Ten years after a brief and ill-fated involvement in the civil war that followed the collapse of Portugal's colonial rule, the United...

PART I: Why Babangida

Clearly, Babangida is popular and very much in charge. He is a very...

Had Rip Van Winkle been a Zairian specialist, and slept but a few years rather than a century, he would have rubbed his eyes with astonishment to behold the new mood of optimism concerning the outlook for Zaire now widely encountered in Washington's foreign policy community....

In discussing challenges to U.S. national security in Africa, it is first necessary to discover whether such challenges exist at all....

South Africa has seven possible destinies. From left to right the seven rubrics are: (1) Revolution, (2) Substantial Regime Change, (3) Power Sharing, (4) Limited Power Sharing, (5) Concessions, (6) Change But No Change, and (7) Reaction and Retrenchment.

When Bechuanaland became the independent Republic of Botswana on September 30, 1966, it was generally regarded as one of Africa's more unlikely pacesetters… Two decades later, Botswana is cited as a model challenging a number of stereotypes about economic and...

Developments in southern Africa since early 1984 have raised a range of new questions about Soviet policy and Soviet relevance in this region of the continent....

On May 20, 1985, the U.S. Department of State released its second annual Report to Congress on Voting Practices in the United Nations. The report sparked renewed calls for consideration of some form of punitive action against those nations whose UN voting records are most at...

Half a decade ago, with the Berlin Wall coming down and the Soviet Union entering its final days, a small-scale conflict in West Africa quietly put post-cold...

The character of South African politics has undergone a sea change in the last five years. Simple oppression of blacks by whites has given way to a contest between reform and violent rejection of the nature and scope of the reforms being instituted by the government of...

As pressures for disinvestment and economic sanctions mount in the United States, it sometimes seems that the American nexus is South Africa's only important...

When Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings seized power in Ghana for the second time on December 31, 1981, his inspirational personality and the new government's populist commitment raised a depressed nation's hopes. An elected but elite-dominated government was replaced by a...