every kind
-
housing, jobs,
commodities,
ma-
educational
terials and so forth are hardly incentives to stay, while the
early departure of some of the most skilled who have compara- tively easier access to information on opportunities outside
their countries (notably in what we shall call the North)
only serves to accentuate the difficulties of setting the economy back on its feet. If the war or post-war conditions have been responsible for forced displacements of population,
the unsettling effect of having been uprooted once or even
several times previously is something conditioning people for a
final uprooting out of the country.
-
68. The colonial partition of Africa, a continent already
seriously weakened by the slave trade, without reference to the geographic, economic, social or political elements of African life, left an inheritance of largely artificial boundaries as
well as a structural imbalance derived from colonial self-
interest. Some national development strategies which placed emphasis on modernization (education, creation of urban jobs, horizontal and vertical growth of cities and so on) tended to
neglect the rural areas.
Despite what the Organization of African Unity has called "a deep sense of mutual communi-
cation within the African continent, a common consciousness
which creates a degree of cohesion", both internal and inter- state tensions have erupted which have led to exodus, while at the s ame time perceptible disparities in countries' gross national product have combined with related factors (such as soil erosion, recurrent drought conditions) to bring about a drift to the towns and/or international migration within
Le
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