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The State of the Nations: constraints on development in independent Arica edited by Michael F. Lofchie Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971. Pp. x + 305. $10.00.

The theme of this collection of essays is that the political experience of the countries of independent Africa must be understood in terms of constraints which they cannot transcend. These constraints are discussed in general terms in Part I, by Michael F. Lofchie (the editor) and Immanuel Wallerstein. Part II consists of studies by Jonathan S. Barker on Senegal, Barbara Callaway and Emily Card on Ghana, R. Cranford Pratt on Tanzania, Richard E. Stryker on the Ivory Coast, M. Crawford Young on Uganda, and Martin R. Doornbos and Lofchie on a particular development scheme in one of the former Kingdoms of Uganda. Part III consists of general essays by Henry Bienen on party machines, Claude E. Welch on the demilitarisation of military regimes, and Rupert Emerson on the prospects for democracy. The editor also provides a concluding review. Several of the contributions are of real interest. Pratt's account of the historical reasons for the acceptance and subsequent partial decline of cabinet government in Tanzania before the Arusha Declaration is marked by exceptional clarity and authenticity. Doornbos and Lofchie's account of the way the landed and business classes in Ankole captured virtually the entire benefit of a $4 million ranching scheme financed by the Government and US A.I.D., with the help of the State Department and to the discomfiture of a naive local US A.I.D. administrator, is a valuable example of a 'normal' process which is rarely made so public. Bienen's discussion of machine politics develops a thesis advanced by him in a previous article, and is valuable for its insistence that while the story of African parties can hardly be grasped without reference to this model, most of their machines have been terribly weak and imperfect. This is a point which curiously does not seem to have been taken by Lofchie, who in his conclusion casually identifies the organisational weakness of the Uganda People's Congress as corresponding 'closely to Henry Bienen's model of a political machine' -one of the confusions which Bienen meant to dispel.