Black politics in South Africa changed dramatically after 1976. It spread far and fast, with black organisations multiplying at all kinds of levels. The African National Congress (A.N.C.) returned and the United Democratic Front (U.D.F.) emerged. The trade unions strengthened considerably and black youths demonstrated their power. Ideologies changed and evolved. Yet at the same time as the movement broadened and deepened its hold on black people, internal divisions grew more intense. Organisational, ideological, and strategic differences became more bitter, and leaders continued to accuse each other of betraying the struggle.

Whether he is called Le Sage (the Wise Man), Le Vieux (the Old Man), or more recently Nana (a Baule term for grandfather), the veneration implied by these words is unequalled by any other leader in West Africa today. It is clear that after over 50 years of political activism, the President of Côte d'Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, has brought together a combination of elements that has allowed him to gain and maintain the respect of western leaders, his African counterparts, and until recently, almost every Ivoirian.

One of the more perplexing problems of democracy in developing countries has to do with their potential for breakdown. In retrospect, at least three dynamics appear relevant in any consideration of how most come to atrophy: first, flaws in the pattern of instauration, involving the design and setting up of the modalities of the régime; secondly, a political process that tends to exacerbate entrenched cleavages such as class, ethnicity, and religion, given their relationship to the distribution of scarce economic and political resources; and thirdly, the events, internal and external, that lead to the onset of an ‘unsolvable’ crisis.

There has been an armed struggle for independence in Eritrea since the dismantling of its ‘federation’ with Ethiopia in 1962. Particularly since the fall of the imperial régime in 1974, the war has claimed many lives, and continues to cause economic and social dislocation in the region. Despite what has happened during the past three decades, however, the so-called ‘Eritrean question’ remains a widely misunderstood phenomenon, not least because there is no authoritative and scholarly modern political history of this part of Africa.

The situation of African states as they enter the 1990s is generally considered to be desperate. Extreme weakness in a number of forms characterises their politics, while their economies are either stagnant or deteriorating. It is not clear what resources are relevant to solving these problems, nor how they will be acquired, although increased external assistance obviously will be needed.

The establishment of the Union du Maghreb arabe (U.M.A.) at the 1989 summit held in Marrakech is the culmination of over three decades of pan-Maghreb rhetoric. As claimed recently, there have been plenty of joint agreements on paper, but ‘unfortunately the importance given to these events is inversely proportional to their real application and effectiveness’.