Africa

by Guy Arnold

  At the beginning of the independence era Kwame Nkrumah had warned of Western neo-colonialism; at the end of the 1980s it was as strong or stronger than ever. Western reluctance to exert pressures upon the whites of Southern Africa, its use of aid as a weapon to force reluctant governments to fall in with Western economic strategies, its manipulation of the World Bank and IMF as instruments with which to extend economic control and its readiness to support any regime that did not threaten its vested interests all indicated how far Africa still had to progress before it could achieve real independence. As Africa entered the final decade of the twentieth century it was collectively weaker than at the beginning of the 1960s when the world waited to see what the new Africa would do. But the accumulated experience of 30 years of ‘freedom’, an awareness of the relentless pressures it faced from outside and a growing understanding that real advances could only come from within the continent opened up the possibility that the last years of the century could witness a different Africa begin to emerge.

  PART IV

  The 1990s

  New Directions and New Perceptions

  CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

  The End of the Cold War

  The end of the Cold War was a global turning point: the bipolar world of the two superpowers that had provided neat parameters for lesser nations was replaced by a unipolar world dominated by the United States. The Third World necessarily disappeared and though it was not at once apparent, Africa, the poorest region of the Third World, found itself more marginalized than ever. Francis Fukuyama, who suggested in his book The End of History and the Last Man that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism meant the spread everywhere of neo-liberal democracy, was propounding a concept whose attractions for a triumphalist West were anathema to much of the rest of the world. He said of Africa: ‘In sub-Saharan Africa, African socialism and the post-colonial tradition of strong one-party states had become almost totally discredited by the end of the 1980s, as much of the region experienced economic collapse and civil war. Most disastrous was the experience of rigidly Marxist states like Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. Functioning democracies emerged in Botswana, The Gambia, Senegal, Mauritius, and Namibia, while authoritarian rulers were compelled to promise free elections in a host of other African countries.’1 Another judgement suggested that if the Cold War had been ‘won’, the success had been achieved by the United States rallying a whole new international economic structure to the cause: ‘When the American economy faltered, the European and Japanese economies which American policy had cultivated were able to take up the slack… We can already say that the real significance of the Cold War, which has dominated the lives of most people now alive, has been to play the role of catalyst in the creation of the extraordinary global economy which will dominate our future.’2 What are described here are the foundations of the new orthodoxy of globalization that emerged in the 1990s. Meanwhile, as the author reminds us in passing, the wars of the Soviet succession in Africa’s formerly ‘Marxist’ states of Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Somalia could trace their origins to the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War ‘the Soviet “threat” served four main purposes: it provided a pretext for Western military intervention and covert action abroad as “defence” against Soviet expansion; it allowed repressive governments to be supported on the excuse that they were bulwarks against communism; it allowed clampdowns on domestic dissent to take place by referring to infiltration by the enemy; and it allowed huge profits to be made by military industry, which produced the weapons demanded by a permanent arms race.’3 The repressive and hypocritical nature of the West’s response to the Cold War led, among other results, to the supply of vast quantities of arms to some of the world’s most oppressive dictators as well as the support and sponsorship of anti-socialist guerrilla movements such as Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola or direct military interventions to defend dictators against popular opposition – all in the name of freedom and democracy. Whatever else the Cold War achieved or failed to achieve in Africa, it left the continent awash with a range of deadly weapons. This was certainly the case in Somalia by the end of the 1980s. ‘Mogadishu’s arms markets had grown unchecked since the eve of the dictator’s (Siad Barre) collapse, when merchants quickly took clients to inspect their clandestine weapons stock. Now the market teemed with criminals and self-appointed defenders and excited boys, the whole scene smelling of gun oil and testimony to an all-pervasive gun culture fed for decades by Italian, Soviet and American “friends”. Here in microcosm was the true wealth of the Barre regime.’4 The collapse of the Soviet-dominated system as well as the failure of socialist economies to achieve sustained development created an ideological vacuum. The West attempted to fill the vacuum and used such institutions as the World Bank and IMF as their instruments to this end as they attempted to persuade the former members of the now defunct Third World to accept the Western doctrines of neo-orthodox economics and democratic politics though whether they will succeed in any permanent sense in non-Western cultures remains to be seen. At least the Cold War had presented countries with a choice or choices.

  During the Cold War a country could be non-aligned, as many were, or it could, as some did, change its alignment from one side to another. The leaders of a country could make their choices in terms of their perceptions of their security interests, their calculations of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences. In the new world, however, cultural identity is the central factor shaping a country’s associations and antagonisms.5

  More than anything, for the small, weak countries that had made up the Third World, the end of the Cold War led to a loss of certainty: where did African states now stand in the new world order? The end of the Cold War confrontation meant the disappearance of the Third World and the emergence in its place of the South, which was the weaker, less influential half of the new North-South divide. Russia, the core of the old Soviet empire, joined the North as the new member of the Group of Seven, to transform it into the Group of Eight; Russia’s former East European satellites queued up for membership of NATO and the EU; the Soviet Republics of Asia became members of the South and in this new line-up all the advantages lay with the advanced economies of the North while the South found that it was of even less account than it had been as the Third World when its members were able to exercise choices.

  A brief period of euphoria followed the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Communist system.

  One widely articulated paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one relatively harmonious world… The expectation of harmony was widely shared. Political and intellectual leaders elaborated similar views. The Berlin wall had come down, communist regimes had collapsed, the United Nations was to assume a new importance, the former Cold War rivals would engage in ‘partnership’ and a ‘grand bargain’, peacekeeping and peacemaking would be the order of the day.6

  Things did not quite work out like this; instead, the United States proclaimed a ‘new world order’.

  When in 1990 US President George Bush Snr proclaimed a ‘new world order’ he implied a world controlled by the North that in its turn would be led by a United States no longer constrained by its confrontation with the USSR. The South was soon to discover that, from its point of view, the passing of the Cold War had introduced a more difficult and dangerous era and this change became quickly apparent once the immediate euphoria had worn off. The end of the worldwide confrontation between the two superpowers and their allies alerted the former Third World to the realization of what in fact had already been emerging during the brutal, recession-dominated 1980s: that it was largely expendable. From about the middle of 1989 Third World leaders expressed increasing fears that their case – for aid, better trade conditions and a more equitable world order – would go by default as a triumphalist West turned its attention to the new and vastly more satisfying problem of reincorporating Eastern Europe,
including the successor states to the Soviet Union, into the Western capitalist system.

  Africa had been deeply affected by Cold War confrontations ever since 1956, when the USSR had agreed to finance the Aswan High Dam in Egypt after the West withdrew its offers of aid, and in 1960, when the superpowers became involved in the collapse of the former Belgian Congo. Throughout the years of the Cold War the real threat to Western interests in Africa came not from Communism or the USSR but from nationalism, which among other policies threatened to take over colonial economies and run them on socialist lines. ‘The principal “threat” they posed was to Western control over their economic resources – the fear that a country’s resources might be primarily used to benefit its people. Nationalist movements and governments were invariably labelled as communist to justify action against them.’7 Thus, the West opposed leaders that the African political process brought to the fore if they appeared likely to threaten Western interests. The Communist threat provided a convenient cloak under which to take action against them and ensure a more pliable leadership came to power. In South Africa the white apartheid regime, with help from Israel, made nuclear weapons, a fact that was known in Washington and approved by silence; the whites, after all, were on the right side in the Cold War and constantly proclaimed their fight against Communism. In 1993, President de Klerk announced that these weapons had been destroyed, but an interesting reflection on the nuclear question comes from Huntington as follows: ‘The ability to build nuclear weapons cannot be destroyed, however, and it is possible that a post-apartheid government could construct a new nuclear arsenal to insure its role as the core state of Africa. Human rights, immigration, economic issues, and terrorism are also on the agenda between Africa and the West.’8 That, indeed, poses a very different scenario about future African relations with the North of the new world order.

  The Congo crisis of 1960–65 saw the first direct and major UN intervention in black Africa that included, at its peak, 20,000 troops as well as civilian administrators. The Prime Minister of newly independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba, had appealed to the UN to provide a peacekeeping force and the UN in responding hoped to prevent a US–USSR clash. The Cold War had come to black Africa. But the UN was not impartial. ‘However, the UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, interpreted the UN mandate in accordance with Western neo-colonialist interests and the US Cold War imperative of preventing Soviet expansion in the Third World.’ The first result of this UN stance was the murder of Lumumba in January 1961 for he, most obviously, was an enemy of Western economic and political interests. After five years of brutal civil war the coup of 24 November 1965 brought Mobutu to power and his emergence as a strong man was popular because he held out the promise of peace. The coup was backed if not entirely engineered by the CIA to ensure a Congo leader who would safeguard Western interests. ‘As an externally backed autocracy, the Mobutu regime was a pure product of the Cold War. It originated in the cold strategic calculation of Western powers that leaders with no social or political base were preferable to those with strong national constituencies, to which they were accountable. Since the latter reflected the militant nationalism and anti-imperialist positions of their supporters, they had to be discredited in the eyes of world public opinion.’9 Subsequently, the key US premise in supporting Mobutu for 30 years was the need to use the Congo as a base from which to promote Western interests in Central and Southern Africa. The consequence of this US support was 30 years of dictatorship and state kleptocracy and only at the end of the Cold War, when Western support for Mobutu wavered, was he obliged to give in to opposition demands for a sovereign national conference. Even so, he staved off any real democracy until his end in 1998. US and other Western support for this corrupt regime was presented as a necessary Cold War policy; in the post-Cold War era the need to uphold such regimes disappeared.

  It became obvious during 1989 that the USSR was disengaging from its active support for African socialist regimes. In a series of meetings with the US through 1988 it helped broker the peace deal that led the Cubans to quit Angola and the South Africans to agree to Namibia’s independence; and in 1989 Gorbachev informed the Ethiopian leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, that he could expect no more arms or aid. Thus, by 1990 the Soviet Union had extricated itself from military involvement in Africa and the decline, or in Africa’s case, disappearance, of superpower rivalry and confrontation meant that, almost overnight, Africa had become of far less interest, both strategically and economically, to the superpowers and, as one cynical commentator said, ‘African states were transformed from Cold War pawns, into irrelevant clutter.’ Africa soon began to realize that in the new post-Cold War climate it was being marginalized and that the West, since Russia could now be discounted, would only intervene or assist where it had direct economic interests or some specific strategic consideration, for example, to prevent large-scale emigration. It was a bleak prospect for countries that had come to rely upon economic support in the form of aid over the years of the Cold War. This reality was forced home in 1992 when the unwillingness of the North to help the South was highlighted in the UNDP’s Human Development Report which contrasted the refusal of the West to write off Africa’s debts with its readiness to reduce the debts of Poland by 50 per cent, despite the fact that Poland’s per capita income was five times that of the average for Africa. The contrast was striking. Africa clearly faced a period of neglect.

  Aid had been the principal link between the developed countries and Africa through the Cold War and African ability to exploit the rivalries of the two sides had assisted it to obtain substantially more aid than otherwise would have been the case; moreover, through the 1960s and 1970s the aid donors had provided assistance with very few restraints upon the manner in which it was used, with the result that recipients came to regard aid as an additional source of finance that gave them considerably more political room in which to manoeuvre than they could otherwise have hoped to wield. This state of affairs now came to an end. ‘The end of the Cold War and the apparent triumph of liberal ideology have drastically altered the international context in which Africa is seeking to manage its present dependence.’ As a result, the amount of aid that most Western countries are prepared to allocate to Africa has been radically reduced. ‘Finally, the age of bilateral aid has faded, as most countries now adhere to World Bank lending principles.’10 At least, during the Cold War African leaders were not simple pawns of the East–West power struggle but had learnt how to play the two sides off against each other as leaders such as Mobutu or Sassou-Nguesso had demonstrated, enhancing their own political positions in the process. After 1990 less aid was provided for the obviously dictatorial regimes but this did not mean more for reforming regimes. In fact there was an absolute decline: while aid flows to Africa had increased by 4 per cent a year during the 1980s, between 1990 and 1996 official financial assistance to sub-Saharan Africa fell in real terms by 21 per cent or US$3 billion. The conflict between East and West had largely been played out in the Third World and Western ‘fear’ of Communism was the principal motive for aid. Moreover, it was recognized that poverty was the most likely breeding ground for Communism so that development assistance was seen as a weapon for containing the spread of Communism while at the same time extending Western, capitalist interests. ‘The Cold War then provided the main rationale for the war on poverty and legitimized the spending of vast resources on peoples in far-away places.’11 The ingrained Western assumption that Third World countries would follow First World development patterns was part of the whole aid process. Only the alternative Communist model threatened to upset this development pattern that otherwise would deliver Third World countries into the capitalist camp. Once the Communist threat had been removed aid could be reduced since the recipient countries had nowhere else to go. Moreover, ‘The collapse of Communism as an alternative development model rendered Western countries much more powerful vis-à-vis Africa and the South in general, and much more stringent conditions could now be attac
hed to development assistance without fear of losing allies to Communist influence. It is at this juncture that we can locate the emergence of the good governance agenda.’12 It should be added that prior to this juncture the West had shown little concern as to the kind of governance pursued by African countries, good or bad. Many regimes that lacked home support had been propped up by Western aid during the Cold War; they soon discovered that they no longer mattered. The more we examine the process of development, both during the Cold War and in its aftermath, the more apparent it becomes that Western aid was not designed to assist genuine development of recipients at all but to promote Western interests: first, negatively, in the sense of confining and controlling the alternative of Communism; and second, positively, in the sense of drawing the recipient countries into the Western economic system in which they would be little more than pawns.

  Between 1962 and 1988 the bulk of US aid to Africa went to half a dozen countries such as Kenya, Liberia and Zaïre that were particularly friendly towards the United States but whose records on human rights or democratic principles did not bear close scrutiny. The same applied to Britain and France, the principal ex-colonial powers. The removal of the Soviet deterrence freed the United States in the exercise of violence, whose deployment would no longer be likely to lead to a superpower conflict. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War an American couple who specialize in war themes commented as follows: ‘Unfortunately for all concerned, friends and enemies alike, American elites, both political and military, are deeply disoriented not only by the end of the Cold War, but by the split-up of the Western alliance, the economic rise of Asia, and, above all, by the arrival of a knowledge-based economy whose global requirements are by no means clear to them.’13 Working out what the Americans are after has become a priority for countries worldwide and not just in Africa. Its negative policies were easily discernible: ‘Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US reduced or eliminated military aid to long-term allies like Kenya, Somalia, Liberia, Chad and Zaïre. The US further reduced its presence in Africa by closing nine aid missions and 15 intelligence posts and redirecting aid personnel to new priority assignments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.’14 Following the US lead, Britain closed its embassies in Congo, Gabon and Liberia while France in especially ruthless fashion would not send troops in 1990 to help stop the army and air force mutiny in Côte d’Ivoire, the most faithfully pro-France of all its former colonies under the aged Félix Houphouët-Boigny. France was coming to regard its African allies as an economic liability and so France, along with Britain and the US, called for political and economic liberalization.