There has been much talk about
all of the problems facing Africa today. Most people are aware of
the land theft taking place in Zimbabwe, the genocide of Sudanese
Christians in southern Sudan, the starvation throughout Africa, the
growing AIDS epidemic, and the endless list of other African
problems. Almost everyone has an opinion, but as usual, as is sadly
the case, Americans for the most part, are poorly informed of the
overall scope of what is occurring. To fully understand things, one
must first take a look at how the problems developed in the first
place.
The slave trade, which began
about 1450 and lasted roughly 400 years, removed millions of people
in their most productive years from Africa and left the continent
ill-prepared to cope with the European "scramble for Africa.
" From the 1870s through the early twentieth century, nearly
the entire sub-Saharan region was divided among the European powers.
The Europeans built a basic economic infrastructure; but imposed a
bureaucratic system of government and strengthened traditional
chiefs and other "big men" to help them rule. These
patterns deepened divisions in African societies and strengthened
anti-democratic patterns of government.
After World War II, African
nationalists organized political parties and began to demand
independence. By the early 1960s, independence had come to most of
eastern and western Africa, but white minority rule persisted in
southern Africa, ending only in 1994, when universal-suffrage
elections were held in South Africa.
In the first years of the
1960s, there were high hopes that the end of colonialism would bring
rapid economic growth. Instead, Africa, confronted a number of
problems, including inefficient, state-centered economic systems,
frequent military coups, ethnic strife, and corruption. The Cold War
contributed to Africa's difficulties, flooding the continent with
arms and strengthening a number of repressive regimes that had
superpower backing. French policy also tended to bolster
authoritarian governments in former French colonies.
In the early 1990s, hopes for
Africa's future revived following widespread political and economic
reforms, and the end of the Cold War. By mid-decade, however, the
pace of reforms had slowed and central Africa, fell into an era of
violent conflict. "Afro-pessimists" believe that these
developments have gravely damaged Africa's prospects, but others
argue that they are temporary problems masking an underlying
"African Renaissance." The Clinton Administration sided
with the "Afro-optimists," despite frustrations over the
war in Congo (formerly Zaire) and other problems. With this general
outlook in mind, lets look a little deeper at just how things came
about.
The Atlantic slave trade
is said to have begun in 1441, when a man and a woman were captured
on the coast of Western Sahara and taken to Portugal. 1
During the 400 years that the trade lasted,
between 10 million and 13 million people were taken from Africa,
according to authoritative estimates, 2
with most going to Brazil and the Caribbean,
and smaller numbers sent to the United States or its predecessor
colonies. The peak of the trade occurred in the eighteenth century,
as plantation agriculture expanded in the Americas. Annual totals
reached 100,000 in some years late in the century,
3 at a time when 3,000-4,000 were
also being taken from East Africa in the lesser-known Indian Ocean
slave trade.4
In 1807, the British
parliament voted to end the slave trade, and over the next 60 years,
the Royal Navy intercepted more than 1600 ships off Africa's coasts
and freed over 160,000 captives, sending most to Sierra Leone.
5 But many
ships evaded the British patrols, and large numbers of slaves
continued to be exported until slavery was abolished throughout the
Americas in the 1850s and 1860s. U.S. participation in the slave
trade was banned by legislation passed in 1807 and strengthened in
1819. For a number of years, U.S. Navy ships were stationed off the
African coast to participate in efforts to halt the trade, but with
limited success. 6
As late as 1870, there
was little indication that the European powers were about to leave
their isolated positions on the coast and partition Africa among
themselves. Instead, it seemed more likely that indigenous political
entities would consolidate their authority and eventually develop
into nation-states. In West Africa, for example, the kingdom of
Ashanti (Asante) had profited from its wealth in gold and the slave
trade, and had acquired a strong central government, an advanced
system of roads, well defined boundaries, and a national language.7
It seemed destined to grow stronger. Buganda
in East Africa, to take another example, had become the chief naval
power on Lake Victoria and was known for its powerful king, the
Kabaka; its strong army; and its growing trade. 8
Meanwhile, a number of
"secondary empires" -- secondary in the sense that they
relied on imported European military technology -- were emerging. 9
Many of these were based in Muslim societies, and their gains did
much to promote the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. In
earlier centuries, Islam had been spreading slowly in West Africa as
a result of trans-Sahara trade contacts, and had made larger gains
in northeastern Africa through trade and Arab immigration. Africans
who wanted to associate themselves with the wider Islamic world
often converted willingly, and Koranic schools had begun to
introduce literacy in Arabic across the Sahel. But in the nineteenth
century, a series of holy wars or jihads created a vast West African
Islamic empire centered on Sokoto, in modem Nigeria. In East Africa,
the sultans of the island of Zanzibar were extending their power on
the mainland, and Egypt was expanding its control in northeastern
Africa. With troops on Lake Victoria by 1876, 10
it seemed headed for an empire reaching into
central Africa.
In southern Africa, it was the
"Boers" or Afrikaners, practicing a very conservative form
of Christianity, who established a nineteenth century secondary
empire. Descended from Dutch, Huguenot, and German settlers who had
arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, thousands of Boers trekked deep into the African interior
to escape the cultural influences of the British. (Britain had taken
control of the Cape during the Napoleonic wars.) With modem rifles
and cavalry tactics, the Boers defeated the powerful Zulu in key
battles, and established farms in grasslands areas recently
depopulated by a series of African wars sparked by Zulu expansionism
. The Zulu were acquiring modem arms themselves and remained a major
force in the region under a king ruling through an aristocracy.
The development of
Africa's indigenous political entities was halted by the European
scramble for Africa, which began in competition over the Niger and
Congo River basins in the 1870s. The scramble concluded in 1920,
when British forces, making use of combat airplanes developed during
World War 1, ended the last resistance in Somalia. By this time, all
of sub-Saharan Africa, except for Ethiopia and Liberia, was under
European control. Ethiopia had thwarted Italian ambitions to make it
a colony by inflicting a humiliating defeat on Italian troops at
Adowa in 1896. However, Menelik II, the Ethiopian emperor, was
unable to oust the Italians from the colony of Eritrea, which they
had established along the Red Sea coast. (Italy invaded Ethiopia
again in 1935, in what some historians regard as an opening phase of
World War II. The Italians were driven from the region by British
troops in 1941-1942.) 11
The scramble was made
possible in part by advances in medicine, which for the first time
gave Europeans a measure of protection against tropical diseases.
Gains in military technology, particularly the development of
machine guns and modem artillery, gave Europeans tremendous
advantages over even very large African forces. In 1898, for
example, an army of British and Egyptian troops killed 10,800
Sudanese in one day of fighting, while losing 48 officers and men
themselves. 12 As
a result of Europe's military advantages, many Africans chose not to
resist the colonial invasion, although the Ashanti, the Zulu, the
Boers, the Herero of German Southwest Africa (Namibia), and peoples
in French West Africa did launch armed struggles against the
colonizers.
Many European leaders were
initially reluctant to seize territory in Africa because they
doubted that potential financial gains would balance the likely
cost. However, in Britain , France, and Germany there were
imperialists and nationalists both in and out of government who
brought popular and political pressure to bear in support of
expansion. Anti-slavery activists felt that direct rule would end
the slavery that continued to exist in Africa itself, and
missionaries saw that their efforts could benefit as well.
The Berlin conference set rules
for the future acquisition of colonies in Africa, requiring that
countries exercise effective control of an area before claiming it.
This had the effect of limiting most further colonization to the
strongest powers -- Britain, France, and Germany, although Portugal
secured territories in Angola and Mozambique, where Portuguese
settlers had long been present. Germany lost its colonies in the
First World War, and by that time it was clear that Britain was the
dominant power in Africa, with colonies stretching from southern
Africa through eastern Africa and Sudan to Egypt, and holding the
Gold Coast, including the former Ashanti, and Nigeria in West Africa
and Nigeria. France, however, also held large territories in West
and in Central Africa.
The United States did not
have colonies in Africa, but the U.S. Navy assisted the American
Colonization Society as it began to settle former slaves on the West
African coast in 1820. The first permanent settlement was achieved
in 1822, after arduous struggles and near-defeat by disease and
unfriendly local warriors. The settlers issued the Declaration of
Independence of the Republic of Liberia in 1847, and in subsequent
decades, the Americo-Liberians used firearms to conquer indigenous
peoples and extend their control into the hinterland. Some scholars
argue that this expansion did not differ significantly from the
actions of the European colonizers,
13 and that it set the stage for
the violent disintegration of Liberian society in the late twentieth
century. In April 1980, indigenous soldiers from the hinterland
killed the Americo-Liberian president, William Tolbert, setting off
a decade of political violence and human rights violations, followed
by a 6-year civil war. 14
In the British and
French-controlled territories, the colonial era did provide a
backbone of infrastructure, including roads and telephone systems,
although rural areas generally benefitted far less than towns and
cities. Standards of public health improved, and some elementary
education began to be provided. Christian missions protected by the
colonial authorities played a major role in promoting education and
literacy -- winning millions of converts as a result. 15
Opportunities for higher education, travel,
and employment in the modem sector, though limited, empowered a
number of Africans who later became leaders in independent Africa.
Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, for example,
studied at the London School of Economics, and Nkrumah also attended
Lincoln University in the United States, as did Nigeria's Nnamdi
Azikiwe. All were later presidents of their respective countries.
At the same time, European
investment in Africa was limited, and colonial governments generally
expected African colonies to pay their own way in terms of
development. In order to generate the necessary revenue, the
colonial state was heavily involved in the economy, influencing
decisions on what crops should be planted and regulating prices as
well as investment. Many statist systems based on the colonial model
persisted after independence, retarding the evolution of market
economies. Colonial economic policies also made Africa dependent on
the export of primary products -minerals, agricultural products, and
timber -- to the developed world in exchange for manufactured goods.
The prices of primary products have fared poorly relative to
manufactured goods in the post-colonial world, contributing to
Africa's problems.
Colonial governments had
no interest in promoting democracy or developing democratic
traditions, which would have complicated their efforts to rule
Africa with a minimum of expenditure. In the words of one expert,
"the colonial state in Africa was an authoritarian bureaucratic
apparatus of control and not intended to be a school of democracy.16
As pressure for political rights and
independence mounted after World War 11, colonial regimes often
imprisoned their critics and took other authoritarian measures that
set unfortunate precedents for post-colonial rulers. Most Africans
had no opportunity for political participation until the very end of
the colonial period, when elections began to be held.
While Britain and France
discouraged popular participation for most of the colonial era, they
did work closely with local chiefs and other big men, because the
cooperation of these traditional authorities was essential in
obtaining the labor and tax revenues the colonial regimes required.
Some contend that in strengthening big men, whose influence rested
on kinship ties, the granting of favors, and the suppression of
dissent, the colonial authorities contributed significantly to the
problems independent Africa has suffered with respect to corruption,
nepotism, and authoritarianism. What we see today is the rampant,
unchecked growth of that early tendency of government corruption.
World War II (1939-1945)
severely weakened Britain and France, and hastened the end of the
colonial era in Africa. The war aims of the western powers tended to
undermine the ideological basis of colonialism by stressing the
importance of democracy and resistance to aggression -- ideas that
resonated with Africa's emerging nationalists. At President
Roosevelt's insistence, the United States and Britain had agreed on
a set of war aims in the 1941 Atlantic Charter that affirmed
"the right of all peoples to choose the form of government
under which they will live." 17
The United Nations Charter signed at the end
of the war committed the colonial powers to developing self
government and free political institutions in the territories under
their control (Article 73).
With the coming of peace,
Africans who had been educated abroad during the 1930s, returned to
Africa and began to organize opposition to the colonial regimes.
Their thinking had been influenced by European intellectual currents
of the day, and many had become socialists. They had also studied
the revolutionary movements sweeping Asia and the struggle of black
Americans to achieve social justice. Nkrumah and other African
nationalists were greatly inspired by the work of W.E.B. DuBois, the
black American sociologist and civil rights leader.18
By the end of the 1940s,
British policy rnakers, who had granted independence to India in
1947, generally recognized that the African colonies would one day
be independent -- but they tended to see that day as many decades in
the future. France, by contrast, was following a policy of
"assimilation" that in theory was to lead to the
integration of its colonies into a greater France. Individual
Africans could be assimilated as French citizens once they had
achieved a certain standard of French education, and some, such as
Leopold Senghor, poet, philosopher, and future President of Senegal,
represented French Africa in the National Assembly.
All around Africa, however,
nationalist sentiments were mounting, and by the early 1950s, the
British faced a guerrilla uprising known as Mau Mau among the Kikuyu
of Kenya. New political parties were organizing and staging anti-
colonial protests in Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nigeria. British
decision-makers soon concluded that their weakened country could
ill-afford the cost of suppressing rising African nationalism, and
the independence timetable was moved forward. Ghana became
independent in 1957, followed by Nigeria in 1960, Tanzania in 1961,
and Kenya in 1963.
Political parties were
organizing in the French colonies as well, but President Charles de
Gaulle was shocked when, in 1958, the little territory of Guinea
voted in a referendum for independence rather than close association
with France in a proposed new French Community. In the face of
agitation for independence elsewhere, de Gaulle decided that France
would cut its losses, and 14 independent countries emerged from
French-held Africa in 1960. Demands for independence sprang up
unexpectedly in the Belgian Congo in 1958, and with little power to
resist, Belgium granted Congolese independence in 1960 as well.
In most of southern Africa,
independence was long delayed because of the presence of substantial
white populations, which generally opposed majority rule. In several
countries in the region, Africans had to resort to armed struggle to
win their freedom. In 1965, the tiny minority British-descended
settlers in Rhodesia issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence
from Britain, which was pushing for democratic reforms. This led to
United Nations sanctions against the Rhodesian regime, and Africans
launched a civil war. Rhodesia finally became the independent
country of Zimbabwe under a majority-elected government in 1980.
Guerrilla wars broke out in Angola and Mozambique in the 1960s, and
independence came only in 1975, after Portuguese military dictator
Antonio Salazar was ousted in a 1974 coup in Lisbon. Armed struggle
also took place in Namibia (South West Africa), which South Africa
had taken from Germany in 1914, but independence did not come until
1990, following a UN-supervised election.
In South Africa itself,
whites of both English and Afrikaner descent had enjoyed
self-government since 1910, when Britain had granted what would
later be known as Commonwealth status. 19
Opposition to white minority rule had existed
for decades, but in 1948, the National Party (NP), representing
conservative, nationalistic Afrikaners, came to power and imposed an
institutionalized system of racial segregation known as apartheid
(apart-ness).
Protests against apartheid
mounted in the late 1960s, and in the 1970s, an increasingly violent
resistance campaign was met by ever-harsher government repression.
In the 1980s, as resistance continued to grow, South Africa launched
a number of military strikes and covert operations beyond South
Africa's borders against bases and personnel of the opposition
African National Congress (ANC). Late in the decade, however, South
Africa's white-controlled government was facing international
isolation, and many Afrikaner leaders came to realize that the costs
of defending apartheid would be unsustainable in the long run.
Consequently, the regime undertook secret discussions with the ANC
on the outlines of a majority-based system that would include
protections for minority interests. ANC leader Nelson Mandela was
freed from prison in February 1990, and difficult constitutional
negotiations concluded in November 1993. Universal-suffrage
elections were held in April 1994, and Mandela became President in
May of that year.
In the first years of the
1960s, the future for western and eastern Africa seemed quite
bright. Heavy- handed colonial governments had departed, and a new
African elite including many individuals with excellent educations
and global experience had come to power. GNP per capita was rising
at about 1% per year, on average, 20
and Africans as well as foreign development
experts expected that the construction of dams, roads, universities,
and other projects would soon result in faster growth. In May 1963,
the heads of 30 African states signed the Charter of the
Organization of African Unity (OAU) to promote African solidarity
and intensify efforts to improve living standards. Member states
pledged to respect the principles of non-interference and respect
for territorial integrity in their relations with one another.
Even in these early years,
however, serious problems were beginning to emerge. The former
Belgian Congo fell into civil war from 1960-1964, and its
mineral-rich Katanga province attempted to secede. In January 1963,
the president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio, was assassinated in the
first of dozens of military coups and attempted coups that would
plague the region. Nkrumah, who had made Ghana a socialist,
one-party state was overthrown in 1966, and the first of Nigeria's
many coups occurred that same year. Ethnic tensions mounted in
Nigeria as a result of the coup, and when the Ibo people of eastern
Nigeria attempted to secede, a civil war broke out that lasted until
1970.
Sub-Saharan Africa's
annual rate of per capita economic growth fell to .8% in the 1970s,
and plunged to a negative 2.2% per year in the 1980s, more than
wiping out all previous gains. 21 In
these decades, most African countries were governed by authoritarian
regimes, and a few, such as Idi Amin's government in Uganda
(1971-1979), were quite violent. Civil wars broke out not only
Uganda, but also in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Chad, as well as
in Angola and Mozambique, where long civil wars followed the wars
for independence. When drought struck wide areas of the continent in
1982-1984, the highest death tolls occurred in the war-torn
countries, particularly Ethiopia and Sudan, where international
relief agencies could not reach the hungry.
The underlying causes of
Africa's problems in the post-independence era have been the subject
of much discussion and analysis. The impact of the colonial era,
which is blamed for inciting ethnic divisions and creating
traditions of authoritarian rule as well as bureaucratic
interference in the economy, has already been mentioned. Colleges
and universities began to appear in African colonies only at the end
of the colonial period, leaving very small indigenous elites to deal
with the challenges of independence. Independent Africa confronted a
major population challenge as well. In 1950, there were an estimated
200 million people in the sub-Saharan region, but by 1990, the
number had grown to 600 million. 22
The Cold War has also
been blamed for many of Africa's problems. Vast quantities of arms
came into Africa during the Cold War, fueling African conflicts.
Most of these arms came from the Soviet Union and its allies, and
went to self- proclaimed Marxist regimes in Ethiopia, Angola, and
Mozambique. In reaction, the United States provided far lesser
quantities of weapons, but focused much of its economic assistance
on regimes that were perceived as anti-Soviet. This competitive Cold
War involvement, critics maintain, tended to strengthen governments
on both sides that were anti- democratic and following inefficient,
state-oriented economic policies, often marked by considerable
corruption. 23
The degree to which
French policy may have contributed to Africa's problems is a matter
of debate. France had remained actively engaged in Africa because
French policy makers believed that a major African role would help
give France great power status at a time when the two superpowers
were dominant elsewhere. By overt and covert means, they cultivated
a "special relationship" with the elites of their former
colonies, which they regarded as France's "chasse gardee,"
or "exclusive hunting ground." 24
In addition, France capitalized on
the tie of language to forge close relations with the
"francophone" regimes in Zaire and Rwanda, former Belgian
colonies.
These special
relationships with France usually brought both military and economic
assistance, as well as a promise of French intervention to protect
friendly regimes from violent unrest. Several thousand French troops
were stationed at African bases. French businesses, meanwhile,
gained privileged access to trade and investment opportunities.
Critics maintained that French policy was perpetuating corrupt and
authoritarian regimes in many countries, but defenders argued that
France was contributing to stability and, as a result, facilitating
development. (France began to reduce its military and financial
commitments in Africa after the Socialist Party won legislative
elections in May 1997, but the future direction of French policy is
not yet clear.) 25
In the later 1980s and
early 1990s, as the colonial era fell farther into the past and the
Cold War waned, scholars began to focus on characteristics of the
African state and African societies to explain the continent's
difficulties. This line of analysis led to a number of discouraging
conclusions about the continent. Some scholars concluded that
African states were too weak to promote societal change and economic
development, largely because the institutions of the state had been
corrupted. The personal ambitions of leaders, ethnic favoritism, and
"pathological patrimonialism," 26
were blamed by some for diverting state
resources to the personal fortunes of ruling cliques, and to the
police and military officials who kept them in power. There was much
academic discussion of the "failed state" in Africa, amid
extensive media coverage of famine and conflict in Somalia, Sudan,
and other countries.
At the same time, there were
several positive developments affecting Africa in the early 1990s
that gave rise to hopes for a better future. With the end of the
Cold War, some noted, Africa's authoritarian rulers would no longer
be able to play the superpowers against one another to perpetuate
their hold on power. The momentous changes in South Africa were also
highly encouraging because they averted a widely expected and
potentially very violent revolution. Many anticipated that a stable
South Africa would soon become an "engine of growth" for
the economies of much of the sub- Saharan region. Several African
countries were already well-advanced in free market economic reforms
that they had undertaken at the behest of western aid donors. By the
mid-1990s, GDP growth rates were exceeding population growth rates
in many countries, and some were achieving rates of 5% or better.
Political reforms were
also beginning in many of Africa's authoritarian states because of
mounting demands for democratization from opposition movements and
donors as well. In some countries, national political conferences
convened and diverse interests in Africa's growing "civil
society" were represented, including human rights
organizations, nascent political parties, and religious leaders.
Multiple political parties were permitted in countries that had been
one- party states for years, and elections that seemed generally
free and fair began to be held. These developments brought favorable
reactions from a number of analysts. In 1991, for example, U.S.
scholar Richard Joseph, who had been a critic of Africa's
patrimonial politics, published an article entitled "Africa:
The Rebirth of Political Freedom," which noted that a
"virtual miracle" seemed to be underway.
27
For many observers, the
hopes of the first half of the 1990s have faded, in part as a result
of disappointment over the course of African democratization. Some
of Africa's authoritarian leaders learned to manipulate the
electoral process and divide the opposition, creating what one
authority, Larry Diamond, calls "pseudo-democracies."
Diamond argues that the governments of Kenya, Gabon, and Cameroon
have played a "cat-and-mouse game with international donors,
liberalizing politically in response to pressure while repressing as
much as they can get away with in order to hang on to power."
28 A disappointed Richard Joseph
wrote in 1998 that Africa's democratic opening at the beginning of
the decade had resulted, with few exceptions, in "virtual
democracies." These may have the surface characteristics of
liberal democracy, such as regularly scheduled elections, but
"their governments systematically stifle opposition behind a
mask of legitimacy." 29
Africa's AIDS epidemic
continues to intensify. According to a December 1998 United Nations
update, 70% of all new HIV infections are in sub-Saharan Africa, and
80% of all AIDS deaths occur there. 30
The disease, much like the slave trade in
earlier times, takes away young adults in their most productive
years. An estimated 11.5 million people have already died in Africa,
while 21.5 million adults and one million children are believed to
be infected. Infection rates in some countries in southern Africa,
which is severely affected, are estimated at 20%-26% of people aged
15-49.
Monty L. Rainey
Email montyrainey@juntosociety.com
Post
comments online You will have
to join this group in order to post. Due to site problems we had to
remove the site boards.
Reference Sources
1. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a
Continent, 127; Reader, Africa: A Biography, 379.
2. Reader, 379-380; Iliffe, 131. Both
authors cite Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A
History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
3. Bohannan and Curtin, Africa and
Africans, 184-185.
4. Oliver, The African Experience,
123.
5. Reader, Africa: A Biography,
42; Iliffe, Africa: the History of a Continent, 148.
6. E.B. Potter, The Naval Academy
Illustrated History of the United States Navy (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971), 59.
7. Basil Davidson, The Black Man's
Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (New York:
Times Books, 1992), 76.
8. Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa
Since 1800, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 81-83.
9. Bohannan and Curtin, Africa and
Africans, 192-204.
10. lliffe, Africans: The History of a
Continent, 165.
11. Post-war Ethiopia took full control
of Eritrea in 1962, setting off a long resistance struggle.
Eritrea finally became independent in 1993.
12. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for
Africa, 1876-1912 (New York: Random House, 1991), 543-546.
13. Curtin and Bohannan, Africa and
Africans, 221-222.
14. CRS Issue Brief 96025, Liberia:
Issues for the United States (continuously updated).
15. Ilffe, Africans: the History of A
Continent, 222-229.
16. Berman, "Ethnicity, Patronage,
and the African State," 329.
17. James McGregor Burns. Roosevelt:
The Soldier of Freedom (New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Javanovich, 1970), 130.
18. Oliver and Atmore, Africa Since
1800, 217-218.
19. Pakenham, Scramble for Africa,
667.
20. Donald George Morrison and others, Black
Africa: A Comparative Handbook (New York: The Free Press,
1972), 52.
21. John Ravenhill, "A Second Decade
of Adjustment: Greater Complexity, Greater Uncertainty," in
Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill, eds. Hemmed In:
Responses to Africa's Economic Decline (New York: Columbia
University Press), 18.
22. lliffe, Africans: The History of a
Continent, 243.
23. Zaire, a major beneficiary of U.S.
assistance over many years, is often cited as a case in point. See
CRS Issue Brief 96037, Congo (Formerly Zaire).
24. Peter J. Schracder, "France and
the Great Game in Africa." Current History (May 1997),
207. On the French covert role, see Kaye Whiteman, "The Man
who Ran Francafrique," The National Interest (Fall 1997).
25. Roland Marchal, "France and
Africa: the Emergence of Essential Reforms?" International
Affairs (April 1998), 355-372.
26. Zaki Ergas, ed. The African State
in Transition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 9.
Articles in this edited volume elaborate the critique of the
African state.
27. Journal of Democracy 2 (Fall
1991), 11-24.
28. "Is the Third Wave Over?" Journal
of Democracy (July 1996), 31-32.
29. "Africa, 1990-1997: From
Abertura to Closure," Journal of Democracy (April 1998),
6.
30. CRS Report 98-816 F, Angola Update
(October 1, 1998).
