Conclusion

In the second half of the twentieth century, Africa was shaped to a considerable degree by events and trends in international politics. Above all else, the most important was decolonization, in which, of course, Africans themselves played a vital role.

In the long run though, the effects of the Cold War were not as significant for the future of the continent as those of the colonial inheritance. It was the latter, above all, in the form of the inadequate preparations for transferring power, the consequences of indirect rule and the colonial approaches towards taxation and development, that shaped the problems which African leaders faced and unfor­tunately in many cases influenced the way in which they responded to these challenges. Moreover, at the international level it was the state boundaries that the imperial Powers had left behind which lay at the basis of the African states system, the short-lived attempt by Nkrumah and others to shake off this legacy failing miserably. Africa therefore may have freed itself from direct colonial rule, but it has still not shaken off the effects of what in most cases had only been a half-century of European domination.

Recommended reading

There are a number of good surveys of African history; these include Peter Calvocoressi, Independent Africa and the World (London, 1985), John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995), J.

The struggle for independence has been the focus of many studies. Two useful overviews are Robert Holland, European Decolonization 1918—1981: An Introductory Survey (Basingstoke, 1985) and John Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa (London, 1996). Important essays on many aspects of the decolonization process and its legacy can be found in Prosser Gifford and W Roger Louis (eds), The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 1940—1960 (New Haven, CT, 1982) and Prosser Gifford and W. Roger Louis, Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power 1960—1980 (New Haven, CT, 1988). The transfer of power in the British colonies is also covered in the essays by Falola and Roberts, Lonsdale and Marks in Judith Brown and W. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), while good summaries of developments in the French Empire are provided in Raymond F. Betts, France and Decolonization, 1900—1960 (Basingstoke, 1991) and Tony Chafer, The End of the Empire in French West Africa (Oxford, 2002). On the Algerian revolution, see Martin Thomas, The French North African Crisis: Colonial Breakdown and Anglo-French Relations, 1945—62 (Basingstoke, 2000), Irwin Wall, France, the United States and the Algerian War (Berkeley, CA, 2001) and Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins ofthe Post-ColdWar Era (New York, 2002). On the Congo Crisis, see Madeleine Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York, 1982), D.

For the debate on the problems facing African states in the post-colonial period, see Carl Rosberg and R. H. Jackson, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley, CA, 1982), David Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945—80: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development (London, 1986), Jean-Francois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London, 1993), Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT, 1994), Christopher Clapham, Africa in the International System: The Politics of State Survival (Cambridge, 1996), Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ, 1996), Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ, 2000) and John Harbeson and Donald Rothchild (eds), Africa in World Politics: The African State in Flux (Boulder, CO, 2000).

The Cold War in Africa can be studied in R. E. Albright (ed.), Africa and International Communism (Basingstoke, 1980), Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948—1968 (New York, 1985), Chris Coker, NATO, the Warsaw Pact and Africa (Basingstoke, 1985), Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Conflict and Intervention in Africa: Nigeria, Angola, Zaire (Basingstoke, 1990), P. J. Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy towards Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and Change (Cambridge, 1994) and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge, 2005). The Angolan crisis is dealt with very ably in Fernando Andresen Guimaraes, The Origins of the Angolan Civil War: Foreign Intervention and Domestic Political Conflict (Basingstoke, 1988) and Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959—1976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).

For South Africa and the apartheid system, useful overviews are provided in James Barber, South Africa in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa (Oxford, 2000) and Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (Basingstoke, 2000). For more detailed studies, see Deborah Posel, The Making ofApartheid 1948—61: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford, 1991), Robert Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975—1990 (London, 1991) and Allister Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Negotiated Revolution (London, 1995). For accounts of the Rwandan genocide and its consequences, see Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1959—1994: The History of a Genocide (London, 1995), Arthur Jay Klinghofer, The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda (Basingstoke, 1998), Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of1994 (Oxford, 1999), Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Became Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ, 2001) and Johan Pottier, Re­Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2002).