Two decades in the life of the world
Are things getting better or worse for the Third World? Peter Adamson and Chris Brazier report.

China in black and white
Two decades of China, from Mao to the Tiananmen Massacre, as seen by photographers Sally and Richard Greenhill.

Return to Bhagyanagar
The NI's first regular series was a report from an Indian village by Andrew Bulmer. We sent him back 15 years on to find out how the community had fared.

Birth of the NI
Dexter Tiranti looks back on days of heady idealism and financial anxiety - and charts the magazine's progress since.

THE WEALTH AND HEALTH OF THE WORLD - THE FACTS

The Third American Revolution
The NI profiled Jesse Jackson as a rising star back in 1973. But even we did not see him as a future US President. June Jordan explains how close he came.

Domitila - the forgotten activist
Sophia Tickell meets the woman who woke up the world to the cause of Bolivia's tin miners. She has since seen her community devastated.

Highs and lows
The key events of the last two decades, as seen by the world's poor.

Where has all the conscience gone?
Indian activist Mari Marcel Thekaekara believes development idealism is being destroyed by business values.

Simply . the politics of development

Santos
The NI witnessed a land invasion in Honduras in 1981. Had the peasants managed to hold on? James Pickles reports.

Sylvia
The Soweto schoolgirl who starred in the NI film Girls Apart.

Half the sky - and more
A personal journey through two decades of feminism by Debbie Taylor

The NI is 200 issues old this month. The early years of the magazine were such a financial struggle that we can perhaps be forgiven for making a bit of a fuss about reaching this ripe old age. After more than 17 years, at least we have enough momentum not to have to worry about surviving month to month (he said, touching wood).

Even now, though, the NI co-operative subsidizes the magazine by taking on other projects. We do at least one contract each year for United Nations agencies, for example, turning their annual reports into press kits full of stories, photos and fact visuals. These are translated into French, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi and sent out to newspapers in every country of the world. And in recent years we have started selling our own products, too - the award-winning Third World Calendar came first, to be followed by greetings cards, books, films and now clothing.

But the magazine will always be the centrepiece - and reaching as many people as possible with its ideas will always be our main goal. That is why the steady annual growth in the number of our readers worldwide is so encouraging. Naturally we are pleased to be successful, to feel that our work is appreciated by ever-growing numbers of people. But more important is the sense that our message is getting through.

That message has changed in many ways over the years - and this issue tries to explain how and why that has happened. One thing which has certainly not changed is our conviction that the experience of people in the Third World is of paramount importance to any sane view of life on this planet.

In the flood of journalistic retrospectives on the 1980s which will follow on the heels of this issue the developing world is likely to feature only as location scenery for a catalogue of wars and disasters. The world's poor are too often reduced to statistics and stereotypes: it is often hard to retain the sense that these are individual people full of feeling and complexity. Even in the pages of the NI, you too rarely get a sense that people's life histories continue long after the journalist has gone. We give a snapshot of a life and then move on, never to return.

This issue seemed a rare opportunity to revisit a few of the people we have written about over the years so as to see what has happened to them since - most notably the Indian villagers about whom the NI ran regular reports in the mid-1970s. Inevitably, though, we only managed to track down a handful of people. So this month's magazine is dedicated to all those people we couldn't trace, who have told us their stories, who have shared with us their traumas and joys. And who have thus helped our Western readers to understand how different in terms of wealth yet how similar in terms of spirit are the people of the Third World.

Letters
Letter from La Paz
Country profile: Enaye Islands

FRONT COVER PHOTO: Claude Sauvageot
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER