricultural growth. The analysis walks on two legs. First, aggregate production indices compiled by African governments and/or the international agencies themselves suggest that, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural output per capita has stagnated or even declined in recent years. Second, studies of development policy in several Asian and Latin American economies (Little et al., 1970) showed that strategies of import-substituting industrialization (widely practiced in the 1950s and 1960s) tend to discriminate against agriculture. After independence, African governments frequently adopted similar policies with, it is argued, similar results: in Africa's largely agrarian economies, the resulting decline in agricultural output (or growth) not only led to food shortages and mounting balance of payment deficits, but also undermined the entire process of economic development.

The physical appearance of Africa's marginal semi-arid lands shows evidence of eroding hillsides, denuded plains, large erosion shelves, and deep sheer-sided gulleys. These features manifest an imbalance between humans and the resources which support them or what some scholars have termed rural population pressure (Anzagi and Bernard, 1977; Steel, 1970). A decade ago, an International Labor Office mission to Kenya (1972: 405, hereafter ILO) noted that surface soil degradation and erosion in marginal semi-arid areas were chronic. Other symptoms of the physical destruction of the land included the drying up of streams, cultivating on river banks leading to silting of streams and dams, unchecked gullying of cultivated slopes, and sheet erosion following bad grazing practices. More recently, the World Bank (1980: 53) noted that increasing population growth in the drier areas of Kenya has led to a pressure exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, which in turn has led to lower income per capita, and even to famine.

In general Kenya's rangelands are densely populated relative to pastoral areas in other African countries (von Kaufmann, 1976: 255). The government itself (Kenya, 1979a: 211) notes the urgency of dealing with social problems related to the rapid population expansion in medium and low potential areas of the country where crop production is feasible but very risky.

The early scholarship on post-independence Africa contained a decided focus on and preoccupation with political leadership. This emphasis was due in part to the fact that political leaders were particularly visible embodiments of the state and that the institutions of the state were much more amorphous and elusive of analysis than the leadership. Even political parties, which were the focus of a great deal of research in the late fifties and early sixties, were examined much more in the context of political leadership than of institutional structures or their relationship to the state. This focus on political leaders was based on the expectation by both writers and political leaders themselves that the new political elites of Africa were going to transform the political, economic, and social life of these states in the very near future. These views were not just functions of the romanticism of the sixties, but were expectations grounded in beliefs about self-government, freedom, participation, self-determination, and development.

Political leaders were seen as the key to mobilization of the masses (Apter, 1963: xv, 303-5; Pye, 1962: 27-28), the driving force for development (Apter, 1967: 378-79), the architects of institution building (Huntington and Moore, 1970: esp. 32; Huntington, 1968), and the focus of national integration (Coleman and Rosberg, 1964). They were to provide a new moral leadership, a short-cut to political and economic development, and the drive and charisma to move the post-colonial state from its period of suspended animation into the twentieth century.

Ever since Raúl Prebisch, UNCTAD's first Secretary General, called attention to it in his famous 1964 report (UNCTAD, 1964), the commodities problem has been a priority item on the international agenda in the various forums where the North-South dialogue has been taking place. When the First Lomé Convention was signed on 28 February 1975 between the nine countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) and forty-six African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) states, it was hailed as a major achievement, exemplary of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) then emerging within the wider framework of the North-South dialogue.

In particular, much was made of the EEC countries' attempt to come to grips with the commodities problem by agreeing to set up a scheme (known as “Stabex” in Lomé parlance) for the stabilization of export earnings from commodities exported by the ACP states to the EEC. This system, generally held as the most innovative feature of the Lomée Convention, seemed to meet some, if not all, of the demands voiced by the developing countries in the context of the NIEO on the problem of commodities.

Yet, this was by no means a gratuitous gesture on the part of the EEC. In the first place, the Community's acute awareness of its dependence on raw materials imports from the ACP states, as well as of the latter's dependence on raw materials exports to the EEC, tended to make it responsive to the ACP states' demands in the area of commodities.

… Fragments of our lost kingdom …

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a deadman's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

There is an extraordinary degree of similarity throughout the region in the nature of the policy problems that have arisen and in the national response to them.

— Accelerated Development, p. 4

We asked for bread

And they chucked a stone at us.

— A senior African economic analyst's observations on Accelerated Development.

Economic growth implies using … scarce resources more efficiently…. Policy making inevitably has to embody wider political constraints and objectives…. The record of poor growth … suggests that inadequate attention has been given to policies to increase the efficiency of resource use and that action to correct this situation is urgently called for.

— Accelerated Development, p. 24

People … must be able to control their own activities within the framework of their communities. At present the best-intentioned governments—my own included—too readily move from a conviction of the need for rural development into acting as if the people had no ideas of their own. This is quite wrong … people do know what their basic needs are. If they have sufficient freedom they can be relied upon to determine their own priorities for development.

— President J. K. Nyere

Our own reality—however fine and attractive the reality of others may be—can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts by our own sacrifices.

— Amilcar Cabral

The absurd, both as an element of satire and as a style in its own right, has always been manifest in African literature both oral and written. However, in an effort to redirect the focus of African literature and criticism from eurocentricism to a literature and criticism informed by African aesthetics, vocal African critics like Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike have persistently condemned the encouragement of modernist tendencies in African writing (1980: 239): “If African literature is not to become a transplanted fossil of European literature, it needs to burst out of the straightjacket of anglomodernist poetry and of the ‘well made novel’.” Their advice to African critics is that the latter must “liberate themselves from their mesmerization with Europe and its critical canons” (p. 302) and must stop encouraging “the manufacture of a still, pale, anemic, academic poetry, slavishly imitative of 20th-century European modernism, with its weak preciosity, ostentatious erudition, and dunghill piles of esoterica and obscure allusions, all totally cut off from the vital nourishment of our African traditions ” (p. 3).

The antagonism of these critics toward modernism appears to be based on a seemingly incontrovertible evidence (Chinweizu, 1973: 8):

There was a specific burden of tradition that Western modernism reacted against in its revolt. But however familiar we may be with all that; however familiar we may be with that tradition or with the various modernist against it (Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, etc.) they are not part of our history. They do not belong to our past….

William Foltz (1978) has argued that the vital economic and strategic interests of the United States are so limited in scope that the making of an American policy toward South Africa is freed from any serious constraints. As such, South Africa represents “in political terms, something of a ‘freeplay area’ for American political leaders,” and an area where the “most prudent and cost-effective policy to protect American economic and strategic interests would be to work with, rather than against, the indigenous African forces of change” (Foltz, 1978: 267–68). While Foltz's argument may indeed be empirically and objectively correct it has certainly been rejected by the Reagan administration. This rejection stems in large measure from the administration's ideological world view which has contributed to the development of the policy of “constructive engagement” toward South Africa.

Constructive engagement holds that U.S. interests are best served by developing stronger economic and cultural ties with white South Africa. The conviction is that such ties will contribute to the gradual liberalization and ultimately to the demise of apartheid. These ties, it is argued, will support and encourage the political ascendancy of a modernizing autocracy of enlightened white elites. The latter's commitment to change, so the argument goes, will transform South Africa into a multiracial democracy and consequently into an acceptable and trusted partner in the overall Western system of defense. This line of argument rests on a particular set of intellectual constructs derived from a general system of beliefs.

The limited size of domestic markets, the availability of natural and technological resources in national units, and the desire to retain some form of protection against full global competition are all factors which promote the formation of regional economic groupings. National markets are usually too small to support efficient industries, exploiting economies of scale or specialization. The elimination of tariffs within an economic community and a common external tariff to non-members should divert trade from external to internal community sources. For industries favorably affected by trade diversion, trade expansion should enable the exploitation of economies of scale and specialization formerly unattainable because of the small size of the domestic market. Production should be allocated among members on the basis of comparative advantage and, following free trade theory, it should then be at its most efficient and low cost. Economic integration is essentially then a strategy of export promotion and free trade among members and of import substitution and protection towards nonmembers (Balassa, 1973; Berendsen, 1978).

As Balassa and Stoutjesdijk (1975) have noted, trade diversion and regional protection may have harmful effects. Goods imported from regional partners may be inferior or higher in price. Less competitive conditions may slow the adoption of new technologies. One of the problems of any economic community is, therefore, to minimize these disadvantages. Relevant policies include both the promotion of efficient and competitive intra-regional exchange by setting external tariffs at sufficiently low levels and, also, the maximum exploitation of member state comparative advantage.

The World Bank has become a subject of controversy, of learned discourse and endless debates between the Left and the Right. The Bank has become the foremost multilateral international lending agency, with an expanding role covering a variety of sectors and involving billions of dollars worth of loans to the Third World, on terms that are not available from commercial banks.

As its role expanded, the Bank began to draw increasing attention, both favorable and critical. The London Economist recently called it “a bank for all seasons.” It is viewed differently by different people, depending on their ideological positions or perspectives. These perspectives may be reduced to two basic positions, divided along a Left/Center axis and a Center/Right axis.

The Left critique has found the Bank—on its record—an instrument of Western corporate capital (Hayter, 1972; Payer, 1982; Bello, 1982). The thrust of the Leftist argument is that the Bank has not proved to be useful to the great mass of the Third World peoples, and that the ruling elites of its borrowing countries have derived benefits from its lending activities. The argument also holds that multinational corporations stand behind its activities also benefiting by selling their goods, which are not a matter of basic necessity to the ordinary peoples.

The Centrist position is essentially supportive of the Bank's role as an important vehicle for the transfer of resources for development of the Third World and as a facilitator of trade among nations (Reid, 1975; Hurni, 1978; Krueger, 1982; Mason and Asher, 1974).

Like most West African countries, Nigeria abounds in traditional associations or societies often referred to erroneously as “secret” societies. Secret societies (according to a dictionary of social science [Gould and Kolb, 1964: 642]) are those associations in which secret rituals, symbols, signs, medicines, as well as other material paraphernalia make up the main part of their raison d'être and gain psychological significance through being concealed. In the same vein, Hammond (1971: 193) notes that membership in secret societies is limited to only a segment of the total eligible population; members focally protect the secrecy surrounding their rituals, secret rites that are believed to increase the supernatural powers of their members; and that non-initiates are usually permitted to learn just enough about them to be frightened, impressed, and, therefore, enticed to join them.

A closer examination, however, shows that, more than nuisance value, secret societies fulfill economic, social, and political functions similar to those of associations based primarily on age and sex. For example, Robert Lowie (1927) was fascinated by functional resemblances between West African secret societies and certain men's organizations among the Plains Indians in America. This led him to suspect that the state might be found latent in sodalities or “associations.”

In the particular case of most Nigerian associations, the esoteric basis of their activities sets them apart from others like medicine societies, that is, societies concerned with the practice of traditional methods of diagnosis and healing.

Rural-urban migration tends to play a central role in analyses of Zambian society. Zambia is, by African standards, a highly urbanized country and has experienced an explosive urbanization since independence. Migration from the rural areas is seen as a major cause for rural stagnation. Consequently it is a major policy goal of the Zambian government to reverse this trend towards more urbanization. The political and academic discussion about this policy is mostly in terms of large aggregates of people; rural versus urban, or peasants and capitalist penetration. For example migration from rural areas to urban centers is seen as a logical consequence of maximizing benefits in individual choices given the market situation (Fry and Maimbo, 1971; Bates, 1976). Another view sees this migration as logical in the interests of international capitalism. Rural-urban migration provides cheap labor of benefit to an export oriented enclave economy. The role of rural areas is limited to the reproduction of labor and this conflicts with a possible role of rural people as commodity producers (Cliffe, 1978).

The danger of such reasoning is that it casts rural people in a passive role, determined by the logic of rural-urban terms of trade or the workings of an all encompassing capitalist system. It implies a centralist view of development (Long, 1977) and overlooks the fact that diverse reactions of peasants are possible, given the influence of a Southern African capitalist system on their economies (Ranger, 1978). This is illuminated by this study of Mwase Lundazi, a chieftainship in Lundazi district, Eastern Province.

In a recent contribution, Bruce Johnston and William C. Clark (1983) deplore the “inconclusive skirmishes among development advisors” which lead to the danger that “those bent on self-interested efforts to exploit or to ignore the poor can invariably find some advisory recommendation to interpret as support for their favoured programs….” While “academic pursuits may thrive on conflict, effective implementation of a social action program requires substantial consensus … because policy makers, with their time and attention limited, otherwise find it difficult to make the ‘right purchases’ of policy options.” The “nay-sayers carry the day.”

All those who have, since September 1981, been parties to the discussion of the World Bank's Report on Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (hereafter Accelerated Development) should take these warnings seriously. As the flow of words has increased, the crisis in Africa has deepened. While this paper adds to the flow of words, it attempts to find the commonalities upon which agreements for action can be based.

In particular, we attempt to clear up some widespread misunderstandings regarding the position taken by the report on certain key issues. After two years of intensive discussion, there is a clear need to reflect both on the markedly deteriorated global circumstances within which Africa has to live and to devise its programs, and on the component parts of Accelerated Development's Agenda for Action.

Education in post-colonial African nations has served as the apparatus for sustaining and accelerating overall development, for increasing political and social awareness, and for providing a cadre of highly trained indigenous manpower to implement, manage, and administer ambitious national development strategies. To understand the process and impact of an educational system, however, one must be cognizant of exogenous forces. From a structuralist frame of reference, Apple (1975) asserts that researchers must examine the power and control external to the educational system, thus making political and economic decisions an integral part of an educational investigation. Scribner (1970) argues that researchers cannot avoid the effects of political demands on the changes in the educational system.

The relationship among educational systems and variables in the social, economic, and political systems in which education exists have been well studied in the comparative education literature (Apple, 1975; Arrighi and Saul, 1973; Dasgupta, 1974; Jolly, 1969; Mazrui, 1978; Morrison, 1976; Simmons, 1974; Simmons and Alexander, 1975). However, the outcomes of the relationship between politics and higher education in post-colonial Africa have not been documented extensively. This paper helps to remedy this deficiency by examining the functional relationship between the national level of leadership in Tanzania and the nation's only university, the University of Dar es Salaam. Julius K. Nyerere, the President of Tanzania since its inception, and the ruling party have attempted to accomplish decolonization, restructure the educational system, and promote rural development