Comprehension of most of the contemporary events and developments in sub-Saharan Africa requires that they be explained in the larger context of the modern world system. Specifically, conflict within and between African nations —often involving various kinds of outside aid, including the use of foreign troops—and racial conflict in Southern Africa could be better understood if they were treated under larger categories related to topics in international relations. Some of the categories would be: Africa’s strategic importance to the superpowers vis-à-vis the Indian Ocean and the Horn of Africa; the extension of support related to racial community; the importance of African natural resources; the dynamics of African internal politics and their aussenpolitic in relation to superpower ideologies; and various forms of development strategies utilized by African nations.

With different names and under different guises ethnicity is old. Despite often drastic changes in the world around it, it remains in most places a lasting vessel containing and fusing individual and collective identities. Words like traditional and primordial are so frequently used to describe it that they now seem almost synonymous with it. Little wonder. As terms deriving their force from their connotation of strong basic emotional attachment and implicit shared commitment, ‘they suggest the sources of ethnicity’s pulling power.

Resting on language, place, faith, phenotype, origin, and passages through common glory or common disaster, ethnicity encapsulates and summarizes a near infinity of spoken and unspoken clues and assumptions which serve to set apart those who know and feel them from those who do not.

The population of Africa in 1977 is estimated to be 423 million, which is about 10.3 percent of the world population. For a quarter of the world’s land area, that is a small population.

Sources: Willcox, Durand, United Nations, PRB.

Africa’s share of world population declined between 1650 and 1920, partly because the population of Europe and the Americas was increasing gradually through factors associated with the Industrial Revolution, and partly because of the ravages of the slave trade and the European colonial pacification measures. Since the 1920s, however, Africa’s population has been growing fast, and its share of world population could reach 13 percent by the year 2000.

The population of Africa is roughly estimated to be 300,000,000 and believed to be growing at a very high rate, perhaps as much as 3 percent per annum. If these figures are accurate, Africa will have a population of over one-half billion by the year 2000. In light of this prospect, a question asked more from desperation than curiosity is whether these millions can all be fed, at least enough to avert mass starvation and pandemic malnutrition. Paul Ehrlich and others have argued it is not possible. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famine, hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Africa is now the least urbanized of the continents but is becoming more so at one of the fastest rates in the world. The history of urbanization in Africa predates the birth of Christ; it may have developed as early as 3500 B.C. in the flood plain of the lower Nile for control and administration of the Nile Valley by the Pharaohs, though most of the ancient and pre-colonial African urban centers are now insignificant towns and some have become extinct. Between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D., the Mediterranean coast of North Africa saw the creation of many cities, which flourished because of trade between the Phoenicians and Carthaginians.

A volume published some years ago, called How to Lie with Statistics, took an extremist view of the problem raised by its title. Unreliability of statistics is my starting point for a necessarily brief analysis of what appears a significant problem for sub-Saharan Africa: how can Africa develop in the interests of its own people, as distinct from the largely European beneficiaries of the African economy today; and how can “development” take place, as opposed to mere “growth”?

The distinctions between development and growth have been analyzed penetratingly in, for example, Basil Davidson’s Can Africa Survive? and in the articles in Africa in the Seventies and Eighties, edited by Frederick Arkhurst, especially in the editor’s comments.

Conjecture on any aspect of future events in Africa is hazardous; applied to politics, it may be altogether unsafe. Yet one cannot avoid looking into the future in some way. In essence our guesswork consists of extrapolations based upon trend analysis. A number of present events and forces display characteristics that suggest persistence. The convergence of the forces and their persistence offer reasonable basis for projections into the future.

Judging by the nature of past superpower involvements in Africa, it is easy to make a case for future interventions by both superpowers and intermediate (European) powers in Africa beyond the year 2000.

During the Nigerian civil war. Punch published a four-panel cartoon whose simplicity elegantly portrayed a common view of Africa’s future. The first panel depicted an outline map of the continent; the second showed another outline map, this one inscribed with colonial frontiers. Panel 3 contained the outline map, crisscrossed with a crazy-quilt of borders. The final panel showed a heap of fragments at the bottom, the continent having disintegrated.

Cartoonists enjoy the liberty to lampoon or to caricature, yet their exaggerations must be based on fact, or on a shared perception of fact. By the year 2000, will the cartoonist’s version, widely shared when printed, have become reality?

The importance of economic growth, development, and independence to. African countries cannot be overemphasized; Africa has been, and continues to be, the most economically disadvantaged part of the world. Economic growth, normally indicated by the increase in monetary Gross Domestic Product, is essential to meet the needs of increasing populations as well as their rising levels of expectations. Development involves the structural changes necessary to make an economy more balanced, integrated, and flexible, and is essential for sustaining growth. Economic dependence, which is reflected in such features as open economies, high levels of foreign assistance, and exports of a few primary products to a limited number of destinations, is viewed as being a major causal factor for underdevelopment and an impingement on national pride and dignity.

Crystal ball gazing is hardly the province of social scientists. The best one can do, in attempting to assess the prospects for real economic growth by the year 2000, is to examine the contradictory trends and struggles shaping the political economy of Africa and the world today, and suggest potential alternative outcomes. Even the possibilities are obscure.

What is clear is that, despite over ten years of independence for over 40 African countries, the majority of African peoples still confront the overriding problem of poverty. Living on a continent endowed with extensive mineral agricultural resources, they still suffer from among the lowest per capita incomes and the highest mortality rates in the world.

The millenarian tone of the rubric “Africa 2000” under which we develop these essays in prognostication reminds us that there are always religious implications in divining the future. We are also reminded of the millenarian expectations which have been planted in Africa or have risen out of the African soil. What part will these expectations claim on the future, and upon the fullness of time, play in African fruition? Bartnett lists over 6,000 independent churches and sects in sub-Saharan Africa—surely a conservative figure and biased toward movements of marked Christian influence—which suggests the vitality of church founding as a cultural phenomenon.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10
The Second Comingl Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe in 1959 turned to the above poem by Yeats, with its prophecy of the approach of a new age, for the title to his first novel. Ezekiel Mphalhlele in the same year chose lines seven and eight of the same powm as the epigraph to his autobiographical Down Second Avenue. This convergence upon one of the most foreboding images in modern poetry is not an accident. Both writers saw their own experiences of loss of order and future debilitation confirmed within the lines of Yeat’s apocalyptic poem. Viewed within the context of Yeats’ theory of 2000-year gyres, this vision becomes even more ominous.

“Everything in Russia is ‘as of old’, at the top.
But there is also something new, at the bottom.”
Lenin, 1911

The most crucial factor overhanging any discussion of Southern Africa today is the imminent revolutionary war between blacks and whites in South Africa. The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the suppression of the ANC and PAC forced upon the leaders of the liberation movement the conclusion that only the violence of the oppressed against the white regime will bring about freedom for the blacks. Sharpeville, therefore, marked a watershed in the liberation struggle, in that the leadership of the liberation organizations abandoned hope of a peaceful resolution of the racial problem. They then proceeded, abroad, to begin preparations for the armed struggle.