This is a huge, 700-page, compendious history of all the African nations from independence (roughly the mid-1950s) to the time it was written (around 2010), so 55 years or so of modern African history.

Meredith chooses as epigraph to this big book the Latin tag from Pliny the Elder, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ meaning ‘Out of Africa always something new’ – but a reading of the actual book confirms how utterly inappropriate this is. For if Meredith’s book demonstrates anything it is that, since independence, out of Africa have come the same five or six stereotypical narratives or events – civil war, one-party rule, dictatorship, economic collapse, famine, vast amounts of foreign aid – and the consistent failure to deliver the utopian dreams everyone hoped for in the heady first years of independence.

Two major contexts

Meredith only mentions them in passing but two broad historical contexts are worth bearing in mind.

1. The independence movement in Algeria spiralled out of control into an appallingly brutal war which neither side was able to stop, and which threatened to tear the colonial power, France, apart. The war was at its worst in 1957 to 1961. The point is that Algeria stood as a terrible warning to the other colonial powers (Britain, Belgium, Portugal) of what might happen if they mismanaged things or delayed.
2. The victory of Fidel Castro’s communists in Cuba in 1959 ushered in an era when the threat of the new African states falling to communism seemed very real and of global importance in the war between the two superpowers. Hence the head of the CIA warning President Eisenhower that Congo’s Patrice Lumumba might be ‘the African Castro’ and America’s feverish paranoia that if Congo fell to the communists it might influence the entire continent (p.104). Looking back, this level of anxiety seems exaggerated, even absurd. But the context is crucial in understanding the actions of all the colonial powers, but especially of America, which set about undermining left-wing governments and supporting right-wing, capitalism-loving dictators across the continent.

Both of these examples or precedents (Algeria, Cuba) lay behind the decisions of Britain and Belgian, in particular, not to linger or suppress independence movements. In other words, they added to the sense of urgency and haste which characterised the rush to make Africa independent, with such questionable results.

Part 1

1. The Gold Coast experiment (Ghana)

The tragic life of Kwame Nkrumah who went from political prisoner in the early 1950s, to lead his own political party, the Convention People’s Party, won the general election held under British auspices in 1954, before leading Ghana to independence in March 1957. Meredith vividly describes the week-long celebrations, attended by worthies from around the world including Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon.

With a sickening inevitability Nkrumah found the new country difficult to rule, repressed political opposition and rigged elections. In 1964 he amended the constitution to make Ghana a one-party state, with himself as president for life. In 1966 Nkrumah was deposed in a coup led by the National Liberation Council.

2. Revolt on the Nile (Egypt)

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser led the 1952 revolution which overthrew the 32-year-old playboy King Farouk I. Much rhetoric about freedom and Arab socialism as Nasser tightened his grip on power, imprisoning rivals and getting elected president in 1956. The catastrophe of the Suez Crisis which put the nail in the coffin of the British Empire. From that moment Britain’s rush to decolonise picked up speed.

3. Land of the Setting Sun (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria)

Apparently, the Arab word for north-west Africa, maghreb, means ‘land of the setting sun’ (as opposed to our word ‘Levant’ which means ‘rising’, to describe the old Ottoman Empire).

This chapter describes the descent of Algeria into a terrible insurgency which kicked off in the spring of 1954 with a wave of bomb attacks by the National Liberation Front (French: Front de libération nationale or FLN) with both sides slowly breaching their early declarations to target only combatants, so that by August 1954 the FLN was bombing civilian cafés and restaurants while the French security forces cracked down hard on the civilian Arab population, with large-scale arrests and torture.

An often overlooked aspect of the terrible war in Algeria (1956 to 1962) was that it made the French more amenable to granting its neighbours, Tunisia and Morocco, independence. Meredith describes the independence campaigning of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco. The French arrested, imprisoned and exiled both these leaders, but eventually gave into widespread protests and both Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence in March 1956.

In 1957, amid an upsurge in terrorist bombings, the French governor of Algeria handed power over to the military, led by General Jacques Massu. The army locked down the capital city Algiers, ringing it with barbed wire, dividing it into sections which could be searched, cleared and then surveilled. Thousands of Algerians were arrested and tortured using electric shocks or waterboarding. It became known as The Battle of Algiers. In the country, peasants were rounded up into camps while native collaborator/spies (harkis) were deployed by the French.

By 1958 the FLN had been defeated, its leaders seeking refuge in Tunisia, whose new leader Bourguiba gave them sanctuary. However, the political system in France itself was in crisis. Violent disagreements about policy in Algeria led to the collapse of a series of short-lived governments. Worried that pacifist-defeatist politicians would gain power, in May 1958 the military took control of Algeria, allying with leading colons (white French colonists) to form a Committee of Public Safety. The French government declared a blockade, at which the Committee called for the return of the wartime hero, General de Gaulle.

4. L’Afrique Noire (Senegal, Ivory Coast)

L’Afrique Noire was the French term for the sub-Saharan part of its colonial empire, including Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Meredith describes the careers of Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire.

5. Winds of Change (British colonies)

This chapter covers the independence movements in British colonies such as Nigeria.

Nigeria

Nigeria had only been created by the forcible union of north and south Nigeria in 1914, the north and south having themselves been slowly cobbled together from former, smaller protectorates since 1900. Nigeria could be divided into three great blocs: the north was Muslim and Hausa-speaking, with a conservative, feudal social system. It had few schools or colleges. The West, including the capital Lagos, was mostly Yoruba. Being on the coast, dotted with cities, it was more economically advanced and urban. In the East lived the Igpo who tended to be very well educated but had no social system of their own and so were scattered around Nigeria’s other territories. In addition there some 250 other ethnic groups, some of which protested and rebelled, including the Edo-speaking people of Benin province who longed to restore the kingdom of Benin. The British struggled with successive constitutions to try and create a balance between all these different constituencies. Nigeria was granted independence in 1960.

As a rule of thumb British colonies in West Africa were much more advanced than British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanganyika) and Central Africa (north and south Rhodesia, Nyasaland). Politics in these latter countries was dominated by the fierce lobbying of the small white minorities, who dominated the local governors. Thus the settlers persuaded the Colonial Office to create a federation of Central Africa, consisting of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Kenya

Plans for a similar federation in East Africa were wrecked by the Mau Mau rebellion, which was an organised protest against the grotesque monopoly of the best agricultural land in Kenya by whites, and the land deprivation and lack of rights enforced on the million-strong Kikuyu population. Meredith gives a thorough account: the phrase mau mau actually meant nothing in Kikuyu, it was just a rallying call, and then the name given to the secret meetings where oaths of allegiance were sworn to the movement. Despite white paranoia, very few whites were actually killed during the so-called ’emergency’ (1952 to 1960), Meredith gives the number as 32, fewer than lost their lives in traffic accidents in Nairobi over the same period. He details British accusations that the Kikuyu leader Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU) was involved, which led to a kangaroo court convicting and imprisoning him; and the brutal measures the British took against the insurgency, including setting up concentration camps.

The first Blacks were elected to Kenya’s legislative council in 1957. In October the Highlands area was formally opened to all races. The British thought they would continue to rule Kenya for at least another decade. In the event, independence was granted on December 12, 1963.

Nyasaland

Meredith gives the story of Nyasaland, to which the elderly Dr Hastings Banda returned as leader of the independence movement in 1959, determined to scupper Britain’s plans to make it part of a federation with Rhodesia. The colonial governor imported troops who tried to quell protests which turned into riots, troops shot, protesters killed, it becomes a nationwide movement etc.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring north Rhodesia, in the run-up to contested 1959 elections the authorities banned a leading nationalist party and imprisoned its leader, Kenneth Kaunda. Britain was losing its reputation for progressive colonialism in a welter of protests and arrests across all its African colonies.

Abruptly, Harold Macmillan’s conservative government gave in. Late in 1959 the Foreign Secretary Iain Macleod said further repression would lead to bloodshed. In February 1960 Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech. Behind it was fear that further suppressing calls for independence would drive African nations into the hands of the communists. The British knew most of their colonies weren’t ready for independence – Meredith lists the pitiful number of native lawyers or administrators in the central and east African countries – but hurrying was a less bad option than delay, with the increasing repression, bloodshed and reputational damage that would inevitably entail.

6. Heart of Darkness (Congo)

The gruesome history of the Belgian Congo. It beggars belief that there are still statues of King Leopold II, one of the most blood-thirsty rulers in history, in Belgium. Congo was notable for four or five reasons:

1. It was and is the largest country in Africa.
2. The grotesque rule of Leopold II was probably the most evil, mass murdering of all the colonial regimes. As many as 10 million Congolese died during his rule, 1885 to 1908.
3. Once the colony had been handed over to the Belgian government to run, it developed through the 20th century as one of the richest sources of minerals (particularly copper and diamonds) in the world.
4. The rush to independence was hastiest and most foolhardy here than almost anywhere else. At independence Congo had 3 Black civil servants, 30 university graduates, no doctors, secondary school teachers or army officers. The firebrand new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, had just four years of secondary school education plus one year in a technical college for postal clerks (p.95).
5. With the result that within days of winning independence on 1 June 1960, Congo collapsed into chaos.

The army mutinied, the entire province of Katanga tried to secede, riots in the main cities included attacks on whites so that the entire Belgian community i.e. everyone who knew how to run the infrastructure of the country, fled in panic. Profile of the hectic unpredictable character of Lumumba, and the long dismal series of events which led, first to his arrest and, eventually, to his murder by Belgian and Congolese soldiers on the orders of his one-time lieutenant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, with the collusion of the UN and US, on 17 January 1961.

The stream of crises continued until Mobutu took power in a definitive military coup in 1965, and was to rule a one-party state for 32 years, until 1997.

7. The White South

South Africa

Meredith points out that the southern nations of Africa – north and south Rhodesia, south-west Africa and South Africa – looked at the other African countries gaining independence and were horrified by what they saw, especially the complete chaos punctuated by bloodbaths and military coups in Congo.

The fiercest response was in South Africa which in 1948 had established the system of apartheid and spent the next decades hardening the division between whites and blacks. Meredith chronicles the early history of the African National Congress (ANC), revolving round the figure of Nelson Mandela and the failure of peaceful efforts to counter apartheid. Peaceful protests such as general strikes became harder to justify after the SA authorities carried out the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, killing 69 protesters and injuring 180.

The more violent atmosphere heralded by the massacre led the ANC to establish the armed wing of the struggle, uMkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. These guys carried out a not very effective sabotage campaign against a variety of infrastructure targets. In 1962 Mandela was arrested and imprisoned, despite a lack of evidence against him. But then in 1964 the authorities discovered the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe hideout at Rivonia, which was stuffed with incriminating documents. On the basis of these, Mandela was retried and, along with the key leadership of the ANC and uMkhonto, sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964.

Rhodesia

Meredith gives the history of Rhodesia, taking in the creation of the two independence parties, ZANU and ZAPU, up until November 1965 when Ian Smith‘s Rhodesian Front government, rebelling against pressure to grant Black independence, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the mother government in the UK.

Angola

Angola was a backwater of the mouldering Portuguese empire, which was ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1956 the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA) was founded but police swoops in 1959 and 1960 arrested most of its leaders. In 1961 the colony was horrified by an outbreak of extreme violence in the north, where machete-wielding gangs massacred white bosses and the Blacks who worked for them. This was partly the work of a different group, the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA), run by Holden Roberto.

Mozambique

On the other side of the continent, in the other Portuguese colony, Mozambique, 1962 saw the creation of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) which commenced a campaign of small-scale guerrilla attacks against border posts etc.

Dates of independence

1956 – Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia

1957 – Ghana

1958 – Guinea

1960 – Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian), Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo (France), Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania,

1961 – Sierra Leone, Tanganyika

1962 – Burundi, Rwanda, Algeria, Uganda

1963 – Kenya, Zanzibar

1964 – Nyasaland (Malawi), North Rhodesia (Zambia)

1965 – Gambia

1966 – Botswana, Lesotho

1975 – Angola, Mozambique

1980 – Zimbabwe

1990 – Namibia

1993 – Eritrea

2011 – South Sudan

Part 2

8. The Birth of Nations

A chapter summarising the dire state of the geography and economies of most African nations at independence, and the consequent economic challenges they faced. It’s here that Meredith gives the shocking figures about the lack of African graduates or professionals right across the continent.

9. The First Dance of Freedom

Abandoning democracy

Meredith laments that almost all the new national leaders consciously disavowed democracy and instituted one-party rule. It’s interesting to read their justifications. It was claimed that democracy derived from advanced societies with well-defined classes and class interests which could be represented by political parties. By contrast, leaders like Nkomo and Kenyatta argued that while parties may have been necessary to organise and motivate different groupings in the fight against colonialism, now the colonialists had left and the nations were free, democracy represented a threat to African countries because the likelihood was that parties would come to be based on tribal or regional allegiances and so work to split and divide the nation. There’s actually a lot to this argument, as that’s what many African parties came to be, fronts for specific tribes or regional interests.

One-party rule

Regardless of the justifications, almost all the first leaders of the newly independent African nations went on to abolish democracy, establish one-party rule, declare themselves presidents for life, lock up any opposition figures (p.176), create cults of their greatness (p.180), set up a secret police which was told it could go to any lengths to save the state from communist or capitalist or imperialist subversion etc etc. These cults often took the name of the Great Leader – Nasserism, Nkrumahism and so on (p.163).

Corruption

And misuse money, in two specific ways: 1) instituting state-sponsored corruption at every level of society, while 2) spending fortunes on grandiose building projects, palaces, mansions, waterfront hotels. Presidents, ministers and powerful figures swiftly awarded themselves ‘the platinum lifestyle’ (p.171).While Nkrumah was crapping on about ‘African socialism’ his ministers made fortunes. Ghanaian minister Krobo Edusei caused a scandal when his wife ordered a £3,000 gold-plated bed from a London store. In later life he admitted to owning 14 homes, a luxury beach house, a London flat, expensive cars and six different bank accounts. African socialism.

Army coups

In 1958 in Sudan the army took control in Sudan from squabbling politicians. In 1963 Togo’s president was shot dead in a coup. In 1964 African mobs overthrew rule by the Arab elite and the sultan was forced to flee, the French army had to put down military coups in Gabon and Cameroon, while the British army suppressed army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya. From 1965 coups became more frequent: in 1965 Algeria’s first leader was deposed; Mobutu overthrew president Joseph Kasa-Vubu in Congo; there was a military coup in Benin; Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic, and so on.

10. Feet of Clay (Ghana)

An extended description of Kwame Nkrumah’s slow descent into authoritarian rule, isolation, paranoia, arbitrary arrest of opponents, accompanied by rising corruption. Meredith makes the pretty well-known point that patronage and corruption weren’t parasites on the system which could be eliminated; they were the system.

A detailed account of how Nkrumah destroyed the Ghana economy through mismanagement, ignorance, terrible accounting, disastrous decisions and so on. Incompetence on a national scale, plus classic withdrawal into dictator paranoia. And, also classically, when the army intervened it wasn’t for the good of the country – they’d happily watched it go to wrack and ruin – it was because Nkrumah started tampering with it, wishing to bring it directly under his control as he had done every other aspect of Ghanaian life. So it was that while Nkrumah was visiting China in 1966, the army deposed him. Joyous crowds celebrated in the streets, his statues was pulled down and portraits defaced. The kind of thing we were to see scores and scores of times in developing countries around the world over the past 60 years.

11. A House Divided (Nigeria)

Nigeria. Meredith explains the entirely tribal basis and vicious infighting of Nigerian politics which led up to the January 1966 military coup, in which the Supreme Council of the Revolution not just sacked but executed civilian politicians. And the complicated rivalries between North, West and East Nigeria which led leaders in the East to declare independence as Biafra, and the 3-year-long war which followed, in which up to 2 million Nigerians died.

12. Death of an Emperor (Ethiopia)

An entertaining account of the elaborate ritual which surrounded the Emperor Haile Selassie and the surprisingly aggressive imperial campaigns which had doubled his country’s size, starting back in the time of his ancestor Menelek (ruled 1889 to 1913), including the annexation of Eritrea and contested parts of Somaliland.

In the early 1970s mismanagement, especially of a famine in Wollo, protests by various sectors, and Selassie’s hastening senility, emboldened a group of army officers, who called themselves the Derg, to stage a coup in stages throughout 1974, which ended with the complete overthrow of Selassie on 12 September. In November the junta executed 60 former officials of the imperial government plus dissident elements within the Derg itself, by firing squad, and Ethiopia was declared a republic to be governed on Marxist-Leninist lines.

• The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)

13. The Coming of Tyrants

After the first few heroic years of optimism, the military coups began. But worse was the advent of the monsters: Abaid Karume in Zanzibar (1964 to 1972); Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic (1966 to 1979); Idi Amin in Uganda (1971 to 1979); Francisco Nguema in Equatorial Guinea (1968 to 1979); Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia (1977 to 1991).

14. In Search of Ujamaa (Tanzania)

Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. He was a committed socialist though without a socialist party or advisers. In the mid-1960s he nationalised everything in Tanzania and proclaimed this native form of socialism ujaama, which is KiSwahili for ‘familyhood’ (p.253). In 1974 this was turned into the forced movement of some 11 million peasant farmers into collective farms, which had the same kind of catastrophic effect as in the Stalin-era Ukraine or Mao’s China i.e. the collapse of agricultural productivity and widespread hunger. Nyerere had to go begging to the World Bank and IMF and food agencies for emergency food supplies. As its economy went steadily downhill, Nyerere’s one-party state did improve literacy, schools, drinking water etc, but almost entirely funded by aid from the West.

15. The Passing of the Old Guard

Ghana

Nkrumah’s sad exile in a slowly deteriorating villa in Guinea planning a triumphant return to Ghana which never took place.

Egypt

Nasser’s great dreams of leading an Arab renaissance came to nothing, attempts to unify with Syria were a fiasco, his intervention in Yemen backfired, leading up to the humiliation of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in which the Israelis seized the Sinai with its oil wells from Egypt. Yet he remained popular and Egypt was plunged into mourning when he died in 1970 of a heart attack, aged just 52.

Kenya

Jomo Kenyatta was the opposite of Nyerere, a keen advocate of capitalism, and provided the stable political and legal framework within which private enterprise could flourish. Much of the land belonging to the white settlers, the issue behind the Mau Mau movement, was sold to Black Kenyans. During the 1970s he faced political challenges and hardened his one-party rule. His fiercest critic was found murdered etc. Late in life Kenyatta slowly lost interest in ruling, preferring to concoct complex riddles. He died peacefully in 1978.

Senegal

President Léopold Senghor remained strongly Francophile, committed to maintaining links with France, accepting French capital in business and retaining French troops to safeguard his regime. In France he was a noted poet. In 1976 he bucked the one-party trend of his neighbours by allowing the establishment of two new political parties. In 1980 he handed over power to his protégé, becoming the first African ruler to relinquish power voluntarily.

Guinea

The first president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, created a paranoid atmosphere of permanent plots which he claimed to uncover and used to arrest, torture and publicly execute opponents, real or imagined. A fifth of the population fled abroad. Touré nationalised industries, persecuted independent businesses, created parastatal agencies, so that the economy tanked and was, eventually, only surviving on western aid. After 20 years of enforced socialism, he began to relent and allow some elements of private enterprise.

16. The Slippery Slope

An overview of the calamitous economic issues which hit Africa in the 1970s and 80s, being:

• famine and drought
• the two oil shocks of the 1970s
• the collapse of commodity prices on which most African states depended for foreign revenue
• the disastrous loss of agricultural land, soil degradation and desertification

On top of all this, an explosive growth in population.

17. The Great Plunderer (Zaire)

This refers to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who ruled Congo from the date of his second military coup in 1965 to his overthrow by the forces invading from Rwanda in 1997. During those 32 long years he changed the country’s name to Zaire, Africanised all placenames (Leopoldville > Kinshasa, Elizabethville > Lubumbashi) and even his own name, changing it to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

Mobutu nationalised agriculture, seized all businesses from foreign owners, causing a collapse in the country’s economy, and looted it on a grand scale, siphoning vast amounts into private bank accounts. Probably the greatest African kleptocrat, he was said to have stolen up to $15 billion. The Americans supported him on the simple Cold War basis that he was fiercely anti-communist and so maintained the centre of Africa against any Soviet influence. Mobutu was an honoured guest of US presidents from John F Kennedy to George Bush. Meredith doesn’t need to comment.

18. White Dominoes (Mozambique, Angola)

Portugal was the last European country to decolonise. Independence movements in its two main African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, commenced military activities in 1961, leading to what became known as the Portuguese Colonial War (1961 to 1974).

In 1968 Portugal’s long-serving dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was replaced by another authoritarian ruler, Marcello Caetano. He inherited military operations in Portugal’s main two African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. However, junior army officers had become unhappy with the way the army seemed like it was committed forever to these ruinous, unwinnable wars and so, on 25 April 1974, carried out the Carnation Revolution, overthrowing Caetano. Portugal’s new military rulers set out to divest themselves of her colonies immediately. Small Guinea-Bissau was easily granted independence in 1973.

Mozambique

In Mozambique the main liberation force had been the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) led by the zealous Marxist, Samora Machel. Terrified by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Marxist Machal, in the year between the declaration of independence in 1974 and its legal implementation on 25 June 1975, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique fled the country, including all the civil servants, administrators, managers of the infrastructure and all businesses.

Frelimo passed a law ordering the remaining Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless, leaving a country empty of experienced administrators, engineers and so on.

Frelimo commenced an aggressive implementation of Marxism-Leninism which proved a disaster: central planning was as badly managed here as in most other African countries, leading to economic collapse, inflation, shortages of everything but especially food. Industrial output and agriculture collapsed leading to widespread famine. Frelimo eventually generated so much opposition that the anti-communist forces united to form the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) rebel militias.

Renamo found backing from South Africa and the US. Civil war between Frelimo and Renamo was to consume 15 ruinous years from 1977 to 1992. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, with somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 dying of famine. 1.7 million Mozambicans took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced.

Angola

Something similar happened in Angola. As the deadline for independence approached, three rebel or independence groups/parties/armies vied for power, being the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA. As violence broke out most of the white Portuguese fled and the country collapsed into a civil war between what emerged as the two main forces, the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The civil war lasted from 1975, with interludes, until 2002. See:

• No One Can Stop The Rain: A Chronicle of Two Foreign Aid Workers during the Angolan Civil War by Karin Moorhouse and Wei Cheng (2005)
• Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey Into Angola by Daniel Metcalfe (2014)

Part 3

19. Red Tears (Ethiopia)

How in 1974 the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC) of army officers, also known as the Derg, overthrew the regime of emperor Haile Selassie. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam seized full control and initiated a wave of repression which became known as the Red Terror. During this two-year campaign as many as 50,000 Ethiopians were arrested, tortured and executed. The Derg dumped the corpses in the street and gained notoriety by demanding that families of the executed pay for the bullets. Marxist-Leninist housekeeping.

Meredith explains how Mengistu’s Marxist-Leninist policies, along with his brutal campaigns against Eritrean and Tigrayan separatists in the north, helped bring about the great Ethiopia famine of 1984 which led to Live Aid. At the time more than half of Ethiopia’s annual budget was devoted to maintaining an army of 300,000 (armed and supplied by Soviet Russia) in order to carry out operations against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (p.334).

Mengistu was a doctrinaire Marxist who believed in collectivising agriculture and enforcing super low prices in order to provide subsidised food for his key constituencies in the cities. The detailed chronicle of his deliberate ignoring of the famine, attempts to deny it, to prevent journalists or aid agencies entering the famine-stricken areas, and then the politically motivated strategy of moving hundreds of thousands of starving people against their will from the north (close to where Eritrean separatists operated) to the more secure south where they had no homes or livelihoods, makes for terrible reading. What a complete bastard.

The title of this chapter comes from a memoir of his time in Mengistu’s government written by a defector from the Derg, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, ‘Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia’. In the words of reviewer Mohammed Hassen, this exposes ‘the callous brutality of the Ethiopian government towards its own people’, and the leaders of the Derg as ‘uninformed, anti-people, anti-democratic criminal thugs’ (Online review).

20. Fault Lines (Chad, Sudan)

Chad

Across the north of Africa is a line between the Arab Muslim north and the start of the Black African and often Christian south. Meredith gives a long, detailed and deeply depressing account of the north-south conflict in Chad, in which both sides massacred each other and Colonel Gaddafi, in power in Libya from 1969 onwards, took advantage by trying to seize northern Chad and, at his most ambitious, declared the unification of Chad with Libya – under his supreme control, of course.

Sudan

To the East, the equally long-running and demoralising war between Muslim north and Christian south Sudan. A key aspect of the backstory to both conflicts is that the northern Muslims had, for centuries, captured southern blacks as slaves as part of the widespread Arab slave trade. In fact Meredith records Arab militias capturing and enslaving Black southerners in the 1980s, all accompanied by vitriolic racism about the Blacks being sub-humans etc. About the Atlantic slave trade I hear on a daily basis and in virtually every art exhibition I go to; about the Arab slave trade, never.

21. The Scourge of AIDS

The interesting point is the number of African governments which refused to acknowledge AIDS or dismissed it as a racist Western conspiracy, with the result that many African countries didn’t commence AIDS-awareness campaigns till the 1990s by which time the disease had taken hold in their populations. Two notable exceptions were Senegal under Abdou Diouf, and Uganda under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni. Respect.

22. The Lost Decade

A detailed look at the economic collapse of almost all African countries by the 1980s so that they became increasingly dependent on foreign aid, on loans which needed to be continually rescheduled, and the accompanying demands from the IMF and World Bank for ‘structural reforms’. Through mismanagement, drought, civil war, collapse of commodity prices, most African countries became dependent on aid from the West.

What comes over, and is expressed in terms by African commentators themselves, is what condemned Africa to becoming the most backward and poverty-stricken of the world’s continents was the appalling quality of African leaders – tyrants, dictators but, above all, thieves, on an epic, mind-boggling scale.

23. The Struggle for Democracy

The long hold on power of Africa’s strong men, the generation who took power at independence and often clung on to it for 25 years or more, for example:

• Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (president for 38 years)
• Omar Bongo in Gabon (41 years)
• Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire (president for 33 years)
• Mobutu in Zaire (32 years)
• Hastings Banda in Malawi (30 years)
• Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (27 years)
• Moussa Traore in Mali (22 years)

Of the 50 African states in 1990, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships.

The fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a new era. One party regimes and Marxist regimes appeared old-fashioned overnight. But the strong men clung on in the new landscape, for example Mobutu who struggled on for another 7 years.

24. A Time of Triumph (South Africa)

A long and harrowing description of ‘grand’ apartheid in all its totalitarian, racist horror. Meredith gives an interesting explanation of the changes in international affairs and geopolitics during the late 1980s which led the apartheid leadership to consider sweeping reform. He ends with a moving account of negotiations with Nelson Mandela, climaxing with his release and then the first free, multi-racial elections in South Africa’s history.

Apart from the long, complex history of violence, guerrilla warfare, civil war between the ANC and Inkatha, South Africa’s interference in all the nations bordering it and so on – on a human level I learned that a) Mandela and the last apartheid leader, F.W. de Klerk, really didn’t get on, and that b) when his marriage to wife Winnie Mandela ended, she very publicly took a much younger lover and embarrassed him in public (‘Mandela’s late years of freedom were constantly blighted by her wayward example’), leaving him an often lonely figure (p.438).

Part 4

25. In The Name of the Prophet (Egypt, Algeria, Sudan)

Sayyid Qutb

The imperialists had oppressed them. Secular nationalism was a failure. The first generation of post-independence rulers turned out to be corrupt tyrants. Socialism and Marxism turned out to be dead ends. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 there began a revival of political Islam which seemed to many ordinary people a last resort, given that all western political systems and theories had failed. Political Islam encouraged the idea that western concepts like democracy or capitalism were infidel and inappropriate to Muslim lands, and that only return to the purity of the Prophet’s laws and rules would restore society.

The principal architect of jihad ideology [was] Sayyid Qutb…whose writings influenced generations of radical Islamists. (p.444)

Qutb, an Egyptian who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, was imprisoned by Colonel Nasser, then executed in 1965 – but not before he’d developed, written and distributed a starkly simplistic view of Islam. According to Qutb the entire Muslim world can be divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan with no middle ground. Repressive regimes cannot be changed from within and so must be overthrown by jihad i.e. armed struggle.

Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar el-Harb – the Abode of War. ‘It should be combated even if one’s own kith and kin, national group, capital and commerce are to be found there.’ (p.444)

This is really, really important. Qutb’s writings are crucial to understanding the modern age. His simplistic binary worldview, and his insistence that democracy, nationalism, human rights and all those other ideas, are infidel western abominations – all this explains the wars which have steadily engulfed the Arab/Muslim world in the last 30 years.

Qutb’s writings explain why generations of jihadis have been convinced that the only honourable and devout course of action is to fight your enemies to extermination. His writings have hugely contributed to instability right across the Arab world and are the ideological background to jihadis fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Meredith mentions a couple of other Muslim thinkers:

• cleric Omar Abdel Rahman who taught that jihad was the only way to vanquish the enemies of Islam (p.445)
• Muhammed al-Farag, who taught that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and that armed struggle is imperative for all true Muslims in order to cure a decadent society: ‘the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them with a complete Islamic Order’ (p.446)

Only jihad can bring about the perfect Islamic society. Jihad must be waged until the perfect Islamic society is achieved. But there are many forces resisting this, the obvious outside forces of America and the West, but also the populations of many of these countries. So the kind of perfect Islamic state the jihadis dream of will probably never be achieved. Therefore the Muslim world, certainly in the Middle East and North Africa, is condemned to permanent war or insurgency for the foreseeable future.

Algeria

The Front de libération nationale (FLN) had been the main force behind the long bloody war for the independence of Algeria from France. After independence was finally granted in 1962, the FLN became the party of government, instituting socialist policies and a one-party regime. Meredith lists the reasons why the FLN slowly became unpopular. Two stick out. One was that they downplayed agriculture in a bid to industrialise, keeping food prices artificially low in order to placate their constituencies in the towns and cities. The result was that life as a farmer got harder and harder, with many rural youths deciding to quit the poverty of the countryside and try their luck in the city. This is interesting because it’s an abiding theme of so many of these countries. If I could travel back in time to the early 60s and was an adviser to newly independent African nations, I’d say: ‘Cherish your farmers’. In Algeria, as everywhere else, neglecting and even undermining agriculture led to the country becoming ever more reliant on food imports.

The second is the explosion in population. I am a Darwinian materialist, a believer in the blunt facts of the environment and biology a long way before culture and politics. Thus the simple relevant fact is that the population of Algeria exploded from 10 million in 1962 to 26 million in 1992. No rate of economic growth, anywhere, could keep up with this explosion in mouths to feed and, more to the point, young men to employ.

Groups of young men hanging round on street corners become a prey to warlords and the siren call of violent revolution. This is true all round the developing world. The West supplied the medicines to developing countries which hugely improved infant mortality and recovery from illness, but without doing anything to transform a) cultural attitudes to women and childbirth or b) expand the economies. Result: lots of aimless young men looking for a cause.

Enter radical Islam which promises a better world, which gives young men a purpose, a goal, a sense of identity, and money and respect. What’s not to like, what’s not to sign up and commit your life to?

As radical Islamic parties began to appear in Algeria the military command which called the shots in the FLN tried to cancel them. After complicated manoeuvres the FLN agreed to hold free elections and Islamic parties stood in them. But when the Islamists looked like winning, the FLN abruptly cancelled the results and took back military control. The rest of the story could have been written by an AI bot. The Islamists hit back with a terror campaign, the army cracked down, arbitrarily arresting thousands, imprisonment without trial, torture etc, the Islamists ramped up their campaign, and so on.

Again, with utter inevitability, the insurgency spawned an extremist wing, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). With utter predictability they started off saying they’d stick to military targets but soon found these too well protected and their attacks having less and less affect so they widened their targets. Journalists were singled out, but more and more members of the general public were also murdered. Abdelkader Hattab wrote a pamphlet titled: ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’ (p.457).

As in Iraq, in order to build the perfect Islamic state, it turned out to be necessary to kill lots of Muslims, first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands.

What became known as the Algerian Civil War lasted from 1991 to 2002 and led to around 150,000 deaths. Of course the economy was wrecked. Of course a lot of the best and brightest middle classes simply fled abroad.

Egypt

I visited Egypt in 1981 and then in 1995, just before Islamist terror groups began attacking tourists. Groups like Jamaat al-Jihad and Gamma Islamiyya increasingly targeted government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians, burned Christian shops and churches, and bookshops and theatres and video stores. Farag Foda, one of Egypt’s best known writers, was shot dead. The Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was knifed. ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’, in practice.

Then they started attacking tourists: in 1996 17 Greek pilgrims were murdered outside their hotel. In 1997 58 foreign tourists were murdered in the Valley of the Kings. Meredith tells us that a Japanese man was eviscerated and inside his stomach cavity was stuffed a note reading: ‘No to tourists in Egypt’ (p.461). Fine by me. I’m never going back to a Muslim country.

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had come to power after the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat by army Islamists in 1981. Now Mubarak set about crushing the Islamic groups ruthlessly, telling his own people and the international community that he wouldn’t let Egypt become the next Algeria. This chapter takes the story up to 2000, when Mubarak was arresting members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organisations to prevent them standing in that year’s elections.

26. Black Hawk Down (Somalia)

The first fact about Somalia is that, at independence, about 40% of the people who thought of themselves as Somalis lived outside the borders of the country, in Ethiopia or Kenya. So from the day of independence the government neglected agriculture and the economy and focused on military action to try and extend its borders to include the full population.

Second fact is the Somalis have a strong and complex clan system, clans within clans, which extends in a hierarchy from the five main super-clans down through ever-diminishing sub-clans. So:

1. Never-ending warfare helped impoverish the country, especially after the Soviet Union dropped its support for Somalia in favour of Mengistu’s Marxist revolution in neighbouring Ethiopia.
2. As central government collapsed under the pressure of military defeats, poverty, famine and so on, the country disintegrated into a warzone of permanently fighting, feuding clans, at multiple levels, with warlords ruling their territories through terror.

27. The Graves Are Not Yet Full (Rwanda)

The Rwandan genocide. I’ve summarised the dreadful events elsewhere. I’ll just pick up on two related themes, mentioned re. Algeria. 1) the population of Rwanda ballooned from 2 million in 1940 to 7 million in 1990, which led to 2) lots of unemployed youths hanging around, waiting for a cause and meaning (and cash):

Youths with no prospect of work were easily recruited [into the interahamwe) with promises of land, jobs and other rewards… (p.496)

The French government of François Mitterrand comes over as the genocide-supporting scumbags indicated by all the other accounts. For example, it was the French government which refused the Belgian request to increase the number of the latter’s peacekeepers, so that Belgians ended up being forced to watch Tutsis being hacked to death in front of them but were unable to intervene. Because of France (p.510).

Mitterrand was determined to prevent a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in Rwanda even if it meant continuing to collaborate with genocidal killers. (p.519)

France made five arms shipments to the Hutu government while it was carrying out the genocide. Bastard Mitterrand sent a French force into Rwanda to protect the Hutu Power génocidaires (the equivalent of protecting the SS). Meredith tells of French soldiers slowly realising that the Hutus they had been sent to protect were in fact genocidal killers and realising that their government (Mitterrand) had lied to them. The piles and piles of Tutsi corpses were a clue. But the French government refused to allow their troops on the ground to track down and bring to justice the génocidaires hiding among the mass Hutu refugees who fled into Congo, once the Tutsi-led RPF reactivated the civil war and invaded in order to end the killing.

To the end, the French protected the organisers of the genocide. (p.522)

We’re never meant to forget the Holocaust. Well, in the same spirit, surely we should never forgive the arms and aid and support and protection the French government extended to the perpetrators of the second most horrific genocide of the twentieth century.

Mind you, Meredith goes on to paint the UN as far worse, biased towards Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, ignoring reports from the Canadian commander of the UN force on the ground, UNAMIR, General Roméo Dallaire. And then the Belgian government, which withdrew their contingent altogether, abandoning thousands of Tutsis who had taken shelter in their compounds and who were hacked to pieces within hours of their abandonment (p.512). And the Americans behaved disgracefully, Bill Clinton doing everything he could to avoid using the G word (genocide) and refusing to commit troops. Everyone in a position of power in the West let the genocide happen.

More Tutsis were killed in churches than any other type of building, although a lot were killed in maternity wards where a lot had their bellies ripped open and their babies hacked to pieces before they themselves were hacked to death.

Some people still believe in the essential goodness of the human race. Such innocence is touching, charming, but dangerous.

28. Where Vultures Fly (the two Congo wars)

Who supported Mobutu after he had reduced Zaire to starving ruins? France. Why? Because he spoke French. Because he represented la francophonie. Because he represented a bulwark against the rise of the beastly English-speaking leaders such as Museveni of Uganda. France supported mass murderers and world-beating kleptocrats because their crimes were less important than the preservation of ‘French culture’ (p.525). Look at their wise and good achievements in the realm of international affairs: Vietnam. Algeria. Models of wisdom and statecraft. And Vichy, when millions of French people wholeheartedly co-operated with German Nazis whose values they enthusiastically endorsed.

This is not an exaggeration. When considering international affairs, it’s important to bear in mind what despicable depths the French establishment’s paranoid fear of the English-speaking world drives them. James Barr describes the despicable behaviour of the French in Lebanon and Syria during the Second World War:

• A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barr

This chapter describes how the million and a half Hutu refugees from Rwanda were crammed into refugee camps, mostly in Congo, where the Hutu Power génocidaires rebuilt their power, controlled the distribution of aid, murdered dissenting voices, kept the refugees in line with terror, while they sold some of the aid the West gave them in order to buy arms to re-invade Rwanda and resume attacking Tutsi communities.

Meredith explains how the leader of the RPF, Paul Kagame, conspired with President of Uganda Mouseveni to invade eastern Zaire, to crush the Hutu Power leaders, to force the Hutu refugees to return to their country. How they found a useful idiot from within Zaire to front the army they were creating, namely fat, stupid guerrilla turned nightclub-owner Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

The combined RPF and Ugandan army force which Kabila fronted not only liberated the Hutu refugee camps, but marched on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, triggering the panic-stricken flight of the sick old dictator, Mobutu in 1997. In short order and to his own surprise, Kabila found himself in power and set about surrounding himself with cronies in the traditional style. Unwisely, he tried to bolster his support among the Congolese by turning on his Ugandan and Rwandan-Tutsi backers, whose forces were much resented in Kinshasa and beyond.

This policy badly backfired because when Kagame and Museveni found their puppet acting up against them, in 1998 they instituted a second invasion from the east, this time not marching but flying their forces direct to Kinshasa to overthrow Kabile. At this point, however, various outside countries began to get involved, several big ones supporting Kabile who had signed lucrative deals with them allowing them to plunder Congo’s natural resources.

This was the complex situation which led to what became known as the Great War of Africa. Slowly the country splintered into regions held by rival warlords or outside armies. A peace treaty was signed in 2002 which required armies from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe to withdraw. In four years of chaotic conflict (1998 to 2002) some 3 million Africans had died, mostly unarmed Congolese civilians. But even after the peace treaty, fighting continued in east Congo, and continues at a low level to this day.

29. Blood Diamonds (Liberia, Sierra Leone)

Liberia

Meredith recaps the extraordinary early history of Liberia, a colony on the west coast of Africa funded in 1822 by guilt-stricken liberal Americans who wanted to return some of their slaves to the motherland. Instead, the few thousand returned Blacks ended up creating their own version of slavery, subjugating the poor locals, exploiting their labour, building homes and dressing in the elaborate nineteenth century style of their former American oppressors. Now the immigrant Blacks oppressed the locals. The Americo-Liberians amounted to no more than 1% of the population but lorded it over the indigenes.

In a neat historical irony, in 1931 an international commission found members of the entirely Black Liberian government guilty of involvement in organised slavery (p.546).

But it the story stops being in any way funny when in April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led a coup which overturned a century of Americo-Liberian rule. Semi-literate, Doe came from a minority tribe, the Krahn, from the deep jungle. He and colleagues broke into the mansion of President William Tolbert to complain about unpaid wages. Finding him asleep in bed they shot him multiple times before disembowelling him and dumping his body in the garden. This was the coup where Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were taken down to the beach, tied to posts and shot by a squad of drunken soldiers. I remember seeing the video on the news. This set the tone of ten years of savage, primitive, ignorant, incompetent rule.

Like all stupid people, Doe thought the world revolved around him and thus saw conspiracies everywhere. His comms people publicised the idea that he had survived 38 or more assassination attempts because of his magical powers, because bullets stopped in mid-air, knives refused to cut him, and so on – fairy tales designed to appeal to the largely illiterate population.

In August 1984 Doe arrested a popular university lecturer and 15 colleagues claiming they were planning a coup. When students protested, Doe sent a troop of soldiers who opened fire indiscriminately, stripped students naked, demanded money and/or raped them (p.551). This all made me think of all Kwame Nkrumah’s speeches from the 1950s and 60s about ‘Africa for Africans’, ‘African values’, how a liberated Africa would become a beacon of progress and civilisation…

Throughout all the mayhem the US government stood by Doe, declaring his obviously rigged elections valid, overlooking his brutal massacres, upping annual aid to $80 million, and inviting him to the White House for red carpet treatment. Why? Because he was staunchly anti-Soviet. That’s all that mattered (p.555).

In November 1985 General Thomas Quiwonkpa, who had led the 1980 coup along with Doe, tried to seize power and there was premature rejoicing – until Doe managed to regain control, hunt down Quiwonkpa and have him kicked and hacked to death, followed by even harsher crackdowns on the population, which including victimisation of the entire Gio tribe which Quiwonkpa came from.

In 1989 another former colleague, Charles Taylor, led a militia into Liberia from neighbouring Ivory Coast, thus commencing a guerrilla war against Doe. Doe sent out death squads to devastate villages in the regions Taylor had seized. Taylor armed children (‘Small Boy Units’) and told them to kill everyone. The country descended into barbarity.

Bolstered by cane spirit, marijuana and cheap amphetamines, youths and boy soldiers evolved into psychopathic killers, adorning themselves with women’s wigs, dresses, fright masks and enemy bones and smearing their faces with white clay and make-up in the belief that this gave them supernatural perception…’It’s a children’s war,’ said a senior United Nations observer. ‘Kids get promoted in rank for committing an atrocity. They can cut off someone’s head without thinking. The troops move into a village. They take everything and kill and rape. They stay a couple of weeks and then move on.’ (p.558)

It’s interesting to read that many of the stoned fighters thought that wearing wigs or dresses i.e. adopting two identities, would confuse enemy bullets. Traditional African values. Reminds me of the website I found last time I was reading about this subject, a collection of photos of the surreal garb of drug-addled psychopathic militia men.

• African civil war fashions

In 1989 a colleague of Taylor’s named Prince Johnson split off from Taylor’s army to set up the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, with the result that Liberia became caught in a three-way civil war. Or just – war. Marauding soldiers from each side burned, looted, raped and massacred at will. Half the population fled the country. Nigeria sent a peacekeeping force which didn’t establish any kind of peace but secured a few buildings in the capital Monrovia. When Doe drove down to the port to greet them, he was captured by Prince Johnson’s men.

Johnson ordered a video to be made of his men torturing a badly battered Doe, including the moments when they sliced his ears off. The video became a bestseller across West Africa. You can watch it on YouTube and reflect on the speeches of Kwame Nkrumah explaining how African values would civilise the world.

Inevitably, the African peacekeeping force turned out to be every bit as corrupt and lawless as the militias they were sent to police, giving warlords weapons in exchange for looted goods, leading to the joke that ECOMOG stood for ‘Every Car Or Moving Object Gone’.

Taylor established control everywhere outside the capital, and came to commercial arrangements with western companies to allow trade to continue. In two years he’s estimated to have raked off £200 million from these gangster deals.

Sierra Leone

The chaos from Liberia then spilled over into neighbouring Sierra Leone. This country was already a basket case due to the 17-year, one-party rule of President Siaka Steven whose regime made a fortune trading diamonds via Lebanese dealers, while the economy languished, government employees went unpaid, and gangs of youths filled the streets looking for a cause. The usual.

The force Taylor sent into Sierra Leone in March 1991 called itself the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and was led by the psychopath, Foday Sankoh. This was the group Anthony Loyd writes about terrifyingly in Another Bloody Love Letter. Child soldiers became a key feature of Sierra Leone’s civil war. They were given drugs, indoctrinated and taught to kill. Some had to kill their own parents as an initiation test. Some hated it, wanted to leave but were afraid of themselves being killed. But others loved it. As researchers Krijn Peters and Paul Richards concluded:

‘The pay may be derisory but weapon training pays quicker dividends than school ever did; soon the AK47 brings food, money, a warm bath and instant adult respect. The combat groups substitutes for lost family and friends.’ (quoted page 563)

Like the white overseers in King Leopold’s Congo, the RUF took to hacking off the hands and limbs of civilians, at random, purely for the terror it created. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes. A coup in the capital brought Valentine Strasser to power. He paid a firm of mercenaries, Executive Outcomes, to clear the capital Freetown in exchange for rights to the country’s diamond mines. Executive Outcomes fighters cleared Freetown in one week, testament to the shoddy, amateurish character of the African fighters on all sides.

More splinter groups, more coups, more fighting, 14 attempts at a ceasefire, tens of thousands more hand choppings and mutilations. A final ceasefire brought UN intervention. But when the UN went to seize the diamond mines, in 2000, the RUF captured 500 of its peacekeepers. It was now that Britain sent in a full battle force to release the UN troops, seize government buildings and train the SL army. Sankoh was arrested and the RUF splintered into ineffectual groups. In the wake of the British intervention, the UN deployed 18,000 troops to bring about a comprehensive peace.

Eleven years of war had left 50,000 dead, 20,000 mutilated, three quarters of the population displaced, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the league of human development. Back in Liberia, Charles Taylor amassed a huge fortune from illegal diamond trading. His overthrow in 2003 was as violent and brutal as his coming to power, with two more factions, groups or militias murdering and raping their way to the capital. Eventually Taylor was forced out but flew peacefully to Nigeria to take up life in a comfortable retirement villa. There is no justice on earth, nothing like justice.

30. No Condition Is Permanent (Nigeria)

Meredith describes the brutal rule of General Sani Abacha, military ruler from 1993 to 1998. His crackdown on all opposition. The rise of organisations representing the Ogoni people of the oil-rich Niger Delta who had seen none of the tens of billions of oil money generated around them, only the pollution and destruction of their environment. The work of the popular writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was eventually arrested, accused of organising an anti-government conspiracy etc and, despite international protests, executed in November 1995.

Abachi’s death in 1998 is the opportunity for a review of how far the country had fallen. Despite annual oil revenue of $280 billion, income per head was less than a third of what it had been in 1980, at $310; half the population lived on less than 30 cents a day and had no access to clean drinking water. Half of under fives were stunted due to malnutrition. Nigeria was regularly judged to be the most corrupt country in the world.

What this litany of disasters begins to impress on even the most sympathetic reader is that Africans do not seem able of running their own countries. Catastrophic wars, epic corruption, barbaric violence resulting in crushing poverty, if the generation of independence campaigners had seen the future would they have been in such a tearing hurry to gain independence from their colonial masters?

Abachi’s death didn’t bring peace and light: the end of the military regime led to an explosion of political parties across the country, which themselves exacerbated ethnic rivalries, and also the rise of Islamic militancy, which led to clashes between Muslims and Christians. Despite free elections in 1999 and again in 2003, observers wondered whether Nigeria, a country of 120 million made up of 250 ethnic groups, was ungovernable. [That was in 2000. Nigeria’s population in 2023 has almost doubled, to 215 million.]

31. The Honour of Living (Sudan)

General Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in 1989 and declared his commitment to creating an Islamic state. This was followed by the arrest of all opposition figures, torture including burning, beating and rape, the usual behaviour of leaders promising to build a better society – first you have to lock up a lot of people. 1991 saw the introduction of a new Islamic penal code: women were hounded out of public life, segregation of men and women was enforced in all public places, there was a ban on music, cinema and the compulsory Arabisation of all culture.

The ideologue of all this was Hassan al-Turabi, founder of the National Islamic Front and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the first Gulf War, in 1991. Turabi set up the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference to bring together thinkers and leaders to fight back against America’s ‘colonisation’ of the Arab World. Sudan became a refuge for anti-western terrorist groups. This is very important. It marks the start of a new type of aggressive new anti-western ideology, of the war on America.

Meredith gives a good short description of the career of Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the blind cleric sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman organised the bombing of the World Trade Centre. Extremists trained in Sudan undertook assassinations and attacks across the Arab world. In 1998 activists trained by al Qaeda attacked hotels in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people. Now we enter ‘the modern world’, the era we still live in in 2023, the era of unceasing conflict and Islamic insurgency across the entire Arab world.

Their Islamic ideology justified the Bashir regime in intensifying the war against southern, Black, Christian rebels. Villages were bombed, populations massacred and sold into slavery, with the blessing of Islamic scholars. The southern forces split into two parties who had a civil war between themselves in which tens of thousands of civilians died, which triggered a famine in which hundreds of thousands perished (p.594). Humans, eh? Impressive species.

Alongside massacres in the south went the discovery and exploitation of oil. The Khartoum government reaped a huge bonanza and spent it on…arms. By 2002 the civil war had left an estimated 2 million dead. But after 9/11 the Americans became active. Sudan was identified as a training base for Islamic terrorists and Bashir had to back down and promise to comply.

32. Black Gold (Angola)

The crushingly depressing history of Angola in the 1980s and 1980s, a country destroyed by an endless civil war between the supposedly ‘Marxist’ MPLA government based in Luanda, and the madly self-centred, narcissistic, overweening arrogance of Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA.

Land mines, aerial bombing, indiscriminate massacre, burning, looting, rape of women and children. Maybe 5 million died, many more had legs blown off by the millions of landmines, the country was laid waste – all while Eduardo dos Santos and the elite of the MPLA lived like kings by salting away the revenue derived from the huge oil deposits found just offshore. Getting on for half the annual oil revenue, billions of dollars, was stolen by dos Santos and his clique, while the children starved to death in the streets. As with Congo, or Nigeria, why give aid to oil- and resource-rich countries which have enough natural income to invest in infrastructure, roads, markets, clean water, schools, but which they either steal or spend on arms and weapons?

33. A Degree In Violence (Zimbabwe)

The slow descent into paranoid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. I hadn’t realised that he was initially conciliatory towards the white minority, and even his arch enemy Ian Smith, for the first two or three years of his rule because his first priority was eliminating all his black rivals, starting with Joshua Nkomo and his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). It was called the Gukurahundi campaign (Shona for ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’). During this campaign Mugabe’s notorious Fifth Brigade, trained by North Koreans, rampaged through ZAPU’s heartland, Matabeleland, and massacred thousands of civilians accused of being ‘dissidents’. Some estimates say as many as 80,000 were killed during the 5-year campaign.

Slowly Zimbabwe became like all the other African one-party states, a machine for redirecting wealth into the pockets of a small elite around the figurehead leader. As the economy collapsed and inflation and unemployment rose, so did Mugabe’s deployment of racist, anti-white rhetoric, focused on the policy of farm reclamation, seizing back land from the white farmers who owned a disproportionate amount of it. As Meredith explains, it’s all Mugabe had left, rabble-rousing racism to distract attention from the complete failure of his leadership.

Mugabe’s successive rounds of farm seizures spelled the end of commercial farming as a major industry in Zimbabwe. Many of the confiscated farms didn’t go to the deserving poor but to friends and family and tribal supporters of Mugabe, who then stripped and sold off their assets or left them to rot. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks who worked on the confiscated farms were thrown out of work. Land lay fallow. Food production collapsed. Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, became dependent on food aid.

By 2003 the economy had collapsed and an estimated quarter of the population had fled the country. Three-quarters of the remainder lived on less than a dollar a day. Meredith covers the coming together of opposition movements in the Movement for Democratic Change and the rise of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the elections he contested in 2002 and 2008, elections Mugabe comprehensively managed with intimidation, violence and hectoring messages through state media.

Opposition activists were hunted down, beaten, tortured and in some cases murdered. (p.646)

Meredith’s narrative takes the reader up to 2008 when Mugabe, despite spending 28 years utterly devastating his country, was still in power. It was very depressing to switch to Wikipedia and see that Mugabe continued to rule the country he had ruined for another nine years, till he was overthrown in 2017.

34. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (South Africa)

The books and movies all focus on Nelson Mandela‘s long march to freedom. Not so many examine the calamitous challenges he faced on taking power in 1994: trying to reverse the best part of a century of totalitarian racism which had entrenched grotesque inequality between the affluent whites and the crushingly poor Black population; trying to integrate millions of badly educated young Africans into the economy, trying to introduce Blacks into every level of a 100% white political and civil administration and into SA’s commercial life. The army, the police, the education system, everything needed reforming.

Plus the expectations of activists at all levels who had spent a lifetime working for the ‘revolution’ which would create a land of plenty. There was an epidemic of strikes and protests or just straightforward crime. To all this Mandela had to react much like Mrs Thatcher, explaining that the state just didn’t have the resources to make everyone rich. There would have to be belt-tightening. It would take time.

Meredith has an extended passage describing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how it struggled to find its way, was a compromise in nature and intent, but ended up unearthing far more than anyone expected. Its impartiality was emphasised by the way it was reviled by both sides, both stalwarts of the apartheid regime and the ANC itself, found guilty of murdering white civilians, Black opponents, of prosecuting a civil war with Inkatha, and the 400-plus victims of ‘necklacing’.

Meredith’s account of Mandela’s sustained efforts to achieve reconciliation between the races at every level bring a tear to the eye. What a hero.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, elected unopposed to lead the ANC in 1997, was not a hero. Despite having been raised a communist, Mbeki promptly announced a set of neoliberal capitalist policies designed to boost the economy, namely strict fiscal discipline, lower government deficits, privatisation and liberalisation of state industries.

But Mbeki will go down in history as the man who adopted a minority view that HIV did not cause AIDS, promoted this view at every opportunity, refused to support AIDS awareness campaigns, refused to license anti-HIV drugs, for year after year, in the face of mounting criticism both within SA and internationally.

Mbeki insisted on playing the race card i.e. insisting that the global scientific consensus about HIV/AIDS was a racist attack on Black Africans on a par with apartheid. His obstinate refusal to allow anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients and pregnant women was calculated, by 2008, to have led to the premature deaths of 365,000 South Africans.

The greatest political challenge facing every nation is not to end up being led by idiots.

Mbeki undertook a more aggressive strategy of getting white businesses to include Black partners but, far from lifting the entire Black population out of poverty, this tended to enrich just the small number of educated, well-connected Blacks. The strategy developed into crony capitalism. Perceiving that they were being discriminated against, some 750,000 skilled whites just left the country, replaced by less qualified or experienced Blacks (p.679). Services decayed. Poverty grew alongside rising violent crime.

South Africa now has exceptionally high rates of murder, gender-based violence, robbery and violent conflict. It has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Mbeki turned into a typical African leader. He created a climate of fear in the ANC. He emasculated parliament. He appointed officials for their loyalty to him, not their abilities. He shamefully supported Robert Mugabe even as Mugabe turned into a dictator and reduced his country to beggary.

And, falling into line with traditional African leaders, Mbeki and his cronies became involved in corruption, in particular creaming off hundreds of millions of dollars from state defence procurements. The ANC became split between the Mbeki faction and one led by Jacob Zuma, who himself was charged with money laundering, fraud and rape.

In 2007 Zuma stood against Mbeki and won the post of ANC leader, then stood for the presidency in 2009. The party split, but corruption became more embedded. The gap between rich and poor grew. Crime became the only way to survive for millions. After this book was completed Jacob Zuma went on to be elected president and serve from 2009 to 2018.

Incidentally, Meredith has written a series of books about South Africa, including a biography of Mandela, which explains the authoritativeness of his SA chapters:

• In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa In The Post War Period (1988)
• South Africa’s New Era: The 1994 Election (1994)
• Nelson Mandela: A Biography (1999)
• Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth (2001)

35. Out of Africa

Decline

In 2001 the Organisation of African Unity was replaced by a new African Union. Same old dictators, though. Same corruption, same tribalism, same civil wars. Same population explosion which means half the population live below the poverty line, same huge unemployment, with millions permanently on the brink of starvation. 250 million Africans are undernourished; school enrolment is falling; life expectancy is falling. [This appears to be wrong, now; life expectancy in Africa is, apparently, 63.]

MDGs

By some estimates the West has spend £1.2 trillion in aid to Africa. There has often been little to show. In the 2000s there was a flurry of activity with the creation of the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005 Bob Geldof created a huge media event around the Live 8 campaign and gigs. But the West has donor fatigue. Pledges made under MDGs and Live 8 weren’t carried through. African countries have promised to reform and then utterly failed to do so too many times.

China

Into the breach has stepped China, which has been signing trade deals across Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). By 2010 China-Africa trade had leapt to $115 billion. A million Chinese had moved to Africa.

The Arab Spring

And then, just as Meredith was completing this book, along came the Arab Spring leading to the overthrow of ageing dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and on into the Middle East i.e. Yemen, Bahrein, Syria. And yet within a few years, Egypt was back in the hands of the military, Libya had collapsed as a state, Syria fell into a ruinous civil war; only Tunisia survived and flourished as a democracy.

• The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar (revised edition, 2015)

Kenya

Meredith ends with the calamitous recent history of Kenya, which threw out Daniel arap Moi and his cronies (known as the Karbanet syndicate) after 23 years of looting the country. However, his successor, Mwai Kibaki, merely instituted a new kleptocracy for his tribe and supporters (who came to be known as the Mount Kenya mafia). Corruption reached scandalous new heights with some $4 billion a year, or one third of the national budget, being raked off by the corrupt elite.

When Kibaki refused to accept the results of the 2007 election i.e that he had lost to opposition leader Raila Odinga, he plunged Kenya into tribal bloodshed which left thousands dead, the economy damaged and Kenya’s reputation for stability in tatters. It had become just one more African country, ruined by its corrupt rulers’ inability to cede power.

Africa’s wounds are self-inflicted. Africans have proved ruinously incapable of running their own countries. Meredith ends his book by describing the majority of Africa’s rulers as ‘vampires’ who have converted all the instruments of the state into money-making scams, who use rabble-rousing ethnic rhetoric or state terror to remain in power, while their populations slip ever backwards into poverty, sickness and starvation.

Thoughts

Some pretty obvious themes emerge from this 700-page odyssey but in the last 5 or 6 chapters something bigger than the themes struck me, which is that this is a very negative view of Africa. Often it is very harrowing and dark indeed, as when the subject matter is bleak, as in Algeria, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola.

But it took me a while to grasp how much this is a journalist’s not a historian’s or academic’s point of view of the subject. And, like all journalists, Meredith accentuates the negative. Man buys a puppy for his kids, who love it, is not news. New puppy attacks children, that is news.

I know it’s an obvious and well-known journalistic principle, but in the last 100 pages it really struck home that Meredith focuses relentlessly on the bad news, on countries with long-running wars and political crises, the ones we read about in the newspapers: Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, settings for horrible wars, massacres, genocides even. On the basis of this book it would be tempting to write all of Africa off as an irredeemable disaster zone. But there are 50 or so countries in Africa, and not all of them are having civil wars all the time. Some of them might even be doing rather well. Many people might be living ordinary lives, doing jobs, getting married, having parties. Despite the impression Meredith gives, life expectancy across Africa is actually rising.

Anyway, that was my one Big Thought: that if you only read this book you would be left with the impression that Africa is a vast abattoir of eternal massacre and mutilation, vampire leaders and epic corruption. I don’t think Meredith intends to be biased and I’m sure everything he writes is absolutely true. But by the end of his book I began to think that it’s not necessarily the complete truth, about the entire continent, and all its countries, and all the people who live in them.

Credit

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith was published in England by the Free Press in 2005. A revised edition was published by Simon and Schuster in 2011. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.

Related links

• Martin Meredith Wikipedia article
• More Africa reviews