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Introduction

Arriving in Malawi in late September 1981, I was immediately fascinated by Africa, and have never since broken free – or wanted to.

Walking across the tarmac at Lilongwe’s tiny airport, which struck me as ludicrously small for a capital city, I was presented with sights, sounds, scents and a type of heat I’d never experienced before. I’d already studied Africa for several years as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, and monitored Ghanaian, Nigerian and South African radio broadcasts from Caversham for the BBC Monitoring Service for 18 months, before being posted to Malawi, but I had much to learn. I was there to monitor more southern African stations and report the news, political and economic information, and comment they broadcast.

After my stay in Malawi, I went on to recently independent Zimbabwe to pursue my research on southern African liberation movements and particularly their relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba and China. While there, I met many of the leaders of the liberation movements, including the founder of the Zimbabwe African Union and author of African Nationalism,¹ Ndabaningi Sithole. With Sithole I talked not just about Zimbabwe and his own political fortunes, but about the broad thrust of nationalism in Africa.

In the 34 years since that first working trip to Africa I’ve been back most years and reported on major events such as the first fully democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, the demands for greater democracy in Africa in the early 1990s and the human consequences of the civil war in Angola, to name but a few. In nearly four decades of reporting, documentary-making and research in Africa I’ve been in the privileged position of witnessing key events at first hand, interviewing major African decision-makers and ordinary people about these events and being able to debate developments and trends with leading analysts and commentators as well as foreign academics and journalists covering the continent’s affairs and those of specific states. This has offered me a perspective that is often different from those of academics, and by keeping a foot in the academic and journalistic worlds, I’ve had the time to dig deeper than deadlines and editors’ demands permit many journalists to do.

This background and direct experience has moulded my views on Africa over time and led me to expect the unexpected. Most of all, it has taught me that it’s only with the luxury of hindsight and historical analysis that we can begin to identify the circumstances, structures and elements of human agency that combined to produce events that took many by surprise.

An example of this is the peaceful transition in South Africa after the 1994 elections. I had been a close observer of the process of change there as both a journalist and an academic analyst. When I went out in April 1994 to lead the World Service’s South Africa news team, I was equipped with a flak jacket and a local minder, both because of the township violence between Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and because of the threat of violence of far-right Afrikaner nationalist groups. Just after my arrival there were explosions near my hotel in a plush suburb of Johannesburg and in nearby Germiston, set off by these latter groups. But after the elections, reconciliation became the theme of the transition and the feared violence from the far right did not materialise, while Inkatha and Buthelezi were brought into the new ANC-dominated government.

At the same time, the horrific Rwandan genocide was underway, ignored by much of the world’s press and by the UN despite the pleas of people on the ground in Kigali. With the luxury of hindsight, analysts and journalists like me can chart the chilling progress towards the genocide, but at the time it took people by surprise, as did the killing of President Juvénal Habyarimana. I was editing the evening edition of the BBC World Service Newshour programme when the news of his death was first reported. I’d been to Rwanda several years before; I was aware of its history and I knew Habyarimana’s death would lead to reprisals and the likely resumption of war, but never in my worst nightmares had I foreseen what actually happened.

Constant engagement as a journalist and an academic researcher over this long period has made me wary of great theories that purport to explain Africa’s historical development, its political advances and setbacks and its economic development. The journalist in me wants to cover every major event and explain the who, what, where, when, why and how; the academic in me cautions against focusing on events or personalities, and to look for wider themes.

The synthesis of these potentially contradictory approaches is that this account of the contemporary history of Africa will have detailed case studies looking at the who, what and when, alongside a more considered and thematic approach to the how and the why. This book concentrates heavily on the period since the early 1970s, not just because it matches the period of my engagement with Africa first as a student and then as a journalist and an academic, but because it was a period of rapid change in post-colonial Africa. The 1970s saw the end of the last colonial empire in Africa, the Portuguese; the escalation of the struggles against white minority rule in southern Africa; the start of a global economic crisis that would shake the export-dependent economies of Africa to their narrow and vulnerable foundations; the destruction of the monarchy in Africa’s oldest surviving polity, Ethiopia; and the entrenchment of authoritarian, highly personalised regimes and the apparent death of inclusive and accountable systems of government. As the late and much-missed Stephen Ellis has identified in his work on the writing of African history,

If one seeks to identify points of discontinuity in Africa’s history since independence or, to be more precise, in the history of Africa’s insertion in the world, it becomes apparent that many ruptures first became visible in the 1970s, when oil crises, currency instability and a series of related events and trends combined to create a comprehensive change in the prospects for African states and societies, and in the forms of their political life.²

Ellis concurs with Eric Hobsbawm in his analysis of global history that the 1970s was a very important decade of change with the end of a period of optimism of ‘a sort of Golden Age’ and as the lustre of this age rapidly faded, ‘The last part of the century was a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis’, not least for Africa.³

The 1970s and 1980s were the decades of growing dictatorial and personal rule. As a journalist in Malawi, I was very well aware of the personal power of His Excellency the Life President Ngwazi Dr H. Kamuzu Banda. His word was law; no Malawian, even in the most private place, ever criticised him in my hearing. I was also able to experience, albeit from the position of an affluent expatriate, the problems of an economy that was dependent on tobacco and tea exports, was landlocked, and whose transport routes to the sea were affected by South African-backed insurgency in Mozambique. There were frequent shortages of fuel, of consumer goods, even of toilet paper. Ordinary Malawians suffered from the shortages, loss of income due to falling export revenues, and increases in maize prices if harvests were low because insufficient fertiliser could be imported; these things meant not just minor inconvenience, but impoverishment and malnutrition. This in turn meant high child mortality rates and fatal or debilitating vulnerability to illnesses that I had considered uncomfortable nuisances – measles, diarrhoea, and of course, malaria.

My wider experience of African states over the years reinforced but also refined my early impressions and posed a growing number of questions. How did these leaders – Banda in Malawi, Mobutu in Zaire, Moi in Kenya, Kerekou in Benin and Bongo in Gabon, to name just a few – maintain power, and how did they wield such a strong personal influence over their states and peoples? Why have states been unable to break out of the cycle of poor terms of trade and export dependence that prevented broader and deeper economic development? How, in states with such weak institutions, could ruling elites survive while at the same time fail to control the whole of the state territory? How did ordinary Africans survive with minimal welfare and health provision?

I had no answers – and as I came to understand more about the core issues affecting African states and peoples, I was ever more aware that the simple depictions of crises, political systems and economic development provided by the media, of which I was a fully paid-up member, did not provide an accurate picture of the continent and its political, social and economic trends, or provide answers when they blamed things on the incompetence, greed, selfishness or alleged tribalism of African leaders and their followers. This is no less true today, when media explanations of the violence in Kenya in 2007–8, the civil war in Sudan or the conflicts in Nigeria, Mali, the Central African Republic and South Sudan still look for simplistic, easily grasped explanations – tribal hatred, religious differences, irrational greed and violence.

Putting everything down to colonialism doesn’t tell the whole story either, though its lasting influence shows that its effects cannot be ignored. More in-depth studies have shown a better grasp of detail and of some of the recurring themes of post-colonial history, but they often opt for a particular structural explanation or deny structure in favour of agency as a key determinant. Some analysts have looked to personalities, the torrent of events such as conflicts,⁴ and theories of underdevelopment; others use theories of neo-colonialism and variant Marxisms to put structures of exploitation at the core of their explanations,⁵ while still others turn to modernisation/development theory, whose strongly teleological approach located Africa in a preordained process of economic and political development from primordial to modern society.⁶ Linked to these broad and contending approaches to Africa are the ideas that Africa’s problems are a product of the continent’s basic inability to cope with either democracy or economic development.

My experience has led me to question these either/or approaches and to examine the complex and, at times, bewildering interplay between structure and agency, between local and national or continental or global factors rather than trying to find a single theme or hypothesis that explains everything. Africans are not helpless or hopeless; they are not simply passive, powerless pawns at the mercy of structural processes. They fight to exercise their agency. But structural factors, whether Africa’s subordinate and weak position in the international economic system, or the artificiality of state borders and the ethnic composition of modern states, cannot be written off either, since they provide the environment in which agency is exercised.

As Marx identified in his work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.’⁷ African actors are the players in their own drama, but not the sole authors; they act out events in circumstances, locations and a wider environment over which they have little or no control.

An important point to emphasise here is that as the interplay of structure and agency has developed, there has been both continuity and change as Africa progressed from the era of pre-colonial history to colonialism and then independence. This progression does not offer clear-cut beginnings and endings, but is a continual flow that cannot be surgically separated into distinct periods with their own particular characteristics. Taking this view, this book does not treat Africa’s post-colonial development as a complete end of external, colonial power over Africa. Nor do I see it as simply a continuation of that rule, a play written and directed externally with most Africans reduced to walk-on parts, bit players in a drama with a few chosen African ‘stars’ in the heavily-directed leading roles. The institutions and cultural, social and economic structures of pre-colonial Africa were changed by colonialism, but they were not totally swept away. Pre-colonial and colonial history and institutions have had their effect on the present and will continue to do so, but not to the extent that all that has happened since the independence of states can be simply blamed on colonialism and the past.

Of course, it would also be wrong to say that colonial history is a thing of the past and can be packed away like an exhibit in a museum – the relationship is far more complex and multi-faceted then that. Just as there was continuity in many spheres of activity between pre-colonial and colonial periods, so there have been elements of continuity from colonialism to independence right up to the present day. There is continuity and change in the physical environments Africans inhabit. Africans are subject to the power, the structures and the agency of foreign and global forces, but not to the point where they are deprived of all initiative or agency.

In this book, I try to unravel and explain how and why Africa moved from the exhilaration of independence and statehood – what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan describes as the ‘days of extraordinary hope and promise, the expectation that Africa was about to take, and that we finally had an opportunity to create for ourselves all that we had accused the colonial power of denying us’⁸ – to the crisis of expectation and disillusionment, and then attempts to find new solutions. By the 1970s, the hope of creating this new world, with prosperity replacing poverty and the powerless empowered, had gone. Living standards failed to improve for the majority of people, and colonial control was being replaced not by evolving democracy and the accountability of the new governments but by variants of authoritarianism, with strong external influences on economic and political evolution. Economic independence proved to be beyond the grasp of African governments. The global economic crisis of the 1970s demonstrated how deeply African economies were integrated into the world capitalist system, and the extent to which this continued to disempower Africans and distort their states’ political development.

By the 1970s, one-party systems and military governments were the norm rather than the exception. Much of southern Africa and parts of west Africa were still under Portuguese colonial rule or the rule of white minority governments. As a result, liberation struggles of varying scales were in progress in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South West Africa (now Namibia) and South Africa. Civil wars had marred the early years of statehood in three of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest states – Sudan, Congo (Kinshasa) and Nigeria. Somalia had irredentist designs on Somali-inhabited regions of Ethiopia, French-ruled Djibouti and Kenya. These problems, as Annan has pointed out, are intertwined, the ‘coups, the mismanagement of economies, brutal regimes, the continual violation of human rights, and underdevelopment are all mutually reinforcing.’⁹

The intervening decades between the 1970s and the writing of this book have been marked by conflict, the continuation of authoritarian and unaccountable rule, mounting corruption, the persistence of debilitating or fatal diseases and other threats to health, vulnerability to external intervention and to the power of the global capitalist system. But they have also seen the end of colonial occupation and white-minority rule. Some states have seen appreciable economic development and the maintenance of forms of accountability, but most have struggled economically and politically with little input from the majority of their populations. Change is constant and there are signs that it is now moving in the direction of greater popular participation, a gradual empowerment of women in what had been largely patriarchal societies, economic growth, and improvements in health provision and disease prevention.

But how deep, widespread and sustainable is this change? Is the ‘Africa Rising’ discourse, seized on with alacrity by some African leaders and analysts, a reflection of real change and growth or is it a discourse based on optimism and a desire to represent transitory trends as lasting economic and political progress?¹⁰ How much have Africans benefited from the changes of the last four and a half decades? Are they more able to hold their leaders to account? Are they developing political systems that are based on their needs, political cultures and diversity of communities rather than on ill-suited Western models? Are they gaining greater control over their own economies and developing diverse and sustainable economic systems?

I have deliberately framed these as questions about dynamic and continuing processes, rather than just attempts to judge what has happened over the last four decades. This is a historical account, but one that takes history as constantly evolving, not as something that can be just stopped in its tracks and analysed.

In trying to answer the questions posed in this introduction, this book provides a narrative of events, an examination of key areas such as political change, economic structures and policies, the role of external powers and international factors, while providing in-depth case studies of key events and issues. The chapters follow a broadly chronological progression but are not rigidly divided by time alone, and narratives are not truncated or split across chapters purely because they cut across decades. That would get in the way of examining long-term developments and inter-connections between events and regions. A historiographical note is included between Chapter 7 and the postscript amplifying the concepts of the gatekeeper state, extraversion and arguments of structure versus agency.

Although the focus is chiefly on the period of African history since 1970, the opening chapter deals with pre-colonial societies, colonialism and de-colonisation, demonstrating the seamless flow of history and the elements of both continuity and change in both structure and forms of the exercise of agency in that history. The second chapter covers the key themes of the early years of independence. The next four chapters deal with the period from 1970 to the present. The narrative and analysis weave together political, military, economic and social developments, local and regional factors as well as continental and international ones. The final chapter draws together the essential themes of the flow of post-colonial African history.

PENGUIN BOOKS

AFRICA’S LONG ROAD SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Keith Somerville

AFRICA’S LONG ROAD SINCE INDEPENDENCE

The Many Histories of a Continent

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction