infrastructures and capital investment transformed
traditional African societies. Over the course of
three generations the continent evolved into
numerous independent nation states. Within them
tribal and cultural divisions continue to cause ten-
sion and conflict; colonial national boundaries
were not everywhere willingly accepted in the
post-colonial era. In Nigeria and the Congo there
was civil war in the 1960s and in the Horn of
Africa – Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia – devastat-
ing fighting continued for decades. Nevertheless
the pre- and post-independence maps of divided
Africa have remained remarkably similar.
The boundaries drawn by the British, French,
Belgians, Germans, Spaniards and Portuguese in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
reflected penetration by missionaries and traders,
the strategic and political interests of govern-
ments in Europe or of enterprising colonialists in
Africa and the outcome of their rivalries. They did
not coincide with any natural geographical, ethnic
or tribal divisions.
The diversity of the fifty-odd countries so
created is extraordinary, ranging from the im-
mense to the tiny, from those rich in resources
to the desperately poor. The great religious divide
between Islam in the north and north-west and
Christianity further south splits Nigeria, the
Sudan and Ethiopia. The new African countries
were also divided ideologically, between Marxist
Mozambique, for example, and the feudal
kingdom of Ethiopia. It is remarkable how little
fighting there has been over the many colonial
frontiers between the new African nations. Plans
for a powerful ‘Pan-Africa’, such as was urged by
the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s (the
Gold Coast’s) first leader after independence,
proved completely unrealistic. The transfers of
power created new ruling groups and leaders who
wished to exercise authority in their own coun-
tries and were, with few exceptions, unwilling to
contemplate fusing with others.
The voice of independent Africa as a whole is
a regional international organisation made up of
sovereign nations, the Organisation of African
Unity (OAU), created in 1963 and modelled on
the United Nations. In the new millennium its
successor is the African Union, which is no more
cohesive. The divisiveness of independent Africa
has not made it an influential or effective body.
Its main effort was to work for the completion of
liberation, the decolonisation of those parts of
Africa still under European rule, and to defend
black rights where they were being denied, as in
South Africa. It provided a means of mediation in
inter-African disputes but accepted the principle
of non-interference in the internal affairs of the
sovereign states. The inherited colonial frontiers
were specifically recognised by the OAU at its
second meeting in Cairo in 1964. Could they
have acted otherwise?
Given the artificiality of the colonial African
frontiers, to have attempted to redraw them
would have invited chaos. Nor, as in the Balkans,
could viable nations based simply on tribal iden-
tities be formed without subdividing the conti-
nent into hundreds of parcels. The principle of
self-determination thus took second place in fash-
ioning the political shape of independent Africa.
The colonial era created ‘facts’ – the clock could
no longer be turned back. Even Nkrumah had to
accept this. The conflicts in Africa thus became
internal, civil conflicts within existing states, an
ethnic group fighting for independence, such as
the Ibo revolt in Nigeria or the long Eritrean
struggle against the Ethiopian state, or straight-
forward civil war, as in Mozambique and Angola,
former Portuguese colonies, where the strife was
for decades prolonged by outside interference.
Independent African countries also aided the
black population in what was Rhodesia to gain
majority rule. And Black Africa supported the
black majority in South Africa in its struggle for
equal rights. By the twenty-first century Africa
had not yet found a continent-wide peace.
The timing of independence was not primarily
determined by the readiness of the colonies, by
the stage of economic, social and political devel-
opment they had reached. The political complex-
ion of the governments in Europe, the perception
of their leaders, economic considerations as they
affected the mother country – all played a greater
role. Crucial too was the differentiation between
colonies with unhealthy climates as in West Africa
and those with temperate zones on the southern
coast or along the highland ridge running north