Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (106 page)

With both the
UN
and the
OAU
not merely endorsing but inciting, indeed commanding, violence, individual African states employed it increasingly to resolve their inter-tribal civil wars and frontier disputes, which colonialism had frozen. Africa appears to have the greatest linguistic and ethnic variety of any continent. Of the forty-one independent states, only Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Lesotho and Somalia were basically homogeneous, and even these had debatable borders.
⁹⁴
Most African civil wars, since they involve transfrontier tribal conflicts, tend to become foreign wars also. One of the earliest of them, the 1958 Hutu race-revolt in Rwanda against their Tutsi overlords, involved Burindi, and this pattern was repeated three times over the next fifteen years. The revolt of the Polisarios against Morocco and Mauritania, the struggle between northern Muslims and southern Christians in Chad, the civil wars in Angola, the Sudan and Nigeria, five of the longer and more serious conflicts, all involved foreign intervention. The
UN
and the
OAU
, not surprisingly, proved wholly unable to arbitrate these conflicts. A typical example was the partition in December 1975 of the old Spanish Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania, which recalled the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century (or in 1939). Algeria was left out, and thereupon backed the Polisario insurgents. The
UN
passed two mutually exclusive resolutions, one supporting Morocco, the other Algeria. The
OAU
has never seriously attempted to enforce its primary maxim that states should not interfere in each other’s internal affairs, except (interestingly enough) in the case of Amin’s Uganda. It failed to censure Gadafy of Libya for his attempts to overthrow Sadat in Egypt, Niheimi in the Sudan, Bourguiba in Tunisia, Francis Tombalbaye and Felix Malloum in Chad and his blatant intervention in half a dozen other states. Nor was the
OAU
able to prevent incursions by non-African powers, since nobody wanted to repeat the Congo’s disastrous involvement with the
UN
,
and it was the individual states themselves which invited the help of foreign troops, as did Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania with Britain and the Ivory Coast, Gabon and Senegal with France.
⁹⁴

The trans-border complexities increased markedly after 1973–4 when Soviet Russia, with its satellite Cuba, first committed large numbers of troops to the African theatre. A case in point was Ethiopia, where the old Emperor Haile Selasse had run a semi-feudal, semi-liberal regime by a careful balance of foreign help. The Indians trained his army, the British and Norwegians the navy, the Swedes the air force, the French ran the railway, the Australians the hotels, the Yugoslavs the port, the Russians the oil refinery, the Bulgars his fishing fleet, the Italians the breweries, the Czechs the shoe factories and the Japanese the textile mills.
⁹⁵
The Russians seized their chance to overthrow the old man in 1974 – he was smothered to death with a pillow – and gain a monopoly of influence, dropping their Somalian protégé in the process. The worst that could be said about the Emperor’s censorship was that he had cut the death of the King from
Macbeth;
after his fall Shakespeare was no longer performed at all. The regime became totalitarian, massacred its opponents by the tens of thousands, and engaged in large-scale frontier wars which continued into the 1980s. After Russia extended the Cold War to Africa, it became the classic theatre of Realpolitik, of abrupt formations and reversals of alliances, and of the principle ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. A characteristic instance was the Katangan invasion of Zaïre across the Angolan frontier in 1977–8, with the Communists, replacing the ‘imperialist secessionists’ of 1960, helping the Katangans with Cuban and Russian troops, and Morocco and France backing Zaïre.

The thirty-odd civil and foreign wars the new African states fought in their first two decades produced a swelling total of refugees. By 1970 there were a million of whose existence the
UN
was statistically aware. The figure leapt to 4.5- million in 1978, plus 2 million described as ‘unsettled’ after returning to their home country. In 1980 there were 2,740,300
UN
-recorded refugees in seventeen African countries, plus 2 million ‘displaced persons’, the vast majority of them the result of the military activities of Soviet Russia, Cuba and Libya.
⁹⁶
The possibility of a significant proportion of these people being resettled was remote. By the early 1980s, all the newly independent states, with the exception of the Ivory Coast, Kenya and the three oil-bearing territories, Algeria, Libya and Nigeria, were poorer than under the colonial system. Some had moved out of the market economy altogether.

In these circumstances, the quite rapid material progress which had been a feature of the final phase of colonialism, 1945–60, was reversed. Though independence was fertile in regional pacts, such as the six-power Casablanca Group, the fifteen-power Monrovia Group and the Brazzaville Twelve, these were largely verbal agreements for political purposes, and they proved ephemeral. Meanwhile the specific and practical inter-state arrangements for currencies, transport and communications were disrupted or lapsed. Wars, ‘emergencies’ and the shutting of frontiers disrupted road and rail links. Rolling-stock was not renewed. Roads deteriorated. Travel patterns tended to revert to those of the 1890s, with links chiefly between the coastal cities (though by air rather than by sea) but with little long-distance movement inland. Mobility became patchy and unreliable. In the late 1970s, the greatest traffic jams so far contrived by man took place not in the advanced West but in Lagos: it was said that the head of state, General Mohammed, died because he could not solve the jam even for himself and his car got stuck at the same time, 8 am, each morning, making it easy to plan his murder. In 1976, after the Nigerian government had ordered 18 million tons of cement, the approaches to Lagos harbour were jammed by nearly five hundred ships, and by the time most of them landed their cargo it was unusable.
⁹⁷

But in many inland areas, even in Nigeria, land traffic declined. As one account put it, ‘More and more of the observable life of Africa takes place within twenty miles of its three dozen international airports.’
⁹⁸
With the decline in air traffic control standards and the frequent closings of internal air-space, it often became easier and cheaper to travel between African capitals via Europe than direct. The same was true of phone-links: for instance, it was impossible to phone Abidjan from Monrovia, four hundred miles away, except through Europe or North America. The suggestion was made that this decline actually benefited authoritarian governments by immobilizing critics, for most African governments maintained for their exclusive use military transport and communications networks on the Iron Curtain model. But the state suffered too. In 1982 the Chad ambassador in Brussels complained he had not heard from his government for more than a year.
⁹⁹

Equally marked was the deterioration in medical standards. The progress made in eliminating malaria, which had been spectacular in the late 1940s and 1950s, was reversed,
WHO’S
twenty-year programme launched in 1958 was a failure. By the end of the 1970s there were 200 million cases in the world and 1 billion people living in malaria-risk areas. The reversal was by no means confined to Africa; results in Central America and Asia were in some ways even
more disappointing.
¹⁰⁰
But the late 1970s saw a disquieting increase in malarial cases returning from African capitals where the disease had been stamped out in the 1950s.
¹⁰¹
The return of traditional scourges reflected the growth of malnutrition and famine, the breakdown of public health and hospital services and the shortage of qualified doctors. In 1976
WHO
reversed its policy and announced that henceforth ‘village healers’ would be employed in rural health services, though a distinction was still made between African-type midwives, bonesetters and herbalists, on the one hand, and ‘witchdoctors’ using ‘spells and superstitions’ on the other. In 1977, however, this distinction was dropped and ‘witch-doctors’, patronized by 90 per cent of the rural population, were given the same status as scientifically trained practitioners.
¹⁰²
In Lagos, within the penumbra of the world’s largest traffic-jam, a joint teaching-hospital was opened for doctors practising medicine and ‘healing’.

The varied but on balance sombre pattern of the African continent a generation after independence was reflected in the following summary of events in the last year of the 1970s decade and the first of the 1980s. For 1979:
Sudan:
attempted
coup. Morocco:
War in Western Sahara against Polisario guerrillas cost £750,000 a day.
Ethiopia:
20,000 Cubans plus Ethiopian troops were fighting wars on three fronts against Eritrea and Somalia, where refugees passed the 1 million mark.
Djibouti:
uprising in Adar region.
Kenya:
successful multi-party elections.
Tanzania:
40,000 troops invaded
Uganda
, when Amin, supported by 2,500 troops from
Libya
, was ousted.
Ghana: coup
by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. Three former heads of state and many other politicians executed by firing-squad; public floggings and canings of corrupt citizens; police strike; country declared officially bankrupt.
Nigeria:
return to civilian rule.
Liberia:
food riots; seventy killed.
Senegal:
a fourth legal party created.
Mauritania: coup.
Ould Salack, who had ousted Ould Daddah in 1978, ousted in turn by Ould Hardallah. Peace signed with Polisario guerrillas.
Mali:
single-party elections.
Guinea:
release of political prisoners, including Archbishop of Conakry.
Benin:
single-party elections.
Togo:
single-party elections; political show-trials of so-called ‘Brazilian élitists’.
Cameroon:
attempted
coup
followed by small massacre.
Chad:
civil war.
People’s Republic of Congo: coup. Equatorial Guinea:
overthrow of dictator Macias.
Central African Republic:
overthrow of Bokassa.
Zaïre:
most major roads reported unusable; two-thirds of road vehicles unusable for lack of spare parts; Benguela railway closed; 38 per cent of foreign exchange earmarked for debt-servicing; 42 per cent of under-fives suffering from malnutrition.
Burundi:
fifty-two missionaries expelled for ‘subversion’.
Guinea-Bissau:
revenue covered only 65 per
cent of expenditure.
Cape Verde:
over 90 per cent of food consumed imported.
Mozambique:
death-penalty extended to sabotage, terrorism and mercenary activities; many political executions; President Machel attacked men with long hair and women with tight clothes. Catholic and Anglican churches closed.
Angola:
civil war.
Zambia:
many political arrests.
Malawi:
import controls.
Zimbabwe:
end of white rule after decade of civil war; 20,000 dead.
Namibia:
guerrilla warfare.
Lesotho:
guerrilla warfare.
Swaziland:
economy under pressure from refugees.
Botswana:
ditto.
South Africa:
guerrilla warfare.

In 1980:
Sudan:
one-party elections.
Tunisia:
attempted
coup. Morocco:
war against Polisario.
Algeria:
Soviet-style concentration on heavy industry abandoned as failure.
Ethiopia:
Soviet helicopter gunships used against Somalis, Oromo, Gallas and other non-Amharic races.
Somalia:
refugees pass 1.5 million mark.
Tanzania:
Nyerere, sole candidate, elected president; famine.
Zanzibar:
attempted
coup. Uganda:
cost of maintaining 20,000 Tanzania army of occupation, plus 6,000 Uganda army, rose to 37 per cent of revenue; fifty political murders a week in Kampala; famine.
Ghana:
114 per cent inflation; universities closed.
Nigeria:
attempted
coup;
1,000 killed.
Gambia:
opposition parties banned; many arrests.
Liberia: coup;
many executions by firing-squad.
Senegal:
voluntary retirement of Senghor after twenty-year rule.
Mauritania: coup:
Ould Hardallah ousted by Ould Louly.
Mali:
schools on strike; economy described as ‘catastrophic’. Guinea-financed coup in
Bissau
, following dispute over oil-rights.
Ivory Coast:
one-party elections.
Upper Volta: coup. Niger:
invasion by Libyan-financed nomads.
Benin:
President Kerekou ‘converted’ to Islam during visit to Gadafi.
Cameroon:
economy under pressure by refugees from Chad.
Chad:
civil war and invasion by Libya.
Zaïre:
Mobutu declared 4 February: ‘As long as I live I will never tolerate the creation of another party.’
Guinea-Bissau: coup. Sao Tomé:
threatened invasion by exiles; 1,000 Angolans and 100 Cubans moved in.
Angola:
civil war.
Zambia:
attempted
coup. Zimbabwe:
British-supervised free elections.
Namibia:
guerrilla war.
Lesotho:
invasion by ‘Lesotho Liberation Army’.
South Africa:
guerrilla warfare.
¹⁰³