As the United States approaches its two-hundredth year of independence, Angola is entering upon its first. Fifteen years after most of Black Africa shed colonial rule, and fourteen after Angolan insurgents shattered the myth of multiracial harmony in Iusophone Africa, a total collapse of Portuguese authority has catapulted Angola to an uncertain nationhood born in chaos and civil war.

Burundi politics is still preoccupied with the maintenance of Tutsi supremacy and therefore necessarily the continued subjection of the Hutu. There would seem to be substantial evidence for this view. Government spending on “national security” has risen from 13.2 percent of the total budget in 1971 to 22.6 percent in 1974; it is now the largest single item, having passed education for the first time; despite considerable recruitment to the army since 1972 there are no Hutu soldiers at any level of real responsibility; the army’s tactical priority is the waging of small-scale guerrilla-type operations in the border areas.

When a capitalist exploiter dies, he is usually survived, apart from his heirs, by his cars, banking accounts, businesses, stocks and bonds. The victims of his exploitation do not survive him; they outlive him. Aware that the masses of the world—once beyond his predatory habits, greed and blood-sucking—are anxious to forget him, he leaves behind a will calling for the construction of a huge foundation, library or museum to perpetuate his name, a name which is usually engraved deep into the walls.

One of the most perplexing features of the welter of events that led to the slaughter of 1972 has to do with the emergence, or the resurgence, of intra-Tutsi rivalries. These were particularly noticeable in the months immediately preceding the holocaust and involved among other things a struggle for power between the so-called Tutsi-Hima and the Tutsi-Banyaruguru. The following passage is excerpted from Father Rodegem’s article “Burundi: La Face Cachée de la Rébellion” (Intermédiaire, 15 June 1973) in which the author emphasizes the historical dimensions of the Hima-Banyaruguru conflict. One may or may not agree with the facts and interpretations presented by the author; however, the article suggests at least one possible explanation for the scale of the massacre: by systematically killing all educated Hutu elements, the Hima elites also destroyed the basis for a potential alliance between Hutu intellectuals and Tutsi-Banyaruguru.

Father Rodegem spent many years in Burundi and is intimately acquainted with the traditional aspects of Rundi culture. He is the author of Sagesse Kirundi (Tervueren: 1961) and “Ainsi Parlait Samandari: Analyse ethnolinguistique d’un phénomène de déviance dans une société à caractère empirique” (Anthropos, Vol. 69, 1974). The latter is a pioneering effort to penetrate the political culture of Burundi through techniques of analysis borrowed from ethnolinguistics.

I appreciate this opportunity to document the long struggle of the Mozambican people for independence and to examine United States policies in response to their quest for self-determination. Within this broad framework, I would like to focus on the long-range goals of FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front), the hostile position of the United States toward the liberation movement, and the achievements of the transitional government during the past year. In conclusion I will recommend some fundamental policy changes which are necessary if the United States is to adopt a progressive posture toward Southern Africa.

In December 1974, Ian Smith, the leader of the white minority regime in Rhodesia, announced for the first time since declaring his country’s independence from Britain in 1965 that his government was willing to begin direct negotiations with the African liberation movements seeking to achieve majority rule in Rhodesia. The prospect of such talks leading to an end to guerrilla fighting in Rhodesia and a termination of the United Nations authorized sanctions against the illegal Smith regime is dimmed by the fact that the Africans demand African rule for Rhodesia in the near future if not immediately, while Smith and his supporters have refused to consider such a development “in his lifetime.” Still the announcement constituted a step forward which few informed observers would have deemed likely even a few weeks before.

In the past fifteen years African heads of state and the Organization of African Unity have striven with little success to unite liberation movements fighting the settlers and colonialists in their countries in Southern Africa. The first attempt was made by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and other leaders, and was directed at uniting the Pan-Africanist Congress and its rival African National Congress of South Africa soon after both were banned and forced into exile following the Sharpeville demonstrations. When leaders of both parties fanned out into the world to solicit support, some of the would-be supporters forced them into a makeshift marriage of convenience.

Mozambique’s rise to independence this June 25th constitutes another example in the world community of successful nationalist revolution against colonialism. Although it comes in the late nationalist period which witnessed its beginnings in central Europe during the nineteenth century, the Mozambican revolution’s international and Marxist image is comprehensible in the general historical context of nationalism.

There are few parallels to the human holocaust that took place in Burundi in 1972 in the wake of a tortuous competitive struggle between the country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Scarcely noticed (let alone understood) by public opinion anywhere, the killings are conservatively estimated to have caused between 80,000 and 100,000 deaths. Approximately 3.5 percent of the country’s total population (3.5 million) were physically wiped out in a period of a few weeks. In comparative terms this is as if England had suffered a loss of 2 million or the United States about 8 million people. To speak of “selective genocide” in describing the outcome of such large-scale political violence seems scarcely an exaggeration.

Early this year I spent some time in Somalia with the purpose of looking for material that could contribute to a history of political ideas in twentieth century Africa; and, as it fortunately happened, I found much more than I had expected. If I was surprised at this it may have been partly because Somalia, at least in recent years, appears to have become somewhat neglected by Western scholarship. Some preliminary notes and impressions may therefore be of interest.

Virtually all of the literature concerning the politics of South Africa analyzes the dynamics of that system within the frameworks of racism, authoritarianism, and repression. Yet, strangely, the political institution which is necessarily the bulwark of such a system—the military—has attracted scant attention except in terms of strategy and armaments.

Our understanding of the international political economy of Africa is underdeveloped; we have inadequate data and theories about the development of underdevelopment on the continent. Even the orthodox study of international politics and foreign policy in Africa is largely a recent phenomenon, stimulated by the rise of new states in the last twenty years. This essay, then, can be no more than a review of the field and a lament over its deficiencies. In particular, we are concerned about: i) the relative inattention afforded the impact of international politics on the rate and direction of social change in African states; ii) the need for a new conceptual framework to advance our understanding of the linkage politics between African elites and external interests; and iii) the related growth and international inequalities on the continent. This essay proceeds therefore from a critical review of analyses of the international political economy of Africa to a tentative presentation of a new typology of states and regimes, regions and behavior, in Africa which reflects the importance of those variables on which students of political economy focus.

Alien settlerism in Africa may be defined as a system of colonization under which an expatriate white community has set itself up as sole possessor of power and sovereignty regardless of the usual status of a numerically inferior group as a minority. Within this definition, the settlers in Africa represent the remnants of foreign invasions from overseas (England, France, Portugal, Spain) which, having receded to their European shores, left behind distinct patterns of legal, political, economic and social oppression of the indigenous populations.

Mozambique is a territory of approximately 300,000 square miles, bounded on the East entirely by the Indian Ocean, on the North by Tanzania and on the West and South by Malawi, Zambia, Rhodesia, Swaziland and the Republic of South Africa. Of the total population of ±7,000,000, there are perhaps 80,000-90,000 Portuguese left, 35,000 mulattoes, and 25,000 East Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese. Of the Black population, the largest ethnic groups are the Makua-Lomwe, perhaps 2,500,000 in the Center-North, the Shona, 1,600,000 strong in the Center, and the Thonga, about 1,300,000 in the South. The population is divided religiously between the Moslems North of the Zambezi River and the Christian or Pagan South. Mozambique, unlike Angola, is still overwhelmingly rural and tribal, and knowledge of the Portuguese language is not widespread outside the urban centers. Additionally, the Portuguese population of the territory, in contrast to Angola, has always been predominantly made up of either peasants or functionaries of the government or of Metropolitan Corporations. Thousands of these have left in the past year. In any case, the entrepreneurial spirit was largely lacking.

Burundi society has become polarized along ethnic lines. In 1972 a series of increasingly violent confrontations erupted into an ethnic civil war. The two ethnic coalitions which faced each other were the Tutsi and the Hutu. The Tutsi are the socio-politically dominant minority in control in Burundi.