Contenu du sommaire

«Mini» Native Agricultural Enterprise in Rwanda. Located in the vicinity of Butaré, Rwanda, the Konfigi is a cooperative association producing fruit and then transforming them into preserves, which are sold in the country's urban markets. More than its activity, which is of modest proportions, it is its very principle that is of significance, and the small amount of capital that was required to found the business. In spite of some difficulties, it has succeeded in operating successfully for a dozen years, now, and it procurs for its members monetary income which traditional agricultural activities would have been unable to give them.

Merchants and Vendors at the Great Market of N'Djamena, Chad, in 1976. In the morphological-functional structure of N'Djamena, the urban area situated around the Great Market and the Great Mosque is a place of gathering characterized by strong commercial activity in the ter¬ tiary sector. This type of centralization is typical of African towns and cities, in which the bulk of the population in Moslem. In them are observed a cen¬ tral zone of business, craftsmen and service activities belonging to the ter¬ tiary sector. In the case of N'Djamena, activities normally associated with marginal work, inadequate integration into an urban type of economy, or the existence of two parallel circuits of commercial enterprise, are observed in the central area. One must, however, note that beneath the apparent disor¬ der of activities there is a very coordinated form of integration of the space of contacts and exhanges in the urban space. The study condensed in this article is a quantitative and qualitative ana¬ lysis of this urban space, based upon observations of the merchant and vendor class at the Great Market of the capital of Chad.

Towns and Villages in Saint Domingue During the XVIII th Century (A Historical Geography Essay). In the rich colony of Saint Domingue, urbanization was characterized by two types of communities : the towns and villages. The former, which were rather large urban centers, benefited from a varied number of functions, while the latter were merely small communities serving as points of exchange and collection for the closest town. Created ex nihilo towards the middle of the xvnth century,, Saint Do-mingue's urban network comprised, in 1788, fifty-eight centers having a popu¬ lation of approximately 37,000 people, which produced an urbanization rate of 8 %, one of the lowest of the entire Antilles archipelago. Among the three racial groups that peopled these centers, slaves were the most numerous ; but it were the Whites and Freemen who performed the responsible duties, occupying, in particular, the administrative, business and professional posts.

For a Development of the Central Part of the Black Volta River and. of the Sourou Valley. — For some years now, specialists (geographers as well as others) have appreciated the potential in developing the regions drained by the Sourou and Black Volta Rivers. For a long time only in the planning stage, some projects are now in the process of being realized ; thus, the dam on the Sourou was completed in July 1977 the Guiedougou land settlement — after several years of hesitation — planned for the 1976-1977 period the recruitment of 140 new farmers, and the Authority for the Development of the Volta Valleys has undertaken the settlement of small holders in the Bougouriba (1977). The present paper has no other object than, on the one hand, to give a picture of a region at a particular moment of its development, and, secondly, to try to emphasize the positive measures taken or to indicate the social and economic problems that one might consider as «obstacles to success».