moderation: members of other parties were
included in the administration, and the 70,000
whites were not dispossessed. Moreover, South
Africa left behind a good infrastructure, so Namibia
had a promising future if internal peace continued
to prevail. But no solution had been found to the
problem of settling the landless former SWAPO
fighters who returned to the country from Angola.
In 2003 Nujoma became more strident threat-
ening to expropriate white South African and
German farmers. But moderation has prevailed;
despite applauding Mugabe, Nujoma has not
copied his tactics.
In Portugal’s other former colony, Mozam-
bique, there was little prospect for a better future;
until 1990, no major international peacekeep-
ing effort had been made, partly because the
Cold War did not impinge with the same inten-
sity as it did in Angola, and partly because
Mozambique has no important resources like
Angola’s oil. The Soviet Union and China sent
aid and technical assistance, but no troops from
the Eastern bloc were introduced. Although the
post-independence government of the victorious
liberation movement, Frelimo, was Marxist, there
was always a tussle between the hardliners and
the pragmatists. The flamboyant first president,
Samora Machel, who was killed in an air crash in
1986, was succeeded by the more moderate
Joaquim Chissano, who enjoyed much Western
sympathy. Mozambique has been subject to
the depredations of the Mozambique National
Resistance (MNR), set up in 1976 by the Rhode-
sian intelligence service. In 1980, the MNR
moved its bases to South Africa. As in Angola,
South African intervention has been racial in
motivation, to maintain white South African
supremacy and to restrict the activities of the
African National Congress. Although the ANC
had no military bases in Mozambique but trained
in Angola and Tanzania, Mozambique was the
transit route used for guerrilla incursions into
South Africa. South Africa retaliated by support-
ing the MNR. In 1984 President Machel tried
to win South African support by refusing the
ANC transit. But this treaty of ‘non-aggression
and good neighbourliness’ had little impact on
conditions in Mozambique.
The civil war raged on, with brutalities and
atrocities perpetrated against the civilians caught
up in it. One million refugees fled to Mali, a quar-
ter of a million camped beside the two railway
lines running from Zimbabwe to the sea. Famine
threatening half the 16 million people in Mozam-
bique added to the huge death toll. In 1990 the
efforts of mediators from Kenya and Zimbabwe
and the international community succeeded in
bringing the Frelimo government and the MNR
to the negotiating table, Frelimo having aban-
doned Marxism–Leninism. In 1993 the situation
looked more hopeful than in Angola; a ceasefire
and UN-supervised elections established peace;
the discovery of oil should have helped repair
some of the devastation.Africa is in crisis. Independence had not brought
the hoped-for benefits in the longer term.
Political freedom had not altered economic fun-
damentals. Dependent on world prices for their
primary export products – coffee, cotton, cocoa,
palm oil and minerals such as copper – Africans
remained poor during the last quarter of the
twentieth century, though there were a few good
years. During the good years the West lent money
for development, but after modest advances in the
1960s the huge rises in oil prices in the 1970s
contributed to stagnation and decline as the
nations struggled with mountains of debt and
falling earnings from what they produced, nor in
countries blessed with oil like Nigeria and Angola
did the people benefit as corruption siphoned off
the earnings. During the 1980s African develop-
ment went into reverse. But this was not solely
due to world economic conditions.
Africa’s nations have airlines and some splen-
did public buildings but these are mere symbols
of nationhood. Since their borders were based on
European colonial partitions, tribal, cultural and
religious differences run like fault-lines through
many of the forty-seven African nations – fault-
lines which, at their most extreme, have caused
civil war, as they have in Nigeria. As the 1990s
began, civil war raged seemingly without end in
the Sudan, as it had since independence. At best,
tribal conflicts made it difficult to create func-
tioning states founded on representative govern-