Chapter 12

In This Chapter

Finding out about African nationalism

Seeing how the colonial powers withdrew

Elderly Africans in the 1960s must have felt as if they were watching history repeat itself in reverse. When they were very young, the Europeans barged their way into Africa and took over nearly the whole continent. So unedifying was the process it was known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’. In the 1960s, the Europeans seemed to be scrambling all over again, but this time to get out – fast. Unfortunately, all too often they left conflict and misery behind them. This chapter looks at how the Africans gained their independence from the Europeans – and at just how far reality lived up to their dreams.

Be Off, and Never Darken My Continent Again!

Back in the nineteenth century the Europeans referred to Africa as ‘the dark continent’. They meant that it was a vast and rather scary Unknown Land (unknown to Europeans, that is; the Africans knew it quite well). Westerners still often look at Africa and its history in a patronising way: First they see it as a backward continent with everyone living in mud huts and fighting with spears, then the Europeans take over and modernise it, and when the Europeans have gone, the Africans take charge and the place falls apart with military coups every other day and women and children starving to death.

Now, no one’s going to deny that Africa has an image problem. Many westerners’ image of ‘Africa’ is a starving child staring out from a charity disaster appeal poster. African countries have suffered from endemic corruption and civil war, and some African leaders have been odious. But other continents have produced their own wars, dictators, and famines, too. Africa had a long way to catch up with the rest of the modernised world and it made a lot of big mistakes along the way, but it also saw huge advances in nation-building, education, medicine, and economic development. The continent produced some of the century’s most respected figures, like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania or the anti-apartheid leaders, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Twentieth-century Africa needs to be taken seriously.

I use the word ‘tribe’ quite a lot in this chapter, but it needs qualifying. Don’t think mud huts and drums – at least, don’t think just mud huts and drums (and don’t scorn these either, until you’ve had to construct a shelter or a musical instrument out of whatever you’ve had to hand). Tribes are sophisticated societies, with their own culture and traditions, their own political hierarchies (not just a chief, but a whole network of princes and nobles), legal systems, communications networks, and military forces. The Asante of west Africa produced intricately crafted treasures in gold. But westerners tended to use the word ‘tribe’ to denigrate other peoples, to suggest that they weren’t as advanced as Western ‘nations’ – and to use that as an excuse for grabbing their lands. Westerners insisted that ‘tribes’ were backward and refused to accept any evidence to the contrary. For many years the whites of southern Africa flatly denied that Africans could possibly have built the famous stone walls of ancient Zimbabwe because that would have meant that these ‘tribes’ had in fact been an advanced civilisation, and white South Africa couldn’t accept that. Avoiding the word ‘tribe’ in talking about African history is difficult, but when you see ‘tribe’ think ‘people’.

White on black: European colonies in Africa

In 1896, at the Battle of Adowa, the Ethiopians sent the Italians packing, and maintained their independence from European rule. Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, was also independent, but in the first half of the twentieth century the rest of the African continent was ruled by Europeans:

Britain controlled a huge area from Egypt to South Africa. Britain also controlled areas in west Africa such as Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. White Europeans had settled in Kenya and in southern Africa and were very happy to be in charge, thank you very much.

France ruled a huge area of north and west Africa. Large numbers of French settlers were living a very comfortable life in Algeria.

Portugal took over Angola and Mozambique back in the sixteenth century. As the British and French started pulling out of their colonies, the Portuguese were all the more determined to hang on to theirs.

Belgium had taken over a huge area of central Africa along the river Congo. In the nineteenth century King Leopold II had claimed the Congo as his personal property and had allowed his agents to exploit the Congolese ruthlessly. The Belgian government bought the Congo off the crown back in 1908. Like the Portuguese, the Belgians weren’t planning on handing over power to the Africans any time soon.

Italy held Libya and part of Somaliland.

Germany held Togo, Cameroon, South West Africa, and Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania) until these territories were taken away from her at the end of the First World War. South Africa took South West Africa, Togo and the Cameroons were partitioned between Britain and France, and Britain got Tanganyika.

Moving toward independence

The Second World War completely changed the Europeans’ position in Africa. Firstly, the war revealed all of them to be weak. This situation made them all the more determined not to show any weakness in Africa after the war. The war also encouraged three important new developments:

Education: Only a tiny proportion of Africans went to school. The ones that did usually went to mission schools, where they learned that all men are equal in the sight of God. Curiously, their white rulers didn’t seem to apply this idea to their black neighbours. Africans also learned their colonial rulers’ language and culture so they could work in their administration when they left school. Some even went on to university. Many of these Western-educated Africans went on to lead the nationalist movements fighting for independence.

Nationalism: When Africans went to college in Europe or America they encountered the Western idea of nationalism, which said that nations should rule themselves and shouldn’t be under foreign rule. Very interesting. They also encountered socialist ideas, which said that rich people exploit the poor and that the exploited poor should seize power. No one was more exploited than the downtrodden workers in Europe’s colonies. Very, very interesting.

Pan Africanism: Pan Africanism was the idea that the Africans should set up one vast pan-African state (the word ‘pan’ means ‘across all’). They should then join together in a vast anti-European crusade and drive the white people out.

The idea of a single African state didn’t take hold for very long, but the idea that all Africans should show solidarity did.

Tribes or nations?

African nationalists had one important question to answer before they got out the banners: Did they want to keep the national borders the Europeans had imposed or go back to the old tribal boundaries? Tribal identity was very strong – it still is – but the nationalists couldn’t ignore the fact that some important things had changed since the Europeans arrived:

The borders between different colonies often ran across old tribal boundaries and included different peoples with very little in common with each other.

Some colonies contained rival religious groups, especially Christians and Muslims.

The peoples in different colonies spoke their own languages plus the language of their colonial rulers, so some Africans spoke Portuguese, some spoke French, and some spoke English.

These factors meant that most nationalists decided that working with the borders the Europeans had drawn would probably be best. This solution was probably the most practical, but it made for serious tribal problems once the new states had won their independence.

Role models

Africans had a number of important outside figures they could look to for inspiration. Two key people were

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940): Garvey was a flamboyant character, always dressing up in European-style military uniform, complete with cocked hat. He was born in Jamaica but spent most of his life in the United States, where he campaigned for equal civil rights for black people. Garvey thought that white America was so deeply prejudiced that black Americans would be better off moving back to Africa and he collected a lot of money to finance his ‘Republic of Africa’, until it turned out he’d been pocketing it, which rather ruined his image. Garvey had spread the idea that black people all over the world should join together in the fight against racial prejudice; just don’t give him your savings.

Gandhi (1869–1948): Gandhi’s successful fight against British rule in India (see Chapter 11) was a huge inspiration to nationalists across the world. He’d actually launched his first campaign in South Africa, where he fought successfully against new racial laws brought in against South Africa’s Indian population (or ‘coloureds’, as the race-obsessed South Africans called them), so African nationalists followed his career with interest.

Now or never?

Planning to take over a country is pointless if you’re not going to be able to rule it properly. A country needs a government, a legal system, a police force, armed forces, a health service, an education system, banks, some sort of economy to bring in a bit of cash – and you can’t ask your fairy godmother for them. The Africans desperately needed large numbers of people educated and trained to a high enough level to run all these things once the Europeans had gone home. Ideally, they ought to have some experience as well. The trouble was that most African countries had very few people of this sort, and didn’t have many schools and hospitals for them to run anyway. When Malawi became independent in 1964, it had only two secondary schools in the whole country. So even the most enthusiastic nationalists had to check whether their country was really ready for self-government or whether it mightn’t be better to hold off for a few years and get a bit more experience under the colonial regime before placing a bomb under the governor general.

Recognising some inconvenient truths

The Europeans had long thought that Africans were less advanced than other peoples and hadn’t bothered investing in them. Most of colonial Africa was still given over to hunting or farming. After the Second World War the Europeans realised that building their African colonies up a bit and maybe introducing a bit of industry, mainly mining some of Africa’s rich seams of minerals, might be a good idea. But even the most die-hard European colonialist couldn’t hide forever from some rather inconvenient truths:

Most African colonies had nationalist movements demanding self-rule.

The United States was hostile to European empires and thought the longer the Europeans held out, the more likely it was that the Africans would turn to the Russians for help.

Big multinational companies wanted to invest in Africa and thought they would get many more openings with poor, independent states than with the European colonialists.

The 1956 Suez affair held the European imperialists up to international condemnation and ridicule (see Chapter 11 for the details).

The more the nationalists demanded independence, the more European troops would be needed to keep them quiet, and the Europeans simply couldn’t afford it.

Don’t worry, chaps, I have a cunning plan

By the 1950s European governments – and especially European businesses – were beginning to look again at the issue of independence for Africa. They began to think that granting colonies their independence and then moving in on them to win contracts to build up their infrastructure might actually be better. Ultimately, the new independent African states would actually be just as dependent on the former colonial powers as they had been when they were colonies. Sneaky, eh?

This tactic of turning a nominally independent state into a virtual colony, dependent on a Western country or company, became known as neo- colonialism. Neo-colonialism wasn’t confined to Europeans: Many American firms were accused of establishing neo-colonial rule in Africa.

I say, don’t forget we live here too

What to do about the large white settler communities in different parts of Africa was one of the most difficult problems. Some of these communities were quite small, but others were large, especially in southern Africa and Algeria. Some of these people would no doubt want to go home to Europe if the Africans gained independence, but most would probably want to stay. The trouble was, they didn’t just want to stay: They wanted to keep their hold on power. Africa’s whites would try various ways to maintain that hold.

You’d better go now

The great scramble out of Africa began with Libya and Ghana, but in the 1960s it quickly spread across the rest of the continent.

Libya liberated

Libya was the first African country to become independent after the Second World War. It had been one of Italy’s colonies, but the British conquered it and handed it over to the United Nations, who decided to grant it independence. In 1951 it became the United Kingdom of Libya under King Idris. No one took much notice until oil fields were discovered in the 1960s, when suddenly the Western powers realised that King Idris had always been their best friend. Not all Libyans, however, liked the way the Americans and their allies were gaining influence in the country.

In 1969 King Idris was overthrown in a military coup led by Colonel Muammer el-Gadaffi. Gadaffi set up a radical revolutionary regime and started providing money, arms, and training facilities to terrorist groups from all parts of the world, as long as they were anti-Western. Gadaffi softened over the years, eventually repenting of his terrorist ways, and was still in power in Libya as the century drew to its close.

One old Gold Coast equals one new Ghana

Kwame Nkrumah set up the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in the British colony of the Gold Coast in 1949 to call for independence. Some of the CPP’s marches turned violent and, inevitably, the British threw Nkrumah in jail. But when the CPP won the 1951 elections by a convincing margin, the British had to let Nkrumah out: After all, he’d just been appointed a minister in the new government. The following year he became prime minister and in 1957 Britain finally granted the Gold Coast (new name: Ghana) independence.

Where did all these Indians come from?

Various parts of British Africa had substantial Indian populations. They had come to Africa in the nineteenth century to work in the colonial administration. They cost less than European staff and were more used to working in the heat. By the 1960s countries such as Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa had large Asian populations, usually doing well in business. They tended not to mix with the Africans, partly for racial reasons and partly because they had brought their own Hindu religion with them. Some Africans resented this large Asian presence and both Kenya and Uganda threw them out as a way of uniting African opinion behind the government.

Ghana was important because it was the first African country to win its independence. Once the British had allowed the Ghanaians to elect an African government, it would only be a matter of time before the other Europeans were forced to do the same.

Unfortunately, Ghana’s experience of democratic rule didn’t last long. Nkrumah had hoped to start building up a big pan-African state with Guinea and Mali, but they lost interest and the plan collapsed. Instead, he set about turning Ghana into a one-party socialist dictatorship and locking up or deporting anyone who dared criticise him. These actions just made his opponents more determined to get rid of him, which they did in 1966 while he was on a state visit to China. Ghana fell into a descending spiral of civil war and tribal conflict, with endless military coups, until in 1979 Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took charge, had all his rivals executed, and set about building up Ghana’s wrecked economy and re-establishing democracy.

Rawlings got help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the economy began to recover. Rebuilding democracy proved more tricky, mainly because Rawlings was running a one-party state. Whenever he held democratic elections the people voted for his opponents, which wasn’t the idea at all. So Rawlings felt he just had to bribe the electors by massive government spending that Ghana could ill afford, and he even staged a coup to keep himself in power as the, er, democratic ruler of Ghana. Not until 2000 did Ghana finally hold properly democratic elections. Rawlings lost.

Hit the road, Jacques!

France had two main areas of Africa: Algeria and Morocco in the north and a huge area over the Sahara and through west Africa down as far as the Congo. Most French people expected to take control of their colonies again after the war ended but one man had rather different ideas: General Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle had no reason to love the settlers of French Africa, who had fought against his Free French forces during the war (see Chapter 11 to find out why). He wanted France to regain her strength and importance and he thought that hanging on to overseas colonies was not the best way to do it. In 1944, even before the war was over, de Gaulle went to Brazzaville in the French Congo and announced that France’s African colonies would be getting some democracy at long last once the war was over. Sure enough, they got proper elected councils and more seats in the French parliament.

De Gaulle was only in power for a few months after the war. After that, he spent much of the time sulking at home in his village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises because the French hadn’t given the presidency the strong powers he had hoped for. So he wasn’t in power when the French empire began coming apart at the seams. In 1954 the Viet Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu (in Indo-China) and France had to withdraw. In 1956 France had to withdraw from Egypt in international disgrace, and the Algerian crisis in 1957 brought down the French government. (You can read about these events in Chapter 11.) Spotting his chance, de Gaulle grabbed a quick cup of coffee and headed for Paris to become president of France. He had plans for Africa.

But I’d like us still to be friends

Nationalists in French West Africa didn’t just want a few more seats in the French parliament: They wanted to rule themselves. Their leading figure was Dr Felix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, though the French managed to draw some of his claws by inviting him to join the French cabinet. Clever. Once de Gaulle was in power, though, he went further and offered France’s west African colonies a choice:

Option 1: Independence immediately, whether they were ready for it or not (most of them weren’t, as de Gaulle well knew).

Option 2: Semi-independence within a sort of French commonwealth called the French Community. France would still run foreign policy, defence, and the economy. So not very independent then.

All of the colonies voted for Option 2 except Guinea. So in 1958 the French cleared everything out of Guinea, administration, police, even the typewriters, and headed back to France, half expecting the locals to call them back before they’d got to the airport. So Guinea became independent and the rest of French West Africa thought to itself, ‘Hmm, maybe we were a bit hasty’. Between 1958 and 1961 all of France’s colonies in west Africa changed their minds, left the French Community, and declared independence.

De Gaulle had intended that the French Community would merge all France’s former colonies into two big federations, one in north Africa and one in the west. But when the colonies opted for independence they became fourteen separate states. Some were very small, such as Upper Volta, Gabon, or Benin. Others, like Mali and Niger, were larger but mostly desert. As they were all very poor, the French calculated that independence would provide openings for aid and trade agreements with France – and they were right.

Gone with the wind of change

In 1960 the wily British prime minister Harold Macmillan set off on a long tour of Africa. With France pulling out of its colonies, Macmillan wanted to gauge the strength of nationalism in the rest of Africa. The final stop on the tour was South Africa, where he was due to address the South African parliament in Capetown. He had a surprise up his sleeve.

Macmillan told the South African MPs – all of them white, of course – that he had been struck by the strength of the nationalist feelings he had encountered on his tour. In a phrase that became famous he declared that a ‘wind of change’ was blowing through Africa, a change towards democracy and Africans ruling themselves. White South Africa had better get used to it.

The South African prime minister, Dr Verwoerd, managed to stammer out a ‘Thank you, Mr Macmillan for that most interesting address’ speech, though he looked like he was chewing a wasp, and he added that it was the whites who had brought civilisation and medicine and education and engineering to Africa – in other words, everything the apartheid system stopped black Africans having access to (see the section ‘The struggle in the south’ later in this chapter to find out more about apartheid).

The fact that it was the British prime minister issuing this warning to South Africa was enormously significant. Macmillan meant that Britain would do nothing to help Africa’s white population resist the rise of African nationalism. The whites were on their own.

Free at Last! Well, Sort Of . . .

Most of Africa finally won its independence in the 1960s. The Europeans withdrew, some with good grace, others more unwillingly, and the new African nations unfurled their flags, learned their national anthems, and took their seats at the United Nations. Many of them discovered important reserves of minerals and even oil: For the first time in its history Africa was going to have a significant industrial economy. Things could only get better.

But gaining independence wasn’t the whole story. The old tribal rivalries hadn’t gone away: In fact, independence seemed to make them even worse. Some areas were industrialising, but most of the continent still lived and farmed the same way it had for centuries. This situation meant that many of these new states soon featured among the world’s poorest nations. Not entirely unconnected with that fact, many of the regimes running the new states proved just as oppressive and corrupt as governments anywhere else in the world. Many African states thus had to turn to other countries for aid and support, and international help never comes free. These new independent states were soon almost as much under the control of the outside world as they had been in colonial days.

The Congo: How not to start a state

The Congo was one of few places with no nationalist movement in the 1950s, mainly because the dreaded Belgian colonial police force, the Force Publique, arrested anyone caught suggesting that life under Belgian rule wasn’t just what the doctor ordered. But even the Force Publique couldn’t keep the Congo isolated from international opinion forever, and by the end of the 1950s a Congolese nationalist party was growing fast, led by a charismatic young leader called Patrice Lumumba.

Belgium had finally made an economic success of the Congo: It was a leading producer of metals, minerals, and diamonds, Congolese farming had improved, and the general standard of living was much better. Even so, in 1959 major riots broke out when Congolese nationalists held independence demonstrations. As a result, in 1960 the Belgians held a big conference in Brussels and announced that they were pulling out of the Congo in a few months’ time. On 30 June 1960 the Congo became independent, with Joseph Kasavubu as president and Patrice Lumumba as prime minister. The transition was so quick that something was bound to go wrong.

The trouble started when the Force Publique suddenly mutinied. Then the wealthy province of Katanga, home to Congo’s important copper industry, declared itself independent. The international copper companies reckoned an independent Katanga would be easier for them to control than a single Congo, especially as Lumumba proved unpredictable, so they sent money to the Katangan leader, Moise Tshombe, which he spent hiring foreign mercenaries. Lumumba appealed to the United Nations for help, and UN troops arrived to stop Katangan secession and restore order. Then things got complicated:

In addition to asking the UN for help, Lumumba also approaches the Russians, so the Americans decide that Lumumba is a dangerous Red and has to go.

President Joseph Kasavubu, encouraged by the Americans, sacks Lumumba. Lumumba refuses to be sacked and sacks President Kasavubu instead. President Kasavubu says he isn’t sacked and arrests Lumumba , but Lumumba arrests him back and no returns. Finally Lumumba arrests the Public Prosecutor, so President Kasavubu can’t arrest him any more.

Americans secretly back a military coup by Colonel Mobutu, who sacks President Kasavubu and arrests Lumumba. For real. And Mobutu hands Lumumba over to Moise Tshombe in Katanga so Lumumba’s men can’t rescue him.

Lumumba’s men take out their frustration by attacking Europeans, spurring Belgium to send in troops. Congo now has a five-way war between Lumumba’s men, Mobutu’s men, Tshombe’s men, the UN troops, and the Belgians.

Lumumba escapes and flees to UN lines for protection; then he decides to leave the UN lines. Bad idea: The Katangans catch and kill him.

On top of all this chaos, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in an air crash while trying to bring peace. Now, instead of keeping the warring sides apart, the UN forces found themselves dragged into the war, fighting against Katanga until the UN pulled them out in 1962. Meanwhile President Mobutu established a firm military grip on the country. Mobutu tried to cut the Congo’s historic links with Belgium: He renamed streets and cities (Leopoldville became Kinshasa) and even told citizens to drop their French names and take African ones. He renamed the country Zaire.

Behind all this establishment of power, though, Zaire was still heavily dependent on Belgian economic aid. The Katangans didn’t give up either: For another twenty years they launched regular raids into Zaire from neighbouring countries until they finally admitted defeat in 1983. By then President Mobutu had turned Zaire into a one-party state.

Rumble in the jungle

For a time in the 1970s Zaire became quite the fashionable place for the jet set. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor got married there (again) and in 1974 the world heavyweight boxing championship was held in Kinshasa between Muhammed Ali and the world champion George Foreman. The fight attracted massive coverage and the press billed it as ‘the Rumble in the Jungle’. Ali won (again). Foreman hung up his gloves and started a new career preaching and selling kitchen appliances instead. I suppose, given its recent history, Zaire was really quite an appropriate place to watch two men of African descent battering each other to a pulp.

Portugal won’t go quietly

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to land in sub-Saharan Africa and they did their level best to make sure they were the last to leave. Portugal was ruled by a military dictatorship under Dr Antonio Salazar who had no intention of granting freedom to the Africans. Or the Portuguese.

Portugal ruled two African countries, Angola in the west and Mozambique in the east. Legally they weren’t even colonies: They were part of Portugal itself. The Angolans rose up in 1961, but Salazar crushed them mercilessly. Not until he died in 1968 could Angola and Mozambique even think about pushing off Portuguese rule.

Mozambique’s nationalist movement was Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). Angola had three rival groups, who all hated each other:

MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertaçao de Angola): Formed in 1956. Backed by the USSR and Cuba. Wanted a socialist state along Marxist–Leninist lines.

FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertaçao de Angola): Formed in 1962. Backed by the USA and Congo. Wanted not to have a socialist state along Marxist–Leninist lines.

UNITA (União Nacional par a Independência Total de Angola): Formed in 1966. Backed by the USA, South Africa, and Portugal. Wanted a pro-Western anti-communist Angola. Unita was for anyone who thought the FNLA were a bunch of liberal wimps.

The wars in Angola and Mozambique soon degenerated into a bloodbath. Neither side could win, until in 1974 a group of left-wing generals in Lisbon decided enough was enough, overthrew the Portuguese government, seized power, and announced that Portugal would withdraw from both territories. In Mozambique, Frelimo simply took over, but in Angola the rival groups could now start the real fight for power. Against each other.

In 1975 the Portuguese left and the war started. The MPLA in the north and Unita in the south gradually crushed the FNLA in the middle. With extra troops sent by Cuba, the MPLA then drove Unita back, but with Western and South African help, the Unita leaders carried on a guerrilla campaign from bases in Zambia and Zaire. The war lasted for several years before a truce could be negotatiated and then several more years passed before the nation finally was at peace. A quick rundown:

UN brokers a truce (1988): Angola, South Africa, and Cuba agree that the Cubans and South Africans should go home.

Peace agreement (1991): MPLA and Unita agree to stop fighting and hold elections.

Elections (1992): MPLA wins. Unita says the election wasn’t fair, and fighting starts again.

More elections (1994): MPLA and Unita agree to stop fighting (again) and hold fresh elections. Unita refuses to give up any of its land to the MPLA.

Civil war breaks out again (1998): Thousands are killed, some three million become refugees.

Peace (2002): Unita leader Jonas Savimbi is killed in the fighting. The two sides finally sign a peace agreement.

Tragedy in the horn of Africa

Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia make up the land called the horn of Africa, because of its shape on the map. This area proved the scene of some of independent Africa’s worst tragedies.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia is home to one of the oldest Christian churches in the world. The country was run as a sort of feudal monarchy until the Italians invaded in 1935 and forced the emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile in London. He stayed there until the British cleared the Italians out of Ethiopia during the Second World War and put him back on the throne.

Haile Selassie became known as ‘the Lion of Judah’ for his strong leadership, but by the 1960s he was falling behind the times: He ran an autocratic regime and only made very limited moves towards democracy. Radical students started to demand a Marxist republic in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia also had territorial disputes with Sudan and Somalia and a serious problem with the Muslim region of Eritrea, which had only been annexed in 1963 and now wanted to pull away. To make matters a lot worse, 1973 brought terrible draught and famine. In 1974 a group of army officers decided the time was ripe to get rid of the emperor and pull the country into the twentieth century. They staged a coup and drove Haile Selassie back into exile. The new president, Mengistu, declared that Ethiopia was henceforth a peace-loving socialist people’s republic. Then he declared war on Eritrea.

The long war in Eritrea was a humanitarian catastrophe. The conflict dragged on because the Eritreans got help from Somalia while the Ethiopians got help from the Russians and Cubans. Just to make things more complex, the province of Tigré, which was part of Eritrea, also declared independence. President Mengistu didn’t let a little thing like a civil war get in the way of restructuring the country: He pressed ahead with a programme of nationalising the land, limiting the amount allocated to each family, which caused maximum chaos just in time for an appalling drought that struck the country in 1984. Result: A devastating famine that shocked the entire world.

The war and the famine in Ethiopia dragged on through the 1980s. When the Soviet Union collapsed after 1989, so did Russian help for the Ethiopian government. Eritrea and Tigré saw their chance and launched a big attack into Ethiopia itself. In 1991 the Tigreans took the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, and put their leader, Meles Zenawi, in charge. Meles immediately announced that he was introducing free elections and that provinces that wanted to pull out and set up on their own could do so. Eritrea took the hint and declared independence. This division didn’t quite end the fighting – the two countries had another war over territory in 1998–2000 – but Meles seemed to be restoring a bit of stability by the time the century drew to its close.

Lowdown on Sudan and Somalia

Sudan and Somalia went through depressingly similar cycles of civil war and famine in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Dreadlock holiday

‘Haile Selassie’ (‘Might of the Trinity’) was the name the emperor took when he succeeded to the throne, rather as popes choose a new name when they’re elected; his actual name was Ras (Prince) Tafari. In the 1970s and 1980s young Jamaicans and African-Americans looking for an inspiring African figure adopted Haile Selassie, as the exiled emperor of an ancient African Christian kingdom, and their Christian-with-back-to-my-African-roots religion was named ‘Rastafarianism’ after Ras Tafari. You could usually tell ‘Rastas’ by their dreadlocks, their fondness for reggae, and by a curiously sweet smell which seemed to emanate from the self-rolled cigarettes many of them were to be seen smoking.

Sudan

Africa’s largest country became independent in 1956, but has seen years of internal strife since then.

Warring groups: Christians in the south versus Muslims in the rest of Sudan.

Fighting about: Christian south wanted to break away, until it got devolved government in 1972. Thereafter conflict between the south and the government over attempts to introduce Islamic Shariah Law.

Rest of the world interested? Once oil was discovered there in the 1970s the rest of the world was very interested indeed. In 1998 the Americans launched a missile attack on a Sudanese chemical plant. They said it was making weapons and accused Sudan of acting as a base for Islamic terrorism.

Who came off worst? The ordinary people. Thanks to the war, famine struck in 2001.

Somalia

In 1960 Somalia became an independent state, but the years since have been amongst the most turbulent seen by any African country.

Warring groups: Marxist government backed by the USSR; Islamic fundamentalists; local warlords.

Fighting about: Somalia attacked Ethiopia in 1977 to get territory but the USSR supported the Ethiopians (who were Marxists too, so perhaps the Russians tossed a coin). Fundamentalists wanted to establish an Islamic state, regions wanted to pull away, and warlords just liked killing people.

Rest of the world interested? The USA and the UN sent troops into Somalia in 1992 to restore peace, but their losses were so heavy they pulled out (see the film Black Hawk Down). Mission: Impossible.

Who came off worst? The ordinary people. Thanks to the war, famine struck in 2001.

Band Aid

Famine was nothing new to Africa, nor even to Ethiopia, but a BBC news report in 1984 showing desperate people, including small children, dying from starvation, somehow touched a nerve in the West. Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats phoned round other singers to form a one-off group called Band Aid which released the single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. He followed it up with a huge rock concert called Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in London in front of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, with headline acts from around the world. Live Aid raised a lot of money, and Bob Geldof made sure it was spent properly.

The end of British Africa

After Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech in Capetown (see the earlier section ‘Gone with the wind of change’), the British Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, decided to get the African colonies ready for independence as soon as possible. Some historians have criticised Macleod for rushing things, but at the time he was greatly respected by African nationalists, even though things didn’t always go according to plan.

Nigeria

The British made Nigeria independent in 1960, but the different regions didn’t trust each other (they were of different tribes and different religions). The British set up a federal system so the regions could run their own affairs. But:

Military coup by the east (1966): Officers of the Ibo tribe in the east seize control, tear up the federal constitution, and set up a centralised state. With the Ibo in charge.

Military coup by the north (1966): Officers of the northern region mutiny and assassinate the Ibo president, General Ironsi. The northern leader Yakuba Gowon takes charge.

The east pulls out (1967): The Ibo declare the eastern region, the more prosperous part of Nigeria, the independent state of Biafra and tell General Gowon to put that in his pipe and smoke it.

Civil war (1967–70): General Gowon leads his troops to crush the Biafrans. The civil war is bitter and tragic. Some one million people die of starvation and disease, many of them children, until Biafra surrenders.

After the war, Gowon tried hard to heal the country’s divisions. Nigeria was becoming an important oil producing country: In 1971 it joined OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), which proved a mixed blessing for General Gowon, because while he was away at an OPEC meeting in 1975 he was overthrown in a military coup. This was the first of many coups in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s the Nigerian regime was promising a return to democratic government. Unfortunately, anyone who pointed out that it hadn’t happened yet was arrested and in some cases, like the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, put to death.

Of course we always called it Keenya

The Brits took to the mild climate and rolling hills of Kenya – or ‘Keen-ya’, as they pronounced it – like a duck to water. It reminded them of home: They even talked of ‘white highlands’. Three ethnic groups lived in British Kenya:

The British: Owned the land and lived (very well) in ‘happy valley’ – one long round of golf, cocktails, and adultery.

The Asians: Large numbers of Indians had settled in Kenya to work in the administration or to set up as shopkeepers and tradespeople.

The Africans: The (vast) majority of the country’s population with (by far) the least share of its wealth.

The Kikuyu tribe wanted their tribal lands back from the British who had settled on them. They tried negotiating, but in 1952 a militant group called Mau Mau began to use force. The British responded with savage repression and encouraged other tribes to attack Kikuyu villages. Both sides carried out appalling atrocities, sometimes massacring whole villages. The British kept Mau Mau suspects in camps where they were tortured and starved. All rule of law appeared to have collapsed in Kenya.

Historians still argue over exactly how many people died during the Mau Mau campaign: Some say about 12,000, others say it was twice that figure. About 1,000 were hanged by the British. What everyone agrees on is that only a very small number of European settlers were killed, even though those were the deaths that got most of the news coverage.

By 1960 the Mau Mau had been put down and the British were willing to talk about independence. Two political parties appeared, KANU (Kenya National African Union) for the Kikuyu and KADU (Kenya African Democratic Union) for everyone else. KANU won the election, and Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, left jail to become president of an independent Kenya. The settlers of happy valley packed their golf clubs and cocktail shakers and headed home.

The Kenyans resented the country’s prosperous Asian population. The government started restricting their freedom of action, making it impossible for them to earn a living. Most got out and headed for Britain, where controversy about immigration was raging, so their welcome was about as warm as the British weather.

Tanzania and Uganda

The nationalists in Tanganyika, as it was called, were led by Julius Nyerere. He won the 1960 election and led his country to independence in 1961. In 1964 Tanganyika joined with the island of Zanzibar to form Tanzania. Nyerere proved one of Africa’s most respected politicians, and he made Tanzania an oasis of stability in a continent where that was in short supply.

A very different story was happening in next-door Uganda, which became independent in 1962. The Kingdom of Buganda tried to go its own way, but in 1964 President Milton Obote took away the kingdom’s right to govern itself, which soon made it behave. In 1971 General Idi Amin staged a coup and took power. Amin was a brutal dictator, as his people soon discovered. In 1972 he expelled Uganda’s Asian community and forced them to flee to Britain. Some 400,000 people died during Amin’s reign of terror. However, he made the mistake of attacking his neighbours; in 1979 Tanzania sent troops into Uganda who toppled Amin and put Milton Obote back in charge.

Idi Amin was an appalling tyrant and murderer: He had opponents beheaded and kept the heads in his fridge. He was also a big, flamboyant character who liked to dress up in a kilt and claim to be Head of the Commonwealth. You can get a sense of his personality in the film The Last King of Scotland. Milton Obote was just as ruthless a dictator, and may have killed even more people than Amin, but he didn’t dress up or make wild threats against other countries, so the world hardly noticed.

The struggle in the south

British southern Africa had four states: Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa. The first two had relatively small white settler communities; the other two had many more Europeans. The British tried proposing a single federation of Nyasaland and the two Rhodesias, but the black Africans realised (correctly) that this idea was a ploy to give the whites control even in the states where they were a small minority. The British tried locking the nationalist leaders up but when that didn’t stop the opposition to federation they finally gave in and in 1964 set up three separate states. Nyasaland became Malawi under Dr Hastings Banda and Northern Rhodesia became Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony just called ‘Rhodesia’ with a right-wing, white supremacist government led by Ian Smith.

Smith was keen for Rhodesia to be independent too but the British insisted they would agree to it on the basis of black majority rule (or ‘democracy’ as this idea’s also called). The white Rhodesians weren’t having that situation – never in a thousand years, as Smith once famously put it – so in 1965 they declared UDI, their Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Though it sounded very like the Americans declaring independence from Britain back in 1776, the UDI sprang from much less noble motives.

All talks between Smith and the British failed and the African nations were pressing London to send in troops. The UN imposed sanctions on Rhodesia while the African nations helped the nationalist guerrilla movements. By 1979 white Rhodesia could not continue. Smith hoped to hand over to the moderate nationalists led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa, but the 1979 Lancaster House agreement insisted that the UDI should end and the British should resume power and organise free elections. So in 1980 colonial rule briefly returned to Africa, and the Rhodesians elected the left-wing Robert Mugabe as president of the new state of Zimbabwe.

South Africa’s painful walk to freedom

Racial tensions were even worse in South Africa, which had a much larger white population. Since the right-wing Afrikaaner National Party won the elections in 1948, South Africa had operated a policy of apartheid, strict segregation of blacks, coloureds, and whites, even for public toilets and park benches, with all the best facilities, jobs, schools, and houses reserved for the whites. The regime operated strict censorship and didn’t hesitate to arrest anyone who dared criticise it. Suspiciously large numbers of those arrested by the South African police never emerged alive.

Opposition to apartheid was led by the African National Congress (ANC), many of whose leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were imprisoned in 1964. Mandela remained in prison until 1990 despite a worldwide campaign for his release. Even worse, the police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960 and on schoolchildren protesting at their inadequate education in Soweto township in 1976.

The UN imposed wide-ranging sanctions on South Africa to pressurise the government into abandoning apartheid. Peaceful protests in South Africa were led by religious leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu; at the same time the ANC carried out armed raids with help from neighbouring states. In the 1980s the South African government began, reluctantly and with great trepidation, to relax some of the ‘petty’ apartheid laws, until finally in 1990 President F. W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela and dismantled the whole apartheid system. South Africa experienced a free election for the first time in its history and the president it elected was Nelson Mandela.

South Africa had taken over South West Africa from the Germans as a League of Nations mandate after the First World War and had held on to it ever since. It extended the apartheid laws into South West Africa and took no notice when the UN withdrew the mandate and told South Africa to hand the country over. SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) kept up a guerrilla campaign with Cuban help until South Africa finally gave in and gave independence to Namibia in 1990. The last African nation was finally free.