ABSTRACT
This chapter will not provide happy reading: no honest appraisal of tropical Africa in the 1980s could do so. Of course, not all the people of the region have experienced famine; not every country has been torn apart by civil war; and the debt crisis facing national governments is not equally intense everywhere. However, all these circumstances are sufficiently widespread to be regarded as being among the key ‘contemporary issues’ of the region as a whole. This volume is sub-titled ‘progress and prospect’, but very little that has been happening in tropical Africa in recent years can be regarded by anyone as progress, and in many respects the prospect, at least for the rest of this century, is very bleak. This is not just the view of an academic outsider: it is one shared by most academics within Africa, and reflects the experience of most men and women in their daily struggle for survival. Many do manage to stay remarkably cheerful much of the time, but it is not only the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa who sees the prospects for the next 20 years as ‘almost a nightmare’ (Adedeji and Shaw, 1985). Mercifully, only a small majority are on the verge of starvation, but the vast majority will remain in extreme poverty by the standards of the rest of the world throughout their lives.
