Drought and famine have become so inextricably linked in both popular and academic analyses of Africa's food problems in the 1970s that the relationship between the two is now taken almost axiomatically as cause and effect. The logic is simple and persuasive. Drought produces crop failure and crop failure, just as inevitably, leads to human starvation. This reasoning and the colour photography of starving children in the world press have proved so irresistible that social scientists have had surprisingly little rôle in scholarly discussions of the causes of the recent African famine. The subject has been left almost entirely to climatologists, physical geographers, water experts, and agronomists. Social scientists have so taken it for granted that the causes of African famine are natural and climatic that most of their literature on the subject falls into the genre of‘impact’ studies which omit the issue of causality and deal almost entirely with the social and political after effects.
There will undoubtedly be many interpretations of the Uganda coup. The purpose of this article is merely to suggest one and, on the basis of available, though admittedly incomplete evidence, to outline a case for its plausibility. The central argument is as follows. The Uganda army can be best understood as a kind of economic class, an élite stratum with a set of economic interests to protect. The coup of January 1971 was the army's political response to an increasingly socialist régime whose equalitarian domestic policies posed more and more of a threat to the military's economic privileges.
It is now generally acknowledged that Tanzania's policy of rural collectivisation has been abandoned as a failure. By most accounts, systematic efforts to bring about collective production ceased altogether during 1975 and may have halted, informally, as early as the end of 1974. According to the Villages and Ujamaa Villages Act of 1975, one or another form of block farming is considered sufficient for a village to become officially identified as an ujamaa village. Thus, ujamaa as a concept once intended to convey a social ideal of collective ownership, labour, and sharing is reduced to describing a state of affairs in which individual farming is intermittently supplemented by occasional cooperation in such tasks as planting and harvesting. Villagisation without socialism is, in effect, the current policy.
Hunger is the most immediate, visible, and compelling symptom of a continent-wide agricultural breakdown in tropical Africa. The crisis of food deficits has now become so perennial and so widespread that it can no longer be understood as the outcome of particular political or climatic occurrences such as wars, ethnic strife, or drought. SubSaharan Africa is the only region in the world where food production per capita has declined during the past two decades. As a result, the average calorie intake per capita has now fallen below minimal nutritional standards in a majority of African countries. By current estimates, approximately 150 million out of Africa's 450 million people suffer from some form of malnutrition originating in an inadequate supply of foodstuffs. This abysmal picture is further highlighted by the fact that the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations recently indicated that no fewer than 28 African countries were faced with food shortages so critical that further famine might occur imminently. This stark reality challenges fundamentally our earlier assumptions about the possibility of economic devlopment.
The British Protectorate of Zanzibar, comprising the two islands of Zanzibar and Pemba and a number of small adjacent islands, is progressing from Protectorate status towards self-government. In strict constitutional terms, Zanzibar is a multi-racial state with an Arab Sultan under the protection of the Government of Great Britain. Though the concept of protectorate implies a limited domestic role on the part of the protecting power, Great Britain has—through usage, agreement, and concession—come to occupy a position of decisive ascendancy within Zanzibar. The present policy of the British administration is to devolve full political power into local hands through a process of constitutional development which will result in a fully representative system of government. This policy has expressed itself in Zanzibar, as elsewhere in the British African territories, in the expansion of the unofficial side of the Legislative Council, in the gradual replacement of nominated and ex-officio members of the Legislative Council by members chosen on the basis of nation-wide common roll elections, and in the introduction of a ministerial system, which is now to be followed by internal self-government.
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