Description
The Democracy and Governance Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) publishes an Occasional Paper series which is designed to offer timely contributions to debates, disseminate research findings and engage otherwise with the broader research community. Authors invite comments and responses from readers.
This paper was originally presented as a lecture in a series in honour of Samuel C Nolutshungu. Samuel Nolutshungu studied at the University College of Fort Hare, from where he went on a scholarship to the University of Keele, where he obtained first class honours in Politics and International Relations. He took his PhD at the University of Manchester, and lectured at the Universities of Lancaster, Ibadan, and Manchester before taking up the Frederick Douglass Chair in Political Science at Rochester University. He wrote on the international politics of Africa, in particular of South Africa and Chad, and on the politics of South Africa and Nigeria. In 1996, he was offered the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of the Witwatersrand but had to decline it for health reasons and he died soon afterwards in 1997.

About the Author
Gavin Williams studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Oxford. He has held posts at the Universities of Durham and Sussex and, since 1975, has been a Fellow of St Peters College, Oxford. Since 1990 he has held a Jill Nattrass fellowship at the University of Natal and a WJ Wilson fellowship at Rhodes University and has been a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Stellenbosch and the Witwatersrand. Gavin Williams has published widely on the politics and political economy of Nigeria, and on land and agricultural policies in Africa. He is currently collaborating with colleagues in Montpellier and Stellenbosch on a collaborative study of the wine industries of the Languedoc and the Western Cape. He is also writing an economic history of the wine industry in South Africa in the 20th century.