The Xenophile Historian

Chapter 9: THE INDEPENDENCE ERA, PART II

1965 to 2005

	Independence: Tying Up the Loose Ends
	Civil War in the Ex-Portuguese Empire
	Who Owns the Western Sahara?
	One-Man Rule:
	The Good
	The Bad
	And the Ugly
	North Africa Takes a Military Road
	Tunisia & Egypt
	Algeria
	Somalia & Sudan
	Libya
	Mauritania
	Nigeria: The Great Underachiever
	The Island at the End of the World
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	The Horn of Africa: Horn of Famine
	Ethiopia & Eritrea
	Somalia
	Southern Africa: The Fall of Apartheid
	Rhodesia/Zimbabwe
	South Africa
	Southwest Africa/Namibia
	Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo: Still the Dark Heart of Africa
	America's Stepchild and Her Anarchic Neighbors
	Liberia
	The Ivory Coast
	Sierra Leone
	The Islamist Menace
	Starting Over Again With the African Union
	Modern African Demographics
	The Challenges Facing Modern Africa
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The Horn of Africa: Horn of Famine

Another ongoing problem was Ethiopia's non-Amhara subjects, especially the Eritreans in the north, the Somalis in the east, and the Oromo in the south. In Chapter 8 we noted that most government jobs, and ownership over much of the land, were reserved for Christian members of the Amhara clans, even in predominantly Moslem areas like Eritrea and the Ogaden. The Eritreans revolted in 1961 because they were supposed to be autonomous, but Ethiopia wouldn't let them have a say in how they should be governed. At first, there was only one group fighting for Eritrea's independence, the Cairo-based Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). It failed to make much headway against the Ethiopian government, and a massive Ethiopian invasion in 1967 drove 7,000 Eritreans across the border into Sudan, thereby raising tensions between Addis Ababa and Khartoum. In 1970 one faction of the ELF broke away and founded another rebel force, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF); it soon became more important, fielding ten thousand guerrilla fighters. In the early 1970s Ethiopia still had the advantage, because the ELF and EPLF were more interested in fighting each other, but even after the government put all of Eritrea under martial law (December 1970) it could not stamp out the rebellion. In 1964 Ethiopia and Somalia briefly clashed over the Ogaden; they agreed to a truce along the border, but new hostilities would break out from time to time.

The drought of the Sahel also began to afflict Ethiopia in 1972, leading to an economic crisis. Haile Selassie did nothing to relieve the resulting famine, and may not have even known about it; the government kept him busy with festivities surrounding his 80^th birthday. It became clear that the government was failing, because the emperor was failing, too. He had so much control over the government--and Ethiopian society--that little got done when he was abroad: "Most Ethiopians thought in terms of personalities, not ideology, and out of long habit still looked to Haile Selassie as the initiator of change, the source of status and privilege, and the arbiter of demands for resources and attention among competing groups."⁽²³⁾ It was time for a change, and because many members of the Oromo tribe had joined the military when other avenues of advancement had been denied to them, Oromo officers would lead the way here. In January 1974, the army garrison at Nagalle, a desert town near the southern border, mutinied because of appalling living conditions, and again the government failed to make an effective response. A group of officers in Addis Ababa decided to take matters into their own hands, forming the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Services (Derg in Amharic, also spelled Dergue). In September 1974 they deposed Haile Selassie, placed him under house arrest, set up a provisional military administrative council to rule in his place, and abolished the monarchy which had lasted for more than a thousand years.

Haile Selassie, at the end of his reign.

The world did not give much attention to the fall of Ethiopia's last emperor: it seemed like just another Third World coup, and because its nearest neighbor, Somalia, was both hostile and a Soviet satellite, Ethiopia was expected to remain pro-Western. However, the Derg had other plans. The new rulers had Marxist leanings, and though the Derg was not a communist party per se, that did not keep them from launching a communist-style revolution. First they announced that the Provisional Council would be a permanent government, and a bloody purge followed, in which 59 members of the royal family, and ministers and generals of the imperial regime, were executed. Meanwhile, all banks were nationalized, and then industry, rural land, and finally urban land and housing. In August 1975 the Derg announced that Haile Selassie had died during a prostate operation; rumors persist, however, that he was smothered with a pillow.⁽²⁴⁾

The revolutionaries soon lost control of what they had started. 60,000 young radical students were sent into the countryside to motivate and radicalize the peasants, a move very similar to what China did with the Red Guard in the 1960s. Ambassadors from communist countries, especially China, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, warned that reckless behavior was endangering what had started as a promising situation. Peasant uprisings broke out, and an anti-Derg movement appeared, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP). The EPRP began a guerrilla war known as the "White Terror," and the Derg responded with a "Red Terror"; an estimated 100,000 people were killed or disappeared in 1977 and 1978, as a result of this conflict. 1977 also saw the revolution turn against itself, the way so many others have; several high-ranking members were purged, including the Derg's chairman, General Teferi Benti, and Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, who may have been the real mastermind behind the revolution, became the new number one.

By now the revolution was in serious trouble, and not just because of the EPRP. Much of Eritrea had come under rebel control by 1977. In the northwest, the Tigrean People's Liberation Front (TGLF) launched a rebellion in 1976, to establish a separate state in the region of Gondar, Ethiopia's ancient capital; it was soon joined by a monarchist party, the Ethiopian Democratic Union (EDU). Somalia invaded the Ogaden in July 1977, to help the Somali separatists, and quickly conquered the whole region except for the towns of Harar and Dire Dawa. And to top all this off there was no more military aid coming in, because the Western powers, especially the United States, had broken off diplomatic relations by now.

Mengistu's last hope was the USSR, and after he made a trip to Moscow in February 1977 he got the assistance he needed--on the Soviet Union's terms. With the Soviet arms came Cuban advisors and soldiers, since they had been so useful in Angola, and they managed to halt the Somali advance. The Soviets couldn't burn both ends of the East African candle, and they probably expected it when Somalia expelled its Russian and Cuban advisors in November, and ordered the closing of the Soviet naval base at Berbera. Then Somalia normalized relations with the United States, but this was the time of the Carter presidency, which didn't want any part in the brush wars of the Third World, so no Western aid came to offset the loss of Soviet aid. In early 1978 Mengistu took back the Ogaden; by the end of the year he had also crushed the EPRP, and the EDU broke up when it was on the verge of capturing Gondar. Then he turned against the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON), a Marxist group that had supported him to this point, fearing that its members were more loyal to their party than to the Derg. After that the USSR built up Mengistu's armed forces until he had the second largest army in sub-Saharan Africa, and a significant navy and air force as well.⁽²⁵⁾

As Mengistu gained the upper hand against his opponents, he declared communism the official ideology of the state, and in 1984 he created a Marxist-Leninist party, the Worker's Party of Ethiopia (WPE), to serve as the country's legal political party. In 1987 he completed a Soviet-style constitution, and it abolished the Derg, though several Derg members remained in the elected national assembly that took its place; this assembly elected Mengistu as Ethiopia's first president.

Now that Ethiopia was a confirmed communist state, in the mold of the Soviet Union, everything quickly went downhill. Mengistu had never defeated the Eritrean or Tigrean rebels (eight Derg-sponsored offensives in Eritrea between 1978 and 1986 had all failed), and the previously mentioned droughts continued to hamper agricultural production. The famine was really bad between 1984 and 1986, when an estimated one million Ethiopians starved to death. Because the famine hit the war-ravaged northern regions the hardest, the government relocated 600,000 northerners to the south, but this didn't help much, and the government's distrust of foreigners made it difficult for the West to send in food and medical supplies.⁽²⁶⁾

Meanwhile, the separatist factions resumed their offensives. The TGLF conquered all of Tigre and began raiding neighboring provinces. In 1988 the EPLF captured Afabet, the headquarters of the Ethiopian army in northeastern Eritrea, and the Soviet Union announced that it would no longer support the Ethiopian government. Officially the Soviets claimed they were dissatisfied with Ethiopia's economic and political development, but in truth the USSR was now bankrupt, and would soon collapse; whatever the reason, it sealed Mengistu's fate. In 1989 the TGLF merged with some other opponents of the regime to create a more universal movement, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPDRF), and later in the same year Mengistu agreed to peace talks with both the EPDRF and the EPLF. However, this did not keep the rebels from fighting--and winning; the EPLF captured Massawa in 1990 and Asmara in 1991, completing its conquest of Eritrea. As for the EPDRF, it marched on Addis Ababa in 1991. The Ethiopian army lost its will to fight, and 50 leaders of the government fled the country; Mengistu found refuge in Zimbabwe, and still lives there, in a mansion provided by Robert Mugabe.

The EPRDF now joined several smaller groups to form a transitional government, led by the former leader of the TGLF, Meles Zenawi (1954-). Following a referendum, Eritrea became independent in 1993, with EPLF leader Isaias Afwerki as its first president. In 1994 Ethiopian voters elected a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution; in 1995 a new legislature, the Council of People's Representatives, was elected, and Zenawi became the prime minister.

Not everyone is happy with these arrangements. Some members of the Oromo and Amhara tribes consider Ethiopia's present-day government to be no more legitimate than the communist one it replaced. In the Ogaden, Somali rebels made another bid for independence, resulting in some battles between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1996. And while Ethiopia and Eritrea were on cordial terms when they parted, they fought a war from 1998 to 2002, because the border between them is not precisely defined. Currently 4,000 UN peacekeeping troops stand between the two countries, and will probably stay there until both sides accept a final border ruling; the war also created yet another landmine-infested zone for Africa. Despite all this, Zenawi was reelected in 2000. It looks like stability has come to Ethiopia, which is more than you can say for neighboring Somalia.

Somalia

In 1982, Somali dissidents backed by the Ethiopian army and air force invaded central Somalia. Siad Barre immediately called for help, and the United States increased the amount of military and economic aid from $45 to $80 million. Somalia managed to defeat the invasion, but most of the American aid was used to repress domestic opponents. In 1984 Somalia buried the hatchet with another neighbor it hadn't gotten along with, by signing a treaty with Kenya that permanently renounced Somalia's claim to Kenyan territory. Around the same time, Somalia also normalized relations with South Africa, and did the same with Libya in early 1985 (Libya had favored Ethiopia during the Ogaden War); Siad Barre's situation at home was getting more critical every year, to the point that he would now accept arms from anybody.

Siad Barre also kept control in the early 1980s by filling available government positions with members of his own clan, the Mareehaan. In May 1986, he was severely injured in an auto accident; although he had diabetes, he recovered enough after a month to go back to work. During his recuperation, however, his four top-ranking generals competed with the president's brother, son and senior wife to grab as much power as possible. The rest of 1986 saw purges of officers who weren't considered absolutely loyal, which weakened the ministries they worked in as well, and those officers who remained started plundering the treasury.

Siad Barre's reign of terror was mainly directed against three clans, the Majeerteen, the Isaaq and the Hawiye. They revolted when they saw themselves shut out of the government, but the government won most of the battles until the crisis of 1986. After that Siad Barre was openly at war with much of the nation; Somali planes bombed cities in rebel-held areas, and government troops massacred opponents in the neighborhood of Mogadishu. The United States cut off aid in 1989, and the army dissolved into small groups loyal to their commanding officers or to clan leaders. By 1990, Siad Barre controlled little besides Mogadishu. In the capital's main stadium, a demonstration against the president on July 6, 1990 turned into a riot, and Siad Barre's bodyguard opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 65. A week later, Siad Barre put on trial several members of the Manifesto Group, 114 signers of a petition that called for elections and human rights. 46 were sentenced to death, but during the trial more demonstrators surrounded the court; everyday activity in Mogadishu stopped, and Siad Barre got nervous enough to drop the charges against the accused. As the city celebrated this political victory, Siad Barre moved into a military bunker near the airport to save himself, should the people come after him. Then the clans opposing the government formed a united front and marched on Mogadishu. Siad Barre fled the country in January 1991; four years later he died in exile in Nigeria.

Siad Barre had led a brutal regime for more than twenty years, but at least it was a regime; nothing resembling a government could be set up after he left. Only their dislike for Siad Barre had united the opposition. In the northwest, the territory that had once been British Somaliland declared its independence, calling itself the Republic of Somaliland. Two warlords in Mogadishu were proclaimed president, Mohammed Ali Mahdi and Mohammed Farah Aidid, so gun battles broke out between their followers. In the rest of the country, authority above the local level simply disappeared. With the landscape rendered desolate by the drought, patrolled by gangs of ragtag militias made up largely of drug-addicted kids (the drug of choice is a hallucinogenic plant named qat), driving pickup trucks jury-rigged with guns stolen from more professional armies, Somalia came to look like a real-life version of the post-nuclear Australia portrayed in the "Mad Max" movies. 50,000 were killed in fighting between factions over the rest of 1991 and 1992, while a devastating famine claimed 300,000 more lives. Even sailing off the Somali coast became a risky proposition; pirates appeared in that part of the Indian Ocean for the first time in centuries.

The first food sent by the United Nations was simply confiscated by soldiers, never reaching the starving folks it was intended for. In response to this, the UN launched Operation Restore Hope; nearly 30,000 peacekeeping troops, led by the United States, arrived in Somalia in December 1992 to guard the next shipments of humanitarian aid, and to protect ports, airports and roads. A lot of lives were saved in the relief effort that followed, but the bully-boys were hostile to these armed newcomers, and intended to undo anything accomplished. When the UN realized this, "mission creep" set in, and the assignment of the peacekeepers changed from feeding the hungry to restoring order. A proposal was floated to reintegrate Somalia through a transitional government, with eighteen autonomous regions under a federal authority. Most of the warlords went along with this plan, and the peacekeepers began to disarm their militias. Mohammed Farah Aidid, however, would not comply, and June his force killed 24 Pakistani troops inspecting a weapons storage site. Now the Americans, backed by helicopters, swept through the city to arrest Aidid, but whenever they torched a building or broke into it, he wasn't there. This led to the battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, in which between 500 and 1,000 Somalis, 18 Americans and one Malaysian were killed. Two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and the body of one of the Americans was dragged through the streets. CNN got pictures of all this, and the outcry was so great that the United States decided to cut and run; the last Americans left Somalia in March 1994, and the rest of the peacekeepers were withdrawn by early 1995.⁽²⁷⁾

Back in Mogadishu, Aidid died from gunshot wounds suffered in a 1996 battle. Paradoxically, his son, Hussein Mohammed Aidid, had lived in the United States for twenty years; now a US citizen, he actually was among the American soldiers who went on the recent mission to Somalia. The younger Aidid had to resign from the US Marine Corps to assume leadership of his father's militia. Hopefully his previous career ("once a Marine, always a Marine") and the long time he spent abroad will make him friendlier to the West.

The rest of the 1990s saw further splits. In 1998 the area north and east of Mogadishu declared itself the independent state of Puntland; the name comes from the idea that the land the ancient Egyptians called "Punt" was here (see Chapter 2, footnote #17). Then in 1999, the area south and west of Mogadishu declared independence as Jubaland, deriving its name from the Juba River. Like Somaliland, none of these states has yet received diplomatic recognition from any foreign government. Of all three quasi-states, Somaliland is the most stable; it has seen two presidents so far (Mohammed Ibrahim Egal, 1993-2002, and Dahir Riyale Kahin, 2002-present), and was largely unaffected by both the recent civil war and the UN intervention, both of which were concentrated in the south.

From 1997 onwards, the main clan leaders made arrangements for a super-conference, in which hundreds of rival clan members would hammer out a new government. Fighting between the factions delayed the conference several times. The conference finally took place in Djibouti, lasting for five months in 2000. The participants at the conference elected a Transitional National Government (TNG), with a legislature and a president. However, it failed to accomplish much else before it expired in 2003. It didn't even control all of Mogadishu; the 2004 elections to create a second TNG had to be held in a stadium in Nairobi, and the legislature still meets in the Kenyan capital.

At the time of this writing, Somalia is less chaotic than it was in the last years of the twentieth century, but not by much. The TNG has not yet found a way to reintegrate Puntland, Jubaland and Somaliland under its rule. It seemed like Somalia was coming back together when Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president of Puntland, was elected president of the TNG in 2004, but as soon as he moved to Mogadishu, Puntland chose another president to take his place. In much of the former Somalia, anarcho-capitalism seems to be the rule; private companies are popping up to provide the services that governments normally provide elsewhere. Ironically, that may be why there is less violence these days; the various militias have found employment as security agencies, and everybody agrees it would be better not to fight than to do anything that would prompt the UN or African Union to send another peacekeeping force. Under those circumstances, attempts to put Somalia back together could make trouble, rather than reduce it; one observer remarked that "state-building and peace-building are two separate, and, in some respects, mutually antagonistic enterprises in Somalia."⁽²⁸⁾

Southern Africa: The Fall of Apartheid

When Angola and Mozambique became independent in 1975, both promptly joined the "frontline states" opposing white rule, and the scales began to tip against South Africa and Rhodesia. Botswana also declared itself a frontline state (though it could only provide verbal support), Angola provided additional bases for SWAPO, and ZAPU and ZANU merged their forces into one liberation army, the "Patriotic Front"; Rhodesia thus found itself surrounded by enemies on three sides. White Rhodesians were leaving the country in large enough numbers that even Ian Smith could see time was running out for his government, so when South Africa prompted him to negotiate a compromise, he did so with three moderate black leaders, all clergymen--a Methodist bishop, Abel Muzorewa, Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, and Rev. Jeremiah Chirau. At the end of 1978 they agreed to a new constitution that allowed limited majority rule and safeguards for whites; Muzorewa was elected prime minister, and the country's name was changed to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. However, the Patriotic Front, which demanded all or nothing where the government was concerned, refused to take part in the elections, and it called Muzorewa a puppet of the whites. Nor was the new state any more popular abroad than its predecessor. In 1980 the Rhodesian government accepted British and American mediation to produce a more acceptable government, and Rhodesia briefly became a British colony again, until new elections could be for majority rule, this time with no strings attached.

South Africa had leaned on Smith because it decided that it could live with a black government next door, if it was a moderate one like Botswana's. Instead, all the previous years of white intransigence made sure this wouldn't happen. When the elections were held in March 1980, most blacks voted for their tribe's candidate for prime minister, and Robert Mugabe won by a landslide. Zimbabwe-Rhodesia became simply Zimbabwe, and in 1982 the capital's name was changed from Salisbury to Harare.

Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe governed cautiously at first. He felt it was payback time, and that Zimbabwe should have an all-black society, but he couldn't discriminate too much against the whites as long as South Africa was under white rule. South Africa threatened to destabilize his regime because he supported the African National Congress (ANC) and Mozambique's government; Mugabe would have preferred to ship Zimbabwean exports through Mozambique, but the civil war between FRELIMO and RENAMO meant he couldn't do without South Africa completely. Also, he had been forced by the 1980 agreement to share power; his rival Joshua Nkomo became vice president, due to his second place showing in the 1980 elections, and 20 of Parliament's 100 seats had been reserved for whites, coloreds and Asians. An uprising broke out in Matabeleland in 1982, because Ndebele dissidents questioned the validity of those elections; at least 20,000 were killed in the massacres that followed, and Nkomo and other ZAPU party members were expelled from the government. After that Mugabe made several moves to centralize power under himself. In 1986 he amended the constitution to eliminate the "non-black only" seats; in 1987 he combined the two offices of president and prime minister⁽³⁰⁾; in 1988 he and Nkomo agreed to merge ZAPU and ZANU into one party, called ZANU-PF. The new super-party won 82 percent of the vote in the 1995 legislative elections, and Mugabe was reelected president in 1996, running unopposed after two opposition candidates withdrew, protesting that the election rules were unfair.

Zimbabwe's economy did eventually tank, but South Africa was not responsible; Mugabe did it all by himself. By this time most of Zimbabwe's whites were long gone--those remaining amounted to 1 percent of the population--but they still owned at least half of the farmland. In 1997 Mugabe announced that he would not tolerate this any longer; 1,500 white-owned farms would be seized without compensation and given to blacks who owned little or no land. Strong protests by white farmers and the international community, combined with a national strike, persuaded Mugabe to back down. He brought up the issue again in February 2000 with a constitutional referendum that would have allowed Mugabe to run for another term as president, and allowed the government to seize white-owned farms without compensation. Voters rejected the referendum, but he went ahead and acted as if it had been passed anyway. Soon squads of armed goons, with government approval, were chasing whites away from their farms. Those farmers who did not run away were arrested, and sometimes even killed; employees of the farmers simply lost their jobs. However, the redistribution of land was neither fair nor productive. London's Daily Telegraph reported in May 2002 that vast tracts of land were "handed out to President Mugabe's closest allies, including 10 cabinet ministers, seven MP's [members of Parliament] and his brother-in-law." Most of these folks didn't know anything about farm management, so irrigation and planting nearly stopped, and yields dropped 90% from previous levels. There was a drought in southern Africa in the late 1990s, but Zimbabwe saw no recovery after the rains came back. Instead, Mugabe used the famine to get rid of as many political opponents as possible, the way Joseph Stalin did with a Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. Nor could people buy imported food; hyperinflation made much of it unaffordable, and Harare officials either prevented emergency shipments of food from entering the country, or made sure that only card-carrying ZANU-PF members got it.

Mugabe ran for president in 2002, again ignoring the rejection of his referendum. He won, and many saw the election as unfair; the U.S. State Department described the election as "marred by disenfranchisement of urban voters, violent intimidation against opposition supporters, intimidation of the independent press and the judiciary and other irregularities." Despite acts of violence in anti-Mugabe areas, his opponent, a trade union leader named Morgan Tsvangirai, managed to get 40 percent of the vote, leading some to wonder if he could have won in a free election. Since then, pressure on his regime has increased, and Mugabe has responded by increasing the pressure on his own people. In 2002 Zimbabwe was suspended from the British Commonwealth, and Zimbabwe quit the organization shortly after that. Individual Western nations like the United States and Australia imposed travel and economic sanctions on Zimbabwe; a March 2003 EU-African summit meeting was postponed indefinitely because the African participants insisted that Mugabe be invited and Britain refused to attend if he came. In June 2005 Mugabe launched "Operation Restore Order," a campaign against the urban poor that bulldozed shacks, workshops, market stalls, churches and a mosque in Harare. At least 700,000 were left homeless, and they called this action "Zimbabwe's tsunami," comparing it with the tidal wave that struck the countries around the Indian Ocean in December 2004. Later in the same year, the International Monetary Fund began discussing the expulsion of Zimbabwe from that organization, because Zimbabwe owes it $295 million and rarely makes a payment on it.

Ravaged by disease and starvation, with 70 percent of its population unemployed, Zimbabwe, once the second richest country in Africa, is now running on empty. The title of a Wall Street Journal story, dated December 24, 2003, neatly summarized the situation: "Once a Breadbasket, Now Zimbabwe Can't Feed Itself." Zimbabweans routinely sneak across the border into Mozambique to buy what they cannot get at home, which is almost everything (a few years ago the refugee traffic went the other way, with Mozambicans fleeing into Zimbabwe). Travel agencies advise tourists visiting Victoria Falls to approach that marvel from the Zambian side of the Zambezi River. The aged Mugabe has become what he once fought: a tyrant. He managed to keep himself in charge by blaming his problems on enemies abroad, especially white enemies. The African Union faced its first test in what to do about Zimbabwe, but African leaders like Nigeria's Obasanjo, and South Africa's Mandela and Mbeki, refused to even criticize Mugabe, because they still view him as a freedom fighter; about the only prominent African who has spoken up is a Nobel laureate, former Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. So far the West has declined to forcibly remove Mugabe; the United States has enough to keep it busy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, while other Western nations don't want to promote "gunboat diplomacy." Indeed, Mugabe has found new friends among those who dislike the West in general and George W. Bush and Tony Blair in particular; he was a prominent guest of France in 2003, and the United Nations gave Zimbabwe a seat on the Human Rights Commission, along with other enemies of democracy like Libya, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam. To his anti-Western audience he can act like he's still the liberator of a country, until he realizes that liberty on an empty stomach is worthless.⁽³¹⁾

South Africa

The transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe meant that South Africa was now alone against the world, but South Africans had been expecting this day for a long time. They didn't really have to worry about an invasion from outside, because their armed forces were excellent and well-equipped, and their mineral and agricultural output was too important to the world economy to risk its loss in a war. The biggest danger to apartheid came from subversive elements within South Africa's borders, so the country built up the best police and intelligence service in the noncommunist world. At home, the ruling National Party also maintained a conservative social policy; most vices, such as gambling, pornography and racy movies, were banned completely. Most businesses, especially cinemas and liquor stores, had to close from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, so that the Sabbath would remain a holy time, and while abortion and sex education were legal, heavy restrictions sharply limited the practice of both. Television was not introduced until 1976, because it was considered immoral.

Abroad, South Africa would try to make a deal with any African country that was willing to listen, such as Malawi, and backed counterrevolutionary movements in the frontline states (e.g, UNITA in Angola, RENAMO in Mozambique).⁽³²⁾ Even Mugabe had to tone down his Marxist rhetoric and policies for much of the 1980s, because Zimbabwe's economy still depended on South Africa.

South Africa had one more advantage not often seen in modern, Westernized states--it was quite willing to dispose of those it considered dangerous, even if it meant putting down demonstrations with a heavy loss of life. We saw this with the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. It happened again at Soweto, a huge black settlement near Johannesburg that formed when several older townships merged together. In 1974 the government had issued the Afrikaans Medium Decree, which forced all schools to use the Afrikaans language when teaching mathematics, social sciences, geography and history to blacks at the secondary school level. The reasoning was that an African student might some day work for a white boss who spoke only Afrikaans or English, so it would be a good idea to teach him both languages. Blacks, however, didn't feel this way; English may be useful almost anywhere, but only their oppressors spoke Afrikaans. Students in Soweto stopped going to school to protest the Afrikaans policy, and when they held a mass rally on June 16, 1976, police responded by using bullets against rock-throwing children. More riots broke out in other parts of South Africa, and by the time the police restored order, 575 people had been killed.

Some enemies of apartheid fell victim to "death in custody." The chief example of that was Steve Biko (1946-77), a medical student who had founded the Black Consciousness Movement. This group patterned itself after the civil rights movement of the United States, and Biko wanted to repeat in South Africa what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had achieved. But while the movement may have been non-violent, the authorities could only tolerate it for so long. In 1977 they arrested Biko and beat him until he went into a coma; he died three days later. This led to an international outcry, and further radicalized black South African students, whose slogan was now "liberation before education."

Meanwhile, Vorster and Pieter W. Botha, who succeeded him in 1978, carried out apartheid's program of resettling as many blacks as possible in ten "Bantustans," or tribal homelands. The homeland of the Xhosa tribe, Transkei, was declared independent in 1976. Soon all the Bantustans were self-governing; by 1981 independence had been granted to three more: Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei. As we noted in Chapters 7 and 8, the homelands were not economically viable, lacking cities and industry, and the lands of most were unconnected tracts scattered across white-ruled areas. No foreign government recognized the Bantustans, and outside condemnation combined with internal unrest to halt the program after 1981; in 1994 the Bantustans were all reabsorbed into South Africa.⁽³³⁾

The Bantustans.

During the 1980s, international pressure steadily mounted on South Africa. The United Nations voted in 1974 to suspend South Africa's membership in the General Assembly, and a call went forth for investors to "divest" their funds from companies that did business with that country. By the mid-1980s this was hurting South Africa's once impervious economy, forcing a devaluation of the rand, the country's monetary unit. In addition, there was violence from blacks who wanted to see apartheid ended now, and counter-violence from a number of white-run neo-Nazi groups, who thought Botha had already gone too far. Finally, there were demographic factors: AIDS began to take its toll, especially among miners and other migrant workers, and the low white birthrate meant that the European portion of South Africa's population had shrunk, from 22 percent in the early twentieth century to 16 percent, a dangerous situation for an elite that wanted to keep all the power and wealth for itself. Under these circumstances, Botha warned that the time had come for change, and that white South Africans would have to "adapt or die." In 1983 he transformed Parliament into a tricameral body that had three separate chambers: one for whites, one for Asians, and one for coloreds. Then a series of reforms did away with the unpopular aspects of petty apartheid, such as the passbook laws and the laws against interracial marriage. However, Botha couldn't bring himself to do much that would improve the lives of the black majority. The fact that blacks were excluded from the new Parliament caused more than three fourths of colored and Asian voters to boycott the 1984 legislative elections. Incidents of violence increased, leading to 2,000 deaths and 20,000 arrests; a state of emergency was declared in 1985, which lasted until 1990.

In 1989, Botha suffered a stroke and had to resign; the next president, Frederik Willem de Klerk, was willing to make the hard decisions that his predecessors kept putting off. At his opening address to parliament in February 1990, de Klerk announced that he would repeal discriminatory laws and lift the ban on the ANC, the Communist Party, and other anti-apartheid groups. In addition, he allowed large demonstrations in Cape Town and Johannesburg, met with black leaders like Desmond Tutu, and released Nelson Mandela from prison, 27 years after he had been locked up under a life sentence.

A long and difficult negotiation period followed Mandela's release, in which all parties concerned discussed what post-apartheid South Africa would look like. The NP was an unwilling participant in these talks, since it meant getting rid of the NP's ideology, and for much of the time it tried to insert a minority veto, or anything else that would prevent rule by "one man, one vote." Whenever progress ground to a halt, the ANC staged strikes and nonviolent protests. In the end it took a special commission, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), to reach a compromise between the NP and the ANC. On November 13, 1993, both sides agreed to free elections that would establish a coalition government for a nonracial, nonsexist, unified, and democratic South Africa.

When these elections took place (April 27, 1994), they were arguably the most important in modern African history. The ANC won an impressive 62.7 percent of the vote, a little less than the two-thirds majority that would have given it the power to amend the constitution without the approval of other parties. The NP got 20 percent, more than expected because colored and Asian voters who feared ANC domination went with that party. Only two other parties won the 5 percent minimum needed to be represented in the government: the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a Zulu nationalist movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and the Freedom Front, a coalition of white extremist groups. The ANC also came out ahead in seven of the nine new provinces that had been created to replace the four oversized provinces that existed previously; the only two the ANC didn't win were the Western Cape province, where the NP won, and KwaZulu-Natal, the IFP's home. Nelson Mandela was elected president, de Klerk became one of the two vice presidents, and Thabo Mbeki, an ANC associate, became the other vice president.

Following the elections, South Africa rejoined the British Commonwealth of Nations (June 1994). Mandela had his work cut out for him; he needed to restructure the economy so that all ethnic groups would benefit under the new South Africa. There was also the need to uncover the full story of the crimes committed in the name of apartheid, and to promote healing from the pre-1994 era, without further polarizing society. To do this, the government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which met from 1996 to 1999. Here victims told their stories and perpetrators confessed their crimes, with possible amnesty to the latter. Those who did not appear before the commission would be prosecuted if their guilt could be proven. Activities of the ANC as well as the government were investigated, and in the end the commission condemned actions from all the country's major political organizations. Desmond Tutu presided over the sessions (he had to retire from his position in the clergy to give the commission his full attention), and explained their purpose thusly: "Without forgiveness there is no future, but without confession there can be no forgiveness." Still, many people wanted those found guilty to pay reparations, and while some soldiers, police, and ordinary citizens confessed their crimes, most of those who gave the orders did not show up to testify; the latter included former President Botha, due to his age and poor health.

In 1996 Mandela announced he would retire when his term as president expired, and one year later Thabo Mbeki took his place as head of the ANC. The next time elections were held, in June 1999, the ANC again won easily and Mbeki became South Africa's second black president. Though not admired worldwide like Mandela, Mbeki proved to be an accomplished politician. In 2003, Mbeki maneuvered the ANC to a two-thirds majority in parliament; in the April 2004 parliamentary elections the ANC won almost 70 percent of the seats, ensuring that Mbeki would be reelected as president.⁽³⁴⁾

South Africa dropped off the world's radar screen when apartheid disappeared; the country hasn't attracted much attention since 1994. But while the outside world may think South Africa's story concluded with a happy ending, there are serious problems with unemployment, poverty, AIDS and crime. Mbeki invited criticism during his first term for keeping silent about the heavyhanded behavior of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and for denying any connection between AIDS and the HIV virus. Nonpolitical crimes also jumped dramatically; one report declared that violent crime increased 33 percent between 1994 and 2001.⁽³⁵⁾ According to 2002 figures, South Africa has the world's highest murder rate, 114.8 murders per 100,000 people.⁽³⁶⁾ In response, Mbeki accused his critics of racism, and published his own statistics which showed a much lower crime rate.

Meanwhile, South Africa's whites are leaving the country; the South African High Commission in London thinks there may be 1.4 million South Africans in Britain. They are not likely to return if they believe South Africa is no longer their country. Other whites have moved into private, gated communities, where they have little contact with blacks.⁽³⁷⁾ Although the whites have lost political power, they still control the economy and most of the media; if the country is to prosper, the blacks must have access to better jobs, but that also means many whites will lose their jobs, which is likely to cause trouble, at least in the short run. If there is a moral to the history of southern Africa, it may be that in this part of the world, blacks and whites can't live with each other, but they can't live without each other, either!

Southwest Africa/Namibia

A transitional period followed, and elections were held in November 1989; SWAPO won 57 percent of the vote, despite heavy funding from the South African government to seven anti-SWAPO parties. Independence finally came on March 12, 1990, with SWAPO's leader, Sam Nujoma, sworn in as the first president of Namibia.

As a guerrilla leader, Nujoma had been a Marxist; after becoming president he encouraged a healthy, growing economy and respected human rights. Whites still owned a disproportionate share of Namibian land, and Nujoma wanted to see most of it eventually transferred to nonwhites, but unlike Mugabe, he wasn't going to disrupt the economy to do it. South Africa handed over Walvis Bay to Namibia in 1994, after three years of negotiations, and Nujoma was reelected later in the same year. Namibia's constitution only allowed two terms, so Nujoma amended it to permit a third, and ran for it in 1999. He seemed to have lost interest in serving during his third term, though, because instead of amending the constitution again, he groomed Hifikepunye Pohamba to run as the SWAPO candidate in 2004. He was seventy-five years old by this time, but longevity seems to run in his family; his mother, Mpingana Helvi Kondombolo, was reportedly alive and more than a century old in 2004. Whatever the reason for Nujoma's retirement, Pohamba became the country's second president in March 2005.

Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo: Still the Dark Heart of Africa

We will look at the Republic of the Congo (also known as Congo-Brazzaville) first, since its history is the shortest, and not intertwined with the other nations. This Congo has never been managed very well, and every time the government destabilized, a more radical one took its place. The first president, a former Catholic priest named Fulbert Youlou, was deposed in 1963, when labor unions and rival political parties launched a three-day uprising. The military briefly stepped in and installed another civilian government, which wrote a new constitution and elected Alphonse Massamba-Débat as president. He improved Congolese relations with the communist world, especially China, but for the armed forces this wasn't good enough; in August 1968 Capt. Marien Ngouabi led a coup that toppled Massamba-Débat and put himself in power. Under Ngouabi's rule, Congo became Africa's first communist state (Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola waited until the mid-1970s to try communism); in 1970 he renamed the country the People's Republic of the Congo.

Ngouabi was assassinated in 1977. Among the alleged killers was Pascal Lissouba, a former prime minister under Alphonse Massamba-Débat; he was sentenced to life imprisonment, which was later changed to exile, and Lissouba stayed abroad until 1991. Other conspirators were tried, convicted and executed, but it was never clear why they did it; the Congo remained under one-party Marxist rule. An eleven-member committee of officers took charge, led by Col. (later Gen.) Joachim Yhombi-Opango. Two years later Yhombi-Opango was accused of corruption and deviation from party directives, removed from office, stripped of all powers and rank, and placed under house arrest until 1984. In his place the committee promoted Vice President and Defense Minister Col. Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who was subsequently elected president and reelected in 1984 and 1989.

Sassou-Nguesso signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1981, but time was running out for his Marxist-Leninist partners. He had second thoughts following the USSR's collapse. A national conference followed, which changed the country's name back to the Republic of the Congo, replaced the flag and national anthem, and legalized opposition parties (1991-92). The country saw its first multiparty elections in August 1992; Pascal Lissouba came back from exile and defeated Sassou-Nguesso to become the new president.

However, the elections didn't mean that anyone would live happily ever after; this is Equatorial Africa, for crying out loud! Lissouba was accused of discriminating against Sassou-Nguesso's tribe, the Mbochi, and because the legislative elections of 1993 only gave a slim majority to Lissouba's party, the results were disputed, leading to rounds of violent unrest in 1993 and early 1994. In June 1997, one month before the next scheduled presidential elections, government troops surrounded Sassou-Nguesso's compound in Brazzaville. Sassou-Nguesso ordered troops loyal to him to resist, and the result was a four-month civil war that killed 10,000 and destroyed much of Brazzaville. Outside intervention decided the winner; Angolan troops invaded in October on the side of Sassou-Nguesso, driving Lissouba into exile again.

A number of militias still opposed the Sassou regime, and 1998 and 1999 saw negotiations between the factions, mediated by President Omar Bongo of Gabon. They eventually signed a peace accord that gave amnesty to most of Sassou-Nguesso's opponents, except for Lissouba and his prime minister, Bernard Kolelas; the latter two were tried and convicted in absentia for treason and war crimes. A new constitution was approved by the voters in 2002, and Sassou-Nguesso was elected to a seven-year term in the same year; he faced no significant opposition because Lissouba and Kolelas were outside the country, and thus kept from running by residency laws.

In Rwanda and Burundi, the chief problem was the ongoing antagonism between the Hutu and the Tutsi. When we first saw these tribes, in Chapter 6, they had different origins: the Tutsi were of Nilotic origin and the Hutu were Bantus. The Hutu were usually in the majority, but the Tutsi were the ones in charge. Centuries of living together, however, blurred the differences between the tribes, and there were enough cases of people switching tribes that by the twentieth century, the terms "Hutu" and "Tutsi" became labels of one's profession and social class, rather than labels of one's racial identity. Laurent Nkongoli, a Rwandan politician, explained it by saying that frequently "you can't tell us apart, we can't tell us apart."

Even when Belgium ruled both countries, there had been large-scale violence. Rioting had driven the last Tutsi king out of Rwanda in 1959, and over the next year between 20,000 and 100,000 Tutsis were killed, and another 200,000 fled the country; this allowed Hutu nationalists to make sure that Rwanda would become a Hutu republic, with Grégoire Kayibanda as president, when independence arrived in 1962. Another massacre took place in 1963, after some Tutsis returned as a rebel army and staged an unsuccessful takeover attempt. At this point Bertrand Russell, the Western philosopher, called the Tutsi massacres the worst event in human history since the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, but by and large the world did not pay attention. The tribal rivalry also meant that the two countries wouldn't take the same side in the Cold War; Rwanda aligned itself with the United States, while Burundi chose to go with China.

Burundi, unlike Rwanda, kept its Tutsi monarch, and launched acts of repression against its Hutus in retaliation for what happened in Rwanda, causing thousands of Hutus to flee the other way. However, both tribes were represented in Burundi's government. In 1966 the king, Mwami Mwambutsa IV, was deposed by his son, Mwami Ntare V; four months later the prime minister, Captain Michel Micombero, in turn abolished the monarchy and declared himself president. Ntare went into exile, but came back in April 1972, along with several thousand Hutu refugees. Having been promised safe passage, he expected a peaceful meeting with the man who threw him out; instead Micombero arrested, judged and executed the former king as soon as he stepped off the airplane. What a homecoming! What happened next is called the Burundian Civil War in history texts, but it was really a massacre of at least 100,000 Hutus, and another mass expulsion.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (also known as Congo-Leopoldville or Congo-Kinshasa), peace did not come right away when Joseph Mobutu took over in 1965. Local insurrections continued, and the loyalty of Katanga remained in question. In 1967 he dismissed the white mercenaries that the government had used during the civil war of the early 1960s, but instead of seeking employment elsewhere, the mercenaries occupied Stanleyville and Bukavu, with the help of Katangan rebels. The Congolese government declared a state of emergency, retook those cities, and eventually drove the mercenaries and their allies across the eastern border into Rwanda. Finally in 1968, the last internal rebellion was put down and its leader was executed. To signify that a new era had begun, Mobutu then embarked on a campaign to change all European names in the country; Leopoldville became Kinshasa, Stanleyville became Kisangani, and Elizabethville became Lubumbashi. In 1971 he changed the country's name to Zaire⁽³⁸⁾, the Congo River was renamed the Zaire River, and Katanga became Shaba, so that people would stop thinking of it as a center for rebellion. Finally he changed his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga ("the earthy, the peppery, all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from contest to contest leaving fire in his wake"--Mobutu Sese Seko for short), and advised all citizens to choose African names of their own.

Mobutu Sese Seko.

For the next twenty-five years, Zaire was relatively peaceful, except in 1977 and 1978, when Katangan rebels, based in Angola, staged two attacks on Kolwezi, the copper-producing center of Shaba/Katanga. Mobutu was able to defeat both invasions, with the help of US military aid and Belgian paratroopers. At first the return of peace brought impressive economic growth (6-7% a year in the early 1970s), but then Mobutu's policy of Africanization led him to do something you wouldn't expect from somebody who was supposed to be anti-communist; Mobutu nationalized all foreign-owned industry and grabbed small businesses belonging to Greek, Portuguese and Pakistani immigrants. These spoils were handed over to "sons of the country," which of course meant Mobutu's cronies, especially those from his own tribe, the Ngbanda. As with Robert Mugabe's confiscation of farms in Zimbabwe, the new owners were incompetent, and after 1973 the Zairean economy entered a decline from which it never recovered. Equally bad, this set a precedent for corruption that marked the rest of Mobutu's career.

Many African leaders were worse when it came to human rights abuses, but when it came to stealing, Mobutu Sese Seko was the unquestioned champion. Over the course of his 32-year reign, it is estimated that Mobutu made off with $8 billion. Much of it came to him in the form of Western aid, because he had established himself during the Congolese Civil War and the Katangan invasions as a firm ally of the West. Pro-Western African leaders were hard to find in the Cold War years, so Western nations, including the United States, generously gave money, said "Thank God he's on our side," and looked the other way when Mobutu kept most of it. He didn't get much criticism, for example, when he enlarged the airport in his hometown to accommodate landings by Concordes, and leased the supersonic airplanes from Air France--while his people starved. In fact, he was running the country in much the same way that King Leopold had run it a century earlier (see Chapter 7), milking it for as much personal gain as possible. What he didn't keep went to friends in the form of paybacks--he lasted for as long as he did because he knew who to butter up and how to keep his enemies divided.

This behavior spread from the head down to minor officials, turning Zaire into the state with the ultimate kleptocracy (government or rule by thieves). In Michela Wrong's book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, written at the end of the Mobutu presidency, numerous examples were cited of how Mobutu's underlings couldn't steal anything fast enough: newly appointed government ministers arrived at their offices to find the place stripped bare by their predecessors and the two official cars missing; the manager of a diamond mine assigned himself an allowance of $30,000 per month for traveling expenses; Mobutu's son once claimed he had been robbed of the $600,000 given to him to close a deal, and was wired replacement funds immediately.

But all good things must come to an end, and for many African leaders, that happened when the Americans and Russians stopped seeing each other as enemies. Those who favored the Soviet Union, like Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam, found themselves without a patron, while the pro-Western leaders were no longer seen as essential allies. Mobutu fell in the latter category, and from 1989 onward, he faced protests at home, and came under increasing criticism from abroad, because of the lousy economy and his massive embezzlement of government funds. In May 1990 he declared the establishment of a "Third Republic"; Zaire would no longer be a one-party state, and elections and a new constitution would soon follow. However, he didn't get around to setting up a "Sovereign National Conference," his version of a constitutional convention, until 1992, because in 1991 soldiers in Kinshasa began looting to protest unpaid wages; it took 2,000 French and Belgian troops, flown in on US Air Force planes, to restore order and evacuate endangered foreign nationals in Kinshasa. When the conference did take place, it set up a new government that Mobutu would not accept, resulting in a deadlock until the two governments formed a transitional council, with Mobutu as president and Kengo Wa Dondo as prime minister (1994). As for the elections, they were scheduled and rescheduled, but the chaos that marked the second half of the 1990s ensured that they never took place.

On July 5, 1973, the defense minister of Rwanda, General Juvénal Habyarimana, ousted his cousin, President Kayibanda, in a bloodless coup. He dissolved the National Assembly, and replaced the ruling Parmehutu Party with a political party that placed less emphasis on ethnic background, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD). Then he got all this confirmed by having himself elected president in 1978, and reelected without opposition in 1983 and 1988.

Ethnic tensions began increasing again in 1990, when bad weather and falling coffee prices caused a slump in Rwanda's economy. Outside the country, exiled Tutsis, some of whom had been away for more than thirty years, decided it was time to return, and they formed a group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). President Habyarimana set up a committee to work out the differences between Hutus and Tutsis, but instead of waiting for these negotiations to produce results, the RPF invaded Rwanda from a base in Uganda. They had miscalculated, thinking that world opinion would be on their side, because all they were asking for was equal rights for both tribes. Instead, outsiders believed the Hutu argument that the invasion was an attempt to put the Tutsis back in power. Belgium and several central African nations sent troops to defend the Rwandan government; the result was a war that lasted for two years, until a cease-fire was signed in 1992. Meanwhile, Habyarimana passed a new constitution establishing a multiparty democracy (1991), and appointed a prime minister to prepare the country for multiparty elections in 1995.

During the 1970s and 80s, Burundi was Equatorial Africa's least stable country. President Micombero was thrown out in a 1976 coup that replaced him with another officer, Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza. Bagaza was in turn deposed by Major Pierre Buyoya in 1987, who established himself as head of the Military Committee for National Salvation. Both Bagaza and Buyoya were Tutsis, but they believed the two tribes could get along; Buyoya went so far as to appoint a Hutu prime minister and include Hutus in his cabinet. Instead, the situation continued to deteriorate. The Tutsi-led army massacred at least 5,000 Hutus in 1988, and from his exile in Libya, Bagaza launched an unsuccessful coup in 1992. Still, Burundi, like Rwanda, tried to make a transition to a multiparty democracy. The first free elections since independence were held in June 1993, and a Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye, won with 60 percent of the vote. Buyoya stepped down peacefully, but only four months later, army factions loyal to Bagaza assassinated Ndadaye. More ethnic violence followed, with the usual killings and mass expulsions, until another Hutu, Cyprien Ntaryamira, a Hutu who replaced Ndadaye, got himself elected in January 1994, and began to rein in the Tutsi soldiers responsible for the violence.

1994 was the year when the stuff really hit the fan. In April, Rwanda's Habyarimana and Burundi's Ntaryamira met to discuss the stationing of UN peacekeeping troops in Rwanda, and the plane carrying the two presidents was shot down as it approached Kigali (Rwanda's capital), killing both of them. It never was clear whether Tutsis or Hutus staged the attack, or what their motivation was. For radical Hutu groups it didn't matter; they had been gathering weapons since the last round of fighting ended, as if the word "cease-fire" meant "reload!", and they figured that the solution to Rwanda's problems was to get rid of the Tutsis once and for all; the assassination was as good an excuse as any to act.

Hutu military and militia groups, known by the catch-all name of interahamwe, now began rounding up and killing any Tutsis and political moderates they could find. The Rwandan prime minister and her ten bodyguards were among the first victims. The genocide quickly escalated and spread all across the country; over the next 100 days, an estimated 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died. Even civilians were ordered by the government to kill their neighbors, and soon they no longer cared about one's ethnic background; Jared Diamond reported that in a neighborhood that had only one Tutsi resident, 5 percent of the 2,000 Hutus were also slaughtered, and suggested in his book Collapse that the main motivations for the massacre were overpopulation and a desire to take the land of the rich.

The outside world gave a questionable response to the genocide. The UN and Belgium pulled most of their forces out of Kigali, and the UN Security council voted against sending more troops to stop the violence, though Rwanda was a member of the Security Council at the time. Only a unit of Canadian, Ghanaian, and Dutch soldiers stayed behind, and the safe zones they created are now credited with saving the lives of 20,000 Tutsis. Nor did any major nation choose to intervene; US President Bill Clinton, for example, didn't want to get involved after the recent humiliation of Americans in Somalia. Not until late June did the UN authorize France to send some soldiers, but in the part of southwest Rwanda where they were deployed, the Tutsis had already been killed or driven away.⁽³⁹⁾

Finally the RPF decided to take matters into its own hands; it renewed its war against the Rwandan government and called in reinforcements from Uganda and Tanzania. In July 1994 the RPF captured Kigali, and the Rwandan government, along with two million Hutu refugees (one fourth of the country's population), fled to Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and Zaire, fearing retribution for good reason. Thousands of them subsequently died from cholera and dysentery epidemics in the refugee camps, and their presence destabilized Zaire, setting the stage for the war that brought down Mobutu.

The influx of refugees, and the activities of Hutu and Tutsi militias, made Burundi even more unstable than it already was, but after the 1993 civil war it would have been hard for anything to get much worse. There were no mass killings like in Rwanda, and Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, the former head of the National Assembly, was named acting president and went on to be elected in September 1994. However, Ntibantunganya was a Hutu so he could only please the Tutsis in the armed forces for so long; in July 1996 they deposed him and brought back Pierre Buyoya. The first act of Buyoya's second administration was to suspend the constitution, claiming that extraordinary measures were required for Burundi's survival. In 1998 he and the National Assembly reached an agreement on a power-sharing proposal that permitted both tribes to form political parties and serve in the legislature and the military. Five years later (April 2003), Buyoya completed the rotation by stepping down, handing over the presidency to his Hutu vice president, Domitien Ndayizeye. Ndayizeye served for two years, and then in August 2005 a former Hutu rebel leader, Pierre Nkurunziza, was elected to succeed him. Nkurunziza had a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, and after the violence of 1993 and 1994 he became a born-again Christian, preaching peace and reconciliation, so it looks like Burundi finally has a president most of its people can accept.

Back in Rwanda, the RPF tried to avoid the mistakes of previous governments by allowing both tribes to participate; it picked a moderate Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu, to be the new president, while the RPF leader, Paul Kagame, became both vice president and defense minister. Still, it was mainly Tutsi refugees who returned immediately; most of the Hutus stayed away until 1996, when both a Tutsi-led rebellion in eastern Zaire and government troops in Burundi began attacking Hutu militias in the refugee camps.

The Tutsi rebellion was a response to the Rwandan conflict spilling over into Zaire; the Hutu refugees included members of the interahamwe who had taken part in the genocide, and when they met Tutsis in Zaire it seemed natural to attack them, too. Mobutu, who favored the Hutus, did nothing to stop these atrocities, and when the governor of South Kivu province ordered the Tutsis in his area to leave Zaire on pain of death, the Tutsis turned against the Zairean government, joining with other enemies of Mobutu to form the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL). Then Paul Kagame of Rwanda and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda entered the game by supporting the rebels. Kagame's contribution was two thousand veteran Tutsi warriors, and when they first clashed with Zairean soldiers, the latter ran away. Kagame suddenly found that he commanded the strongest force in eastern Zaire, but he just couldn't take over the country, so he asked his old friend Museveni what to do next.

Museveni suggested that they call Laurent Kabila out of retirement and set him up as the rebellion's front man. When we last saw Kabila (see Chapter 8), he was the 26-year-old leader of a Marxist guerrilla movement during the Congolese Civil War. Che Guevara had given him aid and training for several months in 1965, only to dump him after concluding that Kabila wasn't communist enough. After the civil war ended, Kabila founded the People's Revolutionary party (PRP) and set a small secessionist state in the mountains just west of Lake Tanganyika. Mobutu crushed that state in the early 1980s, but he didn't try to capture Kabila, who was presumed dead. This gave Kabila an opportunity to sneak across the border into Tanzania, where he ran a gold trading business in Dar es Salaam until Museveni and Kagame called him back.

Once he had taken command, Kabila began to march on Kinshasa, in a conflict now called the First Congo War (October 1996-May 1997). The only real battle took place at Kisangani, where Angolan troops fighting on the side of the rebels won the day. Elsewhere government resistance crumbled, and government troops switched sides, causing Kabila's force to grow like a rolling snowball. Seven months and 1,700 miles later, the rebels reached Kinshasa. Mobutu, now ill with prostate cancer, went into exile, dying in Morocco before the year was over.⁽⁴⁰⁾

One of Kabila's first acts as president was to change Zaire's name back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His other actions, however, showed why he had been a loser up to this point; he now held a job that clearly required more competence than he had. He quickly alienated those who had put him in power; Étienne Tshisekedi, the chief pro-democracy activist under the Mobutu regime, demanded a leading role in the new government, which Kabila rejected. Soon he was breaking up demonstrations with troops, and his opponents accused him of being as corrupt and authoritarian as his predecessor. Foreigners were reluctant to invest in the Congo, because they didn't know if Kabila had renounced the Marxist ways of his youth, so the economy didn't recover. Abroad, he was accused of obstructing UN investigations into the massacres of Hutu refugees during the recent war.⁽⁴¹⁾ Finally, he was accused of being a Rwandan puppet because of his dependence on Rwandan soldiers, who weren't in a hurry to get out of Congolese territory. Kabila subsequently turned against his former allies in the east, accusing them of trying to capture the region's mineral resources, and rejecting the demands of eastern minority groups for autonomy. In August 1998, Kabila expelled all ethnic Tutsis from the government and ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan officials out of the Congo. These two countries now began backing anti-Kabila rebel groups, the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC), triggering the Second Congo War.

The Second Congo War (1998-2003) has been called "Africa's World War" because it involved nine African nations and twenty other armed groups, and was the bloodiest conflict anywhere since World War II; estimates of the numbers killed range from 3.8 million to 6.5 million.⁽⁴²⁾ It has also been staggeringly costly to the Congo in terms of economic exploitation; international observers have accused the participating countries of looting resources like diamonds, cobalt and gold. Despite all this, the war went largely ignored. Because the war took place over such a large area, large battles and clearly defined front lines were not possible, and most of the fighting involved military units concentrated around important points like cities, mining centers and ports; elsewhere the main events were episodes of looting, raping and ethnic cleansing, whenever an armed faction captured a new place. These are not the kind of war stories that will be fondly told to grandchildren, or good source material for documentaries on The History Channel. In addition, there are the usual problems with transportation and communication in a jungle environment, and local troops have learned to charge reporters a special price for safe passage through the areas they control--all the money the reporters have! For these reasons the media has tended to stay away, finding it much easier to cover violent events in places like the Middle East; as for the ordinary citizen outside Africa, if he doesn't see pictures of African wars in the news, then those wars might as well have not happened.

The anti-Kabila coalition of Rwanda, Uganda, and Congolese rebels began the second war the same way as they had the first, conquering as much territory in the east as possible before driving on Kinshasa (in fact, Rwanda had plans to keep part of the east). For the month of August 1998, they had everything their way. A particularly bold group of RCD soldiers hijacked three airplanes, flew them to the western town of Kitona, surprised the local garrison, captured the town, and went on to take the Atlantic port of Matadi. Kisangani fell to rebels in the east on August 23, and by the end of the month it looked like the capital and Kabila would soon fall as well. However, Kabila did much better on the diplomatic front, persuading six other countries (Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Sudan and Libya) to intervene on his side. By flying troops into Kinshasa in September, Angola and Zimbabwe managed to save the day for the government. They could not recover the east, though, because that would have meant a direct conflict with the armies of Rwanda and Uganda.

Several peace conferences tried to end the war in 1999, but no cease-fire agreement was signed by all competing factions, and small incidents were all that was necessary for the war to resume. In the east, Rwanda and Uganda fought for control of Kisangani in 2000, and Ugandan efforts to turn the northeast corner of the Congo into a new Ugandan province led to the Ituri Conflict, a "war within the war" as the local Lendu and Hema tribes began their own version of the Hutu-Tutsi feud.

Meanwhile, Rwanda's Bizimungu resigned in 2000 because he and the RPF couldn't agree on who should be in a new Cabinet; he also accused the parliament of targeting Hutu politicians in anticorruption investigations. Paul Kagame now took charge, becoming Rwanda's first Tutsi president. Because he had held so many jobs under Bizimungu, many consider him to have been the real ruler of Rwanda since 1994. His position was confirmed when he was reelected in 2003, while Bizimungu was placed under house arrest, and sent to prison in 2004 for attempting to form a militia, inciting violence and embezzlement.

Laurent Kabila's bumbling reign ended when he was assassinated by one of his bodyguards in January 2001. It is unknown who planned the killing, but many had come to see Kabila as the main obstacle to peace and free elections in the Congo. He was promptly succeeded by his eldest son, Joseph Kabila (1972-). The younger Kabila felt some unease at taking charge, because most Congolese didn't know him, and his upbringing in East Africa meant that he spoke English and Swahili better than French and Lingala, the two most commonly used languages in Kinshasa. Still, he was more serious about ending the war than his father had been, and in 2002 he reached an agreement with Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe that allowed those countries to begin withdrawing their troops from the country. In 2003 he followed this up with a peace agreement with the RCD and the MLC, which called for them sharing power with Kabila in a transitional government until new elections could be held.

Technically this was supposed to mark the end of the war, but fighting has continued in many areas on a small scale. The Rwandans and Ugandans haven't completely pulled out, either; both arm the groups friendly to them, and the Rwandans have refused to leave until the Hutu interahamwe militias are disarmed, which was one of the terms of the 2002 accord. As a result, only the southern and western quarters of the Congo are under anything resembling government control; Uganda's proxies control the north, while Rwanda-aligned groups control the east. What this means is that the woes of Equatorial Africa are not yet over, and although many of the groups involved here are tired of fighting, as long as somebody thinks the graveyards aren't full enough, we can expect more shocking stories of man's inhumanity to man from the dark heart of the continent.⁽⁴³⁾

America's Stepchild and Her Anarchic Neighbors

William Tubman was the African equivalent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Not only was he the longest-lived Liberian president, but he also was strongly pro-Western; he entered World War II on the side of the Allies in 1944, and even before declaring war he allowed American troops to use Liberia as a base. His seven terms in office are now regarded as the peak of the True Whig era, and while he did not allow any other political parties to exist, he was an honest ruler, and overall the country prospered. Tubman died in a London clinic in 1971, and William R. Tolbert Jr., who had been vice president for twenty years, took his place.

Tolbert made Liberia a little less authoritarian than it had been under Tubman, and tried to reduce the country's dependency on the United States. He accepted aid from the Soviet Union in 1974, and joined with other developing countries to sign a trade agreement with the European Community in 1978. However, he couldn't do much to improve the economy outside of Monrovia, and there were reports that the Tolbert family controlled a monopoly on rice imports, making people skeptical of anything he did with that important commodity. In 1978 a young Liberian named Gabriel B. Matthews announced he was forming an opposition party, and in 1979 a proposed increase in the price of rice led to riots that killed more than forty people. That marked the beginning of the end for the True Whigs, but Tolbert thought it was still business as usual. When he visited the United States in 1979, he confronted a demonstration against his government outside the United Nations headquarters, led by a US-educated Liberian, Charles Taylor (1948-). Tolbert personally debated Taylor, and lost. This made Taylor overconfident, and he tried to seize control of the Liberian mission at the UN; he was arrested, but later released and invited back to Liberia by Tolbert.

The last incident showed that Tolbert was overconfident, too; his downfall came as a complete surprise. On April 12, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe staged a bloody coup that killed Tolbert and several aides. Then Doe suspended the constitution and set up his own ruling group, the People's Revolutionary Council (PRC). Of the surviving officials, more than a dozen were put on trial without a lawyer, sentenced to death, tied to stakes on a beach and shot; one was spared because he wasn't an Americo-Liberian (he got his position by being adopted into the Tolbert clan).

Doe knew that his predecessors had ruled for so long because they kept good relations with the United States, so he did the same, openly declaring himself on the side of the West in the Cold War. There was a humorous incident around this time when Doe visited the White House, and President Ronald Reagan greeted him as "Chairman Moe." In return, the US wanted him to lift the ban on political parties that he imposed when he seized power. Instead, Doe replaced the Americo-Liberian oligarchy with one made up of folks from his own tribe, the Krahn, which was an even smaller part of the population (2 percent). When he gave in to US pressure, it was because he no longer feared being voted out of office; a new constitution establishing Liberia's second republic was introduced in 1984, and Doe narrowly won a presidential election in 1985.⁽⁴⁴⁾ The economy, however, was beyond his control; he tried to fix it by printing new money to pay the bills, and asking foreign governments for more aid. Anyone who has studied economics knows those are short-term solutions at best; by the end of the 1980s inflation was running wild and exports had all but stopped, leaving the Liberian practice of registering ships at a cut-rate price as the main source of income. Doe was also accused of human rights abuses, no surprise since he had begun his reign with a televised execution; Liberians began to joke that the initials of the PRC really meant "People Repeating Corruption."

Finally Doe's enemies pooled their resources, assembled an ill-trained army called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), and on Christmas Eve of 1989 they launched an invasion from the Ivory Coast. They received some assistance from Ivorian President Houphouët-Boigny, who had been Tolbert's brother-in-law and understandably didn't like Doe. Leading the army was the aforementioned Charles Taylor. Taylor had been a member of Doe's government, in charge of the procurement department, only to run afoul of Doe when he was accused in 1984 of embezzling $900,000. He fled to the United States, was captured in Boston, and was supposed to be shipped back to Liberia. Instead he escaped, reportedly bribing the jailors with $30,000, and sawing through the bars of the laundry room. Where he went between the United States and the Ivory Coast is a mystery; some believe he was hiding in Libya.

Anyway, the NPFL soon grew from 4,000 to 10,000 men, and gained control of much of the countryside in a few weeks. Then, when it seemed that they were about to win, a split divided the NPFL; Prince Yormie Johnson, a mentally unstable ally of Taylor's, took 1,000 soldiers from the force and founded his own group, the Independent Patriotic Front (IPF). The rebels entered Monrovia in July 1990, and six West African countries put together a peacekeeping force for Liberia (ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West African States Cease-Fire Monitoring Group), but it failed to halt the fighting. As for Doe, he turned down a US offer to be flown out of the country (the Americans had recently given free passage to Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, after their subjects turned against them). What happened next is unclear; apparently Doe tried to visit ECOMOG headquarters in September, and was captured by Prince Johnson. Johnson had Doe's ears and genitals cut off before killing him, made sure the mutilation was videotaped in gruesome detail, and paraded what was left of Doe around Monrovia.

If you thought the Liberian civil war would end with Doe's death, guess again; it was only beginning. Both Taylor and Johnson claimed the presidency, but neither could hold onto it. By early 1991 ECOMOG held Monrovia while the NPFL held the rest of the country; ECOMOG set up an interim government, led by Dr. Amos Sawyer, a popular politician and professor. In October the NPFL agreed to disarm and recognize this government, but instead it clashed with ECOMOG, and in August 1992 it was attacked by ULIMO, a Sierra Leone-based faction loyal to the late Samuel Doe. By January 1993 the NPFL had been driven back out of Monrovia, and ULIMO captured much of western Liberia before it split into two tribal-based groups (ULIMO-J and ULIMO-K).

Now the civil war became a free-for-all. Cease-fires came and went, and so did temporary governments; between 1994 and 1997 three presidents succeeded Amos Sawyer, ephemeral figures who did not even belong to political parties. The competing factions splintered into smaller ones, all of which executed civilians who refused to join them, and they recruited boys as soldiers, some of them young as six years old; as many as 60,000 young thugs terrorized the countryside as a result. The typical Liberian fighter of the mid-1990s was a doped teenager armed with an AK-47, wearing a fright wig and some other piece of women's clothing, like a purse, a feather boa or a tattered wedding dress. Their outlandish costumes came from the belief that bullets could not kill them if the bullets didn't know whether they were hitting a man or woman (the same kind of thinking had caused African warriors to wear masks in the old days). Many of their leaders had been promoted directly from volunteer to general by Charles Taylor, and they took for themselves nicknames that even a certified hellraiser would hesitate to use: General No-Mother-No-Father, General Housebreaker, General F*ck-Me-Quick, General Baby Killer, General Peanut Butter, and General Dragon Master. The most notorious was Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known as "General Butt Naked" from his habit of going into battles wearing only a weapon and a pair of sneakers. While most of the "generals" came to a quick and brutal end, Butt Naked met the Lord in 1996, and since then he has been preaching in churches and on the streets of Monrovia. When talking about his past, the Reverend Blahyi confesses to having practiced voodoo and cannibalism, and describes his conversion with these words:

"So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people--so many I lost count. But in June last year God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be, so I stopped and became a preacher."

High fashion in 1990s Liberia. From Slate Magazine.		One of the Liberian warlords, ULIMO leader Roosevelt Johnson (no relation to Prince Johnson).

The United States must have expected Taylor to do well as president, because he had excellent character references; former Attorney General Ramsey Clark had been his lawyer during his time in American jails, and President Bill Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter and the Reverend Jesse Jackson had all given Taylor their stamp of approval. He appointed the leaders of rival factions to government positions, and the ECOMOG peacekeepers began to withdraw. In fact, there was no reason to believe that Liberia was not about to see better days--except for the track record of past Liberian presidents. Isolated pockets of the country remained in revolt, and Taylor was accused of atrocities against the opposition, as well giving aid to rebels in all three neighboring countries (Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Ivory Coast). When the UN charged him with smuggling guns into Sierra Leone in exchange for diamonds, Taylor, a Baptist with a martyr complex, publicly appeared in white robes, begged God for forgiveness and denied the charges at the same time.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Despite all his efforts, Taylor went from being Liberia's best hope to the country's biggest problem. A new civil war began in 1999 when a rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), invaded from Guinea (which is why Taylor supported rebels in Guinea). The government responded by shutting down independent newspapers and radio stations from 2000 onward, but this did not stop the decay of Taylor's regime. A second rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, appeared in 2003; by August the two groups controlled at least 60 percent of Liberia's territory, and LURD began a siege of Monrovia.

Now Taylor came under pressure from the US and the UN to step down; he agreed to do so if another peacekeeping force arrived to end the violence. That force came first from Nigeria, and later from the UN, while the United States took a break from pacifying Iraq by sending 2,300 marines, using them to protect the US embassy and monitor the coast. Taylor moved to Nigeria, where he was indicted by the UN for his involvement in war crimes in Sierra Leone; Interpol and Sierra Leone want him too, but the Nigerian government refuses to hand him over until it gets a specific request from Liberia. A Liberian businessman, Charles Gyude Bryant, was sworn in to serve as president of a transitional government for the next two years (2003-2005).

New elections have just taken place at the time of this writing (November 2005). Initial counts give the prize to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated former Cabinet minister who also worked for the UN and the World Bank. If this holds, she will be the first elected female head of state in Africa's history. Her chief opponent is George Weah, a soccer star whose lack of political experience appeals to those tired of the same old politics. More than fifteen years of constant war have left the economy in ruins, with disease and starvation running rampant, 80 percent unemployment and almost one third of the population homeless. By the time you read this, we may know if the man-made plagues that have afflicted Liberia for at least a generation have finally ended.

The Ivory Coast

The next round of unrest came in 2002, first with a failed military coup in September, and then with rebellions in the north and west. France negotiated a peace agreement in early 2003 that would allow the rebels to join Gbagbo in a coalition government, but the agreement also called for disarming the rebels, and they refused to give up their weapons, so the fighting hasn't completely stopped. French and West African peacekeeping troops stepped in to separate the forces loyal to Gbagbo from those backing the rebel leader, Guillaume Soro. This led to a nasty incident on November 6, 2004, where Ivorian air strikes killed 9 French peacekeepers and an aid worker, and France retaliated by wiping out the whole Ivorian Air Force in an attack on the airport at Yamoussoukro. At this time, most of the population is frustrated, because there are no signs that the quality of life will get better anytime soon, and the relative prosperity of the Houphouët-Boigny era is only a distant memory. Many blame the bad situation on northerners, and some have called for replacing Houphouët-Boigny's "Françafrique" system with "Ivoirité," a racist policy that would deny political and economic rights to immigrants. At the least, this may postpone the next elections indefinitely, if Moslems and Christians, the government and the rebels, cannot agree on who is eligible to vote.

Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone was declared a republic in 1971, with Stevens as president. Opposition to the government still existed, but was gradually eliminated, to the point that Stevens' party, the All People's Congress (APC), ran unopposed in the parliamentary elections of 1973; in 1976 Stevens was reelected president. One year later the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP), the party of the Margai brothers, made a comeback in new parliamentary elections, but not by much; it won 15 seats while the APC won 74. Still, it was enough for the APC in enact a new constitution in 1978, one that made the country a one-party state, forcing the SLPP to join the APC. Stevens was sworn in for a new seven-year term in office.

With no checks on the power of the APC, or as the people now called it, the "political class," it quickly grew corrupt. Over the course of the 1980s, Sierra Leone suffered an economic slump, caused by a decline in export revenues. As a result, the APC gradually lost the ability to rule the country. Stevens retired in 1985, and the man he picked as his successor, Major General Joseph Saidu Momoh, had no trouble getting elected as the next president, since he was the only candidate. However, there was a coup attempt in 1987, and in 1990 the Liberian civil war spilled across the border. Following the fall of Samuel Doe in Liberia, Liberian guerrillas entered Sierra Leone and captured several towns to use as bases; when the government tried to take back these towns, a rebel movement, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), appeared and joined the guerrillas, beginning a brutal civil war.

We have seen in this chapter that civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa make wars on other continents look like high school proms, and the one in Sierra Leone was no exception. No distinction was made between soldiers and civilians, so atrocities against civilians became a preferred tactic. The 3,000-man force of the RUF was mostly Moslem, and its leader, Corporal Ahmed Foday Sankoh, had gotten arms, money and training from Libya's Gaddafi and Liberia's Taylor. Most of the rebels had no ideology (how could they, when a lot of them were kids?), and they viewed warfare as a form of hunting, not wanting to make peace or even win, because they figured winning meant killing everyone else, and then there would be no one left to plunder! Instead of code names like Bravo Company, or numerical names like the 82^nd Airborne, RUF units were named after their favorite atrocities: Burn House Unit, Cut Hands Commando, and Blood Shed Squad, to name a few. The Kill Man No Blood Unit specialized in beating people to death without shedding any blood, while the Born Naked Squad stripped victims nude before killing them. Likewise, instead of abstract names for their activities like Operation Desert Storm or Operation Overlord, RUF campaigns had names that brutally described what they were supposed to do: Operation Burn House (arson), and Operation Pay Yourself (looting) were two of them. Cutting off the arms and legs of civilians was commonplace, as well as cannibalism. Definitely not nice people.

The sinking economy and the civil war persuaded President Momoh to establish a constitutional review commission, and it recommended a return to multiparty democracy. Momoh agreed to do this, but some didn't think he was serious about it, and one group of young army officers decided not to wait for new elections; they staged a coup in April 1992 and replaced Momoh with Captain Valentine Strasser.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Strasser's government reduced street crime, lowered inflation from 115 to 15 percent, and secured more than $300 million in foreign aid for Sierra Leone. However, this didn't stop the threat from the RUF. The government only had two helicopters and three planes in its air force, so just tracking small groups of rebels was a challenge. When government troops failed to penetrate rebel-held areas, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria each committed a reinforced battalion to fight on Strasser's side, but they did no better. By the end of 1994 most of the country had been destroyed, and the RUF was the strongest force.

With few choices left, Strasser hired a well-known American mercenary, Bob MacKenzie. A veteran of the Vietnam War, MacKenzie had fought as a soldier of fortune in Rhodesia and El Salvador, and most recently had trained Croatian soldiers in Bosnia. Britain offered to help, too, unofficially asking MacKenzie to lead a brigade of 4,000 experienced Gurkhas--the best soldiers in the British army--to take back the diamond mines. In Sierra Leone he soon met his match, though; he got killed by the rebels (some say he was also eaten) only two months after his arrival. The Gurkhas ended up leaving without taking part in any major action, and the rebel offensive resumed.

Next, Strasser turned to a South African mercenary company, Executive Outcomes. EO's soldiers were veterans of elite South African units that had fought in Angola's civil war; their financing came from the De Beers Mining Company (Chapter 7, footnote #24), which understandably made recovery of Sierra Leone's mines a priority. As soon as the EO arrived in early 1995, it decided that Sierra Leone needed some aircraft, so they brought in five Ukrainian helicopters--two Mi-24vs and three Mi-17s--while Nigeria contributed two Alpha Jet fighters. Two of the helicopters were in such poor condition that they ended up being used as spare parts for the other three.

So far in the war casualties had been light, because soldiers on both sides were poorly equipped and usually under the influence of alcohol or marijuana, the result being that in a typical battle everyone would discharge a clip of ammunition and then run away. Rather than immediately jumping into the fighting, EO devoted several months to bringing in equipment, and because government troops behaved almost as badly as the rebels, the South Africans spent most of their time organizing and training the Kamajors, new combat teams made up of local militia and traditional hunters. When EO and the Kamajors were ready to strike, in August 1995, the results was far bloodier than previous armed encounters, and a complete success; RUF rebels were driven out of Freetown, and those fleeing from helicopter attacks ran right into the ambushes set up by EO and the Kamajors. This was followed up with a second offensive that liberated the mines and pursued the rebels all the way to Liberia.

Strasser had scheduled elections for April 1996, but he didn't take part in them; he was overthrown in a bloodless coup in February by his defense minister, Brigadier General Julius Maada Bio. By this time the RUF was so badly beaten that it requested a ceasefire, and Bio agreed so that the war wouldn't interfere with the elections. Thirteen parties participated, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of the SLPP was elected president, and Bio stepped down. On November 30, Kabbah and Sankoh signed a peace treaty to end a war that had killed 50,000 Sierra Leonians and forced 360,000 to flee into Liberia and Guinea.

The government now terminated its contract with EO, since it no longer needed EO's services. It acted a bit too soon. In May 1997 an assortment of junior army officers with various grievances staged yet another coup, freed Major Johnny Paul Koroma, an officer who had been arrested in September 1996 for plotting a coup, and put him in charge of the new junta. The officers declared they would rule by decree, and Koroma invited the RUF to join both the armed forces and the government. These were bad moves, which the world community immediately condemned; even worse, Koroma made Sankoh, who had been arrested during a visit to Nigeria in early 1997, the government's number two man. The UN imposed an arms embargo on Sierra Leone, and banned travel abroad for members of the ruling council. ECOMOG peacekeepers in both Sierra Leone and Liberia were given the job of enforcing the sanctions. Accordingly, Nigeria led an ECOMOG offensive that captured Freetown in February 1998, and Kabbah returned from exile a month later.

But all this did was switch everybody's places, like a game of musical chairs. The RUF resumed its struggle, this time with most of the Sierra Leone army on its side. Those troops who stayed with President Kabbah became the Civil Defense Forces (CDF). In October the government executed 24 members of Koroma's junta, including several RUF officers, and put a death sentence on Sankoh. The rebels responded with a campaign to kill, rape and destroy everything they could get their hands on, which they grimly named Operation No Living Thing. In December 1998 the rebels infiltrated Freetown and gained control over most of the city, the Presidential Palace, the radio station and the port of Freetown; only the airport and surrounding neighborhoods remained to the government and ECOMOG.

Even at this point, however, the rebels failed to achieve ultimate victory, because they did not have air power. In January 1999 3,000 Nigerian soldiers began a counteroffensive, backed by the previously mentioned Alpha Jets and one of the helicopters. The result was the most savage battle of the war; at least six thousand civilians were killed in Freetown, though the Nigerians lost one of the jets before it was all over. And the ECOMOG forces didn't behave much better than the rebels did; summary executions of rebels and suspected rebel sympathizers were routine, and a UN report at the time accused ECOMOG of a "totally unacceptable" level of atrocities.

Both sides now concluded that it would be impossible to win the war without destroying the whole country, so they began negotiations in Lome, the capital of Togo. Sankoh was released so he could take part in the talks, though Kabbah declared he would still carry out the death sentence unless a pardon was the only way to bring peace to Sierra Leone. Liberia's Charles Taylor also went to Lome to provide some diplomatic prodding, since he was still a pal of the RUF. They signed a peace agreement in July 1999 which promised a general amnesty for the RUF and reserved at least four cabinet posts for the RUF, one of them for Sankoh.

Despite the agreement, the war was in no hurry to wind down. Johnny Paul Koroma, the former coup leader, was put in charge of a commission to implement the Lome Accord, though he had helped cause the trouble that made the agreement necessary in the first place. A UN peacekeeping force stepped in to take ECOMOG's place, and in the May 2000 it clashed with the RUF, which refused to disarm. Foreigners became a popular target for attacks and kidnapings, forcing British troops to come in, rescue and evacuate foreign nationals from Freetown; they also captured and imprisoned Sankoh again.

Another ceasefire was signed in November 2000, at Abuja, Nigeria, and this time it lasted long enough for a UN-supervised disarmament of the rebels to take place. On January 18, 2002, Kabbah declared the civil war officially over, and he won a landslide victory in the elections held the following May. A war crimes tribunal was established in 2003 to try rebels for acts of terrorism, rape, sexual slavery, and extermination. However, it doesn't look like the two best known defendants will ever go to court; Sankoh died of a heart attack in July 2003, and Charles Taylor is still in Nigerian custody as we go to press.

The Islamist Menace

However, the Islamist dream of a seventh-century utopia would not go away; it appealed to those who wanted revenge on the West, when the alternative was to become more like the West. Appropriately, the first group to promote it after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was based in Arabia--the Wahhabis, the spiritual advisors of the Saudi royal family. From them the idea spread to Egypt in the 1920s, via the Moslem Brotherhood, and when the ayatollahs took over Iran in 1979, they reintroduced fundamentalism to the Shi'a branch of Islam. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a Moslem revival, as Islamists popped up in Moslem communities everywhere, and they gained control over many of the schools and mosques responsible for Islam's missionary efforts. What made these Islamists different was that they blamed different nations for causing all of the Islamic world's problems; in the past Christian Europe was the scapegoat, but now anything having to do with the United States or Israel became the primary target.

Americans tend to think that the War on Terror started on September 11, 2001, but long before that date, Islamists declared war on everyone who doesn't share their beliefs, including moderate Moslem leaders. Several African countries were on the front line from the start, especially Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Sudan. In fact, the assassination of Anwar Sadat was one of the first victories achieved by modern Islamists. The Egyptian government is notoriously inefficient when it comes to performing any of the services expected of today's governments, so groups like the Moslem Brotherhood made themselves popular by providing medical, educational and social benefits to poor people, using traditional Islamic networks; the chronic poverty of the Fellahin tended to work in the Islamists' favor, too.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Still, they cannot directly confront the Mubarak regime, so they usually try to murder indirect targets: secular-minded politicians and writers, Copts, and foreign tourists. By scaring away the tourists who come to see what the pharaohs built, they hope to shut down one of Egypt's biggest sources of revenue.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The worst of these attacks occurred at Queen Hatshepsut's Deir el-Bahri temple (see Chapter 2) in 1997, when six militants from the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya group used guns and knives to kill four Egyptians and fifty-eight tourists. In July 2005, three bombs went off near the hotels of Sharm el-Sheikh, a resort city at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, killing 90 and wounding 150 (most of the victims were Egyptians). In both cases the terrorists expected to kill Americans and/or Israelis, but they didn't seem to care that somebody else became the victims. Nor did these attacks swing Egyptian opinion against the terrorists; the native workers who lost their jobs in the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings convinced themselves that "Zionists" or the West were somehow responsible.

Egypt has long been a westward-looking country, at least since the days when Alexandria was the capital, and Egyptian Islamists are relatively weak compared with their Algerian and Sudanese counterparts. Still, many believe that Al Qaeda, the most notorious of today's terrorist organizations, was involved in the Deir el-Bahri and Sharm el-Sheikh massacres, and Al Qaeda has no trouble finding Egyptian recruits: Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, both came from Egypt. Osama's family business, Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry, reportedly employs 40,000 Egyptians.

Whereas the Islamists were limited to acts of terrorism in Egypt, in Algeria they very nearly took over the country, resorting to bullets when they weren't allowed to win with ballots. It began when the military refused to recognize the results of the 1991 elections, which would have established a government run by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). They had good reason to be concerned; the FIS had condemned its opponents as unpatriotic, pro-French and financially corrupt, and that their goal was to establish an Iranian-style theocracy. And while the FIS wanted to be voted into office, it wasn't clear that they would ever allow themselves to be voted out in a future election. It didn't help when spokesmen for the FIS made statements like, "Democracy is like a virgin. You only use it once."

The army declared a state of emergency in early 1992, and started arresting FIS members--5,000 by the army's account, 30,000 according to FIS. Bearded men were afraid to leave their homes, because they might be accused of belonging to the FIS (compare this with footnote #17), and because there wasn't enough room in the jails to lock up everyone arrested, camps were set up for them in the Sahara desert. Part of the constitution was suspended, and the government was accused of many of the abuses that typically take place under Third World dictatorships: torture, the holding of suspects without charge or trial, etc. The FIS activists still at large launched the Algerian Civil War, which lasted until 2002.

As in previous Algerian wars, most of the fighting took place in the Atlas Mts., which have rugged, tree-covered terrain, ideally suited for guerrilla warfare; the oil industry in the Sahara was never seriously threatened. The Islamist rebels included veterans of the recently concluded war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, who had received training in Sudan and had a reputation for being even more extremist than the rest of the bunch. In 1993 and early 1993 some rival groups to the FIS formed: the Armed Islamic Movement (MIA), the Movement for an Islamic State (MEI), and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). From 1994 onwards the GIA was the most prominent group, and the others, including the FIS, united to form the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS).

Though they disagreed on who was best suited to lead an Islamic revolution, all of these groups opposed the government. Most of them, especially the GIA, also felt that the government wasn't the only enemy; they expanded their list of targets to include teachers (because they were paid government salaries), journalists, foreigners, and any civilian who refused to live by the strict lifestyle of fundamentalist Islam. After a few well-publicized killings, like the 1993 beheading of four young women who were sunbathing on a beach in Western-style swimsuits, virtually all foreigners left the country, and quite a few Algerians emigrated, too. Because of the lack of coverage, Algeria disappeared from news headlines, and since 1994 most of the world has pretended that Algeria doesn't exist.

General Liamine Zeroual, a former diplomat and defense minister, became the next president in 1994; he came from the faction of the army that believed a negotiated settlement was still possible. Initial negotiations failed, so he decided to hold presidential elections. When they took place in November 1995, Zeroual won 60% of the vote, beating two Islamists and one secular candidate. The FIS boycotted the election, since they still were not allowed to participate, and the GIA threatened to kill anyone who voted (their slogan was "one vote, one bullet"), but foreign observers agreed that this was the fairest election Algeria had seen so far. International lenders rescheduled Algeria's foreign debt, a move that helped the economy, and Zeroual gained the confidence to introduce a revised constitution in 1996, and hold parliamentary elections in 1997.

Meanwhile, assassinations and disagreements among the rebels caused the GIA to begin to break up. By the end of 1995 it had turned against the AIS, and battles in the west between the AIS and the GIA became commonplace. In 1997 the war got even nastier, as the GIA started going into villages or neighborhoods and massacring everyone in them, regardless of age or sex. By this time the GIA felt that any Algerian who did not fight the government was corrupt enough to be considered an infidel, and thus it was no sin to kill them; Antar Zouabri, the GIA leader at this point, reportedly said that "except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death." Many of the killings took place on the fertile Mitidja Plain, just south of Algiers, which had strongly supported the FIS in the 1991 election; this area was now renamed the Triangle of Death. Killing tens or even hundreds of civilians at a time, they would not even spare children or pregnant women, nor did they take time off during the holy month of Ramadan. Nesroullah Yous, a survivor of one of the worst massacres, claims that the attackers at Bentalha told him this:

"We have the whole night to rape your women and children, drink your blood. Even if you escape today, we'll come back tomorrow to finish you off! We're here to send you to your God!"⁽⁴⁹⁾

At Bentalha and other massacres, it was also reported that the army arrived on the scene, did nothing to stop the killings, and even prevented the villagers from escaping. This led to rumors of collaboration between the army and the GIA. Other rumors asserted that civilian militias, trained and armed by the government, retaliated by committing their own brutal acts, playing tit-for-tat. Whether or not any of this was true, the fighting soon proved to be too much for the AIS. Caught between the government and the GIA, the AIS leader, Madani Mezrag, ordered a cease-fire in September 1997, effectively taking his group out of the war.

Wartime pressures may also have been too much for President Zeroual; in September 1998 he suddenly announced his resignation. Presidential elections were scheduled for April 1999, but before the voting took place, six of the seven candidates withdrew, warning of fraud; this allowed the seventh candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, to win easily. Bouteflika was a veteran of the war for independence and had been foreign minister under Ahmed Ben Bella. To end the war, Bouteflika presented a "Civil Concord" calling for a pardon of all Islamist prisoners not guilty of rape or murder; this approved in a national referendum that September. The AIS formally disbanded in January 2000, now that its members had amnesty. The GIA was torn apart by splits and desertions in its ranks and by successful army counterattacks; it disintegrated after Zouabri's death in early 2002. By 2003, the only Islamist group left that hadn't laid down its arms was the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a splinter faction of the GIA which had an estimated 300 members and was supported by the Al Qaeda network. The GSPC's presence has resulted in an improvement of relations between the United States and Algeria, since Al Qaeda is a common enemy of both.

Algeria has suffered terribly from the civil war. Between 80,000 and 120,000 have been killed since 1992, and half a million were driven from their homes; the only good thing about these figures is that they are smaller than the body count racked up by Algeria's war for independence, forty years earlier. Some terrorist incidents still occur, but the country stabilized enough for new presidential elections, allowing Bouteflika to win a second term in 2004. International observers, however, say that Algeria has not made significant progress on human rights and democracy. There is also the possibility of future ethnic violence, between the Arab elite and the often-ignored Berbers, who make up 30 percent of the population; Berbers in the Kabyle region have staged strikes and demonstrations, protesting the outlawing of their language.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Finally, Algeria will need to deal with large-scale unemployment and diversify the oil-based economy, if it is going to prosper in the long run.

Whereas in Algeria the Islamists fought the government, in Sudan the Islamists and the government cooperated against the country's non-Arab and non-Moslem communities. When Omar Hassan al-Bashir seized power in 1989, he was expected to end the Second Sudanese Civil War, since his predecessor had failed to do so. Instead, he stepped up assaults on the rebels in the south, banned trade unions, political parties and other "nonreligious institutions," shut down the press, and purged 78,000 from the ranks of the police, the army and the civil administration. Al-Bashir dismissed his opponents as imperialist and Zionist agents, and like Moslem leaders elsewhere, he indulged in anti-Semitism from time to time; once he claimed that "Jews control all decision-making centers in the US. The Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the National Security Advisor and the CIA are all [controlled by] Jews." In 1991 he introduced a new criminal law code that called for harsh, Islamic-style punishments, including amputations and stoning. The south was exempt from the new laws for the time being, but since southerners had not received the sovereignty they wanted, the code could always be imposed on them at some future date.

Sudan backed Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War; the United States responded by putting Sudan on a list of "rogue nations" supporting terrorism, began to isolate the country through sanctions, and offered money to any other country facing trouble from a Sudan-backed faction, like Uganda. In 1992 Osama bin Laden arrived, and Sudan became Al Qaeda's base of operations for the next four years. Sudan tried unsuccessfully to mend relations by handing over bin Laden to the United States, which wasn't interested in him yet (only later would he be implicated in terrorist attacks on Americans), and then expelled him in 1996, whereupon he moved to Afghanistan.

In March 1996 al-Bashir and his supporters swept presidential and legislative elections. Hassan al-Turabi, the head of the National Islamic Front and a national spiritual leader, became speaker of the National Assembly. One month later, evidence surfaced linking al-Bashir's government with a recent assassination attempt on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia; the UN subsequently levied sanctions against Sudan for refusing to give up three suspects in the assassination attempt.

After a government offensive in January 1994, the southerners had the advantage more often than not. Soon most of the south was controlled by the strongest rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), led by John Garang. Because al-Bashir was so widely loathed, both by foreigners and by his own people, the rebels got the aid they needed from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and the United States; the Sudanese government also accused Eritrea and Tanzania of helping them. In response, pro-government militias, called the Janjaweed, committed horrible atrocities against civilians in the south; international observers accused them of genocide, torture, rape and murder on a large scale. In addition, because the war had been going on for so long, there was little agricultural or industrial production in the south, and the food sent by foreign agencies to prevent starvation was often kept from arriving by the government in Khartoum. Finally, there were credible reports of the Janjaweed bringing back slavery, breaking up Christian families by kidnaping women and children and forcing them to become workers or concubines. Al-Bashir spoke out against this cruel practice, but did very little to stop it; his government may have even encouraged it.

In December 1999, al-Bashir and al-Turabi had a falling out. Al-Turabi attempted to pass constitutional amendments that would have reduced the president's powers, by creating a prime minister who was chosen by the National Assembly, and by removing presidential control over the selection of provincial governors. Instead, al-Bashir declared a state of emergency, dismissed and jailed al-Turabi, and purged al-Turabi's supporters from the cabinet. One year later new elections were held, and al-Bashir won easily, no surprise since all other parties boycotted the elections and most of the south did not even get to vote. However, he still did not feel too confident about his position, and let the state of emergency continue until 2005.

Because of extremely heavy international pressure, especially after September 11, 2001, Khartoum agreed to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the rebels. Usually the talks failed to reach agreement on a key issue, like the relationship between religion and the government or whether the borders of the southern provinces would be redrawn, now that we know they contain oil. They finally signed a comprehensive peace treaty in January 2005, which called for the following:

• The south would have autonomy until 2011, after which it would vote on whether to become independent.
• John Garang would become vice president, with veto powers.
• Income from oilfields would be shared 50:50.
• Islamic law would only be in effect in the south if the National Assembly approved of it. In addition, the constitutional requirement that the president be a Moslem was dropped.
• A power-sharing agreement in which 52 percent of cabinet positions would go to the National Congress Party, 28 percent to the SPLA, and 20 percent to other groups.

By this time, Sudan's hot spot had shifted from the south to the west. Two rebel groups in Darfur, the westernmost province, launched a revolt in 2003. The rebels accused the central government of neglecting Darfur, though they did not agree on whether the solution was independence from the rest of Sudan or a new central government in Khartoum. The government gave Darfur the same response it had given the south; it sent in the Janjaweed militias, in addition to its own forces. In February 2004 the government captured Tine, a town on the Chad border, and claimed it had crushed the rebellion, but fighting still continues in many areas. Since then various reports have accused the militias of murders, gang rapes and ethnic cleansing, so the conflict has become a race war (Darfur's residents are Moslem, but not Arab), rather than a religious war like the conflict in the south. The UN Security Council passed a resolution in July 2004 that demanded the Sudanese government disarm and prosecute the militias, or face the threat of punitive measures. Instead, tens of thousands of people had been killed in Darfur by 2005, and as many as two million were homeless, with 200,000 of them becoming refugees in Chad. The ineffectiveness of the threat caused UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to state in a BBC interview, "We have learned nothing from Rwanda." Later in the same month (July 2005), Nicholas Kristof noted in a column for the New York Times that the media only gives Africa much attention when celebrities like Brad Pitt talk about the continent's plight, and wrote, "If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur."

South of the Sahara, Islamists have only made limited inroads to date; for some reason Islam has a harder time advancing in places with trees than it does in deserts. Still, it would be folly to ignore a potential threat; Moslems have been trying to conquer/convert all of Africa for centuries, and there is no reason to think they won't try it again in the future. Earlier in this chapter we looked at efforts to spread Islam in West Africa's forest zone (Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone). In August 1998 Al Qaeda set off bombs simultaneously in the US embassies at Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; more than 300 were killed and 5,000 injured, most of the casualties being African. The US response was to launch cruise missiles at Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and at a Sudanese factory, but this was ineffective (the camps were deserted and the factory appears to have only produced harmless medicines, rather than nerve gas). Another bomb went off in an Israeli-owned hotel, and terrorists tried to shoot down an EL AL airliner with a shoulder-launched missile (both incidents occurred in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002).

Despite all this, Africa's non-Moslem leaders are reluctant to side with the West against Islamic terrorism. The main reason for this is the same reflex that made many Africans support communism during the Cold War years; because Western nations ruled them half a century ago, they still see the West's enemy as a lesser evil. As for the United States, it never ruled any part of Africa besides Liberia, but because it has taken the place of Europe as the main Western power, it might as well be the same old thing. Nelson Mandela, for example, once claimed that President Bush "cannot think properly" and "wants a holocaust." Mandela's successor is even more blunt; in a speech to the Non-Aligned Movement in 2000, South African President Mbeki called the United States a country of increasing racism and xenophobia. And when South Africa hosted the 2001 U.N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, it quickly degenerated into a series of anti-American and anti-Semitic rants, until the United States walked out from the meetings. Of course a sudden upsurge in terrorist attacks, or a new Moslem-sponsored war in a sub-Saharan country, could change the minds of Black Africans in a hurry, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Even Muammar el-Gaddafi has become a potential target for terrorists, which is a surprise considering how recently he had been on their side. When he took over Libya, he installed an ideology that was partially based on the Koran, the same ultimate source used by the Sanussi king he replaced. Still, he was too secular for the tastes of hardcore Islamists, and from 1995 onward the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a faction with ties to Al Qaeda, tried more than once to kill the colonel-turned-president. Faced with the possibility of being violently removed from office by either the known devil of the West or the less predictable Islamists, Gaddafi chose to make a deal with the former. When American troops captured the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in December 2003, Gaddafi came clean, announcing that Libya did have programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and that he would allow international inspectors to observe and dismantle Libya's weapons of mass destruction. A spokesman for Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, said that Gaddafi called him on the telephone, because Berlusconi is a good friend of President Bush, and said, "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid." In 2004 the US re-established diplomatic relations with Libya, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a visit to Tripoli, and Libya's rehabilitation into the rest of the world community began. Maybe just the threat of living under the Islamic form of fascism is enough to convince some of its advocates that it is a bad idea.

Hosni Mubarak had joined the US-led coalition that liberated Kuwait in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but many Egyptians sympathized with the Iraqis, so his support got him nowhere. Consequently, the next time the United States went to war with Iraq, Egypt tried to stay out of the conflict, until the introduction of a Western-style democracy in Iraq persuaded the aging Mubarak that he'd better show some progress in the same direction. Originally, it looked like he was going to hand over the presidency to one of his sons, but after Iraq's free election in January 2005, Mubarak announced he would also allow multiparty elections, the first in Egypt's history. In previous elections, Parliament had put forth a single presidential candidate, and the voters had to vote yes or no on him; of course Mubarak won every time, and the results were so predictable that only around 10 percent of the voters bothered to go to the polls. In the multiparty election of September 2005, Mubarak was elected to a fifth term with 88.6% of the votes cast. This time the voter turnout was estimated at 22 percent. Opposition parties charged fraud and outside observers noted irregularities in the voting, but neither was enough to prevent an official declaration of a successful election.

Starting Over Again With the African Union

The 2002 election in Zimbabwe was one of the last events overseen by the OAU. When the United States talked about putting sanctions on the Mugabe regime, the OAU issued a protest, but otherwise did nothing: "We are dismayed by this report, which amounts to interference in the internal affairs of a member state." No wonder Amara Essy, the last Secretary-General of the OAU, said in an interview that "The OAU is the most difficult organization I have ever seen."

The main mover and shaker in the transition from the OAU to the African Union was an unlikely one: Libya's Gaddafi. In the 1990s he gave up on his old dream of pan-Arabism; he no longer even called himself an Arab, insisting that he was first and foremost an African. "Libya has for too long endured the Arabs, for whom we have paid blood and money," he said in a 2003 speech, and because of that, his country had been "boycotted by the US and demonized by the West." In his new role Gaddafi called for the creation of a "United States of Africa," and hosted the first meeting to create a replacement organization for the OAU, at Sirte, Libya in 1999. Additional meetings were held in Lome, Togo in 2000, and Lusaka, Zambia in 2001; all three summits were successful in producing agreements. The African Union itself came into being at Durban, South Africa in July 2002, with South African President Mbeki as its first president.

The African Union flag.

Most former OAU members joined the African Union immediately; the only country that has refused to join is Morocco, because the Western Sahara is a member. The name reflects the European Union, which it is modeled after, though some of the official bodies that make up the organization were inspired by the United Nations.⁽⁵¹⁾ What makes the AU different from the OAU (besides the removal of one letter) is a stronger emphasis on economic development, promoting democracy and improving the lives of ordinary people, even if these goals mean abandoning the principle of state sovereignty. So far, however, when it comes to dealing with corruption, warfare and AIDS, the AU has acted no different from its predecessor. This is not a good sign; to remain a relevant organization, the AU will soon have to show that it can implement what it promises.

Modern African Demographics

Our best estimates put approximately 800 million people in Africa for the year 2000, and at the cut-off date for this chapter (2005), it was 887 million. This is 13 percent of the total world population, so keep in mind that it's really a recovery of sorts; before the introduction of conveniences like modern medicine and sanitation, Africa's portion had been shrinking, thanks to the harsh environment that limited growth across most of the continent. Five thousand years ago, the African portion of world population was probably 20 percent. By 1800 A.D., however, it was as low as 7 percent, so if Africa had kept up with the rest of the world over the ages, there would be nearly one and a half billion Africans by now.

The five most populous countries are Nigeria (128.8 million), Egypt (77.5 million), Ethiopia (73 million), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (60 million), and South Africa (44.3 million). Nigeria and Egypt have been ahead in the population department for centuries, and they piled on to their lead at such a rate (at least a million every year) that it seems only a Malthusian-style plague or famine can stop the growth.⁽⁵²⁾ Ethiopia and Congo-Kinshasa are the big surprises, from a census-taker's point of view; neither was a top contender in the mid-twentieth century, but both of them more than tripled their population in just the period covered by this chapter, and they did it in spite of the wars and poverty that have gripped those lands. South Africa had just two million in 1800, and it got to where it is today by building the most advanced society in Africa, thereby attracting quite a few immigrants; in fact, it was in third place just a few years ago, before Ethiopia and the Congo pulled ahead.⁽⁵³⁾

Africa's population also became more diverse. Besides the ethnic groups listed in previous chapters (Bantus, Nilotics, Pygmies, Bushmen, Semites, Berbers and Malagasy), the above total of 887 million includes more than six million European whites, one million Indians and four million "coloreds." Most of the folks from all three groups live in South Africa; in fact, the continent's population was even more diverse during the colonial era than it is now, but since independence, most African countries have forced the non-Africans living within their borders to leave. Another factor promoting diversity is the city; cities bring together people from many tribes, so the typical urban African will rub elbows with members of other tribes more often than he would if he had lived like his ancestors. Older West African cities like Kano try to limit intermingling by segregating the immigrants to separate neighborhoods, the so-called "stranger quarters." Although Africa's urban population is currently just 37 percent, making this the least urbanized continent, it has some of the world's largest metropolitan areas: Cairo currently has 12 million residents, and Lagos has 17 million.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Finally, modern Africa's population is a mobile one. For those whose ancestors were nomads, moving around a lot comes naturally. Others learned to make long commutes in colonial times, when they worked on mines and plantations located more than a day's journey from home. Nowadays, ambitious Africans will move to the cities, but they don't stay there all year long; many regularly go back to visit their birthplaces and/or the lands of their ancestors.

However, many migrating Africans are refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 30 percent of the world's refugees come from Africa. As in other places, African refugees flee from war, tyranny or famine--and Africa has plenty of all three. Usually they go to the nearest country that will take them in, and if enough migrate in that direction, they will destabilize the host country to the point that another wave of refugees will head in the opposite direction. Examples of such exchanges took place in the late twentieth century between Ethiopia and Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi, and Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Some Africans make a complete break with the past, by migrating off the continent altogether. Generally, the Western nation that colonized them is their first choice, even if the colonial power was oppressive (e.g., Senegalese leaving Africa are inclined to pick France for an overseas home, but so do Algerians, though the French treated them worse than the Senegalese). Unfortunately, most Africans leave for other continents because they have little to lose and much to gain by moving elsewhere. And because the richest and best-educated find it easiest to leave, the result is a "brain drain" that Africa can't really afford. In the United States, for example, 881,300 US residents were African-born at the time of the 2000 census; often they are better off than their "African-American" brothers, whose families have been in the New World for centuries. Walter Williams, a black American columnist, illustrated the predicament by telling about an event he attended a few years ago, at the Nigerian embassy in Washington, D.C. At one point, the Nigerian ambassador told the audience, which was mostly Nigerian, that they should go back to Nigeria, because people with professional skills are sorely needed there. Many of the Nigerians responded by breaking out in near uncontrollable laughter.

Africa has the world's highest birth rate; the total population has tripled in the past fifty years. The annual growth rate peaked at 3.43 percent in 1979, and though it has leveled off since then (down to 2.08 percent), it is still higher than the world average. When it comes to human communities, forget what you learned in school about "survival of the fittest"; the poorest, least fit societies are growing the fastest in today's world, while the most advanced societies, especially those of Europe and Japan, aren't fertile enough to keep their populations from shrinking.

There are both positive and negative factors behind the drop in Africa's birthrate over the past generation. The positive factor is a change of attitude brought about by modernization. In pre-industrial societies, large families are an asset; children are a symbol of wealth and prestige, an important source of labor, a form of insurance to make sure the elderly are cared for, and through marriage, they allow a family to network with as many other families as possible (interdependency is important in a place where many hazards, both natural and manmade, exist). For those reasons, childlessness is often seen as a tragedy. In Chapter 15 of my European history, I explained why Europe's birthrate declined in the twentieth century: marriage and childbearing delayed by the demands of education and career, the viewing of children as a costly burden, and the introduction of birth control. Similar trends are now taking place among Africa's urban middle class.

The negative factor is a high death rate; Africa ranks highest there as well. Plants and animals that produce many young tend to lose many young, and the same seems to be true with human communities. Life in Africa is cheap, to a degree that Europe hasn't seen since the end of the Thirty Years War. For a start, Africa provides so many "natural" ways to die: wild animals (e.g., crocodiles, lions, sharks, poisonous snakes and insects), parasites, bad food, no food at all, and so on. Add manmade causes like violent crime, war, and the various atrocities that come when governments ignore human rights and the rule of law. Top that off with epidemics like AIDS, and you'll get an idea why Africa's life expectancy, after rising for most of the twentieth century, has fallen in recent years; the overall life expectancy for the continent is now just fifty years.

Kim du Toit, a blogger who lived in South Africa for thirty years, used this story to explain Africa's casual attitude toward death:

"My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: 'Three Headless Bodies Found.'
The next day: 'Three Heads Found.'
The third day: 'Heads Don't Match Bodies.'"⁽⁵⁵⁾

So far in this chapter we haven't talked about the impact of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), and we should, because if any disease was ever a confirmation of the theories of Thomas Malthus, it is this one. In Chapter 4 we noted that bubonic plague was first reported at Rhapta, Tanzania, in the sixth century A.D. Well, equatorial Africa is a notorious "hot zone"; the tropical climate of this region, coupled with the natural biodiversity of the jungle, make it easy for microbes to jump from one species to another. Apparently this is what happened with AIDS; we now believe that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, made the jump in the 1930s, when a human hunter butchered a chimpanzee and came in contact with HIV-tainted blood. At first the disease stayed put, because it was confined to an isolated, rural community, but the construction of the Kinshasa Highway, and the wars, famines and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged infected Africans to migrate to the cities, taking the disease with them. From there it spread like wildfire, thanks to modern transportation, and the first cases of AIDS outside of Africa were reported in 1981.

AIDS is a worldwide problem, but Africa has been the continent hardest hit, due to it being the site of the first outbreaks, unsafe sexual practices, substandard medical facilities, soldiers raping their victims in war zones, etc. According to the Population Reference Bureau (prb.org), all of the fifteen countries with the highest percentage of AIDS cases are in Africa. Here are the figures as of 2003:

Some history books refer to the sixteenth century as "the Spanish century," the nineteenth century as "the British century," and the twentieth century as either the American or the Russian century, depending on the author's point of view. At this point it doesn't look like the twenty-first century will be "the African century"--the next section summarizes the things Africa must overcome to qualify for that title. Still, recent population growth shows us that Africa is going to be an important player on the future world scene. In fact, the African nations and peoples will be more prominent than they have been for a very long time, at least since the Carthaginian and Egyptian civilizations disappeared.

The Challenges Facing Modern Africa

Some factors were beyond the ability of African governments to control. The quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC in 1973 hurt Africa badly. Even oil-rich countries like Nigeria suffered, because the price increases triggered inflation in the West, raising the cost of imports. Economic growth gave way to debt payments, and soon the pioneering efforts to improve public health were swamped by AIDS. In this chapter we have pointed out cases when an African country was doing well (e.g., Kenya under Kenyatta, the Ivory Coast under Houphouët-Boigny, Liberia under Tubman), but in no case did a nation's prosperity outlast the man on top who started it. Thus, part of the problem is still too much reliance on centralized economic planning.

In at least 17 African countries, real per capita income (see footnote #10) has declined since 1970, despite more than $100 billion in aid coming from the World Bank between 1970 and 1999, so today's African is arguably worse off than his parents and grandparents. Even the Europeans didn't leave completely; most African countries were economically dependent on, or in debt to, the Western nation that once ruled them. As Kwame Nkrumah pointed out in 1965, colonialism had merely been replaced by "neo-colonialism."⁽⁵⁷⁾

Much of the foreign aid, whatever form it comes in, is simply taken by the first, second or third person to touch it, and rarely does it reach the poor folks shown in news stories about Africa. Some African leaders (e.g., Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir) will intercept aid shipments to keep them from falling in the hands of political opponents, and there have been stories of chiefs or politicians who preferred to see their subjects starve, rather than accept food from an outside source, because taking charity might cause others to realize that the bigwig wasn't all-powerful. This is the main reason why foreign aid has not helped Africa, and if a cure for AIDS was discovered and shipped to Africa at no charge, the epidemic would probably continue for the same reason.

Keith B. Richburg tells a joke about African corruption in his Out of America: a Black Man Confronts Africa. It begins when an African and an Asian go to the same college in the West, and become good friends. After they graduate, they return to their home countries, and get jobs in their governments. One day the African visits his Asian friend, and is impressed by the Asian's spectacular house, his three Mercedes, and a huge swimming pool, all staffed by servants. Neither of them was rich in their college days, so the African asks how he can afford all that. The Asian asks him if he sees the airport and the grand highway in the distance. The African replies yes, he can see those things. The Asian jerks a thumb at his chest and says, "Ten percent."

Five years later, it is the Asian's turn to visit his African friend. He is staggered to find not a house, but a veritable palace, with a whole fleet of limousines, air-conditioned indoor tennis courts, and an army of uniformed chauffeurs and servants. How on earth can his friend afford it all? "Do you see that highway? Do you see that hospital?" asks the African. The Asian sees nothing at all where the African points, just empty fields going to the horizon. Then the African smiles, taps himself on the chest, and says, "One hundred percent!"

Out of habit, today's African politicians will accuse the West of exploitation and blame the outside world for everything that goes wrong in Africa. Maybe this made sense a generation ago, but now some countries (e.g., Morocco, Libya) have been independent longer than they have been colonies of Europe. They can't blame their former masters for the recent massacres in Rwanda, the Congo or Darfur. And the charge that Western exploitation causes poverty rings hollow when one realizes that only 0.4 percent of the US economy depends on trade with Africa, and that the countries that have been the least receptive to capitalism--those that have tried socialism or communism--are usually the poorest of all. Indeed, one could argue that multinational corporations don't exploit Africa enough. Ironically, those who protest free trade at the meetings of groups like the World Trade organization may be doing more harm than good to the Third World countries they claim to be protecting.

Speaking of good intentions, Africa's poverty was recently brought back into the headlines by Live 8, a series of rock concerts by high-profile stars held simultaneously in several cities around the world (July 2005). Unlike the original Live Aid concert held twenty years earlier, this one did not raise any money for Africa; it was just supposed to get the attention of the world's richest countries, and persuade their governments to increase the amount of food and medical aid they're sending. However, those attending Live 8 did not realize that foreign aid hasn't worked in the past, and it may make Africans more dependent than ever on the developed nations. For example, when clothing was sent to the children of Nigeria, it found its way to the black market, where it was sold at prices the Nigerian textile industry couldn't compete with. The result? Nigerian factories went from employing 137,000 textile workers in 1997, to just 57,000 in 2003. One could argue that sending in soldiers to remove Africa's worst governments would help more than just giving a lot of food, medicine, and cash.

Nowadays some Africans are offended by the paternalism of outside do-gooders, which to them resembles the idealistic imperialism that once motivated humanitarians in Europe to conquer Africa--for the good of Africans, of course. One such person is James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist. In a recent interview with Der Spiegel Magazine, Shikwati described foreign aid as a source of corruption for Africa, and a scheme to keep UN workers employed full time: "For God's sake, please just stop the aid."

On a positive note, it looks like some Africans are finally realizing that they can't solve today's problems by trying solutions that failed to work in the past. The September 2005 National Geographic reported that 13 of Africa's 53 nations are full democracies--still a minority, but an improvement nonetheless. And as appalling as the wars in modern Africa have been, non-African countries are reluctant to get involved, except as part of a UN mission, forcing Africans to realize that they're on their own when it comes to resolving these conflicts. That may be the main reason why most of Africa is more stable than it was just a decade ago. And a general rise in commodity prices (not just one item like oil or coffee) would go a long way toward reducing debts and improving the balance of trade.

Though Africa has more than the world's share of problems, it also has the resources (both agricultural and mineral) and the manpower to solve them. But what it needs isn't tangible; Africa needs a sense of responsibility, property rights, free markets, and respect for the rule of law. In Chapters 1-6 we saw how Africans eventually learned to cope with the challenges thrown at them by nature; then in Chapters 7-8 they dealt with new challenges, largely man-made ones from the outside world. More than 1,900 years ago, the Roman author Pliny the Elder found so many novelties in Africa that he said, "Out of Africa always something new." Now Africans are going to have to try something new to deal with today's challenges, since trying the same old thing didn't work. Whether or not they can do this will decide if the "dark continent" will stand with the rest of the world's nations as an equal in the twenty-first century, or sink into a new dark age. Stay tuned; this narrative may now be finished, but the story of Africa is likely to add more exciting episodes every year!

23. Henze, Paul B., Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pg. 282.

24. In 1992, after the Derg was gone, it was revealed that Haile Selassie had been buried under a toilet in the imperial palace; Mengistu Haile Mariam, the most important of the Derg leaders, used the palace as his personal office. In 2000 the late emperor's remains were given a more proper burial by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but the post-communist government refused to call it a state funeral, simply reminding the world that Haile Selassie was "a tyrant and an oppressor."

25. Though Mengistu Haile Mariam may have toed the Soviet party line, his campaigns against the enemies of the Ethiopian state resembled the old-time imperialism of past monarchs like Menelik II. Rumors circulated that he was an illegitimate son of Haile Selassie, and he encouraged this because, paradoxically, it gave legitimacy to his regime.

26. The first Live Aid rock concert was held in 1985 to raise money for the victims of Ethiopia's famine. It generated more than $60 million in donations, most of it coming from sales of the song "We Are The World."
Israel responded to the famine not by shipping aid in, but by taking people out. 12,000 Ethiopians who claimed Jewish ancestry were airlifted to Israel in 1984-85, in a program called Operation Moses, until the Ethiopian government ordered it stopped. Another airlift at the end of the 1980s picked up 3,500 more Jews, and it is hoped that the last members of that community will arrive in Israel by the end of 2007. Those who have already made it are no longer called Falashas, which means "homeless" in Amharic, but simply Ethiopian Jews.

27. The battle of Mogadishu became the subject for a book and a movie, both named "Black Hawk Down." Operation Restore Hope showed how much influence the media has in today's world. The initial landing site in the operation was kept secret, but still reporters and cameras were there on the beach to cover the arrival of the Americans. And while American soldiers could never find Aidid, he managed to appear on CNN more than once for an interview!

28. The instability of Ethiopia and Somalia spilled over into Djibouti. Djibouti's population is 60 percent Somali and 30 percent Afar. From 1991 to 1994 the Afar (also called the Danakil) were in revolt, controlling two thirds of the mini-state at one point. I guess that means no country in Africa is too small to avoid ethnic strife.

29. Membership in these movements tended to follow tribal lines. ZAPU was largely supported by the Ndebele tribe, and led by Joshua Nkomo (1917-99). ZANU's supporters came from the Shona tribe; at first it was led by the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole (1920-2000), but in 1976 a Marxist, Robert Gabriel Mugabe
(1924-), took his place, and Mugabe made ZANU the most radical, implacable opponent of white minority rule.

30. From 1980 to 1987, while Mugabe was prime minister, the president of Zimbabwe was a minor ZANU official, the Reverend Canaan Banana (1936-2003). Go ahead and laugh, even Zimbabweans thought it was a funny name. ZANU may have nominated him for the position as a joke, forcing whites to acknowledge that Zimbabwe really was a "Banana Republic." If you think other presidents have trouble getting things done, well, nobody could take President Banana seriously, and in 1982 a law was actually passed that made it illegal to make jokes about the president's name. After Mugabe eliminated his job, Banana was accused of several counts of homosexuality, a crime which carries a ten-year prison sentence under Zimbabwean law. Shortly before sentencing, however, the ex-president heard a rumor that Mugabe was going to kill him, and Banana split, fleeing to South Africa with a fake beard for a disguise. Nelson Mandela persuaded him to go back and serve his sentence, so if you want to summarize Banana's career, he went from being a black revolutionary to a head of state to a convicted sodomite, and ended his days as a disgraced, pathetic figure.

31. While I was writing this paper (October 2005), Mugabe went to Rome to attend the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's special meeting, commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the United Nations' founding. There he denounced Bush and Blair as "unholy men," compared their alliance in the War on Terror to the World War II alliance between Mussolini and Hitler, and made friends with another notorious leader who felt the same way, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Few of the participants at the conference seemed to care that they were supposed to be talking about ending world hunger, or that in the case of Zimbabwe, Mugabe is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

32. A side effect of South African foreign policy was good relations with Israel, another country that has felt isolated on the world scene. You may have heard that politics can make strange bedfellows, but so can loneliness!

33. South Africa had a similar plan for Namibia, which designated areas along the northern and eastern frontiers as homelands for tribes like the Herero, and left everything else to the whites. However, the South African government never got around to carrying it out.

34. South Africa is the only country the author knows of that has three capitals, one for each branch of the government. The executive branch resides in Pretoria, the legislative branch in Cape Town, and the judicial branch in Bloemfontein. In 2005 Pretoria was renamed Tshwane, after a township in the neighborhood; only a single district of the city will remain "Pretoria."

35. Sibusiso Masuku, "For Better and for Worse: South African crime trends in 2002," South African Crime Quarterly, no. 3, March 2003.

36. "Small mercies," The Economist, October 9, 2003.

37. "If only the adults would behave like the children," The Economist, April 21, 2005.

38. Central African nomenclature is confusing; the truth is that Zaire is not so much an African name as a Portuguese one. When Diogo Cão discovered the Congo River in 1483 (see Chapter 6), he asked the natives what they called it, and they answered Nzadi o Nzere ("the river that swallows all the other rivers"); the last word in that phrase went down in Portuguese logbooks as Zaire. The more common name of Congo comes from the largest tribe living nearby, the Bakongo, as you probably already guessed. By changing both the land and the river name to Zaire, Mobutu was sending a message that the country wasn't just for the Bakongo. In one of the paradoxes of recent history, Laurent Kabila restored the former name of "Democratic Republic of the Congo," though he wasn't a Bakongo (he came from the Luba tribe in Katanga) and had no intentions of establishing a democracy.

39. The lack of an outside response to Rwanda's holocaust caused many to declare "Never again!" Still, it has happened again in Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia and Sierra Leone, in spite of outside intervention, and the current "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur is getting less attention than Rwanda had.

40. Even when he had to leave, Mobutu couldn't change his habits, and tried to take as much with him as possible. When negotiating the terms under which he would depart, he was offered a stipend of $2 million per month, and he exclaimed, "You're pulling my leg. It's out of the question. I need $10 million." He eventually settled for $3 million.

41. Unfortunately, several hundred thousand Hutus stayed too long in the Congo; after the First Congo War started they couldn't return to Rwanda because Kabila's westward advance drove them in the opposite direction, deeper into the jungles of the Congo River basin. Here they were beyond the reach of aid workers, and tens of thousands of them died in the war, or from disease and starvation.

42. Equatorial Africa's wildlife has also suffered badly in the conflicts fought over the past generation. When endangered mountain gorillas in the national parks of Rwanda were caught in the crossfire between warring factions, the incident got international attention. More recently the hippopotami of the Congo have been driven nearly to extinction by hungry rebels and militiamen, who hunt them with machine guns, rocket launchers and even dynamite.

43. We noted reports of cannibalism during the Congolese Civil War (see Chapter 8, footnote #25). Similar stories came out in 2003, reporting that members of the MLC and RCD groups had killed and eaten Pygmies; this prompted a UN investigation. Apparently those rebels thought that Pygmies weren't fully human, and that eating their body parts would give them special power. I wonder how the politically correct crowd would stop such a custom?
And in another case of history repeating itself, the Second Congo War produced modern-day versions of the Simba Rebellion. Called the Mai-Mai and the Ninjas, these groups, like the Simbas, believed that the magic of their witch doctors made them immune to bullets, and when they engaged armed opponents, they found out the hard way that this wasn't the case.

44. The new constitution required that the president had to be at least 35 years old. Apparently Doe did not pay attention to this detail until it went into effect; just before the 1985 election, he had to change his year of birth from 1951 to 1950, so that he could run as a legitimate candidate. One year later Willie Givens wrote a book about the president entitled The road to democracy under the leadership of Samuel Kanyon Doe, and he made an embarrassing mistake, first stating that Doe was born on May 6, 1950, and then showing a picture dated May 6, 1981, with this accompanying text: "the man who changed the course of Liberia's history three weeks before the age of 29, celebrates his 30th birthday."

45. On another occasion, Taylor reportedly said that "Jesus Christ was accused of being a murderer in his time."

46. Incidentally, Captain Strasser was only twenty-seven years old at the time of the coup, making him the world's first head of state from "Generation X."

47. Denunciations of the rich by Islamists aren't really new, either; you may remember in Chapter 5 how the Almoravids preached that everyone should live in single-story houses.

48. I have noticed that while the Arabs are very interested in their history from the seventh century A.D. onward, they tend to ignore earlier eras completely, dismissing them as ignorant times because the people weren't Moslem yet. During my brief visit to Egypt, I saw schoolchildren on field trips at Sakkara and Giza, and foreigners like myself, but the only adult Egyptians among the ruins were the old men who hang around each monument and offer to show you around for a tip. Likewise, the Cairo Museum was largely empty, but the fact that it was a Sunday morning shouldn't have kept Moslems away if they wanted to see King Tut's treasures.

49. Nesroullah Yous & Salima Mellah, Qui a tué a Bentalha?, La Découverte, Paris, 2000.

50. The Algerian government passed a law in 1998 that made Arabic the only language permitted in all government and business activities, and political rallies. This posed a problem for those Algerians who spoke French instead of Arabic; 132 years of French rule had left plenty of these folks around. The Berbers were particularly outraged; they held rallies in their own language, tore down Arabic signs and rampaged through government-owned shops. Lounes Matoub, a popular Berber singer, was beaten up by Islamist militants, after he denounced Arabic as "uninteresting . . . unsuitable for knowledge and science."

51. Africa has long been influential at the United Nations, because of the General Assembly's policy of "one nation, one vote"; African nations hold between one fourth and one third of the seats in the General Assembly. The two most recent UN Secretary-Generals have been from Africa: Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt, 1992-96), and Kofi Annan (Ghana, 1996-present).

52. One Egyptian custom that has lasted through the ages is a fondness for elaborate graves. The mausoleums in Cairo's vast "City of the Dead" are nicer than most poor people's homes; some even have plumbing and electricity! Consequently many of Cairo's poorest have moved in, turning the mausoleums into apartments for both the homeless and the lifeless. However, they have to stay out of sight on holidays, when relatives of the dead come to pay their respects or have picnics among the graves. The keepers of the cemeteries make the best of the situation by charging the squatters rent.

53. Speaking of advanced societies, Egypt and South Africa are the only African countries with a significant presence on the Internet. You can recognize their websites by a URL or address that includes the country code .eg or .za. In the rest of the continent, Internet usage is growing at a triple-digit rate, but still it will be years before any other countries carve out a place in cyberspace. While the author was doing the research for Chapter 6, for example, he came across a website that called itself the National Website of the Republic of Tanzania, leading him to believe it is the only website running off a Tanzanian server!

54. Overcrowding in the cities has led to extremely high rates of crime and disease, prompting some governments to make a new start by building another capital elsewhere. Earlier we saw the Ivory Coast move its government from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro, and Nigeria move its government from Lagos to Abuja. In 1974 the Tanzanian government announced it would relocate from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, a small city in the center of Tanzania. However, Abidjan and Lagos remained in business as commercial ports, and Dar es Salaam is expected to stay as crowded as ever, after Tanzania's move is complete.

55. "Let Africa Sink," by Kim du Toit, http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/essays/36/.

56. Mswati III, the king of Swaziland since 1982, sets a bad example for the country at the top of the AIDS list. As Africa's last absolute monarch, he has ruled by decree, and political parties are illegal. Even worse, he is a libertine, spending millions to support himself and his huge family, which includes twelve wives and twenty-seven children. And twelve wives is not enough; every year he picks a new wife at the Reed Dance ceremony, a traditional rite involving thousands of young women dancing for the king, wearing little more than beads and skirts. In 2001 he tried to deal with AIDS by bringing back another tradition, the umchwasho rite; girls under the age of eighteen were forbidden to have sexual relations, and made to wear tasseled scarves as a symbol of their chastity. But critics called this custom old-fashioned and sexist, and the king himself was accused of ignoring it, so in 2005 Mswati got rid of umchwasho again.

57. Charles Onyango-Obbo, a popular Ugandan editor and columnist, managed to find something good about colonialism--at least the invaders left behind an infrastructure! In 2003, while reporting on acts of cannibalism during the Second Congo War (see footnote #43), he wrote for The East African: ''While colonialism is bad, the colonizer who arrives by plane, vehicle or ship is better--because he will have to build an airport, road or harbor--than the one who, like the Ugandan army, arrived and withdrew from most of eastern Congo on foot.'' Compare this with what Sylvanus Olympio said about the lack of development in Chapter 8.

© Copyright 2005 Charles Kimball