Indigenization and Economic Development: The Nigerian Experience by Nicholas BalabkinsReview by: Jennifer Seymour WhitakerForeign Affairs, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Spring, 1983), p. 989Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20041624 .

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RECENT BOOKS 989

THE STRUGGLE FOR AFRICA: CONFLICT OF THE GREAT POWERS.

By Gerard Chaliand. New York: St. Martin's, 1982, 121 pp. $16.95.

A well-known French journalist and specialist on guerrilla insurgencies takes on Africa. Surveying the continent's crises (most saliently the Horn, which he covered in the late 1970s), he theorizes about the Soviet Union's indirect strategy of gaining access by "filling vacuums." Though scanty on specifics and decidedly dated (the original edition was published in French in 1980), the book provides an interesting European perspective on America's dilemmas in Africa (perhaps

more in tune with 1980 than now), suggesting that with excessive reliance on

the nuclear umbrella the United States has "forgotten how to wield traditional

weapons."

THE STRUGGLE OVER ERITREA, 1962-1978. By Haggai Erlich. Stanford:

Hoover, 1982, 155 pp. $9.95 (paper). An Israeli historian and specialist on Eritrea asserts that the Eritrean separatist

movements effectively lost their struggle with Ethiopia in 1977-1978 when their own internal feuding, aggravated by ideological differences, prevented them from moving decisively while the Ethiopian army was occupied in the Ogaden.

According to the author, most Arab aid to Eritrean insurgents also dwindled after 1978 as a consequence of the heavily Marxist orientation of the dominant EPLF liberation group.

INDIGENIZATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: THE NIGERIAN EXPERIENCE. By Nicholas Balabkins. Greenwich (Conn.): Jai Press, 1982, 325

pp. $40.00 In this account of Nigeria's indigenization program, Nigeria's evolution into

a one-product export economy?accompanied by a decline in agriculture and little industrial growth?happened at the same time that Nigerians assumed

ownership in basic economic sectors. Deeply pessimistic about the ability of

Nigeria's "anarchic" polity to translate the short-lived oil bonanza into real economic development, the author takes refuge in what seems a prescriptive flight of fancy, suggesting that the country should utilize its oil wealth in a

forced-march modernization program run by expatriates under stern military rule?then return to laissez-faire!

EDUCATION, RACE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN SOUTH AFRICA. By John A. Marcum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 251 pp. $25.00.

The author's 70-page introduction to this collection of documents about black

higher education in South Africa strikingly evokes both the dynamic and the

regressive forces working upon and within the separately developing South African university system. Relating the personal experience of a USSALEP (U.S. South Africa Leadership Exchange Program)-sponsored team of U.S. educators in South Africa, Marcum conveys both the urgency of South Africa's need to

develop skilled black manpower and the bureaucratic, fiscal and ideological obstacles to meeting it. The book makes it clear, however, that, through sheer increase in mass, the growth of black higher education opens possibilities of

sweeping changes in South Africa.

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