The Cold War in Africa

In the wake of the transfer of power some of the new African states, including Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Congo (Brazzaville) and Tanzania, had adopted an overtly left-wing stance. Although this had caused some concern among the Western states, the international impact of the phenomenon was in the end fairly limited.

The extension to southern Africa of the struggle against imperialism began to change this picture and force the superpowers to pay greater attention to Africa.

People's Republic of China (PRC)

The official name of communist or mainland China. The PRC came into existence in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

started in the Portuguese colonies with the appearance of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) as the main party in Mozambique and of the National Front of Liberation of Angola (FNLA), the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as contending voices of nationalism in Angola. From rela­tively early on both FRELIMO and the MPLA relied for much of their support on the communist bloc, and this pattern was mirrored in the case of South Africa, where the exiled ANC developed links with the Soviet Union, and in Rhodesia, where Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) followed the ANC's example, while Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was closer to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Naturally the association of these parties with communist regimes alienated them from the poli­tical mainstream in the West, who saw them as nothing more than Soviet puppets. In reality, however, communist support did not initially bring these parties significant advantages, for the degree of military and political assistance provided by the Soviet Union, the PRC and Cuba was too insubstantial to make any serious impact.

This situation changed drastically in April 1974 when Salazar's successor, Marcello Caetano, was overthrown by a military coup. One of the major factors behind his ousting was that elements in the Portuguese army were determined to withdraw from the debilitating colonial wars in Africa. Consequently the new regime in Lisbon rapidly negotiated transfers of power in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola. This in turn provoked a chain of events that led to increasing superpower intervention in Africa and the erosion of white rule in the south of the continent.

The most important of these events was the civil war that erupted in Angola. Under the January 1975 Alvor Agreement Angola was due to become independent in November of that year, while in the interim elections were to be held to determine the character of the new government. The problem was that the three leading political parties were unwilling to work together. Their mutual contempt in part reflected ideological differences, but was also shaped by tribal and ethnic animosities and by a simple hunger for power. The result of this inability to co­operate was that each party sought to strengthen its position by appealing to outside forces, the FNLA to Zaire and the United States, UNITA to South Africa and the United States, and the MPLA to Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Once the Angolan parties had generated foreign interest in their civil war, the fighting in the country quickly escalated. The first major foreign intervention came in October 1975 when South African forces invaded in order to prevent an MPLA victory. The danger that South Africa might assist the recently formed FNLA—UNITA coalition to seize Luanda led in turn to Cuba sending its own troops to support the MPLA. The United States interpreted the arrival of Cuban forces, which numbered 12,000 by early 1976, as a Soviet attempt to establish Angola as a client state, but it was not able to respond in kind as Congress refused to supply the appropriate funds. The result was that the Cuban troops, well equipped with Soviet weaponry, were able to assist the MPLA to defeat the South African and the FNLA—UNITA forces. Angola thus emerged on independence as a state with strong links to the communist bloc. Moreover, it threatened the wider security of southern Africa by offering support to SWAPO, the leading force fighting for the liberation of Namibia.

At the same time the regional balance of power was also being transformed by the appearance of a FRELIMO government in Mozambique, for this meant that Rhodesia was now bordered on three sides by hostile states.

The spread of the Cold War was not limited to the southern part of the continent, for it also affected East Africa. In 1974 a coup in Ethiopia dethroned Emperor Haile Selassie. The new republic was controlled by a military council, the Dergue. This body espoused vaguely socialist ideas, but it came to rely increasingly on Marxist advisers as it introduced policies designed to modernize what was still a largely feudal country. This transformation was completed in 1977 with the emergence of Mengistu Haile Mariam as the key political figure. Ethiopia's shift to the left alienated the country's former patron, the United States, but attracted the interest of the Soviet Union, which believed that at last a truly Marxist-Leninist regime was emerging in Africa. Accordingly in 1977, when Somalia launched a war against Ethiopia to seize the province of Ogaden, whose population was ethnically Somali, the Soviet Union cut its ties with the Siad Barre regime in Mogadishu and began shipping large quantities of arms to Mengistu's government instead.

While the events of the middle to late 1970s suggested that Africa could be on the verge of being divided along Cold War lines, in the end the impact was less substantial. In part, this was because the Marxist regimes in Africa faced such severe domestic problems that it was impossible for them to export their beliefs to their neighbours. In the case of Ethiopia, the radical land reform policy launched by the Mengistu government and its refusal to make any concessions to the secessionist movements in Eritrea and Tigre helped to spark a debilitating civil

COMECON

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, a Soviet-dominated economic organization founded in 1949 to co-ordinate economic strategy and trade within the communist world.

European Economic Community (EEC) Established by the Treaty of Rome 1957, the EEC became effective on 1 January 1958. Its initial members were Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany (now Germany); it was known informally as the Common Market. The EEC's aim was the eventual economic union of its member nations, ultimately leading to political union. It changed its name to the European Union in 1992.

war, while Angola was beset by the continued resistance offered by UNITA, which was able to draw on support from the United States and South Africa. Another important constraint on the spread of communism was the fact that the West could still massively outbid the Soviet bloc in the provision of economic aid. The relative weakness of the Soviet position in Africa was graphically illustrated in 1980, when Mozambique’s application to join COMECON was rejected on the grounds that it would prove too great a strain on that organization’s resources. Desperate to find trading partners, Mozambique was forced to turn instead to the EEC, and negotiated its entry into the Lome Convention agreement that regulated trade between the Community and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.