ROAPE Publications Ltd.

Editorial: The African JigsawAuthor(s): Jan Burgess and Gary LittlejohnSource: Review of African Political Economy, No. 53, The African Jigsaw (Mar., 1992), pp. 3-4Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4005987 .

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Review of African Political Economy No.53: 3-4 ? ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1992 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX #5301

The African Jigsaw

Jan Burgess and Gary Littlejohn

In 1991 ROAPE addressed the key issues confronting Africa: its place in 'the new world order'; the struggle for resources; its dialogue with various funda- mentalisms; and - running through them all - the search for democratic solu- tions to its development crisis. In our first editorial of 1991 we took stock of the dramatic changes sweeping the global political economy and their signifi- cance for Africa. We discussed the implications of the ending of the cold war at a time of deepening recession and continued restructuring. We considered the implications of approaches to world events in the US, Japan and Europe and the consequences of the collapse of stalinism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Most of these changes, we argued, posed serious challenges - and many dangers - to Africa struggling to cope with debt, economic decline and political crises.

What has changed in the past 12 months? In a post-Soviet world, even the small space for manoeuvre that non-alignment once provided for African countries has all but disappeared. For all the talk of the US as an imperialist power in decline, its hand rests even more heavily on the third world since the Gulf War than it did before. Deep as our dislike is for Moi's authoritarian regime in Kenya, the sight of the US ambassador in Nairobi so contemptu- ously attacking it in public is indicative of the new imperialism. For the present, it is clear that Africa faces becoming even more peripheral to the international capitalist economy.

In this first issue of 1992, we step back from this global perspective to consider aspects of how the process is imposing itself on the ground in various parts of the continent. Among several salient contributions, Tickner's analysis ex- plores the mechanisms by which IMF stabilisation measures have taken over agricultural pricing policies in Mozambique; Sachikonye and Stoneman dis- cuss, in different ways, the impact of the IMF and World Bank interventions in Zimbabwe; Babalola assesses the impact of international capital on the agri- cultural economy of Oyo State in Nigeria; and Samoff offers a trenchant cri- tique of the way in which 'a financial-intellectual complex' uses research to justify and impose aid policies. The welter of evidence provides few hopeful signs; that is the pity of it.

The editors who founded ROAPE never thought that we would be here this long. Some hoped that the need for a critique of development, of global impe-

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4 Review of African Political Economy

rialist pressures on Africa, of corruption and despotism, might become less appropriate over time. It is a source of regret and no little anger among us that it seems more rather than less necessary now. Over the years this journal has been run by individuals typing copy, pasting up in the kitchen, involving the help of our children (some of them now ready to take over from us!). Some of our editors have been jailed and one, Ruth First, was murdered in Maputo by apartheid's death squads. Yet we have survived with the support of friends and readers. We still run on a shoe-string although you might not guess it from the improved look of the journal and its contents.

For 18 years we have depended on subscriptions and donations and voluntary labour. We have in that time supported many institutions which wanted to receive copies of ROAPE but could not afford it. Unfortunately, the crisis in Africa has meant that the number of individuals and organisations asking for assistance has grown steadily. Many of the issues we send to Africa need to be supplied free. We need the continued help of our friends and readers to be able to keep doing this and to survive this period of crisis. We need readers to subscribe not only for themselves but on behalf of friends, organisations and students in Africa. We would welcome and appreciate this kind of help.

We also need more feedback from our readers. We receive many more contri- butions than we can ever publish. Are we publishing on the issues our read- ers want to see explored? Should we be looking for other (different) material as well? Should we move to four issues a year? What should be the role of ROAPE as it approaches the end of its second decade? We need some sense of what those many people who have travelled with us through these last 18 years see as the form our contribution to Africa's struggle for independence, development and democracy should take. +

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