When Britain first made a bid for membership of the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) in the early 1960s, it was generally understood that its negotiators had the responsibility for safeguarding the interests of other Commonwealth countries. Although the matter was discussed briefly by the Heads of Government in January 1971, and more fully later that year at the Nassau meeting of Finance Ministers, it was realised by all parties concerned that the other members of the Commonwealth would have to deal themselves with the effect of British entry into the E.E.C. and negotiate directly with the European Commission.

If during the 1960s the coup d'état emerged as the most visible and recurrent characteristic of the African political experience, by the 1980s quasi-permanent military rule, of whatever ideological hue, had become the norm for much of the continent. At any moment in time, up to 65 per cent of all Africa's inhabitants and well over half its states are governed by military administrators. Civilian rule is but a distant memory in some countries. Few at some stage or another have not been run by an armed-forces junta, and fewer still have not been rocked at least once by an attempted coup, putsch, or military-sponsored plot. According to one tabulation, ‘only six states have not witnessed some form of extra-legal armed involvement in national politics since 1958’.1 The phenomenon has even reached the non-state Homelands of Bophuthatswana, Transkei, and Ciskei in South Africa. Rule by civilians is very much the statistical ‘deviation’ from the continental norm, as military leaders lay a permanent claim to the political throne in much of Africa

Widespread scepticism prevails that the proper conditions for negotiations do not as yet exist in South Africa. Yet, most major parties to the conflict (with the exception of the Pan-Africanist Congress) flaunt negotiations as the magic formula for settling a seemingly intractable dispute. From the western governments to the Soviet Union, from the African National Congress to the National Party, all advocate negotiations. In 1989 the N.P. fought a successful election campaign to receive a mandate for talks. The A.N.C. issued a lengthy policy document that aims at preparing its constituency and setting wellknown preconditions (lifting of the emergency, release of political prisoners and return of exiles, free political activity). Even the Conservative Party admits that it eventually will have to negotiate the boundaries of a Boerestaat when it ‘opts out’ of an increasingly integrated, undivided one-nation state.

In the 1980s, a financial crisis engulfed Southern Africa. Widespread evidence exposed the way that inherited institutional structures and technologies – reinforced by International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) conditionality – had reproduced the region's poverty and vulnerability.1 To overcome the crisis requires an alternative strategy built on theoretical foundations fundamentally different from the neo-classical models that underpin the ‘restructuring’ programmes of the I.M.F. and World Bank. The state must play a positive interventionist rôle.

The Christian and animist population of the Southern Sudan is largely composed of black Africans, estimated to number 5·3 million in 1983, as against the 15·3 million, predominantly Arabic and Muslim, who inhabit the Northern Sudan. The economy of the Southern Sudan, comprised of the three semi-autonomous regions of Bahr El Ghazal, Upper Nile, and Equatoria, remains one of the least developed in sub-Saharan Africa. The great majority of the population is engaged in subsistence agriculture, although some limited cash income is generated from the sale of surplus crops, and nomadic pastoralism is also widely practised. Only about three per cent of the inhabitants live in the three regional capitals of Wau, Malakal, and Juba, and they have to depend heavily for work in the public sector and small-scale informal activities.

The Recent resumption of popular protest signals a new phase in South Africa's internal opposition, characterised notably by the rising political engagement of black labour unions and their federations. Membership in these unions has reached over a million workers, reflecting the dramatic expansion of South Africa's industrial manufacturing sector in the last 20 years. With severe restrictions placed on the leading national and local political organisations since 1985, the unions have developed beyond their initially narrow concerns for their members into the forefront of opposition to established economic and political order. As a result, class consciousness and working-class organisation have increasingly been combined with, and taken precedence over, previous conceptions of opposition based on racial and national identity. This development has exacerbated both remaining ideological divisions and pressures for united action within the union movement.

It has become the common wisdom among students of sub-Saharan Africa since the publication of the so-called Berg Report that the poor performance of agriculture in the continent is a result of the economic policies pursued by most governments.1 Their intervention in the economy, according to several authors, has systematically favoured those living in the towns and cities at the expense of the vast majority in the rural areas. Urban bias is allegedly the consequence of the inability of the state to resist pressure from urban constituencies. Robert Bates, in particular, has been influential in disseminating the view that these policies are chosen because they have a political rationality, even if they are economically irrational.3 His central contention has been that state allocations in Africa have favoured urban at the expense of rural constituencies because the former are able to exert more influence on decision-makers.

The Approach of the Reagan Administration towards the Third World was criticised as too simply anti-communist: a growing ‘predisposition toward globalism’,1 so it was claimed, led to a ‘Sovietcentric orientation’,2 an ‘obsession with the Soviet Union’,3 which obscured regional complexities.4 But American decisions about what actions to take in Southern Africa during the 1980s were part of a surprisingly effective strategy that often ignored Reagan's doctrine of aid to anti-communist resistance. That strategy was shaped by several hands, and the President's were not even the most important.

Over the last decade or so scholars in the social sciences have been reassessing works on the rise of nationalism in Africa published in the 1960s and early 1970s. These earlier studies, written during the euphoria following independence and the spread of liberation ideology, regarded the transfer of power to the African élite as signalling the end of subjugation to European control and the emergence of modern African states.1 This revision focused on the post-colonial state and its rôle as a mediator between competing groups for power and the allocation of resources.2 Since then, the trend has generated a revival in understanding ethnicity which is again seen as a major force in most of the crises which have troubled Africa.

Few Decisions exert a greater impact upon the polity and the pattern of public policy-making than those defining the nature of the political system itself. Transitions from military to civilian rule constitute a dramatic type of institutional change which is encountered with increasing frequency in the Third World. One type of ‘planned withdrawal’ initially involes little alteration in the distribution of power. This approach, which has been employed in Zaïre and Ethiopia, typically yields new nomenclature – for example, the military ruler assumes the title of civilian head of state – and a political structure dominated by a single individual and/or party, closely tied to the same ideology embraced by the military predecessors.

Women in Tanzania's largest city, Dar es Salaam, used to be described as ‘relatively inactive’ as regards paid work or self-employment.1 One study undertaken in 1971 found that only one-fifth of urban women were either working for wages (13 per cent) or earning their own sources of income (7 per cent).2 The situation could not have been more different in the late 1980s, with as many as 66 per cent in Dar es Salaam being self-employed. Although about the same proportion of women were in some kind of paid employment as during the previous decade, it appeared that since then many of them had been leaving their place of work to farm and to engage in small income-generating projects, known as miradi midogo midogo or shughuli ndogo ndogo in Kiswahili3.

The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) was established by the Treaty signed in Lagos on 25 May 1975 by the Heads of State and Government (or their representatives) from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. They were joined a few months later by Cape Verde, thereby increasing the number of member-states to 16. Following the post-World War II convention whereby international organisations formally insert in their constitutive instruments a declaratory statement concerning their status, it is not surprising that Article 60(1) stipulated that the Community ‘shall enjoy legal personality’. Although such organisations may be similar they are never identical, and this is why the nature and scope of the legal personality of each needs to be ascertained and discussed.

During the past 25 years, there have been several efforts by developing countries to establish regional economic institutions to address their poverty, underdevelopment, and external dependency. Although the economic imperatives and rationales for their creation intuitively seemed sufficient to ensure that the national political leaderships would choose to engage in whatever give-and-take was necessary to achieve their stated goals, the historical record reveals that these regional organisations have experienced uneven results at best. Several are now defunct. Why is this the case?

France continues to wield considerable power and influence in Africa three decades after her former colonies achieved their independence. Based on a variety of socio-economic, political, and cultural interests, many of her actions in Africa are essentially neo-colonial in so far as they are designed to perpetuate the prevailing pattern of dominance.1 Yet, France also suffers from an almost excessive dependence on African sources for the supply of cheap minerals essential to her economy and national defence.

Daniel arap Moi's announcement in October 1982 that Kenya would henceforth allocate its resources for rural development on a decentralised basis, to be more responsive to the ‘needs and aspirations of wananchi’,1 is one of the clearest statements by an African President that the state must establish a better consultative relationship with the people it claims to serve.

After Many years of exhortations, it is now widely claimed that African governments are beginning to implement the reforms needed to fundamentally alter their economies.1 Zimbabwe, after achieving independence 15 years later than most of the continent, has been singled out as a country that immdiately recognised the lessons of African economic failures and therefore adopted more rational policies.2 However, efforts to rationalise the public sector have often proceeded much slower than other reforms designed to reverse ‘the trend of chronic economic decline’, notably by reducing over-valued currencies, increasing agricultural prices, and lowering real urban wages.3 Even Zimbabwe, despite its record of relatively good economic management, has not been able to adopt a package of policies which would resolve the severe problems of its parastatals, namely those companies/corporations/other organisations owned by the state that operate outside the formal governmental apparatus. In Zimbabwe specifically and in Africa generally, the political imperatives of leaders have often prevented the adoption, let alone the implementation of comprehensive public-sector reforms.

The Epistemological status of their own consciousness is the core contradiction of Marxist thought. This difficulty has not been acknowledged by African Marxists, nor do they explicitly admit to the varieties of radical scholarship which form their intellectual heritage, and which their own worl seeks to modify and elaborate. Marxist scholars have been unable to develop a cogent, persuasive justification for radical theorising as an alternative to positivist social science, largely because of their unwillingness to confront and affir, their own historical specificity. As argued by Bogumil Jewsiewicki:

While most African states are struggling hard to correct the severe imbalances in their economies that have been created, in part, by declining agricultural exports and rising food imports, recent evidence from Zimbabwe suggests that growth is being fuelled by the strong performance of the agricultural sector. In September 1988, it was expected that the value of crop production for 1988–9 would rise by 40 per cent over the previous year, contributing strongly to a real increase in the gross domestic product (G.D.P) of 5–6 per cent.1 The great foreign-exchange earners, tobacco and cotton, broke previous output records and achieved very favourable prices on the world market as well, and the maize harvest also improved significantly.

There is increasing evidence in Ghana, as well as in other African countries, to suggest that the relationship between rural production and nation-state politics is more complex than has been realised. In the late 1970s, it appeared to some analysts that global market fluctuations, continuous rural extraction and exploitation by the state, disdain for traditional institutions, and ‘urban bias’ had so ravaged Ghanaian rural producers that they were continuing to distance themselves from the state and its vaunted political economy. This peasant behaviour, although symptomatic of deep economic and other socio-cultural problems, was viewed as creating a basis for political instability within which riots, coups, and social disorder occurred with great frequency.1 Political scientists generally downplayed these complex socio-cultural factors, and argued that it was lack of political integration which failed to correct the fragmentation and incoherence within the newly independent states, and which made political stability and national development impossible. Here seemed to be another example of the ‘chicken and egg’ phenomenon, in which politics and economic stability were so inextricably interwoven that it was not feasible to have one without the other.

The study of elections and parliamentary behaviour in Africa has become a neglected topic. Whilst the emergence of political élites during and after the colonial period has been examined carefully, little attention has been paid to the structure and functioning of the modern one-party state. Emphasis has tended to shift towards the analysis of political economy and of the nature of class relations, partly as a consequence of the close linkages between economic and political relations within developing states. However, studies of post-1969 politics in Kenya are now scarce, and basic knowledge of the operation of the political system is often absent. In order to help redress the balance, this article presents and analyses data about the socio-economic background of the Members of Parliament.