INTRODUCTION The recurrent theme of imperialism and how it continues to exploit and dominate our people is the overriding subject matter of this issue. Professor Arnold Temu, formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Oar es Salaam, has given us a sharp and critical perspective of the role of U. S. imperialism in Africa, and the bases of this imperialism in the economic, military and ideological penetration of this continent by the United States of America. Seeing that he was invited to give a keynote address at a conference organised at one of the major citadels of U.S. imperialism in Africa, his lashing out at imperialism was indeed, a bold act. Equally bold was his answer to the question: "What is to be done?" The petty bourgeoisie in Africa, he says, has played out its historic role. "The petty bourgeoisie played a progressive role by leading the nationalist movements to independence. But it cannot be relied on to continue the struggle against capitalism and imperialism ... " Who, then, will carryon the struggle? This historic role can only be per- formed by the proletariat and the peasantry" organised and led by revolu- tionary parties". Professor Temu is now teaching at Ahmadu Bello Univer- sity in Zaria, Nigeria. The next article is a critique, a preliminary critique, of "imperialist education" in East Africa and local ideological collaborators. It is written by a section of the c;onsumers of this education, radical Kenyan students from the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta College. Parts of it has appeared before in the Sunday News (Oar es Salaam), but we believe this is the first time it is appearing in its full version. Under the banner of "aqademic authority", the students argue, what some learned professors peddle is ideological servility to imperialism. The carriers of this "disease", they insist, must be exposed and denounced, and this is what they proceed to do with some well-known figures in the area of art, literatur~, political science and history who occupy positions of eminence and authority in Universities. They ~ay that they make no false claim to "objectivity". Why? Because: "We are partisan. We are shamelessly biased towards the Kenyan people .•. Our learned 'teachers' will accuse us of .,academic' infidelity'. We have already accused some of them of treason". G. T. Mishambi, in the next article, picks on an old idol of the left in East Africa, Walter Rodney, and gives his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa a fresh and critical look. Mishambi accuses Rodney of Afro-centrism wh ich, he says, leads to "mystification of reality". "He is all out to disprove that Africa had no history, culture or civilisation of its own before contact with Europe" . What is the resu1t?The result is that "he reduces history to a balance sheet of the African achievements before contact with Europe", and he lapses into 1.47 bourgeois moralism and romanticism. "This results from the failure to see the dialectical relationship between the development of producti ve forces and the concomittant social relations that develop. What Rodney develops, .Mishambi argues, is a \I structural explanation of history" and not an explanation based on historical and dialectical materialism. We hope Walter Rodaey would take up the challenge and respond to Mishambi. E.8. Ferreira's exposition of the contradictions in Portugal that led to the process of decolonisation in Africa remains, even after the independence of Portugal's colonies, a succint analysis of considerable historical value. Ferreira \ analyses the economic roots of Portuguese capitalism and colonialism, and in contrast to those who argue that Portugal was merely a pawn in the hands of U.S. and British imperialism, he argues that the Estado Novo was able to strengthen Portuguese capitalism and relieve it of external dependency. The Portuguese bourgeoisie, he argues, "came to assume a position where it 'no longer served as lackey of international capital but) although poorer, (could) rather be regarded as a partner and co-operator of the international capital". Hen< the opposition to decolonisation had indigenous roots within Portuguese capitalism, , which also explains why the Portuguese bourgeoisie tried so hard to impose a neo- colonial solution on Mozambique and Angola. Ferreira also analyses how the Movimento das Forcas Armdas (MFA) came to challenge and pull down the Estado Novo creating the conditions for internal as well as external change. Nathan Shamuyarira's re-examination of the Lusaka Manifesto and the OAU's strategy of liberation in the light of more recent events and of new material that has come to surface since the Lusaka Manifesto provides a sharp and useful perspecti ve of one who has been in the inside of the struggle for over twenty years. 8hamuyaripa, in contrast to the South African Liberation Movements, subscribes to the "domino theory". Why? Because "the absence of major geographical barriers and the extensive movement of ordinary people across national boundaries in search for work and employment, has built a sense of solidarity and common destiny amon~ them", so that Mozambique's liberation is also c1 part liberation of Zimbabwe, paving the way for the fuller liberation of Zimbabwe, an d thus right the way through to the southern tip of South Africa. Shamuyarira goes on to show how the fortunes of liberation struggle in one part of Southern Africa are effected by, and in turn effect, the fortunes of liberation struggle in another part of the sub-continent. His final verdict on the Lusaka strategy of the OAU is hard-hitting. The strategy, he argues, "does not support the proletarian struggle to its logical conclusion". What is its objective then? "It seeks (rather) to argue and persuade imperialism which is arming itself to the teeth, and building alliances that will divide the peoples of Africa, and defuse the real struggle for liberation" . Is this an ominous prediction about Zimbabwe? Nawaz Dawood, in the next piece, addresses himself to the question of the 148 super-power rivalry in the Indian Ocean. It is a straightforward historical and factual record of the struggle on the one hand for competitive militarization of -the Indian Ocean by the super-powers, and on the other the strenuous effort by littoral states to keep the Ocean demi.litarized. Dawood does not think that the proposal for the Indian Ocean Peace Zone is such a Utopian idea as some critiques would have it. "Each idea not yet realised curiously resembles a Utopia". The superpowers, he argues, will have to take into account the increasing solidarity of the third world countries, and their specific demands with respect to the Indian OceaJ?_. Kwetsi Botchway asks himself the challenging question of why, whereas the liberation struggle in Asia (Vietnam, Korea) has brought about a total transformation of the society there and the destruction of the state and economic structures created by imperialism, this has not happened in Southern Africa. Out 0f a complex of factors, Botchway picks up one of the mos t important ones, namely, the importance of correct scientific ideology in directing the course of liberation struggle. "That the proletarian struggles in Asia have achieved remarkable success while relatively little progress has been made despite the tremendous sacrifices made by the toiling workers and other oppressed forces, ::)not an accident. Neither is it the product of invincibility of South Africa's army •••. It is largely a function of ideology. The Asian struggles have been guided by scientific theory whereas in Southern Africa, the struggles have tended to neglect ideological and theoretical work". Once again the OAU comes for smart whipping: "The petty bourgeois position espoused by the OAU ••• is a typically opportunistic one" . Abdul Minty's "Apartheid: A Threat to Peace" is one more addition to Minty's uptodate periodic exposures of the armed might of South Africa. Minty's sources are impeccable, and his analysis of the involvement of the Western powers in the defence system of South Africa is backed by so much evidence that even the en emy would find no way to refute. the facts. Of special interest is the Advokaat System which is claimed to be "the most modern system of its kind with the ability to maintain surveillance from South Africa's coastline across South Atlantic to South America and across the Indian Ocean to Australia and New Zealand". That, indeed, is formidable. The enemy, therefore, must be taken seriously .in the short run and tactically, though we know that in the long run and strategically South Afric~'s armed might is but a paper tiger. The next three articles are review articles. The first two are review articles of two important and controversial books that have appeared in the area of Marxistttheory. Jacques Depelchin1s review of Hindess and Hirst, however, takes up only one specific issue for discussion - the question of the relationship between history and Marxist theory. Depelchin subscribes to the Althusserian notion of the epistemological break within the evolution of Marx's thought, and builds a c01l1plexargument, wh ich in the fi nal analysi-s, adds up to a rejection 149 of 'any attempt to derive categorIes from the study of history as an empirical torm of irvestigation, and a plea for a logical rigour in producing what Depelchin calls a "materialist epistemology" that is free from historical empiricism. Not disimilar in its essential meSSc3.geis Henry Bernstein's review of Geoffrey Kay's book, although this is a much fuller review of the book itself. He too makes a plea for a rigorous discipline that is required to build a Marxist theory in the manner that Marx himself had carried out in Capital. " ... the purpose of going back to Capital", he argues, "remains how to learn to go forward from Capital". The last review is that of a debate that was sparked off with the publication in Maii Maii (No. 27), later published in Utafiti. Vol. II, No.1, of Dan Wadada Nabudere's critique of Issa Shivji's Class Struqqles in Tanzania. Since the review itself presents a succint summary of the debate, and since the debate has raised several complex issues of Marxist theory and practice, and especialty of its application to class analysis, the state, imperialism, the national question, and the relation~hip between the base and superstructure, we can only ask the reader to look at the review himself. 150