The Xenophile Historian

Chapter 8: "WIND OF CHANGE"

1914 to 1965

	World War I
	Troubles in the Italian Empire
	The Beginnings of African Nationalism
	The Rif War and Maghreb Nationalism
	The Road to World War II Passed Through Ethiopia
	The Liberation of French Africa
	The See-Saw Struggle in North Africa
	Decolonization Begins
	North Africa Rejoins the Arab World
	The Algerian War
	The Mau Mau Rebellion
	"The African Year": Independence Below the Sahara
	The Congo Crisis
	South Africa and Rhodesia: Segregation Forever
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Neither side was prepared to fight in Africa when the war broke out in August 1914, but the Allies had the advantage because Britain ruled the waves. The smallest German colony, Togoland, was defended by 568 policemen; it was overrun by French and British forces in only three weeks. The conquest of German Southwest Africa by the South Africans was a model campaign, but it was delayed until early 1915 when some diehard Boer War veterans made an unsuccessful bid for independence. In Cameroon, an Anglo-French force captured Douala, the capital, by the end of September 1914, but the Germans withdrew into the interior, where jungle conditions and 400 inches of annual rainfall made for some very slow going; here they resisted the Allies until February 1916.

The campaign on Lake Tanganyika was truly bizarre. This long lake had a shore that was shared by three colonial powers: Germany on the east, Belgium on the west, and Britain on the south. When the Germans on the lake began to attack Belgian shipping, the British decided it was their duty to get some boats in there and establish Allied dominance. However, the naval officer who led that expedition, Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, must rank as the looniest military figure of all time; his arms and legs were covered with tattoos, and he acted like a character from "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Previously, Spicer-Simson's only claim to fame was that he was the oldest lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy; he had worked behind a desk for most of his career, and got the Tanganyika assignment because no other officer volunteered to take it. The two ships he was put in charge of were wooden, 40-foot-long launches that had been built by the Greek air force; since they had to be transported by rail from Cape Town, proper warships were not feasible. They bore numbers instead of names, so Spicer-Simson christened them Dog and Cat. When his admiral protested that these weren't appropriate names, Spicer-Simson renamed them Mimi and Toutou.

Things got even more odd after the British reached the lake. Spicer-Simson started wearing skirts (not a sarong or kilt, mind you, but a skirt), which he claimed his wife had made. Whenever a decision had to be made, he usually made the wrong one, but incredible luck saw him through anyway. As a result, his two launches captured a German launch, the Kingani, in their first battle (Spicer-Simson renamed it the Fifi). In the second battle they sank a larger steel ship, the Hedwig von Wissmann; of course Spicer-Simson got the credit for both victories. Then some British soldiers marched up from Rhodesia to capture the main German fort on the lake; this time Spicer-Simson kept his squadron in port, a move which gave the Germans enough time to escape in their boats. He may have felt that he didn't need to risk himself anymore, now that he was a hero in London. A local African tribe, the Ba-HoloHolo, thought that madness was next to godliness, so they made clay images of Spicer-Simson and paid homage to him when he took a bath.

The Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany's side in the fall of 1914; twice it tried to take back Egypt from the British. Though these invasions failed to penetrate the British lines of defense in the Sinai, the sultan could still make trouble by proclaiming a jihad against the Allies.⁽²⁾ Besides a few tribes in Arabia, the sultan of Darfur responded to this call. His state had remained autonomous after the British conquered Sudan in 1898, so when he was killed in battle in 1916, the British occupied Darfur and terminated the sultanate. The Sanussi also responded to the call; in November 1915 they launched a series of raids from their home base in Cyrenaica, and managed to capture several oases in Egypt's western desert before the British drove them back in 1917.

The French leaned heavily on their colonies for men and supplies to support the war effort in Europe. Blaise Diagne, the Senegalese member of the French National Assembly, persuaded many Africans, especially Senegalese, to join the French armed forces.⁽³⁾ Other West Africans, however, fled to the nearest territories that were not under French rule (Gambia, Portuguese Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Gold Coast) to avoid conscription. Rebellions broke out in Mali and the Volta region in 1915, and northern Dahomey in 1916. The Tuareg were exploited most of all, through heavy taxation, confiscation of grazing lands and livestock, and interruption of the salt trade. Because their location in the middle of the Sahara left them with no place to run to, they revolted in 1916. Kaosen ag Muhammad, a Tuareg chief in northern Niger, besieged the French fort at Agades; the French captured and executed Kaosen in 1919, but instability in the area continued until the early 1930s.

Abyssinia's king, like the sultan of Darfur, came to grief because he picked the wrong side. A year before the war began, seventeen-year-old Lij Iyasu succeeded his grandfather, Menelik II. He opened communications with Sayyid Muhammad, the Somali leader (see the next section), and apparently converted to Islam; that by itself disqualified him from being king, as far as the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was concerned. During the war he openly favored the German agents that came to his country, and dreamed of creating a Moslem empire in the Horn of Africa, one that would include Eritrea and the British and French parts of Somaliland. For the church and the rest of the royal family this was too much, so in 1916 they got together to depose Lij Iyasu and replace him with his aunt, Zauditu. A cousin of Zauditu, Ras Tafari Makonnen, was named heir apparent; he may have been the mastermind behind the coup. Ras Tafari would be crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1930.⁽⁴⁾

German East Africa was the toughest nut to crack; in fact, the campaign there outlasted the entire war. This colony was nearly self-sufficient, so economic blockades against it didn't hurt much. Furthermore, the German commanding officer here, Lt. Col. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, was a military genius. He had 3,000 German soldiers and 11,000 African askaris (warriors), and unlike many white men of that day, he recognized that the African could fight just as well as the European if given the right equipment and training. It took a long time for the Allies, especially the South Africans, to accept this fact.⁽⁵⁾

The first three British invasions of German East Africa were skillfully thrown back. Finally, the British got a commander who was not downright blimpish--Jan Christian Smuts, who we last saw as a guerrilla leader during the Boer War. In March 1916 he launched a new invasion in the Kilimanjaro area, and Belgium attacked from the northwest, annexing the heavily populated Ruanda-Urundi corner of the colony. But Lettow-Vorbeck was more clever than Smuts. His strategy was not to defeat the Allies, but to delay them. He knew all along that the fighting in Europe was more important than what happened here, and even if the whole colony was lost it would be regained at the conference table, if Germany won the war. Consequently his main goal was to draw Allied soldiers out of Europe and keep them from going back. Whenever the Allies made a move to capture Lettow-Vorbeck, he would withdraw instead of defending the territory. He also used the local climate to his advantage (for some reason the Germans were always less bothered by diseases than their opponents) and practiced a scorched-earth policy, which slowed down the Allies more. Whenever it looked like the Allies would stop pursuing, the Germans would turn around and give them a bloody nose, and the fox-and-hound chase would resume. During 1916 half of German East Africa was conquered; by late 1917 Smuts had confined Lettow-Vorbeck to the colony's southeast corner. Still, this was a hollow victory as long as the Germans remained at large. During the war, more than 120,000 Allied troops (Portuguese, British, Belgians, Indians, West Indians, Rhodesians, Nigerians and South Africans) would be committed to East Africa. 20,000 of those soldiers would be killed, along with 20,000 African noncombatants (workers, porters, etc.); again most of the casualties were caused by disease.

The last year of the war was the strangest of all. In November 1917 a zeppelin loaded with supplies was sent to East Africa from Germany; it got as far as Sudan before a mysterious radio message called it back. But Lettow-Vorbeck didn't need it anyway. At the same time his force escaped into Portuguese East Africa (Portugal had declared war on Germany in March 1916). The Portuguese defended their territory abysmally, and the natives welcomed the Germans as liberators. The Germans captured more food, ammunition, arms, etc. than they could possibly carry, and the looting of a Portuguese vineyard became an especially welcome event. The army was outnumbered, surrounded on all sides, forced to live off the land, and faced with no possibility of winning on its own, but morale was never better. When British troops arrived at the ports of Mozambique, the Germans turned around and re-invaded German East Africa. They found Allied resistance here too much for their dwindling force to handle, so Lettow-Vorbeck turned west and entered Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). At this point he received news that the war was over, so on November 25, 1918, two weeks after the war ended in Europe, the only German army that had never been defeated formally surrendered at the town of Abercorn. Lettow-Vorbeck had 155 Europeans, 1,156 askaris and 1,598 carriers left at this point. He received a hero's welcome when he returned to Berlin, for upholding military honor so far away from home, and because the Germans had little else to cheer about.

Once the war was over Germany's colonies were quickly disposed of. France got most of Togoland and Cameroon, except for a strip on the western border of each, which went to British-ruled Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Southwest Africa went to South Africa, while German East Africa was divided into British-ruled Tanganyika and Belgian-ruled Ruanda-Urundi. The acquisition of Tanganyika fulfilled Cecil Rhodes' dream from the previous generation, of a British-ruled African empire that would stretch all the way across the continent from north to south. All of these territories were supposed to be temporary "mandates," which would be given independence when the inhabitants were ready to stand on their own. Permission to occupy the mandates came from the League of Nations, the international organization set up after the war, but in practice the occupying powers ruled them much like their prewar colonies. South Africa, for example, treated Southwest Africa as if it had just gained a fifth province.

Troubles in the Italian Empire

Libya proved to be even tougher, because as soon as the Italians had taken the Libyan coast in 1912, the Sanussi Brotherhood transformed itself from a network of religious schools to a full-blown nationalist movement. Egyptians, Arabs and Turks sent money and arms to the Sanussi, especially after Italy entered World War I. When the war ended the head of the Sanussi, Sayyid Ahmad, went into exile at Constantinople, and Sayyid Idris (1890-1983), his nephew and a grandson of the Sanussi founder, took over. Idris tried to reach some sort of agreement with the Italians that would recognize Italian rule in return for autonomy in Libya's interior, but then in 1922 Benito Mussolini and his Fascists seized power in Italy, and Mussolini denounced these agreements. Arab leaders in Tripoli and Benghazi responded by recognizing Idris as the emir of all Libya, and Idris withdrew to Egypt, expecting a military response from the Italians. It came soon enough, and for the next nine years about a thousand armed Bedouins fought 20,000 Italian soldiers. To subjugate Libya's interior, the Fascists resorted to aerial bombardment and the herding of civilians into concentration camps, since they were giving the Bedouins their support. Thus, the war was an early preview of the destruction and inhuman brutality that would characterize World War II. Not until the 1931 capture and public execution of Sidi Umar al-Mukhtar, the Sanussi military leader, did resistance end, allowing the Italians to claim that Libya had been completely pacified.

The Beginnings of African Nationalism

In the previous chapter, we looked at how Africa came under Western rule. After the conquest, Europeans looked supreme almost everywhere. Even in Abyssinia and Liberia, the two countries that survived the "scramble," independence was in a precarious state; Italy would invade Abyssinia before long, and Liberia's economy was deeply in debt to the Firestone rubber company. Slavery had been abolished wherever the West could enforce its authority, but only a racist could think that making the black man a second-class citizen was much of an improvement. For a period of roughly seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, maps of Africa were marked with the same colors used to identify nations in Europe, and the African was rarely heard from, even in his own land.

Once the "scramble" was over, some Europeans had misgivings about it. It appeared as if the colonial powers had simply jumped in to grab as much as they could, and then expected to rule their gains as smoothly as if they had no inhabitants. Merchants wondered if the effort to conquer was worth it, because there were few easy profits to be made, except in South Africa. As early as 1902 Winston Churchill, one of the key individuals who had made imperialism a success, wrote that "the inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors. And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached by so foul a path."

Another early critic of imperialism was Mary Kingsley, a Victorian-era traveler who questioned whether the new rulers really understood what they had destroyed, and poked fun at how astonished they were when the natives didn't act grateful to those who had saved them from savagery. She wrote that the imperial adventure was like "that improving fable of the kind-hearted she-elephant who, while out walking one day, inadvertently trod upon a partridge and killed it, and observing close at hand the bird's nest full of callow fledglings, dropped a tear, and saying 'I have the feelings of a mother myself,' sat down upon the brood. This is precisely what England representing the 19^th century is doing in . . . West Africa. She destroys the guardian institution, drops a tear and sits upon the brood with motherly intentions; and pesky warm sitting she finds it."

Colonialism had created Western societies in the Americas and Australia, but there never were enough Europeans to do the same thing in Africa. When South Africa became independent in 1910, it had six million people, of which 22 percent (1.32 million) were white. The second largest European community on the continent was in Algeria; Algeria's population in 1914 was 5.25 million, of which three quarters of a million (14 percent) were Europeans. Elsewhere, white people were only a common sight in colonial capitals and ports like Zanzibar; the typical African lived unaffected by the hospitals, schools, railroads and industries that were built to serve as an infrastructure for the colonies. When the rulers tried to make their subjects pay taxes, many Africans chose to become peasants or migrant workers, because then they retained more control over their lives than they would have as wage-earning workers. As a result, to most outsiders Africa was as mysterious and misunderstood as it was before the scramble began, and would stay that way until independence came.

Of course, in a place as large as Africa, colonialism didn't affect everyone the same way. Those tribes which cooperated with the rulers were treated better than the other tribes. Among such privileged tribes were the Lozi of Northern Rhodesia, the Swahili on the east coast, the Baganda of Uganda, the Tutsi of Ruanda-Urundi and the Fulani of northern Nigeria. Likewise, the tribes which resisted suffered the most; several revolts broke out in the opening years of the twentieth century, but all of them were put down before World War I began. Losing tribes included the Ndebele and Shona, who saw their land taken by white settlers in Rhodesia, the non-Merina tribes of Madagascar, who fought against both the French and their former Merina rulers, and the Bunyoro of Uganda, who felt compelled to be anti-British because their Baganda enemies were pro-British. Worst of all was the fate of the Herero, a Bantu tribe in Southwest Africa; in the aftermath of their 1904 rebellion, the Germans exterminated two-thirds of the Herero, confiscated their land, and would not allow the survivors to keep cattle. Most of the Herero were thus forced to take jobs from their German masters, except for the few that managed to escape across the border into Bechuanaland.

In the early twentieth century, the most frequently seen Westerners were missionaries. The churches of Europe and the United States now supported missionary activity more than they ever had before. Here the goal was to win as many African souls to Christ as possible, and in most places below the Sahara, they were so successful that many Africans were soon becoming ministers, teachers and evangelists, because there weren't enough non-Africans to fill all available posts, except in supervisory positions. Islam also worked to gain new members, by establishing religious schools and brotherhoods in the areas that were Moslem already. Remembering past experience, most Christian missionaries chose to stay out of Moslem areas, so about the only place where Christianity and Islam competed for the same people was in southwest Nigeria (the Yoruba tribe).

The Christian missionaries also did very important humanitarian work. The most famous example is Dr. Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), who built a hospital at Lambaréné in Gabon and was widely admired for the books he wrote on philosophy and theology; his tireless promotion of life and the brotherhood of man won him the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize. Others built schools, because they felt their converts had to learn to read and write before they could understand Holy Scriptures. In the process, the students got a Western-style education, and in a Western-run society, that put them in a position to challenge the old royal and priestly families. At first, they only wanted to apply what they had learned to the churches they joined, either by rising to positions of leadership in those churches, or by starting new churches of their own that would be entirely African.⁽⁶⁾ It wasn't long, however, before they got the idea of doing the same thing in politics; the pre-1914 rebellions had failed to return Africa to return to its traditional way of life, but what about Western-style states run by Africans?

These early nationalists preferred using Western, Christian terms to express their views, rather than African ones. One good example was Charles Domingo, who wrote a pamphlet in 1911 that explained, in broken English, what was wrong with the behavior of Nyasaland's European rulers:

"There is too much failure among all Europeans in Nyasaland. The three combined bodies--Missionaries, Government and Companies or gainers of money--do form the same rule to look upon the native with mockery eyes. It sometimes startles us to see that the three combined bodies are from Europe, and along with them there is a title Christendom. And to compare and make a comparison between the Master of the title and his servants, it provokes any African away from believing in the master of the title. If we had power enough to communicate ourselves to Europe, we would advise them not to call themselves Christendom, but Europeandom. Therefore the life of the three combined bodies is altogether too cheaty, too thefty, too mockery. Instead of 'Give', they say 'Take away from'. There is too much breakage of God's pure law as seen in James's Epistle, chapter 5, verse four."

The important point to be made from the above quote is that Charles Domingo was judging the Europeans by their own moral standard, namely the New Testament. He felt that God's law as put forth in the Bible was suitable for Africans, so he did not see Christianity as a "white man's religion," nor did he call for anyone to abandon it; he simply felt that Africans would do a better job of practicing it, if they were in charge.

A few Africans managed to go to Europe or America to complete their education and become doctors and lawyers. When they returned, however, they did not get the jobs or status that they wanted, so these dissatisfied young men started forming political associations. Most of the meetings of these early organizations were held in Europe or the United States, because Africa didn't have a good meeting place or a significant audience for them. William E. B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the NAACP, hosted four of the earliest meetings, called Pan-African congresses, between 1919 and 1927; besides African nationalism, they promoted closer ties between Africans and blacks living elsewhere.

The first significant nationalist organization based in Africa was the National Congress of British West Africa, founded in 1918 by J. E. Casely Hayford, a lawyer from the Gold Coast, and expanded to include Nigeria in 1920. More important in the long run, though, were the activities of Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904-96), a Nigerian student. When he came home in 1935 after studying in America, he launched a popular press in both the Gold Coast and Nigeria, allowing him to spread his political ideas to the masses, something his predecessors had not done. Then he sent eight Nigerians and four Gold Coasters to study in America, all of whom would eventually become nationalist leaders. One of them, a teacher named Kwame Nkrumah, we'll be hearing a lot from later in this chapter.

Before World War II, this new intelligentsia did not get much attention; even most Africans ignored them. The Europeans also ignored them, because they were firmly in control, and since everything seemed to be going their way, they expected to stay in Africa for centuries, maybe even for a thousand years. When they felt the need to make a deal with the natives, they spoke to tribal chiefs and other traditional leaders. Little did they realize that by patronizing Africa's old nobility, they were cutting out the ground beneath them, and once the chiefs were discredited politically, the Western-educated Africans would rise to take their places.

The Rif War and Maghreb Nationalism

Spain didn't do so well. In northern Morocco the Spaniards proved to be inefficient, unjust rulers, so in 1919 the Berbers of the Rif Mountains revolted, under two leaders, a charismatic chieftain named Abd el-Krim, and a brigand named Ahmed ibn-Muhammad Raisuli. Spain managed to defeat Raisuli, but in 1921 a Spanish general, Fernandez Silvestre, and 12,000 of his 20,000 troops were slain by Abd el-Krim in the battle of Anual. Abd el-Krim followed this up by driving the Spaniards into the towns on the coast, and proclaimed a "Republic of the Rif," though he really wanted to set himself up as sultan and found a new Moroccan dynasty. Because he had done so well against Spain, he grew overconfident and invaded the French portion of Morocco in 1925. This forced two European countries to form an alliance against him. General Miguel Primo de Rivera, the military dictator of Spain from 1923 to 1930, personally led an expeditionary force across the Mediterranean, while France's Marshal Petain brought in 160,000 French troops on the southern front. Within a year they forced Abd el-Krim to surrender; France exiled him to the island of Réunion until 1947, after which he was able to return and play another part in Morocco's bid for independence.⁽⁷⁾

The 1912 treaty that divided Morocco between France and Spain also declared Tangiers a "free city." However, they didn't put this into action right away, and Spain withdrew her agreement to this after World War I began. Then the Rif War persuaded Spain to restore the international zone in 1923. From 1940 to 1945 Spanish troops occupied Tangiers again, but after World War II it was declared a free city once more. Finally in 1956 it was incorporated into a now-independent Morocco.

An indirect casualty of the Rif War was Lyautey himself. In 1925 he submitted his resignation, because the French government was taking too long to send the reinforcements he requested during the war. It was an act of protest, and Lyautey didn't expect Paris to accept his resignation, because both he and the government knew that only lesser men would take his place; instead, the resignation was accepted. When he boarded the ship in Casablanca to leave Morocco for the last time, tears were reportedly streaming down his face.

Not long after Lyautey's departure, Muhammad V became the new sultan (1927). Because he was only seventeen years old, the French thought they could teach him to loyally toe the European line. Instead, he grew up to become a nationalist. When he met US President Franklin Roosevelt at Casablanca in 1943, he concluded that the Americans were the only real liberators among the Allies. One year later a Moroccan political organization appeared (Istiqlal, meaning the Party of Independence), and it had his full support, making him the automatic leader of Morocco's nationalist movement.

By the 1930s, France had controlled most of Morocco for a generation, Tunisia for fifty years, and parts of Algeria for a century. Because they had been there so long, the French worked hard to develop the Maghreb's infrastructure. A railroad ran all the way from Marrakesh to Tunis, and Casablanca had grown from a little fishing village in 1900 to a port that was home to a quarter of a million people. Europeans continue to settle here as well; this caused considerable stress for the Arabs and Berbers, who saw themselves crowded out of the best land and the best jobs. Because their birthrate was higher than the birth and immigration rates of the settlers, they grew poorer as time went on.

In Tunisia, nationalism was initially centered on the bey, the Ottoman-era governor who had been allowed to stay in office after the French took over. In 1920 the first Tunisian political party was organized; called the Destour (Constitution) Party, it called for the bey to get serious about human rights and ruling by law. However, it only appealed to a few wealthy citizens in Tunis, so it was disbanded five years later. In 1934 Habib Bourguiba (1903-2000) founded a more radical movement, appropriately called the Neo-Destour Party. Bourguiba called for making Tunisia a modern, secular society: "The Tunisia we mean to liberate will not be a Tunisia for Muslim, for Jew, or for Christian. It will be a Tunisia for all, without distinction of religion or race, who wish to have it as their country and to live in it under the protection of just laws." Because the Neo-Destour took aid from leftists and nationalists in France, Morocco, and Algeria, the government banned its newspapers, forced it to dissolve, and imprisoned Bourguiba from 1938 to 1942, when he was released by the Germans.

Algerian nationalists faced a real uphill struggle, due to the success the French had at trying to turn Algerians into Frenchmen. They had received a French education, and spoke French better than they spoke Arabic, but they stopped seeing themselves as French when even this could not get the settlers to treat them as equals. Still, like nationalists in other parts of Africa, they were a tiny minority among the native population. One of the first, Ferhat Abbas, wrote a lamentation about this in 1934: "Men who die for a patriotic ideal are honored and respected. But I would not die for an Algerian fatherland, because no such fatherland exists. I search the history books and I cannot find it. You cannot build on air." Not until the war for independence in the 1950s would most Algerians get the idea that they could become their own nation.

The Road to World War II Passed Through Ethiopia

The League tried to prevent a war over this matter, but Mussolini was determined to fight anyway, and he got his excuse at the end of 1934, when Ethiopian and Italian troops clashed in the Ogaden Desert. The border between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland was poorly defined, but the site of the incident, Walwal, was far enough inland that nobody considered it Italian territory; nevertheless, Mussolini claimed that his soldiers had been attacked. On October 3, 1935, without a declaration of war, Italian forces invaded Ethiopia in two columns, one from Eritrea and one from Mogadishu; ironically, they used roads that had recently been built as part of Haile Selassie's modernization campaign. This time the Italians were better prepared than they had been in 1896, and because they made heavy use of warplanes and poison gas, their opponents were hopelessly outclassed. Vittorio Mussolini, Il Duce's son, was a pilot in that war and described the thrill he got from bombing Galla tribesmen: "One group of horsemen gave me the impression of a budding rose unfolding as the bomb fell in their midst and blew them up."⁽⁸⁾

All the League of Nations could do was suggest a partition of Ethiopia (the Hoare-Laval plan); of course Haile Selassie rejected it. Economic sanctions were slapped on Italy, but these were nothing that could really hurt the Italian war effort, and an embargo on arms sales to both sides kept the Ethiopians from acquiring up-to-date weapons. Britain didn't even close the Suez Canal to Italian shipping, thereby allowing unrestricted transport of Italian soldiers and supplies to the war zone. On May 5, 1936, Italian tanks entered Addis Ababa, and Haile Selassie fled the country. He went to the League of Nations, where he made an eloquent appeal to the conscience of the world: "I pray to Almighty God that He may spare nations the terrible sufferings which have just been inflicted on my people." His plea went unanswered, and the dictators who arose in the 1920s and 1930s were encouraged to act more boldly, convinced that no one would punish them for their deeds. Before 1936 was over, Germany's Adolf Hitler would break the Versailles treaty by moving soldiers into the Rhineland, and Hitler and Mussolini would form the alliance known as the "Rome-Berlin Axis." Instead of buying peace, the world would soon have to go through the most destructive war of modern times, because it waited too long to stop the aggressive activities of the dictators.⁽⁹⁾

Haile Selassie I.

More activity would occur in Africa after World War II began. France surrendered to the Axis in June 1940, and the British were concerned that the French fleet, intact up to this point, would soon be used against them; Britain was fighting alone at this time, so having the French ships on the side of Germany and Italy would be enough to turn the balance of sea power against them. As a result, in July the British reluctantly attacked and seriously damaged the French ships stationed near Oran, Algeria (three battleships, two destroyers and one carrier). The next day (July 4, 1940), two Italian brigades crossed the Eritrean-Sudanese border to capture the towns of Kassala and Gallabat, and the French responded to the loss of their ships by attacking Gibraltar from Morocco.

In August Mussolini used his forces stationed in Ethiopia to invade British Somaliland. Britain was not a helpless opponent like Ethiopia, and Italian casualties were heavy, but with Britain itself now under attack by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), there was nothing to spare for the colonies of Sub-Saharan Africa; sixteen days after the invasion started, the last British survivors were evacuated from Berbera. With French Somaliland now under the control of Vichy France, the pro-German puppet government set up after the French collapse, the entire Horn of Africa now belonged to the Axis.

However, it was Italy's last triumph, and it only lasted for five months. By the end of 1940, Great Britain was preparing for a counterattack, now that the Battle of Britain was over. On January 19, 1941, the British launched a double offensive, one army group attacking Eritrea from Sudan, and the other attacking Italian Somaliland from Kenya. Haile Selassie personally led a guerrilla unit that went directly into Ethiopia from Sudan, and his son led another one. The Italians made a stand in a heavily defended gorge near the fortress of Keren, which delayed the Eritrean advance until the end of March; once it fell Asmara and Massawa were taken easily. By this time Mogadishu had also fallen (February 25), another British force from Aden had landed at Berbera (March 16), and one more British force had entered southern Ethiopia from Kenya. The force in Mogadishu struck across the Ogaden to reach Jijiga, and then all Allied units converged on Addis Ababa, which was liberated on April 6.

The remaining Italians were confined to two areas, Tigre province and the region southwest of Addis Ababa. The Duke of Aosta, the Italian commander, was captured on May 19 after a two-week battle in another pass, Amba Alagi. Those in the southwest surrendered by the end of June, and with the capture of Gondar on November 27, Italy's empire in East Africa was no more.⁽¹⁰⁾

Haile Selassie returned in triumph to Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941, five years to the day after he had been forced to leave. At this point the old imperialist reflex kicked in, and the British tried to put Ethiopia under a military administration, the way they had just done with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Instead, Haile Selassie had his way, and was allowed to resume his reign.

The Liberation of French Africa

Also in November 1942, a second attempt on Dakar was made, using Americans. The United States had been in the war for nearly a year, but this was the first activity outside of the Pacific involving American troops. This time the Allies succeeded, and French West Africa was free. Then Operation Torch, the campaign to liberate French North Africa (see below), got underway, and de Gaulle finally had a base close enough to the European theater to be useful.

The See-Saw Struggle in North Africa

Only Germany could save Mussolini's empire, which was now crumbling on three fronts. Ethiopia was too far away for Hitler to come to the rescue, but he did dispatch enough planes, tanks and soldiers to turn the situation around in North Africa and the Balkans.⁽¹²⁾ For North Africa he sent two armored divisions, soon to be known as the Afrika Korps, and his best general, Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox." It took until mid-April for the second division to arrive, but Rommel began his attack on March 24. The offensive was a complete success; the overstretched British forces crumbled and within three weeks Rommel had recovered all of Cyrenaica except for Tobruk. The Afrika Korps advanced as far as Buqbuq, about halfway between the Libyan-Egyptian border and Sidi Barrani. Rommel stopped there because he was busy with Tobruk, feeling that he could not move safely while a port behind him was in Allied hands, but the Australian division in Tobruk stubbornly resisted all attempts to dislodge it.⁽¹³⁾

General Erwin Rommel.

In fact, Rommel was ready to try again just a month after pulling back. In a span of two weeks, from January 21 to February 6, he advanced rapidly, not stopping until he reached the Eighth Army's first defensive line, which ran from Gazala to Bir Hakeim, just west of Tobruk. Both sides paused here to gather strength for nearly four months, and then after a three-week battle, the Axis forces broke through.⁽¹⁴⁾ This time Tobruk, the port that had held out against everything in 1941, was taken in a single day. Auchinleck fell back to the next line of defense, at Marsa Matruh in Egypt, but Rommel had an even easier time getting through this one. By the end of June 1942 he had reached El Alamein. Located sixty miles west of Alexandria, the British chose to stand at El Alamein because it was near the Qattara Depression, a rocky valley that is impassible to mechanized infantry and tanks; here it was easy to form a narrow defensive line between the Qattara Depression and the sea. If the Axis got past El Alamein, nothing would keep them out of the Nile Valley itself.

Auchinleck beat off the first attack on El Alamein in July, but instead of striking back, he planned on regrouping his forces until mid-September; he was good at defending a fixed position but overly cautious about going on the offensive. Most expected that Egypt would soon fall to the Axis, and in fact, many Egyptians, including King Farouk, looked forward to this happening, resenting the control Britain had over their country. In August, Winston Churchill flew to Cairo to see why Auchinleck wasn't moving against Rommel, and ended up dismissing him; in his place he put Sir Harold Alexander in charge of the North African theater, and a little-known general, Bernard Law Montgomery, in command of the Eighth Army. He hated getting rid of Auchinleck, but it turned out to be one of his best decisions; it restored the Eighth Army's morale, and in the new leaders Rommel finally met his match.

The Eighth Army withstood a second attack on El Alamein at the end of August, and Montgomery built up his forces until he had nearly twice as many men and tanks as Rommel did. On the night of October 23, 1942, he began a battle of his own with an artillery barrage from a thousand guns, which blasted holes in the minefields that the Germans had dug along the front line. Then he fooled the enemy with a fake build-up in the south that led them to think the main breakthrough would come there, so when it happened in the north, the surprise was total. Rommel, who was on sick leave in Germany, hurriedly came back to the front, and after nine days of nonstop bombings and assaults with new tanks and infantry, he decided he would have to pull back. Hitler foolishly gave orders to stand and fight to the last man, which delayed Rommel one more day until he realized these orders could not be followed. As a result, he barely managed to get the Afrika Korps out of Egypt, helped by sudden heavy rains that bogged down British vehicles in mud; the Italian units had to be abandoned altogether. By the time he was moving, he also realized that he could not rest again in Tripolitania, for by then the Allies had landed in his rear, in Morocco and Algeria. The result was one of the longest retreats in history, which didn't stop until he reached a new defensive perimeter in southern Tunisia, the Mareth Line. The Eighth Army pursued, taking El Agheila on December 16, and Tripoli on January 23.

The campaign to take back the Maghreb, Operation Torch, began with three amphibious assaults; 35,000 Americans landed at Casablanca, 39,000 Americans landed at Oran, and 33,000 Britons landed at Algiers (all on November 8, 1942). Vichy French resistance ended the next day when Admiral Darlan ordered a cease-fire; within a week all of Morocco and Algeria north of the Atlas mts. was in Allied hands. However, the Germans rushed reinforcements as soon as Hitler heard the news of the landings, allowing them to hold onto Tunisia as 1943 began.

For General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the new supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe and North Africa, the biggest challenge of Operation Torch was keeping the troops united. Even at this late date, the British and French didn't get along very well, so their soldiers couldn't be put together. The Americans got along all right with both--that's why most of the soldiers used in the landings were American--but they were mostly green recruits. Rommel tried to take advantage of these differences by staging his counterattack in the sector where Americans were stationed. In the battle of Kasserine Pass (February 14-25, 1943), he broke through and managed to recover much of southwest Tunisia. Next he planned to rush to the sea near Bône, Algeria, thereby cutting off the rest of the Allied troops from their supply lines and pinning them against the north wing of the Afrika Korps. However, this would be Rommel's last victory; by now Montgomery had reached the Mareth Line in the southeast and was beginning to penetrate it. Montgomery, Alexander and Eisenhower managed to coordinate their movements just in time to keep Rommel in the Tunisian bottle; the Allied forces were badly shaken, but not cut to pieces.

In early March Rommel relinquished command and returned to Germany, a sick man again. After that it was simply a matter of squeezing the Axis-held area down to nothing. By mid-April only the northeast corner of Tunisia was left. The two main cities there, Tunis and Bizerte, were both taken on May 7, and the last defending soldiers laid down their arms on May 13, in the Cape Bon peninsula. For the Allies it was a great victory; not only had the Axis been completely cleared out of Africa, but they had also gained the experience they would need for the upcoming campaigns in Italy and France.

Decolonization Begins

At the end of World War II, five colonial powers remained in Africa (Great Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, and Spain), and of those five only Britain and France were important on the world scene. They had divided Italy's colonial empire between themselves, so at this point their position looked stronger than ever. The truth of the matter was quite different, though. Two World Wars had exhausted them, and the two strongest nations of the postwar world, the United States and the Soviet Union, now put pressure on the nations of Europe to dismantle their colonial empires. The Soviets had opposed colonialism on principle since they had seized power in Russia, and the United States set an example by letting go of its most important colony, the Philippines, in 1946. Because of this pressure, by 1948 the British and French had terminated their "mandates" in the Middle East, independence had come to the Indian subcontinent and Burma, and most of the rest of Southeast Asia was in revolt. Africa was far behind Asia when it came to political progress, but when Africans read the Versailles Treaty and the UN Charter, both of which called for self-determination for all peoples, they wondered why these couldn't apply to them, too.

One of the first calls for African self-determination was at a conference featuring several black politicians, the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Held in Manchester, England, in October 1945, they claimed to speak for all of Black Africa. William Du Bois led this conference, like the prewar Pan-African congresses, though he was now seventy-seven years old; the main speaker was Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast. Also in attendance was Nigeria's Nnamdi Azikiwe, who set a deadline for independence: the British must get out in fifteen years, and eventually the other colonial powers must quit Africa as well. The only participant familiar to outsiders was Du Bois, and the British government paid no attention, but in the end what happened was remarkably close to what they had demanded.⁽¹⁵⁾

North Africa Rejoins the Arab World

Before leaving the Horn of Africa, the Europeans tried to alter the borders to better reflect the ethnic makeup of that region. Three different plans were proposed for Eritrea; in the end it was handed over to Ethiopia, so that Haile Selassie could have a seaport (1952). However, that turned out to be a hasty decision; the mostly Moslem Eritreans didn't want to be part of a Christian kingdom, especially after the Ethiopian government declared Amharic the only official language and insisted that all government jobs be filled by members of the Amhara ethnic group, thereby offending even the Christians from Tigre. Consequently the Eritreans revolted in 1961, beginning a long guerilla war that would last for more than thirty years.

Italian Somaliland was declared a UN trust territory after World War II. Because the British had enough to keep them busy elsewhere, the Italians were invited to come back in 1950, on condition that they hold the territory for no more than ten years and do nothing but prepare it for independence. Italy complied with these terms, and did a fine job during its second administration.

The Ogaden Desert, ruled by Ethiopia before the war, had been transferred to Italian Somaliland in 1936, after Mussolini's invasion. The British returned it in 1948, after trying to persuade the Ethiopians to give it up for a future Somali state, since the Ogaden's population is Somali. The Ethiopians refused, though the desert has no resources to make it worth keeping, creating another situation that would lead to war in the next generation.

Egypt was a place where nationalism had been going strong for decades; in fact, Egypt's nationalist movement got started before the British takeover, as we saw in the previous chapter. In 1914 the threat of a possible revolt or a Turkish invasion caused Britain to impose martial law on the Nile valley. The war saw terrible inflation and hardship for the Fellahin, who were used as cheap labor and saw their livestock confiscated by the army. Violent unrest broke out after the war ended, and the formation of a political party called the Wafd, led by Saad Zaghloul, prompted the British to terminate the protectorate in 1922, when everything else failed to put a lid on the unrest. The title of khedive was dropped, having gone out of date when the Turks lost control of Egypt, and the last holder of the title became King Fuad I. Technically this meant that Egypt was now independent, but Britain kept soldiers around to protect the Suez Canal and to intervene in the event of an emergency. In 1936 these troops were withdrawn to the canal zone. The same year also saw Fuad succeeded by his fat and foolish son Farouk, who was fated to become both a national embarrassment and the last king of Egypt. You can read the rest of the story about Egyptian nationalism in Chapter 15 of my Middle Eastern history.

There really wasn't a good reason for the British to keep the Suez Canal after India was gone, but because they had worked so hard to acquire and defend it, they couldn't bring themselves to let it go; instead, they built up their troop presence in the canal zone until they had seven times as many soldiers as the 10,000 allowed by the 1936 treaty. Another thorny issue was the Sudan. After the battle of Omdurman it was declared a jointly ruled territory, but everyone knew which member of the Anglo-Egyptian partnership pulled the strings. The Egyptians felt they should be the only rulers there, since the Sudan had been under the rule of Cairo for much of the nineteenth century. Because the British insisted on holding both the Canal and the Sudan indefinitely, while the Egyptians wanted them out completely, Anglo-Egyptian relations worsened as time went on.

In 1952 King Farouk was ousted by a military coup. For the next two years the president of Egypt was Major General Mohammed Naguib, but the real leader of the coup was Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, so in 1954 he dispensed with the front man, ruling alone for the rest of his life. For the first time in 2,300 years (since the XXX dynasty, see Chapter 4), Egypt had an Egyptian ruler who didn't have to obey the wishes of any foreign empire. He managed to reach an agreement with the British that settled the Sudan question, in February 1953. Since neither side would give up the Sudan if it meant handing it over to the other party, they went for parliamentary elections, followed by a three-year period of autonomy, and finally independence on January 1, 1956. When the elections were held, Egyptians hoped the Sudanese would vote to rejoin Egypt, while the British wanted elections to produce a pro-Western, anti-Nasser government. Independence came on schedule, but the election was a disappointment for both sides; though the pro-Egyptian parties got elected, once they were in office they changed their minds and chose not to become part of Egypt.

Like past leaders, Nasser paid more attention to Egypt's Asian neighbors than to Egypt's African neighbors. Therefore, most of his activities have already been covered in Chapter 16 of my Middle Eastern history. However, he did see himself as both an African leader and an Arab leader, and had a vision to make Egypt the foremost nation of both regions. One event during his career, the Suez Crisis, needs to be retold here because it marked the end of British involvement in Egypt.

Though he ruled as a dictator in all but name, Nasser was the benevolent kind of strongman, who put the needs of his people first. Along that line, he had a very ambitious development program, which began with the building of the world's largest dam across the upper Nile River, the Aswan High Dam. This dam would turn Lower Nubia into an artificial lake⁽¹⁶⁾, but it would also prevent floods downstream, generate electric power, and provide water for future irrigation projects. At first he counted on aid from Western countries, especially the United States, to pay for the dam, but the Americans backed out in 1956 because of two things he did outside of Africa: he refused to get involved in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and he assumed leadership of the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, promising to drive the Jews into the sea. When he realized that Western aid was not coming, Nasser decided to use the Suez Canal to finance the dam, so he announced the nationalization of the canal, thirteen years before the Suez Canal Company's charter was due to expire. This move was legal so long as Nasser paid off the canal's stockholders, but the British would have none of it; they called for the assistance of France and Israel, and in October 1956 all three countries invaded the Sinai peninsula from the east, hoping to seize the canal and topple Nasser's regime. They got as far as the canal, and then international opinion forced them to stop, because this looked too much like the 1882 intervention that had brought Britain to Egypt in the first place. Both the United States and the Soviet Union agreed that gunboat diplomacy was no longer acceptable behavior, and they put pressure on the three attacking countries until they withdrew from Egyptian territory in the following year. Instead of being removed from office, Nasser emerged from the Suez Crisis as a hero, though in the end he had to accept Soviet aid, rather than wait for revenues from the canal, to get the Aswan High Dam finished.

Nasser's reputation was so high in the Arab world after 1956 that the government of Syria tried to escape its problems by asking for political union with Egypt. The new state, called the United Arab Republic (U.A.R.), flanked Israel on two sides; indeed, as it turned out, the Arabs couldn't agree on anything except that Israel was their common enemy. Once they discussed something else, internal tensions started to build. In 1961, three years after the union was declared, Syria changed its mind and pulled out. Nasser tried a looser federation between Egypt and Yemen, and attempts were made to bring Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq into the Egyptian-Syrian union while it lasted, but these efforts were even less successful. Nevertheless, the U.A.R. remained Egypt's official name until 1973, when Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, changed the country's name to the Arab Republic of Egypt.

In the Maghreb, the natives didn't think very highly of the French, after they had seen their land become a battleground between Vichy and Free French factions. Consequently the political evolution of this region accelerated after the war. Earlier in this chapter we saw a quote from Ferhat Abbas about the lack of Algerian nationalism in the 1930s; in 1946 he sang a different tune: "The Algerian personality, the Algerian fatherhood, which I did not find in 1936 among the Muslims, I find there today. The change that has taken place is visible to the naked eye, and cannot be ignored." In response, the European colonists called on the government of postwar France, the Fourth Republic, to promise it would always keep the Maghreb in French hands. Paris tried to placate North African natives by offering full citizenship to more of them, and dropping the requirement to renounce any aspect of Islam. However, the Moslems who could take advantage of this privilege were still in the minority; the colonists didn't want any concessions granted to the natives whatsoever, while French politicians got nervous about the idea of treating Frenchmen, Arabs and Berbers as equals, because it could mean more than a hundred Moslem deputies getting elected to the French Parliament. Thus, the government's concessions were always too little to satisfy the nationalists.

In accordance with the wishes of the colonists, the government took a hardline attitude toward movements like the Neo-Destour and Istiqlal. Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba was arrested again in 1952, and in 1953 the French removed and exiled Morocco's Sultan Muhammad V, exiling him first to Corsica, and then to Madagascar. However, when the Algerian war for independence broke out, the French realized that they weren't going to be able to hold onto all three Maghreb colonies, so to save Algeria, they abandoned the other two. In 1955 Bourguiba was released, and Muhammad V was allowed to return; both Morocco and Tunisia were declared independent a year later. Then in 1957 Bourguiba removed the last of the beys, since they had been figureheads for three quarters of a century. There was still a Franco-Tunisian dispute over Bizerte, because the French wanted to keep a military base there, so Bourguiba attacked it; a thousand Tunisian lives were lost before the French agreed to leave in 1962. By then, most of Tunisia's 180,000 Europeans had fled the country as well.

Morocco was blessed in that of all North African countries, it was the least affected by imperialism, both by accident and by design. It had been under European rule for only 44 years, and unlike other African and Arab states, its monarchy had existed long before Europeans started meddling in the region, so nobody could call the sultan a puppet of the West. Muhammad V favored left-wing politicians and pursued a radical nationalist foreign policy, to nip in the bud any criticism from those who wanted to replace him with a Nasser-style republic. By contrast, his son Hassan II (1961-99) did not see the need to play such a game, and under him Morocco was one of the most pro-Western states, in both Africa and the Arab world.

Spain didn't make a fuss over its part of Morocco when the French gave up theirs. Within months after French Morocco became independent, the Spaniards withdrew from Spanish Morocco, except for the three ports of Ifni, Ceuta and Melilla. Ifni was returned in 1969, but Spain held onto the territory to the south, the Spanish Sahara, until it provoked a crisis in 1975 (we'll cover that in the next chapter).

The Algerian War

The Algerian nationalists got the organization they needed in March 1954, when nine of them founded the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale). That summer they received news of France's humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnamese communists (the siege and fall of Dienbienphu), and concluded that they, too, could beat the French. Accordingly, they launched their war for independence on November 1, 1954, with a series of bombings and raids all over Algeria. However the French army was ready for them, and because it was no longer tied down by a war in Southeast Asia, it responded with overwhelming force, so that the rebels only had firm control over Kabylia and Aurès, two remote mountain ranges which had been their original bases.

At first all advantages were with the French. They had the advantage in arms and technology, which allowed them to control the cities and move about freely in the daytime. Over the next two years they brought in reinforcements, until 400,000 French troops were stationed in Algeria. Paris also appointed a liberal governor for the colony, Jacques Soustelle, in the hope that the Algerians would be willing to end the war by talking peace with him. However, any plans Soustelle had for defusing the conflict were dashed on August 20, 1955, when 80 FLN guerrillas went to a suburb of Philippeville and killed 123 people, including women and children. The French responded by tracking down and killing as many as 12,000 Algerians in the region the guerrillas came from. Atrocities mounted on both sides; the FLN attacked not only Europeans, but also terrorized Algerians into supporting their cause; their tactic of cutting the throats of enemies became known as the "Kabyle smile." On the French side, the paratroopers defending Algiers found that the field generator for an electric telephone could also be connected to prisoners and used as a fiendish torture device. Soustelle himself gradually moved to the right in his views, now preferring armed confrontation to negotiation, and the colonists, who were suspicious when he first became governor, came to see him as their champion.

On the international scene, most foreigners sympathized with the FLN. Nasser supported them from the start, allowing the FLN to establish its political headquarters in Cairo (that's why France took part in the 1956 campaign to topple Nasser, along with the British and Israelis). Arms were smuggled to the rebels from Morocco and Tunisia, prompting the French to block the Algerian-Tunisian frontier with an electric fence and minefields, the Morice Line, in 1957. In October 1956 the French air force intercepted an airliner flying from Morocco to Tunis and forced it to land in Algiers. On that plane were five top-ranked members of the FLN, including the movement's leader, Ahmed Ben Bella. However, the arrest and imprisonment of these men did not kill the movement; instead, it raised the FLN's profile, got the United Nations to discuss the Algerian situation, and eventually attracted more outside support to FLN. France found itself winning the military war, but losing the political one.

The largest urban engagement of the war, the battle of Algiers, lasted from January to March of 1957, and ended in a French victory. Despite this, the French armed forces were no closer to winning, but it was considered unthinkable to quit the game; no French politician would admit that the only solution was to uproot the pieds noirs and give independence to Algeria. When Guy Mollet, a socialist prime minister, went to Algiers in 1956 to see the situation first-hand, angry colonists greeted him by throwing rotten tomatoes. And when oil was discovered in the southern Algerian desert in 1957, the French saw that as another reason to hold on at all costs.

Because the Fourth Republic had proven itself too weak to handle Algeria, settlers and right-wing soldiers joined forces to overthrow it. In May 1958 they set up a Committee of Public Safety in Algiers, and demanded that Charles de Gaulle be made the next prime minister; by this time many Frenchmen saw de Gaulle as the only person who could save French Algeria. De Gaulle, who had been waiting a decade for such a call, was given emergency powers to write a new constitution, an event which marks the end of France's Fourth Republic and the beginning of the Fifth. Meanwhile, the rebels set up a government-in-exile in Cairo, with Ferhat Abbas as prime minister.

It looked for a while that the old general would indeed win the war. The offensive he launched in Kabylia (Operation Binoculars, July 1958) was highly successful; afterwards 1.25 million Moslem villagers were relocated to "regroupment camps," and much of the countryside was devastated to keep supplies from getting to the FLN. But de Gaulle was also willing to think the unthinkable, and do something about it. He realized the war was unwinnable, so his real goal was to get out of Algeria with as few losses for France as possible. While he reassured conservatives by promising not to lose any battles, he pursued what he called the politique de l'artichoux ("artichoke policy"); step by step he stripped away the political power of right-wing generals, settlers and reactionary administrators, like leaves from an artichoke or cabbage. Then he proposed a referendum to give self-determination to the Algerians.

When the pieds noirs realized what was happening, they organized their own militia, the OAS (Organization de l'Armée Secrète), and vowed to fight to the death. In 1960 they launched a terror campaign in both Algeria and France, and even launched a mutiny against de Gaulle in 1961. However, de Gaulle persuaded most of the armies to remain loyal to him, and opened secret negotiations with the FLN. They finally agreed to a cease-fire, the Evian Accords, in March 1962. In July the referendum took place, and the vast majority of Algerians voted for independence. Most French citizens were willing to accept this result; by now OAS atrocities had killed the emotional attachment many of them had for Algeria.

Few wars for independence have seen as much nastiness on both sides; 500,000 of Algeria's nine million people were killed before it was over. The OAS tried to stay and fight on, figuring it could hold on to a piece of Algeria if Europeans made up the majority of its population. Instead, 80 percent of the pieds noirs emigrated by the end of 1962, rendering even this last-ditch effort impossible. Back in Algiers, Ahmed Ben Bella emerged as the leader of a one-party socialist state, and reprisals against pro-French Algerians began. Because of the bitter struggle Algeria had gone through to throw off European rule, Ben Bella would oppose anything that looked like neocolonialism in Africa, and he became one of the most vocal critics against the white-ruled governments in South Africa and Rhodesia.

The Mau Mau Rebellion

Kenyatta was a thoroughly Western-educated African; he had spent seventeen years in England, married and divorced an English wife there, and even played an African chief in the movie Sanders in the River. Still, he had belonged to a nationalist group, the Kikuyu Central Association, in the 1930s, and because it had been banned during the war as a subversive movement, he joined another, the Kenya African Union (KAU), when he returned to Africa in 1946; one year later he became its president. Still, the British were not overly concerned with the Kikuyu, because they were not one of "the martial races," as they liked to call tribes with a warrior tradition. Instead, they were worried that an independent, majority-ruled Kenya would be unfair to the Europeans, so they were against setting up any form of government that guaranteed "one man, one vote." In May 1951 the British Colonial Secretary, James Griffith, visited Kenya, listened to the demands of the KAU, and then proposed a legislature which would give 14 representatives to the 30,000 Europeans, six representatives for 100,000 Asian (mostly Indian) immigrants, one representative for 24,000 Arabs, and five representatives for the five million Africans; in addition the African representatives would be appointed by the government, not elected. To any African nationalist, this was simply unacceptable.

By this time, many Kikuyus had decided to take matters into their own hands. To win the support of the masses, tribal leaders encouraged them to take an oath that promised their total commitment; breaking this oath meant ostracism from the tribe, in addition to other penalties. Then they held mass meetings to rally more support to the cause; more than 25,000 gathered for one meeting in the town of Nyeri, in July 1951. Rumors appeared, largely spread by the white settlers, that the tribal activity was led by a secret society called the Mau Mau, and that their oaths involved cannibalism, necrophilia, bestiality, and the drinking of blood. How much of this was true is questionable; in fact, it is not even clear that an organization by that name existed.⁽¹⁸⁾ Nevertheless, when acts of violence broke out in October 1951, aimed mainly at white farmers and Africans loyal to the British, it was enough to make the government outlaw the Mau Mau and declare a state of emergency.

Kenyatta was arrested and charged with leading the uprising; though he strongly denied this, he spent the rest of the 1950s in prison or under house arrest. As British troops moved in to restore order, they attracted international attention all out of proportion to the size of the rebellion; most of the Mau Maus were poorly armed and organized. 92 Europeans and 1,920 Africans were killed by them, while the British army in turn killed 11,500 Mau Maus and their supporters. 90,000 Africans were also processed through detention camps to find Mau Mau members and others who had taken tribal oaths; all of Nairobi was emptied for this purpose at one point. For their prisoners, the interrogators announced a form of "counter-magic"--a new oath that would free the subjects from the Mau Mau oath. However, the Kikuyu didn't really believe there was a cure for their oaths, so many Mau Maus took it willingly to get released. Eventually the Mau Maus were confined to Mt. Kenya and the Aberdare forest, and these areas were taken in 1956, ending the rebellion.

Captured Mau Mau suspects in detention.

"The African Year": Independence Below the Sahara

The son of a goldsmith in a small village on the Gold Coast, Nkrumah managed to get an education when his mother sent him to a Catholic missionary school in another village. There he did so well that he became an untrained elementary school teacher, and then went on to Achimota College, near Accra. Graduating at the head of his class, Nkrumah then taught at several Catholic schools, and considered becoming a priest, but now his ambitions were too big to stop there. In 1935 he got the opportunity he was seeking, when a rich uncle and the aforementioned Dr. Azikiwe arranged for him to go to the United States. He studied first at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where his class voted him "most interesting," then at Lincoln Theological Seminary, and finally at the University of Pennsylvania. During these years he also did a lot of reading on the side; his favorite book was The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (by Marcus Garvey, see footnote #4), and he was also heavily influenced by the three most famous communist writers--Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. When he sailed from the United States in 1945, he looked back at the Statue of Liberty and said, "You have opened my eyes to the true meaning of liberty. I should never rest until I have carried your message to Africa."

In London, Nkrumah meant to study law, but he got involved with a Marxist group instead. In 1947 he returned to his homeland, and found it in turmoil. To quell riots, the British had just introduced a constitution that gave a majority of seats in the Gold Coast legislature to Africans, but to those wanting independence, it wasn't enough. Opposing it was a nationalist party called the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), and it asked Nkrumah to become the party's general secretary. The UGCC was made up of chiefs, lawyers, businessmen and rich farmers--men inexperienced in politics--who so far had not accomplished much, so they hoped that with Nkrumah in charge, they would do a better job of getting their message to Africans that weren't Western-educated, and that he would give the party the organization it needed. That he did, and more; the following year saw violent demonstrations, and the British arrested six UGCC leaders, including Nkrumah. Then the British set up an all-African committee to rewrite the constitution, and because Nkrumah's colleagues were having second thoughts about using violence to achieve independence, they were invited to join the committee, but Nkrumah wasn't invited. Deciding that the UGCC was too conservative and timid, Nkrumah left it to found his own party, the Convention Peoples Party (CPP).

For organizing a series of strikes that nearly brought the Gold Coast economy to a standstill, Nkrumah was imprisoned again in 1950. The same year saw a new constitution go into effect; it provided an all-African Legislative Assembly, and had eight of the eleven cabinet members chosen from the Assembly, with the governor appointing the other three. Nkrumah denounced it as another imperialist fraud, and offered instead the slogan "Self-Government Now." Nevertheless, the new constitution worked in his favor. When elections were held in 1951 to fill the seats in the Assembly, the CPP won most of them; Nkrumah, though he had to campaign from a prison cell, won the seat representing central Accra by a landslide. The British governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, had an abrupt change of heart; he released Nkrumah and invited him to lead the new government. Nkrumah agreed, and promised to abandon his "Self-Government Now" campaign if there was real progress toward independence. After that Nkrumah and Arden-Clarke gave each other their full cooperation, until independence came on May 6, 1957. As prime minister of the new state, Nkrumah wanted to erase memories of the imperialist past, so he renamed the Gold Coast after a glorious kingdom that once existed in medieval West Africa--Ghana (see Chapter 5).

Kwame Nkrumah.

For a while after World War II, France thought it was business as usual in Africa; there was a revolt in Madagascar (1947-48), but it was put down as easily as previous uprisings. This time the Malagasy rebels didn't even have guns; instead, they tried a form of magic, chanting "Rano, Rano" ("Water, Water") when they saw enemy soldiers, thinking this would turn bullets into water! Needless to say, it didn't work.

As in Algeria, the French did not really expect their colonies to become completely independent. Instead, they hoped they would want to remain part of France if it meant an improved life for Africans. Several high-ranking members of the Free French government met in Brazzaville in 1944, to draw up a plan for administering the colonies after the war. They called for a French union, in which the colonies would have seats in the National Assembly in Paris, but not self-government. This never went into effect, though, because the wars in Indochina and Algeria got in the way. When Charles de Gaulle became president in 1958, he proposed a French version of the British Commonwealth, the French Community, of which each colony would be an autonomous member, with self-government at home but retaining economic and military ties with France. Then he told the African colonies to choose whether or not they wanted to join the French Community. Most went with the plan; only Guinea, led by Ahmed Sekou Touré (a great-grandson of the Samori Touré who had opposed the French conquest of West Africa) chose full independence. What de Gaulle didn't say was that independence would come with a price; he immediately canceled all French financial aid to Guinea, and over the next two weeks, 4,000 teachers, lawyers, doctors, and civil servants got out. They took paperwork, generators, and even telephones with them, leaving Guinea devoid of an infrastructure.

If de Gaulle was trying to teach Guinea a lesson, it had the opposite effect. Sekou Touré immediately became a hero to Africans, Ghana provided a £10 million loan to keep Guinea's infant economy from collapsing, and the Soviet Union promised more aid. The other colonies started having second thoughts about staying with France, and de Gaulle realized that he would have to fight a third colonial war to keep West and central Africa. Thus, the idea of a league of French-speaking nations died before it became a reality.

By this time, both the rulers of France and Great Britain realized that Ghana and Guinea were not unique; soon every African colony would be demanding independence, and saying no to them would only cause trouble. Kwame Nkrumah explained it thusly before Ghana became independent, when critics warned him that Africa wasn't ready to stand on its own: "We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility." Even the Belgians, who had expected to stay in the Congo forever, now suddenly decided to pull out. Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, spoke about this trend in his famous "Wind of Change" speech, which he gave to the South African parliament at Cape Town in 1960, in the hope that South Africa would stop getting in the way of progress:

"We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power. Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia. Many countries there of different races and civilizations pressed their claim to an independent life. Today the same thing is happening in Africa and the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not this growth of national consciousness is a political fact, and our national policies must take account of it."

1960 is sometimes called the "African Year," because that was the year when nationalism hit the jackpot; seventeen new African nations were born in that year. Most of them were former French colonies; in one stroke France chose to liquidate its entire empire below the Sahara, except for French Somaliland and the Comoros. French West Africa was broken into eight component territories: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali⁽¹⁹⁾, Niger, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Togo and Dahomey. Likewise, French Equatorial Africa was split into five states: Chad, the Central African Republic, Cameroon⁽²⁰⁾, the Republic of the Congo, and Gabon. In addition to that, three of modern Africa's largest countries were turned loose; the British released Nigeria, the Belgians released their part of the Congo⁽²¹⁾, and the French released Madagascar, which promptly renamed itself the Malagasy Republic. Finally, Italian Somaliland became independent five days after British Somaliland, and the two merged to form Somalia.

Nigeria was a special case because of its huge population, and because there was more than one major tribe: the Fulani and Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the west, and the Igbo (also spelled Ibo) in the east. Only a federal government was likely to work under these circumstances, so while the British began preparing Nigeria for independence in 1951, the same year as for Ghana, the transition process took three more years to complete. The result was a dominion state like Canada, where the constitution loosely held together three states (called simply the Northern, Eastern and Western Regions); Queen Elizabeth II was the ultimate head of state, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a Hausa, was elected to be the first prime minister, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was an Igbo, became governor-general. The Yoruba were represented by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who became the opposition leader. Even so, this carefully worked out compromise didn't satisfy everybody; bitter disputes arose over the accuracy of the 1962 and 1963 censuses. In October 1963, Nigeria altered its relationship with the United Kingdom by proclaiming itself a federal republic. The Queen was removed from the hierarchy, and Azikiwe became Nigeria's first president. The easternmost part of the Western Region was detached to become a fourth state, the Mid-Western Region, because its ethnic makeup wasn't Yoruba. Matters got worse when Awolowo's party, the AG, was maneuvered out of power in the Western Region and replaced by another Yoruba party that was more conservative and pro-government, the NNDP. Soon, Awolowo would be imprisoned on questionable treason charges; this was the first step in the slide toward Nigeria's civil war in the next chapter.

As the 1960s began, the "wind of change" spread to East Africa, where the British were no longer trying to make sure their colonies remained under white minority rule. 1961 saw Britain grant independence to Sierra Leone, Tanganyika (where nationalist leader Julius Nyerere and the governor had prepared the country for independence in only three years), and the British Cameroons. The latter were two strips of territory between Nigeria and Cameroon that had been awarded to Britain after World War I, so a plebiscite was held; the northern piece voted to join Nigeria, and the southern piece joined Cameroon. In 1962 the British withdrew from Uganda, and the Belgians pulled out of Ruanda-Urundi, which then split to become Rwanda and Burundi⁽²²⁾. Then Britain gave up Kenya and Zanzibar in 1963, Zambia and Malawi in 1964, and Gambia in 1965. These transitions went smoothly at first, until Zanzibar became independent. The British had left Zanzibar's Arab sultan in charge, though the island's population was mostly African; in January 1964, just four weeks after independence, a communist-inspired revolutionary group seized power, forcing the sultan (and most of his Arab and Indian subjects) to flee. Within days army mutinies broke out in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya, led by younger army officers who wanted to give their own countries more radical governments. All three countries had to swallow their pride and ask the British to send troops, disarm the rebels and restore order. The long-term effect of this was that in April 1964 Zanzibar asked to join Tanganyika, forming a union called Tanzania; unlike other attempts to unite Africa, this one worked, and today there's no reason to believe the Tanzanian union won't last. Another effect was that Nyerere stopped acting like a moderate and began to pursue socialist policies, when forced to choose sides in the Cold War, for instance, he picked China for his closest non-African ally.

One problem that most of the new nations faced was a lack of development; most of what infrastructure existed had been created to connect each former colony with the mother country, but not with its neighbors. Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo, explained it this way:

"The effect of the policy of the colonial powers has been the economic isolation of peoples who live side by side, in some instances within a few miles of each other, while directing the flow of resources to the metropolitan countries. For example, although I can call Paris from my office telephone here in Lome, I cannot place a call to Lagos in Nigeria only 250 miles away. Again, while it takes a short time to send an air-mail letter to Paris it takes several days for the same letter to reach Accra, a mere 132 miles away. Railways rarely connect at international boundaries. Roads have been constructed from the coast inland but very few join economic centers of trade. The productive central regions of Togo, Dahomey and Ghana are as remote from each other as if they were separate continents."

Another challenge was one of language; most African countries contain many tribes, and thus, the people use many languages. To understand each other, the citizens of any given country usually had to keep on using the language of their former colonial masters, rather than play favorites by using the language of one tribe. Thus, European languages, especially French and English, remained widely used after the colonial era ended. If the predominant religion was Islam, Arabic would be used, too. In this regard, the nations on the Indian Ocean were the luckiest, because their lingua franca didn't come from the white man; Swahili had been understood over a wide area for centuries, so they could use that instead.

After independence came, there was talk of an international organization to encourage cooperation between African states. Nkrumah thought this would be the first step toward creating a United States of Africa, but this was too much for most other heads of state, who didn't want to give up the sovereignty they had so recently won. Instead, they experimented with economic unions, an African "common market." Along that line, Nkrumah got Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt to join with Ghana in committing themselves to socialism in January 1961; this became known as the Casablanca Group. Four months later, the other former French colonies, Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria and Liberia formed the Monrovia Group, mainly to present a moderate alternative to the Casablanca Group's radical vision. During the Congo civil war, these groups backed opposing sides, with the Monrovia group behind the United Nations and Kasavubu, and the Casablanca Group supporting Lumumba's party. Still other organizations were tried, but none of them lasted very long. Finally in early 1963, the two main coalitions talked about resolving their differences. They succeeded, and out of this came the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which had its first meeting in Addis Ababa on May 25, 1963.

Early on, the OAU endorsed the idea that no nation's borders should be changed. The frontiers of Africa had been drawn to suit Europeans, not Africans, but the continent had enough problems without worrying about wars between its constituent states. The typical state created by colonial-era frontiers was larger than the land held by any tribe, so several states ended up containing tribes which did not get along; Rwanda, Nigeria and Sudan are the best examples of this mishap. On the other hand, some tribes got split by political boundaries. Examples of these include the Ewe, who ended up in both Togo and Ghana, due to the division of German Togoland between the French and the British, and the Somalis, who currently have parts of their tribe in four countries.⁽²³⁾ But when Africans looked at post-independence conflicts in places like the Congo, they had to conclude this was the safest course of action.

The Congo Crisis

In 1955, Antoine van Bilsen, a Belgian professor, published a paper entitled Thirty-Year Plan for the Political Emancipation of Belgian Africa. He thought independence was thirty years away because no political elite had yet formed in either the Congo or Ruanda-Urundi, and these colonies were at least a generation behind the British and French ones in terms of development. Belgian authorities denounced him as a dangerous revolutionary, because they had no intention of leaving at all; most Belgians accepted the plan because it meant they could stay for thirty more years; African nationalists disliked it for the same reason that the Belgians liked it. But as it turned out, the Belgians would cut the Congo loose before anyone expected, including the nationalists.

In August 1958 Charles de Gaulle visited Brazzaville, just across the Congo River from Leopoldville, to announce to French Equatorial Africa his plan for autonomy within the French Community (see the previous section). Those in Leopoldville who heard about it began demanding independence, and this led to a major riot in January 1959. Order was restored in less than a week, but then the Belgian government looked at the rest of the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, and saw tensions rising everywhere. This caused the authorities to abruptly change their minds about staying; if a war on the scale of the Algerian one broke out while they were there, it would be too much for a little country like Belgium to handle. At the beginning of 1960, several Congolese politicians were summoned to a "round table conference" in Belgium. They went expecting to hear the announcement of a five-year transition period, followed by independence, and were prepared to haggle with the Belgians over the details. Instead, they were simply told that independence would come in less than six months, on June 30, 1960. This wasn't enough time to form political parties on a national scale, or to train Congolese in the details of administration; it wasn't even enough time for the politicians to learn how to get along with each other.

Elections were held in May to form a Congolese government. Forty parties participated, so nobody won a majority. Most political parties at this stage were tribal-based; the typical voter belonged the same party that his tribe belonged to. The only politician who had more than a local following was Patrice-Emery Lumumba (1925-61), a former postal worker from Stanleyville who headed the radical Congolese National Movement. After lengthy negotiations, Lumumba and his chief rival, Joseph Kasavubu (1913?-69), the top politician in Leopoldville, formed a coalition government, in which Kasavubu would be president, and Lumumba would be prime minister. Then things started going wrong. Even the independence ceremonies were a disaster, promising a bad future for Belgian-Congolese relations; Belgium's King Baudouin delivered a patronizing speech, to which Lumumba responded with a diatribe against Belgian colonial excesses, declaring, "We are no longer your monkeys."

Within a week of independence, the Congo descended into chaos. The initial spark came from the military--because there were so few Congolese officers, the government decided to keep some white officers around until they could train their replacements. On July 5, a unit in Leopoldville mutinied after hearing from a Belgian general that he wouldn't promote Africans to the officer ranks right away; "things won't change just because of independence" was how he put it. African troops went on a rampage against Belgian officers and their families, Kasavubu and Lumumba tried to defuse the situation by promoting African officers as quickly as possible, and Belgium flew in more troops--quite against the government's wishes--to protect the 100,000 Europeans still living in the Congo. As law and order disappeared, everyone with a grudge seemed to come forth to settle it; Africans attacked not only Europeans, but also Africans from tribes they did not like. Virtually all remaining Europeans fled, leaving the new country without administrators, and white-collar workers in general.

The situation got much more complicated when secessionist movements kicked in. Moise Tshombe (1919-1969), the leader of the southernmost province of Katanga, declared independence from the rest of the Congo on July 11. Katanga had most of the Congo's mineral wealth (especially copper, uranium and cobalt), and 60 percent of the country's income came from these resources, so it was an area the Congo could not afford to lose. Meanwhile, the southwestern province of Kasai, a source of diamonds, also seceded, calling itself the "Independent Mining State of Kasai." Kasavubu and Lumumba now appealed to the United Nations for help, and a peacekeeping force, personally led by UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, arrived to replace the Belgians and restore order.

The UN force was mostly made up of Africans, sprinkled with a few Swedes and Irishmen, so unlike the Belgian intervention, nobody could call the UN's involvement an act of imperialism. Between the departure of the Belgians and the arrival of the UN, the central government managed to retake Kasai, forcing its separatist leader, Albert Kalonji, into exile. But then the Security Council ruled that no UN forces could be used to affect the outcome of any conflict, so Tshombe allowed them to enter Katanga, using them as a buffer between himself and the Congo government. Disappointed that the UN would not help him recover Katanga, Lumumba then turned to the Soviet Union for aid. This convinced Westerners that Lumumba was a communist sympathizer, and both the Belgians and US President Eisenhower decided that Lumumba must go, before the Soviets could use him to establish a communist base in Africa. With their encouragement, President Kasavubu turned against Lumumba and dismissed him in early September. Lumumba refused to step down and dismissed Kasavubu. To break the deadlock, the army's chief of staff, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (1930-97), seized control of the government. He kept Kasavubu as president, but had Parliament transfer most presidential powers to himself, and placed Lumumba under house arrest; the Czech advisors sent by the Soviet Union were expelled. The UN decided to continue recognizing Lumumba as the rightful leader of the Congo, though it did him little good.

In December 1960 Antoine Gizenga, a former deputy minister under Lumumba, proclaimed himself prime minister at Stanleyville. Because he was one of Lumumba's supporters, most communist and Arab nations, as well as Nkrumah's Ghana, recognized his government, rather than the one of Kasavubu and Mobutu. When he heard the news, Lumumba escaped in a visiting diplomat's car from the Leopoldville residence where he was being held, and made his way toward Stanleyville. Mobutu's troops followed, and they caught up with him as he was trying to find a way across the impassable Sankuru River. Back in Leopoldville he was shown beaten and humiliated to journalists and diplomats, taken to Mobutu's villa, and beaten again before television cameras--but the Belgians and Americans wanted a more permanent ending to the affair. The Belgian minister for African affairs contacted Moise Tshombe, Lumumba's worst enemy, and told him he must accept Lumumba immediately. After a moment's hesitation Tshombe agreed, and Lumumba was flown to Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga, in January 1961.

Lumumba was beaten again on the flight, and driven by Katangese soldiers commanded by Belgians to Villa Brouwe, where he was tortured some more while Tshombe and his cabinet decided what to do with him. Later that night Tshombe and the soldiers took Lumumba and two other members of his government into the bush, and brought them before a large tree, where three firing squads were waiting. The morning after the executions, a senior Belgian policeman told Katanga's interior minister to get rid of the evidence: "You destroy them, you make them disappear. How you do it doesn't interest me." A few days later, Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother dug the corpses from shallow graves, hacked them to pieces, dissolved them with sulfuric acid and finally burned them. When Lumumba's death was officially announced in February, it was reported that he had escaped and was murdered by angry villagers. Not many believed this story, and riots occurred in many parts of the world; the Belgian embassy was burned down in Cairo, and the USSR accused Hammarskjöld of being involved in Lumumba's death.⁽²⁴⁾

In February 1961, Mobutu allowed Kasavubu to form a new provisional government. There were now four Congolese factions: Kasavubu's government in the west, Gizenga's government in the east, and the two breakaway provinces of Katanga and Kasai (Kalonji had returned to Kasai and reestablished control). Then the UN Security Council gave authorization to use force to prevent civil war in the Congo, and ordered all foreign military personnel to leave, unless they were under UN command. This was bad news for Katanga, which largely depended on white mercenaries (led by "Mad Mike" Hoare, a famous Irish adventurer) and now found itself up against the UN as well as the Kasavubu government. Negotiations among the leaders of the factions to replace the central government with a confederation of Congolese states began in March, and when Tshombe withdrew his cooperation in April, he was arrested by Kasavubu and charged with treason. He won his release in June by promising to dismiss all foreign advisors and troops in Katanga, but as soon as he got back to Elizabethville he reneged on his agreement and declared independence again.

The UN force in the Congo launched a limited but successful military action against Tshombe's forces in September. UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld then flew to the scene to meet with Tshombe, hoping to establish a cease-fire, only to have his plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, killing everyone on board. A second UN offensive, launched in December, was defeated because the Katangese had control of the air (no planes backed up the UN forces at this stage). Meanwhile to the north, Gizenga joined the central government as a vice prime minister when Kasavubu's new prime minister, Cyrille Adoula, promised to follow the policies of Lumumba, but Gizenga was dismissed in January 1962 after refusing to go to Leopoldville to face secession charges.

For much of 1962, Adoula and Tshombe tried to negotiate a settlement that would keep Katanga in the Congo. They failed to reach an agreement, in part because Tshombe's armed forces were melting away--international pressure forced Belgium to remove its officers from Katanga. Fearing that time was running out, Tshombe began harassment attacks against the UN. However, his troops went too far when they shot down a UN helicopter in December; this time the UN force had Swedish Saab jets, and the UN counterattack destroyed the Katangese air force on the ground. Then Katanga's army crumbled as the UN ground forces moved in to take Elizabethville. Tshombe was forced to surrender in January 1963, after receiving a promise of amnesty for himself and his followers. He went into exile in May, while Hoare and his mercenaries were rounded up and deported. Then a UN offensive in the northeast captured Stanleyville, destroying Gizenga's faction. For the first time since 1960, the former Belgian Congo was united under one government.

It would not last. In September, Adoula dissolved Parliament, and several members of Lumumba's party turned against him. The most important of these rebels, Laurent-Désiré Kabila (1939?-2001) and Christopher Gbenye, fled to the eastern border of the country and launched new uprisings. Another revolt, led by Pierre Mulele, Lumumba's education minister, broke out at the town of Kikwit, about 250 miles east of Leopoldville, in January 1964. Worst of all for Kasavubu, the UN had to withdraw from the Congo. Always operating on a budget that put it near bankruptcy, it had gone broke on the Congo operations; France and the USSR had refused to make any contributions, while the contributions of the USA and Britain led some to suspect they were using the UN to install a pro-Western government. Without the UN, President Kasavubu did not have the military force needed to keep Katanga from breaking off again. As a result, when Adoula resigned in June 1964, Kasavubu made Tshombe the next prime minister; the only way to keep the country united was to bring Katanga's separatists into the central government on their own terms. To strengthen the army, Tshombe brought back "Mad Mike" Hoare to recruit more mercenaries, and negotiated with US President Johnson for some T-28 armed trainers and B-26K light bombers, flown by exiled Cuban pilots working for the CIA.

The new soldiers and planes were needed because of the Simba (Swahili for Lion) rebellion, led by Gaston Soumialot. The Simbas were tribesmen motivated by the belief that they had become invincible. Witch doctors would cut scars on the faces and chests of Simba recruits, sprinkle "magic dust" in the wounds, place animal skins on them, close their eyes and fire guns in the air--and then they would tell the recruits that the guns had been aimed at them, but they had no effect. Now they thought they could not be killed as long as they followed the Simba code, by staying loyal, keeping themselves pure, and avoiding uninitiated folks like whites and educated blacks. When the Simbas marched on Stanleyville in August 1964, their reputation went ahead of them; 1,500 Congolese soldiers fled, leaving behind armored vehicles and mortars, after they had been scared by forty Simba warriors, led by witch doctors waving palm branches! Approximately 1,650 Europeans who were unlucky enough to be in the city were captured and held hostage.

The next few weeks saw the Simba rebellion spread rapidly, until it engulfed a third of the country. Discipline broke down, and the youth gangs put in charge of rebel-controlled areas behaved with cruelty, massacring possibly 10,000 Westerners and Westernized Africans. The only place where government troops stood their ground was in the eastern town of Bukavu, where they had air support (afterwards the Simba leader blamed his defeat on American atomic bombs!). In September a government counteroffensive began at Lisala, the point farthest down the Congo River reached by the Simbas. The combined force of Katangese, mercenaries and American planes was completely successful, and they went on to take the next town, Bumba. Instantly Simba morale collapsed, because it was proven that they can die; their magic failed to protect them from armored vehicles and warplanes. A second Simba attack on Bukavu failed disastrously, and government forces began advancing up the Congo River toward Stanleyville. When they got to Stanleyville in November, Belgian paratroopers recaptured the city and rescued the hostages. After that it was a mopping up operation; by the end of March 1965, both Mulele's revolt and the Simbas were all but crushed.⁽²⁵⁾

Many Africans found it humiliating that the Congo government depended on white soldiers to stay in power; letting the Belgians intervene was an act of colonialism, from their point of view. Still, this didn't prevent anti-government factions from accepting white help when they needed it. Accordingly, Cuba sent Che Guevara, the famous Latin American guerrilla leader, with a team of Cuban revolutionaries, in April 1965. He had a dream of leading a continent-wide revolution--the continent where it happened didn't really matter--and thought that in a place as anarchic as the Congo, he could do it by delivering men and arms to Kabila. Since the western shore of Lake Tanganyika was still in rebel hands, his first plan was to turn that area into a training ground for new fighters. He traveled heavily disguised, with stops in Algeria and Tanzania, but the CIA knew he had gone to Africa. So did Egypt's President Nasser, who told Guevara not to go, warning that he could become "another Tarzan." American military advisors working with the Congolese army were able to monitor Guevara's communications, arrange an ambush against the rebels and Cubans whenever they tried to attack, and keep supplies and reinforcements from getting to them.

An absentee leader, Kabila was in Cairo and Dar es Salam, meeting with important foreigners like China's Zhou Enlai, so Che Guevara was largely on his own. This was not a good thing, because the Cubans and the Congolese didn't even share a common language, making it impossible to communicate most of the time. In June a letter arrived from Kabila with an assignment--he wanted the Cuban advisors and their trainees to attack Bendera, the site of a hydroelectric plant and a barracks containing 300 of Tshombe's soldiers and 100 of Hoare's mercenaries. It failed miserably and predictably; of the 160 men Guevara had available, sixty deserted before the attack began, and most of the rest never fired a shot. Four Cubans were killed and their papers and diaries were captured, revealing to the other side that Cubans were now involved in the Congo.

Kabila finally showed up in the war zone in July. By then Guevara was growing disillusioned. He had found out the hard way that Africa was not like Latin America. Whereas Guevara thought he was fighting "Yankee imperialism," most of the Congolese on his side were leftists in name only, claiming to follow Lumumba, but more interested in women and drinking than in ideology. As for the leaders, Kabila no longer got along with Soumialot or Gbenye, so it was difficult to present a united front against the enemy. Finally, Guevara was disgusted by the native reliance on magic and mystical customs, which didn't make any sense to him. The Congolese just didn't seem to be revolutionary material. Nevertheless, he stayed until November, when, ill and humiliated, he withdrew to Tanzania.

By that time, the civil war winding down. The principal African backer of Che Guevara and the rebels, Algeria, dropped out in June 1965, when Ahmed Ben Bella was ousted by a coup. Then in October Kasavubu dismissed Tshombe, who was clearly a liability; too many Africans saw him as the white man's stooge.⁽²⁶⁾ With Tshombe gone, his mercenaries had to leave, too, which removed the main reason why African states had opposed the central government; support for the rebels quickly dried up. However, Kasavubu didn't get a chance to enjoy his victory; on November 25 Mobutu, now a general, staged a second coup that removed him. This time, instead of using a front man, Mobutu installed himself as president, remaining firmly in control of the country for the next 32 years.

South Africa and Rhodesia: Segregation Forever

In 1921 leaders of the country's gold-mining industry decided to replace white labor with black labor, figuring that they could get away with paying black workers less. This caused white miners to revolt in March 1922 and seize control of the Rand (the Rand Revolt). Prime Minister Smuts declared martial law and used the military to put down the revolt, but then in 1924 the miners teamed up with the NP to defeat Smuts in that year's election. Hertzog now took over, ruling until 1934, when the Great Depression forced him to form a coalition with Smuts, merging the NP and SAP to create the United Party. This coalition promoted white interests in general at the expense of the Africans; now the ultimate goal was to create two South African states, one white and one black, both part of the Union of South Africa, but the blacks would only have political rights in their own state.⁽²⁷⁾ One consequence of this policy was the passage of the Natives Representation Act in 1936, which took away the right of blacks to vote in the Cape Province, but increased the amount of land they could own from 7 to 13 percent of the country.

South Africa's white supremacist policy worked for as long as it did because it depended on black labor, and though typically blacks were only paid an eighth as much as whites, they still earned more money than they would have gotten in most other places. Because these jobs weren't located in or near the land assigned to Africans, they continued to live in large slums (the townships) around the white-ruled cities, though it meant a denial of rights and a requirement by law to carry passbooks, as if they were immigrant workers. In the years before 1948, a peaceful transition to a government for all races was possible, but nobody tried it because the white voters feared what might happen if they lost their status as a privileged minority. Consequently they tended to elect politicians with the most extremist racial views, figuring that this was the only way to keep South African society the way it was.

South Africa reached an important turning point with the 1948 elections. The NP won a majority of seats, though not a majority of votes; Daniel Malan, a hardline Afrikaner, became the new prime minister, while Smuts and the United Party were relegated to the opposition. Now that they controlled the entire government, the Afrikaners put into action their program to keep the country's races separate and unequal--forever. Called apartheid, Afrikaans for "separateness,"⁽²⁸⁾ it made South Africa's racial discrimination a formal policy, the most important part of the law of the land.

First, the government classified all South Africans into four racial categories: white, black, colored (mixed ancestry) or Asian. Then it stripped the nonwhite groups of all political and economic rights, and specified what neighborhoods they could live in, and what jobs they were allowed to have. Finally, various segregation laws were enacted to keep the races from mingling together. The end result was a society that looked very much like the southeastern United States in the "Jim Crow" era (1877-1965). Interracial marriage, sex and even most casual contact were forbidden. Hospitals, trains, busses, park benches, swimming pools, libraries, stadiums, beaches, movie theaters, and restaurants were all segregated, and the ones labeled "white only" were usually in better condition. Nonwhite schools were expected to give their students inferior educations, so that they would only be qualified for inferior jobs, and learn to accept working at them.

In South Africa, restrooms were segregated by race as well as by gender.

To make it harder to oppose the regime, South Africa's intelligence service became the most efficient in the non-communist world. Even the definition of communism was expanded to mean any struggle for political, economic, or social change, giving the government an excuse for still more repressive measures during the Cold War years. The ANC responded by forming a military faction, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Zulu for "Spear of the Nation") to carry out armed resistance. This led to the arrest of the ANC's most visible leader, Nelson Mandela, in 1962, and his sentencing to life in prison. In 1963 a law was passed making it legal to detain someone for up to ninety days without a trial, for interrogation purposes--for enemies of the government this detention could be renewed indefinitely.

Prime Minister Malan had two very similar successors, Johannes G. Strijdom (1954-58) and Hendrik F. Verwoerd (1958-66). Both of them were just as uncompromising when it came to supporting apartheid, and because the NP continued to gain parliamentary seats with each election, they felt they were moving in the right direction. In 1960, Verwoerd declared the country a republic, with himself as president, rather than prime minister, to reduce Great Britain's ability to criticize South Africa; one year later South Africa pulled out of the British Commonwealth for the same reason.

Because they were Christians who took their religion seriously, some Afrikaners had misgivings about the apartheid system; they wanted to stay in power without looking like they were denying even basic human rights to the blacks. Accordingly, in 1959 Verwoerd introduced a final solution to the racial problem, which he called the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act. South Africa would prepare a decolonization plan of its own, in which the tribal homelands would be organized into ten "Bantustans" and prepared for independence; all blacks who wanted more freedom simply had to move to the Bantustans. The truth of the matter, though, was that the Bantustans would never be able to stand on their own. Not only did they have the country's poorest land, most were divided into several pieces, so that the residents would have to depend on South Africa's good will simply to travel from one part of a Bantustan to another. And because 13 percent of the land wasn't enough to support 75 percent of South Africa's population, most Africans would have to stay where they were--as cheap labor for white-run industries.

As long as South Africa's economy was healthy, with a GDP as high as the rest of the continent put together, apartheid looked like it was good for business. The rest of the world couldn't ignore South Africa's mineral resources, which included most of the world's platinum and chromium, and nearly one half of the gold and manganese, topped off by the famous South African diamond mines. Foreign investment in South African industry and the Johannesburg stock market continued to rise steadily until the Sharpeville massacre. And the nearest countries found their ability to act limited, because many of their citizens worked at South African jobs. Nearly every nation criticized South African policy, but without effective economic sanctions, nothing seemed capable of moving the implacable, self-righteous Afrikaner leadership.

On the other side of the Limpopo River, a similar system was established in Southern Rhodesia. When the charter of the British South Africa Company expired in 1923, Britain allowed the colony's European settlers to vote on whether or not they wanted to join South Africa. They voted no, so Southern Rhodesia got its own local government instead. At the same time, copper was discovered in Northern Rhodesia, so the next few years saw industrial development in both colonies.

After World War II, many white immigrants moved to this part of Africa. Before long, Sir Godfrey Huggins, the leader of Southern Rhodesia, and Sir Roy Welensky, his Northern Rhodesian counterpart, proposed that the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland be joined in a single federation. They argued that the three colonies had become interdependent; Nyasaland supplied labor to both Rhodesias, while Southern Rhodesia supplied manufactured goods and food. Together they formed a powerful economic unit, second only to South Africa on the continent. However, Africans were not yet trained to manage a modern economy and government, so Europeans would have to be in charge of everything. London agreed, and the white-run Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was set up in 1953.

During the next ten years, the clashing forces of settler intransigence and African nationalism tore the new federation apart. Nearly all the benefits of rapid economic growth went to the Europeans; in 1961, it was estimated that the average annual income of a wage-earning European was £1,209, while for a wage-earning African it was only £87. Government spending was even more unequal, with the Federation's 220,000 whites receiving 25 times as much per capita in educational spending as the 15 million blacks, to give one example. Africans began to demand a bigger piece of the pie, both economically and politically, but the politicians in charge of the Federation and South Rhodesian Parliaments refused to yield. Huggins wrote in 1956 that "Political control must remain in the hands of civilized people, which for the foreseeable future means the Europeans." Welensky was even more blatant; he didn't see the Federation as a partnership between equals, but something like the relationship between a rider and a horse, with the African as the horse! In 1959, a series of riots, strikes and demonstrations broke out, leading to states of emergency being declared in Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia.

The settlers insisted that a handful of extremists were responsible for the unrest; just lock them up and all would be well again. London wasn't convinced, and a commission sent to investigate the situation found out that "partnership was a sham." By this time, the British were no longer interested in enforcing white minority rule, after their experience in places like Kenya, so the Federation Constitution was rewritten in 1960 to give each colony more African representation in its government, and the right to secede from the Federation. As a result, Africans gained control of the local government in Nyasaland in 1961, and Northern Rhodesia in 1963. Neither of those colonies had a significant European population, and the nationalist leaders that emerged in each (Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda in Nyasaland, Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia) announced they would leave the Federation at the earliest opportunity. Britain got the message, and the Federation was officially dissolved on the last day of 1963. Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia both gained independence a year later, under new names: Nyasaland became Malawi, and Northern Rhodesia became Zambia.

Many expected that the next step would be for Britain to grant independence to Southern Rhodesia (now called simply Rhodesia), once a majority-rule government was established. Instead, the white minority acted first. A new leadership, more extreme than its predecessors, came to power, announcing that its goal was independence without surrendering power to the blacks. To anyone who cared to listen, they pointed out that while their state on the surface resembled South Africa, it didn't have racism codified to the degree that apartheid was. Furthermore, in 1961 the blacks were given fifteen of the sixty-five seats in Parliament, and they could have more if enough whites joined them to provide the two-thirds majority needed to change the Constitution. As far as they were concerned, those concessions were enough, and they were appalled when Britain insisted on more progress toward majority rule. After all attempts to negotiate a compromise failed, Prime Minister Ian Smith declared Rhodesia an independent state on November 11, 1965. In a twisted view of what liberty meant, the first paragraph of his declaration deliberately sounded like the 1776 Declaration of Independence that created the United States:

"Whereas in the course of human affairs history has shown it may become necessary for a people to resolve the political affiliations which have connected them with another people and to assume among other nations the separate and equal status to which they are entitled . . ."

Smith finished by exclaiming "God Save the Queen!" as if he was still a loyal British citizen. For each of the next thirteen years, on the anniversary of the declaration, he would commemorate it by ringing a replica of the American Liberty Bell.

This was an embarrassing situation for the British, with Rhodesia's English-speaking settlers still claiming to be "British," but refusing to take orders from London. Nobody wanted to use military force against them, so Britain opted for economic sanctions. The UN agreed that a total blockade would bring down Rhodesia in a matter of weeks, and together they persuaded the rest of the world not to give diplomatic recognition to Ian Smith's regime.

In practice, though, it didn't work (sanctions rarely work, as the world has found out the hard way). Three of Rhodesia's neighbors also had white leadership--South Africa and Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique--and they were quite willing to let vital supplies get to Rhodesia through their ports, and for Rhodesian exports to go out the same way. When the British tried to stop shipments of oil from going to Rhodesia by way of Beira, Mozambique, for example, South Africa let the oil pass through its territory instead, and even the world's superpowers didn't want to slap a blockade on South Africa. As time went by, white Rhodesians grew more intransigent. Liberal whites emigrated, taking the so-called "chicken run," while white farmers with a hardline attitude moved in from South Africa, seeking new opportunities. Thus, Rhodesia's 250,000 Europeans succeeded in imposing their will on six million Africans, at least for the short run, and Rhodesia joined the bloc of states in southern Africa that resisted the "wind of change." They couldn't defy the world forever, but getting them to realize this would take years, not weeks or months.

1. For the other campaigns of World War I, read Chapter 14 of my European history, Chapter 2 of my Russian history and Chapter 15 of my Middle Eastern history.

2. He could do this because of his status as Islam's Caliph (spiritual leader), a title that had technically been his since the events in Chapter 6, footnote #10.

3. In 1917 Blaise Diagne became the Undersecretary of State for the Colonies of Metropolitan France. He was definitely an exception to the rule. The French government had promised full citizenship to any black African who accepted French culture, but nobody was in a hurry to educate the natives for this, because it would mean treating them as equals rather than as conquered peoples. For Moslems it was even worse, because they had to reject Islamic law in favor of French civil law; few were willing to go that far. By 1936, French West Africa had a population of 14 million, of which 80,000 Senegalese and only 2,000 others were French citizens.

4. Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist leader, told his Jamaican followers before he left for the United States in 1916, "Look to Africa where a Black King shall be crowned; he shall be your redeemer." They viewed the coronation of Haile Selassie as a fulfilment of this prophecy, and called themselves Rastafarians, using Selassie's pre-coronation name. When Haile Selassie visited Jamaica in 1966, a hundred thousand Rastafarians mobbed the airport, smoking marijuana and playing drums, convinced that the emperor was the Messiah. He had no idea what was going on, and refused to leave his plane for an hour, until persuaded that it was safe to do so. Still, he was disturbed enough to tell the Ethiopian archbishop about the affair after he got home, and the archbishop sent a team of missionaries to Jamaica, in the hope of converting Rastafarians back to Christianity.
Rita Marley became a Rastafarian after seeing Haile Selassie, and her enthusiasm drew her husband, the famous reggae singer Bob Marley, into the faith that he later publicized. Today's Rastafarians still believe that Haile Selassie was an incarnation of God, though he remained a Coptic Christian and died decades ago under humiliating circumstances.

5. The 6th South African Infantry, an inexperienced unit sent to the East Africa campaign, tended to look down on all non-European soldiers until February 12, 1916, when they ran away from a group of pro-German askaris charging with bayonets. However, a nearby Indian unit, the 130th Baluchis, stood their ground and managed to save the machine gun their white colleagues had abandoned. After the battle, the Indians sent the machine gun back to the South Africans on a mule, with a note that read, "With the compliments of the 130th Baluchis. May we request that you no longer refer to our people as coolies."

6. For more details about the development of the Church in Africa, read the "Zulu Zion" section in Chapter 8 of my history of Christianity.

7. Also take note of the fact that Spain's most battle-hardened troops were now stationed in Spanish Morocco. Ten years later, General Francisco Franco would use them to launch the Spanish Civil War.

8. Of the 300,000 soldiers that Italy committed to the campaign, 5,000 were killed, and most of the casualties were not ethnic Italians, but troops from Italy's African colonies. This made Mussolini remark that he wished more Italians had been killed so that people would take the war seriously.

9. "If there ever was an opportunity of striking a decisive blow for a generous cause it was then. The fact that the nerve of the British government was not equal to the occasion, played a part in leading to a more terrible war."--Winston Churchill

10. Mussolini had the largest of Axum's ancient obelisks hauled away as a war trophy in 1937. These structures, raised by pre-Christian Ethiopians to mark royal graves, are at least 1,700 years old, and were probably inspired by Egyptian obelisks, but have a distinctive style of their own. After World War II, Ethiopia called for the return of the 78-foot-tall granite obelisk, but the Italian government dragged its feet for decades, arguing that it wasn't feasible to send the obelisk back, and even claiming that it had been in Rome long enough to become part of Italy's cultural heritage, like "Cleopatra's Needle" in St. Peter's Square. It was finally returned in 2005, after having been sawn into three pieces so a cargo plane could carry it. One old Ethiopian man, who had been a child the last time the obelisk stood in Axum, remarked that he didn't believe the war between Italy and Ethiopia had truly ended until the obelisk returned.

11. Felix Eboué went on to become the governor of all of French Equatorial Africa in 1943. As far as the author knows, he was the first black man to serve as governor of an African colony; but he wasn't an African native; he was born in French Guiana, France's South American colony.

12. However, this meant delaying Hitler's upcoming invasion of Russia, and may have been the main reason why that campaign failed, resulting in the ultimate defeat of Germany. See Chapter 3 of my Russian history for the details.

13. Both sides found it distressingly easy to get lost in the desert. This happened to Rommel in 1941, when he lost track of where he was along the front lines, decided he wouldn't be able to find his way back before nightfall, and chose to spend the night out in the open. The next morning he learned he had spent the night next to a British unit, the 4th Indian Division, but had not yet been detected--so he escaped from what could have been a very embarrassing situation.

14. For two weeks in early June of 1942, 2,000 Free French soldiers held out at Bir Hakeim, against 40,000 Germans and Italians. In the end they had to withdraw to keep up with the retreating British, but nowadays this is counted as the first Free French victory against the Axis (as opposed to them fighting other Frenchmen).

15. Three future African heads of state were living in London at the time: Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast. They were involved in activities with the men at the congress, but did not attend.

16. The new lake, called Lake Nasser, drowned a number of ruins dating back to the time of the pharaohs, most of them temples built by Ramses II. Consequently, in the late 1950s and early 60s there was a rush by archaeologists to study as much of the landscape between the first and third cataracts as possible, before it was lost to the rising waters of the lake. One site, Abu Simbel, got international attention as a team of engineers dismantled its two temples and put them back together on higher ground. I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is the greater achievement, the original Abu Simbel temples, one of which featured four 67-foot-high statues of the mighty pharaoh, or the modern effort to rescue them from a wider, higher Nile.

17. Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya, London, 1938, pg. xxi.

18. The origin of the name "Mau Mau" is just as mysterious. Some think it was made up by Europeans overhearing Kikuyus talking; others have suggested it was a Swahili acronym for Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru -- "Let the white man go back abroad so the African can get his independence." Because the raiders usually attacked at night, and in small numbers, they never were easy to identify.

19. In 1959, Senegal had merged with Mali (then called French Sudan) to form the Mali Federation. They were still together when independence came in June 1960, but two months later, Senegal withdrew because of political disagreements. As it turned out, the Senegalese have more in common with a former British colony, Gambia, so those two countries might come together some day, in a union called Senegambia.

20. A pro-communist party, the Cameroonian People's Union, tried to seize control of Cameroon in 1956. It was still battling anti-communist forces when independence came four years later, which shows how anxious the French were to leave. It took until 1963 for Cameroon's first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, to suppress the uprising.

21. Cartographers sometimes name each part of the Congo after its capital; thus, the former French Congo becomes Congo-Brazzaville, while the former Belgian Congo is either Congo-Leopoldville or Congo-Kinshasa, depending on what time period you're talking about. It was easier from 1971 to 1997, when the ex-Belgian Congo was called Zaire.

22. Rwanda was ruled by the Hutu tribe, and Burundi by the Tutsi. It became necessary to give them separate countries because Hutu riots had forced the last Tutsi king of Rwanda to flee in 1959. However, that wouldn't prevent the worst bloodbath in recent history, as we'll see in the final chapter of this work.

23. Shortly before independence came to Togo, Nkrumah proposed reuniting the Ewe tribe by making Togo part of Ghana. Olympio wanted nothing to do with the idea.
The flag of Somalia has a single star on a light blue field. The five points on that star represent the five places where Somalis live: Italian, British and French Somaliland, the Ogaden desert in Ethiopia, and Kenya. Since 1960, Somalia's boundaries have only encompassed the first two communities; it would probably take a war to get the other three.

24. The full story of Lumumba's overthrow wasn't revealed until forty years later; most of the details posted here came from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/974745.stm. Lumumba became a martyr among leftists, because he was only 35 years old, and because the United States apparently ordered his assassination. A CIA agent showed up in Leopoldville with a tube of poisoned toothpaste, but he never got a chance to plant it in Lumumba's bathroom. The Russians remembered him by building Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow; during the Soviet era roughly 10,000 students went there, nearly three fourths of them from the Third World. It also got a reputation as a training ground for terrorists and revolutionaries, like Cuba's Carlos the Jackal. The school is still in operation today, but since the Soviet Union's collapse it has been renamed the People's Friendship University of Russia (PFU), and now the students are mostly Russian; the only foreigners are those who can pay with the cash modern Russia needs so badly.

25. Congolese soldiers of all factions usually ran away if they thought they were losing a battle, because even in the mid-twentieth century, some tribes in the region practiced ritual cannibalism, eating the heart of a slain enemy to gain his strength. Nobody wanted to fight to the end if it meant becoming dinner! One CIA pilot was reportedly captured, killed and eaten after his plane was shot down.

26. After his dismissal, Tshombe fled to Spain. The Congo sentenced him to death in absentia, and in 1967 he was hijacked in his private plane and taken to Algeria. He died there two years later, while awaiting extradition.

27. As you can see, Hertzog was one of the founders of apartheid, but he was more honest about it than other white politicians. He admitted that the only reason for separating the races was the fear that someday the whites would be overwhelmed by the country's black majority: "The European is severe and hard on the Native because he is afraid of him. It is the old instinct of self-preservation. And the immediate outcome of this is that so little has been done in the direction of helping the Native to advance."

28. Appropriately, the correct pronunciation is "apart-hate."

© Copyright 2005 Charles Kimball