ABSTRACT
Many contemporary postcolonial societies are involved in, what we may call, the “modernization struggle,” one which involves an attempt to strike a balance between economic development and political stability. The struggle is often complicated by the fact that these societies are burdened by a complex of internal social divisions, inherited from their pre-colonial, colonial pasts and those that have emerged during the post-colonial era. As nation-states, each of these postcolonial societies has to juggle constantly between domestic imperatives and global demands, a task often perceived by some of these societies’ ruling elite as a political nightmare of gigantic magnitude.1
