An understanding of Tanganyika's economy must begin with the bleak geographical facts. In 1945 an area of some 343,000 square miles, larger than France and Britain together, supported a mere seven million people. The size and distribution of this population resulted from an oppressive physical environment over which remarkably little human control was exerted. One example of this was man's subservience to the tsetse fly, which—as a result rather than a cause of under-population1— infested some 60 per cent of the land. Even more serious were the hazards of a rainfall that exhibited all the vices—inadequate and irregular in its geographical distribution, capricious in its seasonal visitations. Prolonged periods of drought were common everywhere except at the coast and near Lakes Victoria and Nyasa. As the overwhelming majority of the people were subsistence producers, the incidence of rainfall was a principal and variable determinant of economic welfare. Thus, for example, 1946 was a bad year; there were food shortages in every province and in some areas the Government had to organise famine relief. The rice crop failed almost completely, maize was grievously affected, and even sorghum and millet, the most drought-resistant of grain crops, were sufficient for only half the year. In the following year rainfall was heavy and well distributed; indeed in the Highlands it was excessive, destroying crops through flood and disease. But generally harvests were the biggest since 1943 and ‘a long back-log of tribal ceremonies’ was elebrated.2

Boys shook their heads a number of times while girls covered their faces with white handkerchiefs as the pathetic story of Congolese first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was read out to a crowded audience by PYC dramatic group at the Lagos City College, Yaba, last Sunday.

This notice, describing the staging of a play by a youth club run by a Lagos newspaper, the West African Pilot, appeared in that newspaper on 31 March 1962.1 All over Africa Patrice Lumumba's meteoric rise and tragic death caught the imagination of men and women in all walks of life, and more especially that of the young. In Nigeria, however, this reaction is of particular interest. First of all, the news of Lumumba's murder in February 1961 provoked 'anti-white' rioting in a country where race relations had not been an overt issue for a decade. Demonstrations outside the United States Embassy in Lagos, the Federal capital, led to indiscriminate attacks on Europeans resulting in much damage to cars and serious injury to several individuals.2

The achievement of independence may tend to dull the interest which African leaders have shown in the organisations that try to influence policy-making in British government. But they should need no reminding that in Britain there are comparatively few means of maintaining an informed body of public opinion about international affairs as a background against which the Government can operate. Colonial policy was frequently left to colonial experts, and the case for African nationalism was argued by a small number of groups such as the Fabian Colonial Bureau, or the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

Although Liberia is the oldest African republic, its economy is still young and growing. The road of independence has been uphill, lonely, and difficult. During Liberia's early decades of independence, the British and French were antagonistic towards what they considered a threat to their colonial ambitions as well as a refutation of the assumption that the black African was incapable of self-government. Across the Atlantic, Liberia's unofficial mother country, the United States, was still in the isolationist period of its history; its gestures of friendship were few and cautious. Nor did Liberia have easy-term foreign aid programmes to provide quick remedies for financial crises. Pleas for aid fell upon the cars of unsympathetic bankers. For the first 80 years or more, each of Liberia's several loans was used to repay the last. The battle was for survival, leaving little opportunity for development.

The basic aims of this Institute are the same as those of its sister Institutes in Santiago and Bangkok. Indeed the reasons for their establishment in Latin America and Asia are valid a fortiori in the African setting. A great number of newly emergent states are faced with the inescapable claim for accelerated economic growth, and this in its turn depends upon a considerable extension of public investment and upon the introduction of national economic planning, of a more or less comprehensive kind according to conditions in any particular country.

Historians sometimes claim to be making their own modest contribution to the African revolution by re-establishing the identity of Africa's pre-colonial past. But it should not be thought that the relevance of their work to modern Africa can end there, nor even that this is the most difficult of the adjustments of perspective which they will need to make. Now that the colonial flags are coming down, European and African historians will need to look back—so far as is humanly possible, without anger—and try to answer the question of how the Europeans came to be there as rulers. (An even more difficult task, still not seriously begun, will be to appraise the lasting historical importance of their rule.)

There was a considerable increase in the number of African countries compiling national accounts during the 1950's; ‘what was once the happy hunting ground of the independent research worker has become the routine preoccupation of official statisticians and international Civil Servants.’1 A comparison of the methods of calculation in use was speeded up when the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa was established, and the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (made up of national accounts workers in different countries) sponsored a regional conference for Africa in January 1961. Official statisticians at that conference proceeded immediately to a U.N.E.C.A. meeting and considered the role national accounts calculations could play in Africa, and how far a standardised system was possible. This article reviews the published papers considered at the I.A.R.I.W. conference, and other relevant publications recently becoming available.2

Cuba's revolution is one of the genuine revolutions of our century. By the scope, depth, and irreversibility of the changes wrought, it has ushered in a new era in the history of the Americas and is as epochal an event as the American declaration of independence. Two outstanding works, the first by two British academics and two Latin Americans,1 the other by a distinguished French agronomist, Africanist, and adviser to the Cuban Government,2 have done much to illuminate the past, immediate, and future problems of the first American nation to embark on the lines of socialist development. These authors have for the first time assembled and synthesised dispassionately a prodigious amount of data concerning the economic life of this controversial nation; and they have managed to avoid the passions of the cold war. The two works are harmoniously dovetailed; the first treats its subject historically and analytically since the turn of the century, the second deals with the institutional strengths and weaknesses that have emerged since the revolution, and takes the story up to the end of 1963 and the appearance of ‘socialist monoculture’.

Rapid social, economic, and political developments on the continent of Africa since 1950 made it almost impossible for general African Studies Programs in the United States to keep up with new knowledge and events. In order to fill the growing need for more sharply defined Programs, Syracuse University, through the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, established in September 1962 the East African Studies Program with Dr Fred G. Burke as director.

African studies at Northwestern University will enter a new phase of their history in September 1964, when Professor Gwendolen M. Carter takes up her post as director of the Program and Herskovits Professor of African Studies. The new appointment coincides with an expanding intellectual involvement of the faculty with the developing countries of the world, which have been somewhat neglected by scholarship, and the future goals of the Program are closely related to this wider academic development. First, however, a note on the background.

The Political Studies Centre is one of the four divisions of the University's Institut de recherches économiques et sociales (I.R.E.S.). The other three are: Le Centre de recherches économiques, Le Centre de études sociologiques, Le Centre d'éperfectionnement en gestion des affaires. I.R.E.S., at present under the direction of Professor H. Leclercq, was founded by means of grants from the Ford Foundation in 1958, but developed into its present form in 1962, with the creation of its four divisions. The Institute publishes. Notes et documents de I's I.R.E.S. (duplicated, 1960 onwards), and a review, Cahiers économiques et sociaux (every two months, 1963 onwards).

After the last war the Office of Scientific and Technical Research Overseas (O.R.S.T.O.M.), an official French organisation in Paris, set up a network of polyvalent institutes and research centres in French-speaking Africa, in Madagascar, New Caledonia, Tahiti, and Guiana. At the same time it organised a number of centres for specialised training in tropical research to supply its overseas institutes with staff, and asked the university and the French technical services to pay their salaries. This was how the Institut d'études centrafricaines (I.E.C.) came to be set up in 1946, under the direction of Professor L. J. Trochain, its aim being to cover the whole of the former French Equatorial Africa.

Until a few years ago, applied economic research in Germany was mainly concerned with the industrial countries and their economic growth. Then the problems of the developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America moved into the forefront of economic research programmes conducted both in the universities and by independent institutes. In 1961, the I.F.O. Institut für Writschaftsforschung (Institute for Economic Research) in Munich, the largest institute of its kind in Germany, which has more than 80 scientifically trained collaborators, set up the Afrika-Studienstelle to investigate the problems of economic development in tropical Africa.

Many readers of this Journal will be familiar with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, either through personal contact or through its publications. Situated a few miles outside Lusaka, the capital of Northern Rhodesia, the Institute has during the 25 years of its existence become one of the foremost centres of anthropological and sociological research, and by its publications has made Northern Rhodesia one of the best-documented areas in the continent of Africa.

Up to World War II, Germany was a major centre for the development of African studies, arising out of her colonial interests and general academic traditions. African studies were among the casualties of the Nazi catastrophe; and even the more recent revival of German interest in Africa is handicapped by the continued division of the country. Thus, while the West German Federal Republic has been the more active in building economic and cultural ties with the new African states, it is in East Germany that academics have given greater prominence to Africa.

The Centre of West African Studies has been in full operation since October 1964. Its staff is as follows: J. D. Fage, M.A., Ph.D. (Director and Professor of African History); P. C. Lloyd, M.A., B.Sc., D.Phil. (Senior Lecturer in Sociology); D. Rimmer, B.A. (Lecturer in Economics); R. E. Bradbury, B.A., Ph.D. (Lecturer in Social Anthropology); K. W. J. Post, M.A. (Lecturer in Political Science); A. G. Hopkins, B.A., Ph.D. (Assistant Lecturer in Economic History). A number of other members of the University of Birmingham are closely associated with the work of the Centre, including D. W. J. Johnson, M.A., B.Litt. (History); R. E. Wraith, C.B.E., B.Com. (Local Government); W. B. Morgan, M.A., Ph.D., and R. P. Moss, B.Sc., Ph.D. (Geography); and R. H. F. Dalton, B.A. (Education).

This seminar was organised by the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, in collaboration with the Government of Northern Nigeria, and was held at the Institute of Administration, Zaria. It was the second of a series of U.N. regional seminars on Central Services to Local Authorities. The first was held in Delhi about a year age. A third, in Latin America, will follow next year.

The purpose of the seminar was to study the central agencies and institutions needed at the national level (or in a federal system at the state or provincial level) for the improvement of local government, and to assist local authorities by equipping their senior officers to contribute more effectively to local—and national—development.

The practice of holding conferences of Commonwealth Speakers or Presiding Officers of legislatures and of the Clerks of those legislatures is not as prevalent as one would expect in view of the importance which is attached to the institution of parliament as a bond between Commonwealth countries.

For many years India has provided an outstanding example of co-operation in this field. The first conference of Presiding Officers of the various legislatures in that country took place in New Delhi in 1921. Since then these conferences have been held periodically and they have now become a regular annual event. The agenda largely comprises procedural points of interest; no votes are taken and no formal resolutions are adopted. The first conference of Secretaries of legislative bodies in India was held at Gwalior in 1953, and subsequent conferences have been held annually in different states.

The main aim of the social affairs section of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, in organising this workshop, was to analyse the economic aspects of the situation of women in African urban areas, and their importance in general economic development. Twenty-four women had been invited from as many African countries, representing the whole range of modern activities; 14 of them came, with another 10 representing the various regions of Nigeria, and more than 50 observers.

This Association was founded in 1958 as a meeting point for all American scholars seriously interested in African affairs, and it is now one of the most active organisations in the field. African study in the United States started much earlier, with the pioneering field work of Melville Herskovits, the interest of Lincoln University in the education of young Africans, and the first steps by W. E. B. Du Bois to create a Pan-African movement. During World War II, there were attempts to organise an international conference on Africa. Most academic interest, however, dates from the late 1940's, when the Carnegie Corporation of New York extended its programme of grants to universities for area studies to include the African field, gave funds for fellowships and sent groups of mature scholars to Africa for ‘look-see’ tours. In the 1950's, the Ford Foundation made major grants to Northwestern, Boston, and Howard Universities, and established a field training fellowship programme under which a majority of the younger Africanists now active in the United States have been trained. Other university programmes have followed; there are now more than 20.