This book is an outcome of research on African development from the standpoint of economic geography which I have been undertaking over the last four years. The initial impetus for the research was a social science grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which enabled me to write most of the preliminary draft of the book during a sabbatical in1984/85 which I spent at the University of Zimbabwe as Visiting Professor of Geography. A good deal of the latter part of the book was written in September of 1985 at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and ConferenceCenter in Bellagio, Italy, where I spent three weeks as a member of theReflections on Development Fellows of the Foundation from Africa and Asia.