The skirmishes over ‘Big Man’ rule that began in 1989 became an enduring feature of the African landscape. A host of opposition groups, propelled by public anger over unemployment, falling living standards and corruption, emerged to challenge one-party dictatorships and military regimes. Events abroad, in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, affected the clamour for change. In its final years, the Soviet Union decided it could no longer afford to sustain client states that had relied on Soviet largesse for survival. In 1989, the outbreak of mass street demonstrations in Eastern Europe, culminating in the downfall of European dictators such as Ceauşescu in Romania and Honecker in East Germany, provided potent examples of what ‘people’s power’ could achieve. The end of the Cold War, moreover, changed Western attitudes towards Africa. Western governments no longer saw any reason to prop up repressive regimes merely because they were friendly to the West. Along with the World Bank, they concluded that one-party regimes lacking popular support constituted a major impediment to economic development; the emphasis now was on the need for democratic reform.
Over a period of five years, many of the one-party systems that had prevailed in Africa for more than a generation were dismantled. Forced to accept multi-party politics, one dictator after another was ousted from power. Military strongmen in Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic and Mali stood for election but were trounced at the polls. Two notable independence leaders, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Kamuzu (Hastings) Banda of Malawi, tried to cling to office but were roundly defeated. In Ethiopia, Colonel Mengistu, denied support from the Soviet Union, was driven out of power in 1991 by a joint army of Eritrean and Tigrayan rebels and fled into exile. Eritrea gained independence two years later.
But while many dictatorships fell, as many dictators survived. Military rulers won presidential elections in Guinea, Mauritania, Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) – ‘the land of honest men’. A new breed of dictators emerged, adept at maintaining a veneer of democracy sufficient for them to be able to obtain foreign aid. Even when regime change occurred, it tended to make little discernible difference in practice. Opposition leaders who won at the polls were often former ministers or members of the elite motivated not so much by democratic ideals – though that is what they proclaimed – as by determination to get their own turn at the trough of public power and money. Once installed, new governments soon reverted to the same systems of patronage and patrimonialism run by their predecessors.
Some Big Men managed to outmanoeuvre the opposition and hold on to power until their death. In Côte d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny remained president for thirty-three years, dying in office in 1993 at the age of eighty-eight. In Togo, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, a former army sergeant who had participated in the assassination of Togo’s first president, entrenched himself for thirty-eight years until 2005, using brute force to suppress the opposition. In Gabon, Omar Bongo remained as president for forty-two years, using his access to the country’s oil and mineral revenues to make himself one of the richest men in the world; on his death in 2009, power passed to his son.
The faltering steps that Africa took towards democracy were soon overshadowed by a series of upheavals that left behind permanent scars. In Somalia, the humiliating defeat suffered by the Somali army in 1978 after invading Ethiopia’s Ogaden region precipitated a civil war between rival clans and set in motion an implosion of the Somali state. In the hope of establishing a ‘Greater Somalia’, the Somali leader, General Mohammed Siyad Barre, had built a massive military force, relying on Soviet largesse in exchange for allowing the Soviet Union to use Somalia’s naval facilities on the Indian Ocean coastline. By 1977, despite its dire poverty, Somalia had acquired an army of 37,000 men, heavy artillery and a modern air force equipped with jet fighters. But when the Soviet Union decided to switch sides, preferring to back Mengistu’s Marxist regime rather than his own, Siyad was left without the support of any major arms supplier. Within weeks of the Ogaden defeat, he faced internal revolts. As the conflict spread, Somalia began to disintegrate, fragmenting into a patchwork of rival fiefdoms controlled by clan warlords. In 1991, Siyad was forced to flee southwards from Mogadishu. In the fighting that followed, rival militias reduced much of the capital to rubble. In northern Somalia, two regions declared their independence, taking the names of Somaliland and Puntland.
Somalia’s plight was compounded by a calamitous drought in 1992 that caused widespread famine in areas already devastated by war. Foreign aid agencies arriving with relief supplies were promptly drawn into the mayhem and appealed for foreign military intervention to protect their operations. Under United Nations auspices, a multinational task force was assembled, led by the United States military. When the first US troops landed on the beaches of Mogadishu in December 1992, they were generally welcomed by the Somali population. A ceasefire was organised. But instead of limiting the scope of their intervention to famine relief, ambitious foreign officials devised plans to rebuild Somalia as a viable state. The task force grew to 20,000 peace-keeping troops, 8,000 logistical staff and some 3,000 civilian personnel from twenty-three nations. A massive complex was built among the ruins of Mogadishu to accommodate expatriate employees, complete with a shopping mall, satellite communication systems, a modern sewerage network, street lights and flower beds. But after $4 billion had been spent, the entire venture collapsed. Foreign troops became caught up in urban battles with Somali militias. After eighteen American soldiers died in an incident in Mogadishu known as ‘Black Hawk Down’, the US decided to withdraw all its forces, and other participating countries followed suit. Somalia was left in the hands of a collection of rapacious warlords without a functioning government.
A far greater catastrophe unfolded in Rwanda. Since independence in 1962, Hutu politicians had enforced tight control over the Tutsi minority, determined to prevent any attempt to restore Tutsi rule. But they had been equally preoccupied with their own internal struggles. In 1973, the army commander, General Juvénal Habyarimana, a ‘northern’ Hutu from the district of Gisenyi, overthrew the ruling clique of ‘southern’ politicians, installed a one-party dictatorship and favoured his fellow northerners, notably from Gisenyi, with cabinet posts, administration jobs, economic opportunities and foreign scholarships; virtually all senior members of the army and security services were drawn from Gisenyi.
Habyarimana’s corrupt regime eventually provoked opposition from other Hutu groups. Faced with demands for political reform, his northern clique sought to keep their grip on power by rousing Hutu against the Tutsi ‘threat’. A raid launched into northern Rwanda in 1990 by Tutsi exiles based in neighbouring Uganda collapsed within days but allowed Habyarimana to foment a climate of fear and hatred. With French assistance, he embarked on a huge expansion of Rwanda’s armed forces that included a new Presidential Guard recruited exclusively from his home district.
Under pressure from Western donors as well as from local politicians, Habyarimana abandoned his one-party system in 1991, entered into a coalition with opposition parties in 1992 and agreed to participate in peace talks with Tutsi exiles. This wave of reform enraged Hutu supremacists. In secret, a northern clique planned a counter-campaign to regain control, preparing for an onslaught well in advance by arming militias, organising murder squads, collecting death lists and whipping up ethnic hatred with relentless propaganda. An outbreak of mass violence between Hutu and Tutsi in neighbouring Burundi in 1993 intensified the miasma of fear and paranoia gripping Rwanda. The genocide that followed was caused not by ancient ethnic antagonism but by a fanatical elite engaged in a modern struggle for power and wealth using ethnic antagonism as their principal weapon.
Among the first victims in 1994 were prominent moderate Hutus – politicians, government officials, lawyers, teachers – all regarded as opponents standing in the way of the ‘Hutu Power’ movement. The slaughter of Tutsis was carried out on a scale not witnessed since the Nazi extermination programme against Jews: in the space of a hundred days some 800,000 were massacred – about three-quarters of the Tutsi population. Though Western governments knew that mass killing was underway, they failed to take the steps needed to prevent it. The genocide stopped only when a Tutsi army led by Paul Kagame fought its way from northern Rwanda to the capital, Kigali, and captured other extremist strongholds.
The impact of Rwanda’s holocaust soon spread to neighbouring Zaire. In the final days, as Hutu extremists lost their grip, they ordered a mass exodus of the Hutu population across the border into Zaire’s Kivu region, planning to use it as a base from which to regain power. The roads to Zaire became choked with hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, fleeing in trucks, cars, on bicycles, on foot, taking their livestock and whatever belongings they could carry. Among them travelled the defeated militias with their weapons and equipment. In two days, about a million people crossed into Kivu.
Mobutu’s Zaire by 1994 had been reduced to little more than a carcass, stripped of all wealth. The currency was worthless. The provinces were largely separate fiefdoms, remote from the reach of central government. Long before the hordes of Hutu génocidaires arrived, Kivu had become a cauldron of ethnic violence between indigenous groups – autochtones – and successive waves of settlers and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi, both Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu militias, bringing with them their virulent brand of ethnic hatred, now added to the mix.
With fatal consequences, Mobutu allowed Hutu Power extremists to carve out a mini-state in Kivu. Foreign aid agencies rushed to support the refugee camps that the génocidaires controlled, fattening their coffers by employing civil servants, doctors, nurses and other professional staff loyal to the cause. Having regrouped, the génocidaires launched raids into Rwanda and also attacked Tutsi groups in Kivu, intending to annihilate them. In retaliation, Kagame combined his forces in Rwanda with Tutsi militias in Kivu, determined to wipe out the génocidaire threat.
The rebellion they ignited in eastern Congo in 1996 was led ostensibly by Laurent Kabila, a small-time former rebel leader from North Katanga with a reputation for greed and brutality. But the mastermind behind the campaign was Kagame. As one town after another fell to the rebels, Kagame decided to press on to Kinshasa to overthrow Mobutu’s putrid regime altogether. In May 1997, as the rebel army approached the capital, Mobutu fled to his palace in Gbadolite and then escaped into exile, dying from cancer three months later.
Installed as president of what was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kabila ruled with the same tyrannical methods that Mobutu had employed. He surrounded himself with friends and family members, packed his administration with supporters from North Katanga, imprisoned political rivals and relied on a security apparatus to maintain control. His relations with his Rwandan sponsors soon soured. When Kabila sought to assert his independence, dispensing with his Tutsi backers and turning to Hutu militias for support, Kagame ordered the Rwandan army to invade and overthrow him.
Other African governments now intervened, all intent on profiting from Congo’s disintegration, descending on it like vultures. Angola and Zimbabwe hastened to prop up Kabila’s tottering regime; Uganda supported Rwanda in trying to overthrow it. For elite groups of army officers, politicians and businessmen, Congo offered rich pickings. In return for military support, Kabila readily handed out mining and timber concessions and offered favourable deals in diamonds, cobalt and other minerals. Angola gained control of Congo’s petroleum distribution and production. Angolan generals also grabbed a slice of its diamond business. Zimbabwe established joint ventures in diamonds, gold and timber and was awarded a stake in the state mining company. A United Nations Panel of Inquiry estimated that over a three-year period $5 billion of assets were transferred from the state mining sector to private companies without payment.
For their part, Rwanda and Uganda, having failed to dislodge Kabila from Kinshasa, turned eastern Congo into their own fiefdom, plundering it for gold, diamonds, timber, coltan, coffee, cattle, cars and other valuable goods. Each established separate zones of control there and set up Congolese militias as partners in the enterprise.
After a series of tortuous negotiations, a peace deal in 2002 required foreign armies from Rwanda, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe to withdraw. Over a period of four years, more than three million people had died, mostly from starvation and disease, the largest toll of any conflict in African history. For eastern Congo, however, there was no respite from violence. Rival militias, some acting as proxy forces for sponsors in Rwanda and Uganda, others controlled by local warlords, continued their wars of plunder, bringing yet more years of misery to a population desperate for peace.
In Liberia, a rebellion which started in the northern border region grew into an anarchic civil war that eventually spread to Sierra Leone, destroying both countries as viable states. Liberia’s descent into violence began in 1980 when a semi-literate army sergeant named Samuel Doe led a revolt in Monrovia, overthrowing the old Americo-Liberian elite that had held a monopoly of power for more than a hundred years. With the backing of the United States government, Doe enforced his dictatorship on Liberia through brutal repression for ten years. He relied for support on his own small tribal group, the Krahn, and took revenge on Gio and Mano opponents after a failed coup attempt. His pogroms in Nimba County provoked an endless cycle of tribal savagery. In 1990, a small-time political hustler, Charles Taylor, used Nimba County as a base to recruit an army of child soldiers. In a bid to seize power, Taylor’s marauding gangs swept through the countryside towards the capital. Monrovia was wrecked in the fighting. Doe was executed in gruesome fashion. But Taylor was prevented from taking power by the intervention of troops from Nigeria. Instead, he turned his attention to gaining control of the diamond fields across the border in Sierra Leone.
The diamond fields were Sierra Leone’s main asset. They had been plundered for two decades by successive groups of politicians in Freetown. They now became a battleground for rival militias and roving bands of child soldiers notorious for hacking off the limbs of victims. The mayhem in both Sierra Leone and Liberia continued for year upon year. Freetown, like Monrovia, was caught up in the fighting and reduced to a derelict slum. Little semblance of government remained in either Liberia or Sierra Leone. Only when British troops intervened in Sierra Leone in 2000 was some form of order restored there. The end for Liberia came in 2003 when Taylor was forced into exile, leaving behind a wasteland.
Zimbabwe too was brought to the brink of ruin. Facing a groundswell of discontent over economic failure and government corruption, Robert Mugabe reacted by blaming Zimbabwe’s woes on the white community and ordered reprisals against white farmers, seizing white-owned land in the hope of regaining popularity.
Since independence in 1980, Mugabe had acquired vast personal power, subordinating the police, the civil service, the state media and parastatal organisations to his will. Under Mugabe’s auspices, a new ruling elite emerged – ministers, members of parliament, party officials, defence and police chiefs, senior civil servants, select businessmen, aides and cronies – whom he allowed to engage in a scramble for property, farms and businesses, as a means of ensuring their loyalty and underpinning support for his regime. The scramble became ever more frenetic, spawning corruption on a massive scale. The bulk of the population, however, saw few benefits. Although there was a major expansion in education and health services, unemployment was rife. A land reform programme intended to benefit peasant producers made only slow progress and was soon mired in corruption and controversy. On average, the population of 13 million was 10 per cent poorer at the end of the 1990s than at the beginning. More than 70 per cent lived in abject poverty.
In 1997, war veterans, once considered the most loyal of Mugabe’s supporters, took to the streets to protest against the government’s neglect of their grievances. In 1999, an alliance of trade unions, lawyers and civic groups launched a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, aiming to oust Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party at the next parliamentary elections. In February 2000, Mugabe suffered a humiliating defeat in a referendum on a new constitution he had drawn up extending his power even further and allowing the government to expropriate land without compensation.
Shaken to the core, Mugabe and his inner clique saw their power slipping and with it all the wealth, the salaries, the perks, contracts, commissions and scams they had enjoyed for twenty years. Attributing his defeat principally to the white farming community, Mugabe was determined to make the whites pay for their defiance.
Within days, gangs of party youths armed with axes and machetes invaded white-owned farms across the country, set up camps and roadblocks, stole tractors and equipment, slaughtered cattle, destroyed crops, polluted water supplies, and assaulted farmers and their families, forcing many to flee. Farm employees were subjected to the same campaign of terror. Thousands were rounded up and taken to ‘reeducation’ centres. The police refused to take action, leaving the farmers and their employees defenceless. When farmers sought protection from the High Court, Mugabe shrugged off court orders that declared the farm invasions illegal. ‘The courts can do whatever they want, but no judicial decision will stand in our way,’ he said.
In the election campaign that followed, Mugabe used similar tactics of violence and intimidation against the MDC opposition. After securing a narrow victory at the polls in June 2000, he pursued his vendetta against white farmers relentlessly, seizing cattle ranches, tobacco farms, dairy estates and safari properties. The farm seizures spelt the end of commercial agriculture as a major industry. Hundreds of thousands of farm workers and their families were left destitute. The impact on food supplies was calamitous. Food imports and foreign relief supplies were needed to prevent mass starvation.
Through the use of brute force and political repression, Mugabe managed to keep his grip on power. But the cost was enormous. Over a five-year period, from 1999 to 2004, the economy shrank by a third. Not only whites fled abroad but a large part of the black middle class – doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants and other professionals – seeing no future for themselves while Mugabe’s regime lasted. Zimbabwe became a country of power cuts, food shortages, crumbling infrastructure, rigged elections and endemic corruption – a once prosperous country laid waste.
Even when African states began to reclaim lost ground, the backlog on the road to recovery made any advance a formidable task. In 1983, Ghana’s military dictator, Jerry Rawlings, embarked on a programme of economic reform designed primarily to revive the agricultural sector and stimulate private enterprise. In further reforms in 1992, he lifted an eleven-year ban on political activity, stood for election as president and won a credible victory, setting Ghana on course for a sustained period of democratic rule. By 1998, however, after fifteen years of reform effort, Ghana’s gross national product was still 16 per cent lower than in 1970.
Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 but in parlous circumstances. An oil bonanza of $280 billion had been largely dissipated in corruption, mismanagement, failed projects and chronic inefficiency. Public services, schools and hospitals were in a decrepit condition; higher education had virtually collapsed; roads were pitted with potholes; the telephone system hardly functioned; power cuts were commonplace. On average, Nigerians were poorer in 2000 than they had been at the start of the oil boom in the early 1970s. Millions lived in slums surrounded by rotting garbage, without access to basic amenities. The Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka described his own country as ‘the open sore of a continent’.
The rot in Nigeria went deep. In despair at the government’s failure to provide even basic services, much of the population turned to ethnic and religious groups for aid and protection. Some groups demanded self-determination; some wanted control over local economic resources; some set out cultural, social or religious objectives. Militant groups formed their own militias. Communal violence flared up time and again. Year after year, the north of Nigeria was torn apart by endemic bouts of religious strife between Muslims and Christians. Politicians for their part exploited ethnic and religious loyalties as a means of gaining mass support in their own struggles for power. The political arena remained much the same as it had been since independence: a scramble among elite groups on the look-out for money-making opportunities.
Overshadowing Africa’s prospects of recovery was the spreading menace of Aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) and its causative virus, HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), a slow-acting retrovirus that infects individuals for up to ten years before serious illness occurs. Originating from viruses carried by two African primates – chimpanzees and sooty mangabey monkeys – the disease had been active among the human population in the forests of the Congo Basin for several decades after crossing the species barrier before it was identified in the 1980s as the cause of a growing number of deaths. Transmitted predominantly through sexual activity, it spread to Uganda and Tanzania, carried by truck drivers and migrant workers along the arterial highways of east Africa, moving inexorably southwards to southern Africa and westwards to west Africa. Its advance was hastened by marauding armies and refugee movements; by increasing numbers of woman and girls forced by poverty into prostitution; by ‘sugar daddies’ preying on young victims.
The groups at greatest risk were those aged between fifteen and fifty, normally the most productive people in society. The disease tore through the ranks of skilled personnel – teachers, doctors, nurses, administrators and industrial workers – aggravating a chronic shortage of skills. It left households and communities struggling to cope with an increasing stream of orphans. Generations of children were deprived of childhood, forced to abandon school to undertake work or care for the dying or simply to fend for themselves. With ever widening consequences, the pandemic impoverished families, disrupted farm activity, undermined business, reduced productivity, overwhelmed health facilities and eroded the capacity of governments to provide public services.
The initial response of most African leaders to the growing calamity was to deny or dismiss the problem, allowing the pandemic to rage on unchecked. Only two countries – Uganda and Senegal – launched effective anti-Aids programmes. Not until the 1990s did others begin to follow suit. By then, the death toll had reached the millions.