Last year, a distant cousin, who also happens to be a white South African, sent me a fascinating article from her local newspaper. The article was about her husband’s family, the Moores, and specifically about a claim the family made recently with South Africa’s Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (see Segar 2003). The claim is remarkable, because it has been one of the few lodged by white South Africans to obtain compensation for land that was taken from them under the apartheid regime. It seems that in 1965, several trading stores that had been owned by the Moores since the 1880s were confiscated by the South African Bantu Trust because they stood on land that was to become part of the independent black homeland known as the Transkei. The confiscation and the family’s eviction from the area were deeply traumatic—they were uprooted from their home, separated from friends and loyal customers (including Xhosa), and forced to witness the end of a family tradition. But the Moores had no choice, and the government offered them only one-third of the real value of the property as compensation. Today the family is seeking restitution, but as with most of the injustices perpetrated under apartheid, there is little that can be done to restore a way of life that was destroyed long ago.

Richard A. Joseph’s article “Facing Africa’s Predicament: Academe Needs to Play a Stronger Role” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2003) poses a thought-provoking question. He asks, “How can a revolution in African governance be effected that would build complexes of institutions that operate efficiently and synergistically?” The revolution is needed, he says, because “entrenched political corruption throughout Africa has become just one element of a broader phenomenon that I call ‘catastrophic governance.’” He defines the catastrophe as “endemic practices that steadily undermine a country’s capacity to increase the supply of public goods to serve the basic needs of its population, including the security of life itself.” The practices he has in mind include repressive regimes, absence of democratic institutions, pervasive corruption, theft, mismanagement, and inefficient utilization of public resources.

The African continent remains besieged by many conflicts. Since 1970, Africa has seen more than thirty wars which have resulted in more than half of all war-related deaths worldwide and have produced about 9.5 million refugees (The Observer, June 15, 2003). The conflicts have led to genocide in Rwanda and gross violations of human rights, including gruesome mutilations of large numbers of people, in Sierra Leone, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, the Sudan, and Uganda. In addition to causing the collapse or near collapse of some states, these conflicts have produced severe economic dislocation and disruption in the provision of public services. Moreover, there are growing indications that they have directly or indirectly exacerbated the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases.

The practice of treating the environment with disdain has gradually become unfashionable. Yet in many developing nations, Nigeria among them, environmental education and awareness campaigns remain something regarded as unnecessary. According to Berry (1993: 158):