Suchergebnisse

Marc Wuyts' copy of the Mozambican Miner report. A report on Mozambican miners produced by the Centro de Estudos Africanos at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, 1977. The research was directed by Ruth First and conducted by up to 40 other researchers and activists.

Abstract:Ha-Joon Chang, in his article 'Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History', raises doubts about the effects of institutions on economic development and questions the positive effects of entirely free markets based on secure private property rights. We respond by stressing that institutions structure the incentives underlying individual action, secure private property rights are indispensable for prosperity, institutions have a first-order effect whereas policies only have a second-order effect, successful institutional change comes from within a society, and, given the status quo of developing countries, first-world institutions are likely not to be available to them.

Research on political behavior that has investigated the cognitions underlying attitudes has identified the simplest of these cognitions as political facts, a heretofore unmeasured concept in political science. Described here are the development & testing of survey-based measures of political knowledge, with special attention to the existing items on the National Election Study surveys. The use of a variety of techniques for item analysis & scale construction is demonstrated, & a five-item index -- the Survey of Political Knowledge -- are constructed. 4 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 39 References. Adapted from the source document.

A report on Mozambican miners produced by the Centro de Estudos Africanos at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, 1977. The research was directed by Ruth First and conducted by up to 40 other researchers and activists. Portuguese language.

Ruth First, Director of the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, Mozambique, was killed by a letter bomb in her office on 17 August 1982: the final act of censorship on a lifetime of active opposition to apartheid and other forms of social injustice in South Africa. Born in Johannesburg in 1925, she was a student of social science at Witwatersrand University when she joined the Communist Party and founded a multi-racial students' group. During the great African mine strike of 1946 she was among a handful of whites who assisted the strikers. In 1947, despite risk of police harassment, she helped to expose farm labour conditions on the Bethal potato farms, writing investigative articles which led directly to a month-long boycott of potatoes organised by the Congress Alliance, headed by the African National Congress. Soon afterwards she was appointed Johannesburg editor of three radical South African investigative papers: the Guardian, the Clarion, and New Age, each in turn banned by the government. With her husband Joe Slovo, an Advocate, and with Fatima Meer (see outside back cover), she was one of the 156 people accused but acquitted in the Treason Trial of 1956. In the early 1960s she visited South West Africa (Namibia) and wrote a searing expose of apartheid in that territory which was, and remains, under United Nations mandate but is run by South Africa. The book resulted in tighter government restrictions on her activities, prohibiting any publication of her work and forbidding her from even entering newspaper offices. In 1963 she was detained and held for 117 days, much of it in solitary confinement. Shortly after her release from prison, when it was obvious that she would be rearrested, she left South Africa. During her years of exile in England, she wrote The Barrel of a Gun, a study of African coups, and a portrait of Libya entitled The Elusive Revolution. She lectured in sociology for several years at Durham University. In 1978 she returned to Africa, to take up the post in Mozambique which she held at the time of her death. As head of an international research team, she was helping to initiate plans for the new Mozambique: economic and socio-political development projects which promised to make Mozambique economically independent of South Africa. It seems she became a target in South Africa's apparent programme of destabilising its black neighbours. Ruth First's book, 117 days, an account of her confinement and interrogation under the South African 90-day detention law, was first published in 1965. It was republished by Penguin Books in November 1982, with a new preface by Ronald Segal, which we reprint below:

In this powerful and concentrated exam­ ination of army interventions in African politics, Ruth First produces a general theory of power for independent states which goes a long way towards explain­ ing why they are so vulnerable to military coups. She gives detailed accounts of the coups in Nigeria,the Sudan and Ghana, and includes material on the role of the army in Algeria and Egypt,showing the kinds of conflict which lead to the situation where the political machinery is short-circuited and guns do the leading. She makes use of interviews, conveying a vivid idea of what a coup means to those involved in it. 'I count myself an African', writes Ruth First,'and there is no cause I hold dearer.' And though she makes harsh judgement on Africa's independent leaderships. her purpose is not to confirm irrational European prejudice but to contribute to the continent's ultimate liberation.