The Penguin History of the World

The wars that happened at the end of the Cold War era were particularly devastating to Africa. The wars against apartheid South Africa and its supporters created much human misery, as did the civil wars, which the South Africans fomented, in nearby countries. The Rwandan civil war in 1990–93, where demagogues drew on past ethnic conflict to incite genocide against the Tutsi population, led to the deaths of at least half a million people, nearly 20 per cent of the population. In Congo (named Zaire during the thirty-two-year rule of the western-supported dictator Mobutu), civil strife with foreign involvement in the late 1990s soon developed into the most devastating war the continent had ever known, with at least 5 million killed. The end of colonialism did not mean an end to Africa’s suffering.

In many of the new nations, the need, real or imaginary, to prevent disintegration, suppress open dissent and strengthen central authority, had led by the 1970s to one-party, authoritarian government or to the exercise of political authority by soldiers (it was not unlike the history of the new nations of South America after the Wars of Liberation). Often, opposition to the ‘national’ party that had emerged in the run-up to independence in a particular country would be stigmatized as treason once independence was achieved. Nor did the surviving regimes of an older independent Africa escape. Impatience with an ancien régime seemingly incapable of providing peaceful political and social change led in 1974 to revolution in Ethiopia. The setting aside of the ‘Lion of Judah’ was almost incidentally the end of the oldest Christian monarchy in the world (and of a line of kings supposed in one version of the story to run back to the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba). A year later, the soldiers who had taken power seemed just as discredited as their predecessors. From similar changes elsewhere in Africa there sometimes emerged tyrant-like political leaders who reminded Europeans of earlier dictators, but this comparison may be misleading. Africanists have gently suggested that many of the ‘strong men’ of the new nations can be seen as the inheritors of the mantle of pre-colonial African kingship, rather than in western terms. Some were simply bandits, however.

Their own troubles did not diminish the frequent irritation with which many Africans reacted to the outside world. Some of the roots of this may not lie very deep. The mythological drama built on the old European slave trade, which Africans were encouraged to see as a supreme example of racial exploitation, had been a European and North American creation. A sense of political inferiority, too, lay near the surface in a continent of relatively powerless states (some with populations of less than a million). In political and military terms, a disunited Africa could not expect to have much weight in international affairs, although attempts were made to overcome the weakness that arose from division. One abortive example was that of 1958 to found a United States of Africa; it opened an era of alliances, partial unions and essays in federation which culminated in the emergence in 1963 of the Organization for African Unity (the OAU), largely thanks to the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. Politically, though, the OAU has had little success, even in its present incarnation as the African Union, although in 1975 it did conclude a beneficial trade negotiation with Europe in defence of African producers.

The very disappointment of much of the early political history of independent Africa directed some politicians towards co-operation in economic development, above all in relation to Europe, which remained Africa’s most important foreign source of capital. But memories of the exploitation of the colonial era created a barrier to such developments, as did the unfair deal many African countries felt that they got overall in export prices for their raw materials. Many countries turned inward and introduced command economies of various sorts. Some began co-operating with the Soviet Union and the east European countries. But very few of these schemes had any success in terms of development. The economic record of independent Africa has, up until recently, been dreadful. In 1960, food production was still roughly keeping pace with population growth, but by 1982 in all but seven of the thirty-nine sub-Saharan countries it was lower per head than it had been in 1970. Corruption, misconceived policies and a preoccupation with showy prestige investment projects squandered the countries’ output, as well as some of the development aid they received.