modelled on St Peter’s in Rome with space for
18,000 people. It was (reluctantly) consecrated
by Pope John Paul II in 1990. It is not easy to
assess which is the worst region of misrule and
conflict, too many qualify. The Côte D’Ivoire,
once stable, was rent by civil war in the new mil-
lennium. French troops and peacekeepers from
West Africa imposed an armed separation and
mediated a shaky peace deal in 2003; this did not
halt sporadic fighting. Over a million people out
of the population of sixteen million fled from
their homes contributing to yet another human-
itarian tragedy.
Guinea was also a one-party state until the mil-
itary took over in 1984. But, in contrast to the
Ivory Coast, it began independence by cutting its
ties with France in 1958. The strongman of
Guinea and its leader for decades was Sékou
Touré, who had built up his support through the
trade union movement. He erected an authori-
tarian state and adopted an African Marxism,
though rejecting the basic tenet of the class strug-
gle. What he took from communism was the
highly organised one-party state, and his harsh
regime drove hordes of refugees into neighbour-
ing countries, estimated at between 1 and 2
million. At one time it looked as if Guinea would
fall into the Soviet orbit, but Sékou Touré was a
passionate African nationalist, ready to accept aid
from all sides and adjusting his relationships with
West and East to suit his perception of Guinea’s
national interests. Potentially rich in mineral
deposits, especially of bauxite for aluminium,
Guinea by the 1990s had earned too little from
their export. The Russians, who developed the
extraction of bauxite, paid a low price and Guinea
remained at the mercy of a few foreign buyers.
With Sékou Touré’s death in 1984 the repres-
sive control his party had exercised ended. There
was to be no opening to civilian party rule,
however. The armed forces seized power in a
bloodless coup led by a new strongman, Colonel
Lansana Conté, who denounced Sékou Touré’s
bloody and ruthless dictatorship. The economy
was in a terrible state after twenty years of
Marxism, and the new leader turned to the West.
With nowhere else to go for economic aid, he
ended the policy of isolation. France, the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund
offered assistance with aid and in liberalising the
economy. Opposition to military rule mounted
and the military procured a five-year programme
in 1988 for a transition to civilian rule, with elec-
tions for a parliament in 1992 and a presidential
election in 1993.
One-party states and authoritarian leadership
became the norm for the newly independent
French African territories in Benin, Niger,
Cameroon, Togo, Burkina Faso and Mauritania.
The same was essentially true of Senegal, although
its leader, Leopold Senghor, was an impressively
educated man in the Christian humanist tradition,
a Catholic and a professor at the Sorbonne who
expounded ‘negritude’, the identification with
African culture; Senghor’s very French education
led him to seek the value of black culture and to
set limits to assimilation, yet he also adopted the
socialist Western model of a dominant one-party
state.
With the collapse of the people’s republics of
Eastern Europe in 1989 and the economic fail-
ures of communist economic state management,
which became so evident as the 1980s drew to a
close, the authoritarian rulers sought to change
their image. A further cause of change was the
perilous economic condition of developing Africa.
African states overspent lavishly in the 1970s, only
to suffer economically from the upheavals of the
mid-1970s and from falling commodity prices in
the 1980s. Most African states became saddled
with heavy foreign debts. To gain access to essen-
tial new funds from the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, their leaders had to
accept a painful restructuring of their economies
and their politics. But the impoverished masses
ceased to be docile; workers, teachers and civil
servants went on strike to halt the steep falls in
their standards of living. Corruption became the
most obvious target for their anger. As a result,
the style of African government began to change:
African leaders at least had to appear accountable
to the people. The president of Benin in 1990
renounced failed Marxism and introduced a
multi-party system. The presidential election in
1991 marked a first in continental Africa. It was
free and an incumbent president lost it, accepting