By Alice Hills

Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, and Colorador 80301. 2000 www. rienner. com

Price: $53. 00; pages: 212

Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Montreal, Canada

In an area short of openness and published works, especially for public consumption, this work opens up onto the public, especially the non-specialists, and help us know a bit about policing in Africa, especially in an era of tumbling continental changes. The police in Africa remain a mystery, some sort of an alien occupying force which is felt to be removed from the everyday life of the African, an unfriendly profession, and a group not considered openly when discussing Africa's development. More so in an era fast moving transition in the continent's development.

The book deals specifically with policing in sub-Saharan Africa during the fast changing 1990s and wants to deepen our "understanding of the broader issues associated with state-society relations and state behaviour, especially with regard with security. " This viewed in the context of quicksand of regime transitions in Africa since independence, where the police system has been mirroring the state to justify its existence.

How do the African police behave in one-party system, in military regimes, in transition governments or in multiparty democratic governments? Does the African police reflects the colour and substance of the government of the day or it is detached and maintains strict professionalism, not dancing to the tune of governments of varying political ideology.

The author asserts that the idea of the police functioning as a general barometer of political development is not new, in some cases it has provided test cases about the evolving of accountability in transition regimes in Africa, as are elsewhere. This relationship has not received any marked attention, especially from the media. "African police maybe comparatively modern-and alien-invention, and police forces may be less influential and effective than the military, but police systems are, in Africa as elsewhere, tenacious. "

The book states that the African police will remain part of the continent's coercive facilities for the foreseeable future, and as such deserve consideration in any discussion of about Africa's liberalisation journey, "because as an expression of regime power, the police help to illuminate the character of a regime. It is too easy to forget that power is as central to liberalisation and democratisation as it is to restriction and authoritarianism. "

In her search for key areas of change and continuity in Africa's police and political development since the 1990s Prof. Alice Hill, 50, a senior teacher in defence studies at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in the United Kingdom, says there is now opportunity to assess the African police in today's liberalisation and democratic climate. She uses this as her definition, "Whereas liberalisation refers to the political process of reforming authoritarian rule, democratisation refers to the construction of institutions of divided power. we define political liberalisation as the relaxation of government controls on the political activities of citizens, with particular reference to civil liberties. "

Her reason for using such definition is that studies of the African police have often not included such issues like liberalisation, democratisation and development in Africa. And reveals that much of the Western academic police literature is inapplicable to Africa, unlike earlier timers when this has been the case. She cites the cases of Ethiopia and South Africa where professional concerns received government-sponsored overseas advisers but issues relating to policing systems and national development are rare. And it is because of such dearth of studies that Hill casts today's policing into perspective by developing a typology specifically relating police system into national development.

In her exploration of the relationship African police and national development, Hill engages current talks on security reforms, governance, law and justice, and civil society in the environment within which Africa's police forces operate-considering the increasing tension worsened by civil wars and rumours of civil wars, ethnic agitation, worsening poverty, diseases, grand scale corruption and general distress. The trouble here is that the use and misuse of political power in Africa has closely been related to the role and function of the police.

Hill discusses the problems the police in Africa faces and, in an era of liberalisation and democratisation in the 1990s, the challenges to it from private and informal civilian groups.

Policing, in the Western sense, may be alien to Africa, informed by the fact that no accurate account of policing in pre-colonial Africa before the arrival of the Europeans can be given. But Hill suggests that "it is likely, though, that many of the most powerful traditional rulers maintained bodies of men whose roles could be likened to those of the police. " But the current thinking, says the author, is that whether policing in Africa is viewed as alien Western imposition, permanent and rule-based is irrelevant today. And that "colonial law, for example, was radically different from pre-colonial customs in terms of the scope of jurisdiction and procedures is undisputed. "

But alien or no alien, the police force in independent Africa was softened by the fact that fully fledged states need a police forces though not all had armies; new African rulers needed it to draw authority if threatened; and the police adapted to the changed situation. Hill cites many cases in Africa to buttress her assertion that the essential substance of African policing was derived from both "European systems and the ensuing Africanisation policies marking the adaptation of colonial patterns of thought and organisation to Africa realities. "

In such a climate, as other African development errors indicate, there were sweeping transformation of authority patterns at the local level, "most marked in the replacement of the all-purpose authority of the chief with a multiplicity of government agents whose work was not directly co-ordinated with that of the chiefs. " This new pattern of authority, says Hill, made the police remote from the people they supposed to serve. "In the real sense, the state had become more remote in rural areas, leaving individuals to deal with a distant police force, an alien judicial system, and chiefs whose powers had been dramatically weakened. "