Health: The African example (XV)
African farmers who were able to retain their land grew a variety of crops for the new colonial markets. They grew groundnuts in the Sénégal and Gambia river valleys and in northern Nigeria. Palm oil continued as an important product of the forest region, from Côte d’Ivoire to the Niger River delta, while cocoa planting was adopted by the Akan of the Ashanti forest of the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). In Uganda local African initiative ensured the development of thriving cotton production for export by rail to Indian Ocean ports.
Minor rebellions were widespread in colonial Africa wherever land was seized for white use, forced labor was particularly oppressive, or taxation was harshly or unreasonably imposed. Major rebellions aimed at expelling colonizers altogether erupted in Rhodesia (1896-1897), German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia, 1904-1907) and German East Africa (now Tanzania, 1905-1907). Ultimately, however, the colonizers had the resources to summon however many reinforcements were needed to suppress these rebellions.
In South Africa, Africans suffered the most extreme form of colonization. The British controlled the entire area following their victory over the independent Boer republics in the South African War, or Boer War (1899-1902). In 1910 Britain established the Union of South Africa, granting the white population—both British and Afrikaners—control of their own parliamentary government. Between 1910 and 1940 successive white governments pursued increasingly restrictive policies of segregation, which included restricting Africans to bantustans (homelands) that amounted to a mere 13 percent of the country’s land area. For the most part, Africans were only allowed into the “white areas,” which included all the cities, if they were employed by whites. What emerged was an unbalanced economic system based upon race, designed for the benefit of whites and dependent on the subservience of blacks. It evolved haphazardly in the first half of the 20th century, but following 1948 the National Party government codified it into the apartheid (Afrikaans for “separateness”) system, which lasted until 1994.
Africa and the World Wars
World War I impacted many parts of Africa as British, French, and Belgian forces invaded their neighboring German colonies. Africans suffered badly, mostly as noncombatant forced laborers. In addition, many thousands served in the French Army as combatants in the trenches of Western Europe. After the war, Germany’s African colonies were handed over to neighboring colonial powers.
World War II (1939-1945) combat was limited to Ethiopia and North Africa. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and, with the use of aerial bombardment and poison gas, conquered it in 1936. Driven into exile, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie failed to gain any wide support for Ethiopia until Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. With the aid of British troops and volunteers from all over Africa, Ethiopians expelled the Italians in 1941 and Haile Selassie was restored to the throne. In North Africa, the British, Germans, and Italians fought a hugely destructive war across the deserts of Libya and Tunisia until 1943. African volunteers from British- and French-controlled areas served in the Allied army in Europe and Asia.
In the long term, the most significant impact of World War II on Africa was political and psychological. The brief colonization and subsequent liberation of Ethiopia had galvanized the emerging class of urban, educated Africans. These people were determined that the war—fought and won in the name of freedom—should liberate them too. Throughout the continent, from Algeria to Ghana to South Africa, Africans awoke with a new determination to bring an end to the humiliation of colonization.
The Winning of Independence
After World War II the dominant African colonial powers, France and Britain, were too economically weakened to resist African demands for political reform. They hoped, however, that even as they loosened their political grip upon the continent, the colonial economic subservience of Africa to Europe could be maintained.
North Africa
In some parts of North Africa, independence came fairly quickly and smoothly after the war: Libya became independent in 1952, and both Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. Meanwhile, in Algeria, the numerous and powerful French colonists were determined that it would remain part of France. The bitter and bloody Algerian War of Independence was fought until the French finally conceded independence in 1962. In Egypt, radical Muslim army officers overthrew the British puppet government in 1952. Led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, they redistributed Egyptian land to the peasantry and nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. This was the final symbol of Egyptian independence from Europe, and the failure of Britain’s attempt to regain the canal signaled to the rest of Africa that the colonial bluff had been called.
French Sub-Saharan Colonies
In sub-Saharan Africa, the French were quickest with political reform. Across French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the French allowed the election of local government representatives and in return received African agreement to maintain close economic ties with France. In 1946 the French established a common West African French currency, the CFA franc (franc de la communauté financière Africaine, or franc of the African financial community). The currency, exchanged at a fixed rate with the French franc, assured that virtually all of France’s decolonizing African territories would continue to bank, invest, and trade with France. All of France’s sub-Saharan colonies became independent in 1960, except Guinea (1958) and Djibouti (1977).
British Colonies and South Africa
The British decolonizing process was more haphazard and often more African-driven in its initiatives. The Gold Coast led the way, becoming independent Ghana in 1957. Thereafter, the pace of liberation of British colonies largely depended on how long it took the population to agree on its leaders and form of government. Most sub-Saharan British colonies became independent in the period from 1960 to 1964. It was only in the colonies with substantial numbers of white settlers that the process was seriously delayed or fought over. Thus, the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s was required to persuade the British to drop their backing of white settler power in Kenya. The British did little to prevent the white settlers of Rhodesia from declaring the independence of their own white minority regime in 1965. After a decade of guerrilla warfare, Zimbabwe was finally liberated in 1980.
White settler power in industrialized South Africa was more entrenched. The white South African government overrode the wave of African nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by the use of widespread oppression and imprisonment. Through the 1980s internal rebellious pressures combined with the loss of Western support finally prompted the South African government to change. South African-occupied Namibia became independent in 1990, and the government negotiated an end to the oppressive apartheid system with the country’s African majority from 1990 to 1994.
Belgian Congo
Belgium had no plans for decolonizing the Belgian Congo until 1959, when it panicked in the face of rapid political change in surrounding colonies. It rushed toward an ill-prepared decolonization in 1960, with the departing Belgians hoping to retain a measure of economic control by handing political power over to a weak and disunited government. With Belgian prompting, civil war erupted. As the country slid into chaos, the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered, while United Nations peacekeeping troops were largely ineffective. Order was only restored in 1965 with the establishment of the brutal military dictatorship of Joseph Désiré Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko). Mobutu’s regime was to last until 1997 when, following his overthrow, the country once more slid into a state of civil war.
Portuguese Colonies
The liberation of Portugal’s colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique was only achieved after lengthy and bitter guerrilla wars. Exhausted, Portugal withdrew from its colonies in 1974 (in Guinea-Bissau) and 1975 (in Angola and Mozambique), leaving behind revolutionary Marxist regimes to attempt to transform battered economies. Instead, Angola and Mozambique became pawns in the Cold War, as South Africa and the United States supportedrebel armies in both countries in the name of fighting communism. These external pressures were not lifted until the late 1980s. Even then, Angola’s civil war continued for another decade.
Africa into the 21st Century
Africa’s political inheritance from colonial rule was a mass of artificial “nations” with arbitrarily drawn borders and ethnically diverse populations with few or no historical ties. In the buildup to independence, “nationalism” presented only a façade of unity in the face of the colonial opponent. After independence that unity only survived while the new African government was able to deliver on its promise to improve the lives of its citizens, particularly in terms of employment and social services.
The colonial powers had been at pains to emphasize ethnic diversity, as a way to weaken national opposition. They had encouraged a sense of ethnic difference and rivalry far greater than that which had existed in precolonial times. In the most extreme version of this policy, for instance, the German and Belgian rulers of Rwanda and Burundi had encouraged Hutu and Tutsi adversity. They co-opted the Tutsi aristocracy as their partners in colonial rule and, in doing so, deprived the Hutu peasantry of educational and economic opportunities. In this policy lay the seeds of Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hatred that was to lead to massacres and genocide in the 1990s. In many democratic nations of independent Africa, political parties developed around ethnic identity. As a result, insecure governments constantly feared ethnic conflict or secession. The fear was well founded, as shown by the 1967 secession of the Igbo homeland, called Biafra, from Nigeria, leading to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).
Political Development in Independent Africa
In the 1960s fear of divisive tendencies encouraged many African governments to set up one-party states, in which it was argued that the entire population could work together for the common good of development. In practice, this allowed weak governments to become dictatorial in order to stay in power. In many of these cases, the country’s military responded by intervening and seizing power by force.
In the first decades of independence, military intervention was often welcomed by urban populations who felt betrayed by weak civilian governments tainted by corruption and failed economic schemes. Military governments proved no better, however, and they too supported themselves by corruption. Many grew even more brutally dictatorial and, unrestricted by constitutional rule, committed atrocities against their perceived opponents. Among the most extreme examples were the rules of Idi Amin of Uganda and Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, both overthrown in 1979. Through the 1980s many dictators were kept in power by external support, usually in the name of Cold War politics.
It was not until this support was withdrawn around 1990, at the end of the Cold War, that most African people had the chance to demand accountable governments. From 1990 to 1994 most countries established or reestablished multiparty systems of elective government. Citizens voted long-standing autocratic governments out of office in countries such as Niger, Mali, Malawi, and Zambia, while the more astute military rulers, such as Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, discarded their uniforms and were elected as civilian presidents.
Several African countries went against the trend of ousting dictatorial and military governments in favor of multiparty democracy in the first half of the 1990s. The scale of military corruption in oil-rich Nigeria delayed the process until the late 1990s. Mobutu’s 1997 overthrow by armed rebellion created the instability that slid the Congo into outright civil war in the late 1990s and early 21st century. In Algeria, when it appeared that a militant Islamist party was about to win 1992 legislative elections, the Algerian military cancelled the election, suspended the legislature, and ushered in a decade of violent civil conflict. In Libya, the long-standing one-party regime of revolutionary leader Muammar al-Qaddafi ruled on, supported by huge oil wealth, reasonably redistributed among a sparse population.
Although a new era of accountable government arrived in Africa in the 1990s, it is still very unstable, and military coup d’états still occur. Nevertheless—as in the cases of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Niger in the mid- or late 1990s—an incoming military ruler now has to justify his presence by declaring that he is only there temporarily to right some specific wrongs and to reestablish civilian democracy within a very short timespan. Africa no longer tolerates indefinite dictatorships.
However, the proliferation of weapons across the continent, economic hardship, and weak government infrastructures have combined to encourage banditry and civil conflict across much of Africa. In West Africa, a violent civil war in Liberia in the 1990s spilled over into Sierra Leone, where it continued long after peace returned to Liberia. Even Côte d’Ivoire—long a model of stability—has not been immune from violent conflicts. At least, however, African governments have taken up a collective sense of responsibility and are prepared to intervene on a regional basis to settle disputes or even to restore peace and order.
Africa and the World Economy
Africans are faced with widespread poverty, ill health, and lack of educational opportunities. Despite the positive political developments of the late 20th century, many African governments have been unable to improve their peoples’ standards of living. The foundation of Africa’s disadvantaged position has been its economic role in the world trading system.
Since at least the mid-19th century African economies were increasingly reworked to meet the needs of industrial Europe. Virtually all economic infrastructure was geared toward the export of Africa’s raw materials to Europe. Economic transaction and communication between neighboring states stopped if they were ruled by different colonial powers. African manufacturing was discouraged, and even banned, if it was likely to compete with the interests of European manufacturers. Indigenous African industry dwindled, and Africa was forced to import virtually all of its manufactured consumer goods. This was the economic system that Africa inherited at independence.
Making Africa even more dependent, the prices paid for its exported raw materials were set in the major financial markets of the world: New York City, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The prices on African commodities rose and fell according to the needs of the industrial world, bearing no relationship to the costs of production or the economic needs of Africa. The full implications of this were powerfully demonstrated during the energy crisis of 1973. As oil prices quadrupled, the Western world went into recession and African commodity prices tumbled. Although North African oil producers benefited, sub-Saharan Africans were not yet oil producers on a significant scale and they too suffered from the hike in oil prices. The industrial world paid less and less for African commodities, while at the same time demanded higher and higher prices for its manufactured goods, which Africans needed to import. In this way Africa helped subsidize the industrial world’s economic recovery while most African countries spiraled into debt, poverty, corruption, and political instability, from which they have spent decades trying to recover.
Since the 1980s the industrial world’s financial tools, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), have proposed solutions to Africa’s chronic indebtedness. These solutions have been based upon the economics of developed economies, however, rather than upon the specialized needs of developing countries. They have directed African development plans to increase raw material exports, in order to generate the foreign exchange to pay back Africa’s debts. But as Africans export more coffee, for example, the price of coffee falls. Thus, Africans work harder and receive less for their efforts. The ultimate goal of the IMF and World Bank has been to enable Africa to pay its debts rather than to enable Africa to develop the self-sufficient ability to compete on equal terms with the industrialized world. They have succeeded in their goal: Africa pays back more in debt servicing than it receives in direct aid. But this means that governments have less to spend on health and education, leading to falling living standards.
African leaders are striving to establish regional trading groups to strengthen their position in the global market. In 2002 they inaugurated the African Union, an organization intended eventually to establish a common economic market and political union across the entire continent. Achieving this goal, which would make Africa a formidable world power, remains Africa’s primary task for the 21st century.
The History section of this article was contributed by Kevin Shillington.

Culled from Encarta.