FIFTEEN years after most of Africa received its independence, Europe is still present and influential in the continent. The Euro pean presence has, however, shifted from overt and direct to more subtle forms. While military occupation and sovereign control over African territories have all but been eliminated, political in fluence, economic preponderance, and cultural conditioning remain. Britain and France, and with them the rest of the European Commu nity, maintain a relatively high level of aid and investment, trade dominance, and a sizable flow of teachers, businessmen, statesmen, tourists and technical assistants. Perhaps most symbolically signif icant of all, the long-nurtured dream of an institutionalized Eur African community was finally inaugurated on February 28, 1975, when the convention of trade and cooperation was signed at Lom? between the European Nine and the then-37 independent Black African states (plus nine islands and enclaves in the Caribbean and the Pacific). Thus, Eur-African relations are a matter of continuity and change, but judgments of them vary considerably, according to the impor tance given to one or the other of these two elements. To some, the successor of colonialism is neocolonialism and dependency; for others, what is taking place is gradual disengagement, and the multilateral ization of ties to the developed nations. The first look askance at the continuing presence, comparing it with an ideal of total mastery of one's destiny; to them the change seems trivial, or worse, insidious. The second emphasize actual changes, the moves toward indepen dence, and see them as part of a continuing process. The best perspec tive obviously is the one that can encompass and provide an explana tion for the largest number of facts. The dependency approach is now widely used in analyzing Third World developmental problems. According to this school of thought the attainment of political sovereignty masks the reality of continued dependence on world economic structures, and calculations of power and interest within this dependency relationship explain underdevel opment. Impatient with the slow progress of African states toward development and the real difficulty for new nations in narrowing the gap that separates them from the industrial states, dependency an alysts locate the source of the new nations' developmental problems