David E. Apter is Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Comparative Political and Social Development at Yale University. His publications incude Ghana in Transition; The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study of Bureaucratic Nationalism and The Politics of Modernization.Carl R. Rosberg is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include: with coeditor James S. Coleman, Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa; with coauthor John Nottingham, The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya; and coauthor Robert H. Jackson, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant. Since the 1950s David Apter and Carl Rosenberg have been among the leading American scholars in African Studies. In this volume they, along with other major specialists in the field, explore the new configurations of African politics.With tentative efforts at a revival of democracy now taking place, it seems appropriate to reasses the theoretical debates ad empirical themes that have characterized postwar Sub-Saharan African politics. Focusing on "new realism" that has emerged among Africanists since the dismantling of colonial rule, the essays are presented as a corrective both to the initial euphoria informing African studies and to the later tendency to place blame for all Africa's political and economic difficulties on the receding specter of colonial oppression. Read Less