Book Reviews 325

THE THIRD WORLD CALAMITY. Brian May, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981. No. of pages: 255.

This is a very well informed book, carefully researched on the ground and full of facts. It preaches the truth, as seen by Mr May but even he would not claim that it is the whole truth. Certainly his version is not of itself enough to substantiate his ‘indisputable fact’ that the Third World is, always has been and will continue to be socially and economically stagnant and can never achieve Western standards. Mr May shows some sympathy for the down-trodden peoples of the developing world but his approach is entirely materialistic, and he has little regard for religious, social and cultural values which differ from those of his West. Indeed, a certain neo-colonial contempt seems to permeate much of his thinking. The causes of the undoubted failure of the Third World countries to blossom into Western capitalist democracies have been much discussed by sociologists, anthropologists. psychologists and even biochemists and certainly include apathy and inertia. But the main cause, as the author recognizes, is the refusal of the rich West to share their wealth with the developing countries because that would mean a cut in their living standards. And the calamity? To risk putting atomic weapons into the hands of the irrational Third World instead of restricting them to the civilised, wise and rational West. Nevertheless, this book is a stimulating contribution to the great North-South debate and was well worth reading. His chapter on the recent events in Iran is particularly interesting and illuminating.

SIR NICK LARMOUR KCMG Overseas Services Unit, Royal Institute of Public Administration

THE NYAMWEZI TO-DAY: A TANZANIAN PEOPLE IN THE 1970~, R. G. Abrahams, Cambridge University Press, 1981. No. of pages: xiii + 145.

Dr. Abrahams is a social anthropologist who has made a special study of the Nyamwezi of Western Tanzania (vide his Political Organisation of Unyamwezi published by Cambridge University Press). While he shows sympathy and understanding for the ideals of Dr. Nyerere’s TANU government, his heart lies in the traditions of the people, their culture, religion and rural way of life. He is able to look from the ‘inside’ at the impact of independence: he sees the new-style courts as no longer mainly administering genuinely local law and custom, and he laments that the informal ‘reconciliation’ tribunals have no substantive powers and that their ‘findings’ can always be upset if either party to a dispute chooses to take his suit onward through the Primary Courts system. Infer alia he notes that the move of the capital to up-country Dodoma ‘may bring the power of government to bear more firmly on the people’; that concentration in Ujamaa villages is not always popular, there being those, for example, who apparently like to have to walk to a dispensary rather than to have the facility on their doorstep; that a reduction in the number of Ujamaa villages has resulted from people moving from the less to the better villages in order to avoid the apparent threat of perforce moving and having to start another village from scratch. Attention is drawn to the clear distinction between the first compulsory stage of establishing ‘multi-purpose co-operative villages’ and the still voluntary second stage of fully-fledged Ujamaa status. Note is taken of how the hoe as an election symbol proved much more attractive than the house, irrespective of the candidates concerned.

Dr. Abrahams writes with modesty, considerable academic knowledge in his own field and with kindly disposed intent. But it is remarkable that he makes no more than a single passing reference to the tsetse fly which had earlier devastated much of Kahama district (where he

326 Book Reviews

stayed both in 1957 and again in 1974), where over 1000 cases of sleeping sickness were diagnosed in 1928 alone, necessitating the concentration of villages and considerable upset to the existing tribal structure. On his first visit Dr. Abrahams must have visited the Catholic Mission at Ushirombo and met the venerable Father there who once described to this reviewer how the incursion of tsetse fly had caused a population of thousands to dwindle to hundreds only. When Independence came, unlike their relatively prosperous neighbours of Nzega, the people of much of Kahama District were still to no mean extent seeking to emerge from the trauma of sleeping sickness.

Among personalities named there is no mention of Maswonya, one of Dr. Nyerere’s first ministers, while Haroun Lugusha of Sikonge is described as Nsabilia Lugusha of Ngulu.

PETER JOHNSTON Formerly Tanganyika f Tanzania Administration,

Minktry of Overseas Development, and Development Planning Unit, University College, London

ADMINISTRATION IN ZAMBIA. Edited by William Tordoff, Manchester University Press, Great Britain, 1980. No. of pages: 306.

This study of Administration in Zambia, edited by Professor Tordoff is a companion volume to his Politics in Zambia (1974) and covers the post-independence period, 1964-1978. I t is meticulously produced and arranged and consists of a series of chapters, including two useful case-studies, by an impressive team of experts all of whom have had experience in Zambia as lecturers or researchers in the University, or in the case of Mr. Greenwood, a contributor. as a U.N. Adviser on Local Government.

The volume contains a comprehensive bibliography on the subjects in the text and a map. A succinct and excellent introduction by the Editor provides the background for the book,

and the final chapter on his conclusions sums up the situation in the country at the end of 1978. It would have been valuable had Professor Tordoff been able to include a little more, perhaps as a postscript, than his rather brief mention of more recent changes.

The writing throughout is clear, objective and refreshingly free of jargon. No punches are pulled in the record of administration in any of the fields covered, during the period under review. The chapters on the Public Service, Local Government and Party and Administration under the One Party State, are particularly informative on the conflicts and problems and on the attempted solutions in a newly independent country, as indeed is the account of the influence of President Kaunda’s humanistic philosophy. The chapters on the economy and the phenomenal growth of the parastatals and their disappointing achievements can, regrettably, be matched in other African Commonwealth countries. The harmonization of State Capitalism, Humanism and State Control and the parastatal position, is clearly a major task for the President. It would have been interesting to hear more of this-but perhaps it is too early to say.

The last chapter concludes with a note on the not inconsiderable achievements of Zambia since independence and this brings the situation into perspective after the picture which emerges as a country struggling not very successfully to achieve some sort of efficiency in the administrative system and in the operation of government, particularly in view of its almost sole economic dependence on the copper industry with its fluctuating prices.

Administration in Zambia is a well written book which will be indispensable reading for both academics and practical administrators concerned with the development of independent Africa.

J. E. s. GRIFFITHS CMG, MBE