Introduction

Africa After Independence: Realities of Nationhood

Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile

Paperback: 252 pages

Publisher: New Africa Press (16 November 2009)

ISBN-10: 998716014X

ISBN-13: 9789987160143

Introduction

MOST African emerged from colonial rule during the sixties, only to be confronted with an array of problems which proved to be more formidable than the struggle for independence itself.

The biggest problems were poverty, ignorance, and disease. As President Julius Nyerere stated in September 1963, although the people of Tanganyika had won the right to international equality when Tanganyika became independent, a man who was ignorant, who could not produce enough food for himself, or who suffered from disfiguring diseases could not really stand on terms of equality with other people not in his condition.¹

He was entitled to dignity as a fellow human being but was accorded none. People who beg are not respected, a harsh reality even today more than 40 years after independence for millions of Africans on what has now become a continent of paupers, although Western culpability and direct involvement in compounding Africa's plight can not be ignored.

But soon after independence, none of those problems could be tackled without first consolidating the nation-state. As a creation of the imperial powers who partitioned and colonized the continent, the newly independent countries were no more than a hodge-podge of different ethnic groups or tribes with conflicting interests, many of whom were at each other's throat. And they still are today, as the history of Africa since the sixties sadly demonstrates.

That is one of the main reasons why many African countries have been wracked by civil wars through the years. It is an endless struggle for power between competing ethnic groups and individuals who exploit ethnic differences and rivalries to get power and perpetuate themselves in office while stoking embers and fanning flames of ethnic hatred to keep their opponents weak and divided.

National unity remains an elusive goal because nationhood is a nebulous concept in the African context of polyethnic entities where tribalism is probably the most potent force in national life in most countries across the continent. It transcends nationalism. To millions of Africans, their tribe or ethnic group is their nation; the modern nation-state no more than an abstract concept.

And I use the term tribe here not in a derogatory sense typical of the attitude of the colonial masters who ruled and despised us and others who despise us just as much even today.

I use it to demonstrate one simple truth. As long as we talk about the existence of tribalism in Africa and the devastating impact it has on the lives of millions of people, we can not avoid acknowledging the existence of tribes, hence tribalism, although the term "ethnic groups" is preferable in this context and does not have the derogatory connotation the term "tribe" has.

But that is an entirely different subject and which I have not addressed in this book.

What is critical to our understanding of the events which have unfolded in Africa since independence is that nations did not really exist on the continent when our leaders assumed power. Colonial boundaries defined and shaped those "nations." Instead, the creation of states – institutions of authority over a given territory – preceded the creation of nations in Africa, while the reverse was the case in Europe. It is in that context that the leaders of the newly independent countries set out to forge unity out of diversity no matter what the cost.

Unfortunately, pursuit of such a noble goal entailed suffocation of dissent leading to the institution of dictatorship under one-party rule which was justified in terms of national interest. The young African nations composed of different ethnic groups or tribes needed unity in order to survive and develop. In most cases, strong leadership meant dictatorship and pursuit of national interest was used to justify tyranny. The alternative was anarchy and national disintegration, too ghastly to contemplate. As Dr. Kwame Nkrumah stated:

"Even a system based on social justice and a democratic constitution may need backing up, during the period following independence, by emergency measures of a totalitarian kind. Without discipline, true freedom cannot survive."²

Nkrumah, for instance, invoked authoritarian powers to suppress separatist tendencies among the Ashanti in central Ghana, the Ewe in the east, and among other ethnic groups in the north.

Regional loyalties predated colonialism. Before the advent of colonial rule, the area of what is Ghana today comprised a number of independent kingdoms: the Ashanti in the central region, the Gonja and Dagomba in the north and the Fanti states along the coast. The British further strengthened ethnoregional loyalties when they established different administrative regions reflecting ethnic identities.

The coast region of the former independent Fanti states became the colony of the Gold Coast. The kingdom of Ashanti also became a colony, and The Northern Territories, a region north of the Ashanti kingdom, became a protectorate. And the UN Trusteeship territory of Togoland which the British acquired after Germany lost the colony during World War I became an administrative entity linked to the Gold Coast, a name that eventually came to encompass the entire area under British colonial rule.

Therefore the Gold Coast was not fully integrated as a single colonial unit and did not become a highly centralized state until Nkrumah rose to power. And he did everything he could to neutralize regionalism.

However, regional tendencies continued to pose a threat to national unity under his leadership even in what was once the British UN-mandated territory of Togoland, which is predominantly Ewe, although the people of this former British colony voted in a UN-sponsored plebiscite in 1956 to become part of the Gold Coast which became Ghana at independence on 6 March 1957.

Other African leaders including Dr. Milton Obote of Uganda and Dr. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia resorted to the same measures – only in varying degrees – during the sixties to maintain their territorial integrity with strong central authority under a unitary state.

The biggest threat to central authority under Obote in Uganda came from the Buganda kingdom. And in Zambia, Barotse province, also known as Barotseland, in the western part of the country with its own king and the southern province dominated by the Ilunga and the Tonga ethnic groups caused a lot of problems for President Kenneth Kaunda when he tried to consolidate power at the centre in order to maintain nation unity.

The two regions were also opposition strongholds to his leadership, with opposition parties which were regionally entrenched.

Although his slogan, "One Zambia, One Nation," resonated well across the country, he still faced a lot of resistance to his efforts to establish a unitary state. The Bemba, the country's largest ethnic group out of 70, also challenged his authority.

And the fact that both of his parents came from Nyasaland (renamed Malawi), although he himself was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), did not help him among some people in spite of the fact that he came to be acknowledged as the father of the nation after he led his country to independence from Britain on 24 October 1964.

But it was used against him years later when President Frederick Chiluba, his nemesis and to whom he lost the election in 1991, stripped him of his citizenship in the late 1990s simply because his parents were not born in Zambia. However, he regained his citizenship and Chiluba became a discredited figure even among many of his former supporters. He himself was said to be a Congolese, a member of the Luba ethnic group native to Congo across the border with Zambia.

By targeting Kaunda that way, Chiluba used divisive tactics reminiscent of what the colonial rulers did to facilitate imperial rule.

There is no question that the colonial rulers employed divide-and-rule tactics to consolidate their position and perpetuate themselves in power. They exploited ethnic differences and even encouraged hostilities in many cases to keep Africans divided and prevent them from forming a united front against colonial rule.

But it is also true that ethnic and regional loyalties were already strong and existed across the continent long before Europeans came. For example, in the case of Rwanda and Burundi, the Belgian colonial rulers have been accused of being largely responsible for creating a climate of hostility for ethnic conflicts between the Hutu and the Tutsi through the years especially since independence because they favoured the Tutsi minority in employment and education over the Hutu majority. And it is true that they did that.

But what is sometimes ignored is the fact that Ruanda-Urundi, what became two countries known as Rwanda and Burundi at independence, was already a hierarchical society stratified along ethnic lines long before the advent of colonial rule. The Tutsi conquered and subjugated the Hutu about 400 years before Europeans came.

Whatever peace existed during all those years did not eliminate the inequalities – and latent hostility –between the two ethnic groups which eventually led to bloodshed years later after independence; and even before then in the case of Rwanda where there was a mass uprising of the Hutu against the Tutsi aristocracy in November 1959 not long before the country became independent on 1 January 1962.

There was latent hostility towards the Tutsi among the Hutu because of their subordinate status and the injustices perpetrated against them. They lived in virtual servitude under the Tutsi for centuries.

What the Belgians did was accentuate the cleavages which already existed in this stratified society dominated by the Tutsi and virtually glorified the Tutsi as the natural rulers whom they said were also more genetically endowed, physically and intellectually, than the Hutu. And that was a recipe for disaster of catastrophic proportions as was clearly demonstrated by the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which about one million Tutsis were massacred by the Hutu in about 90 days at a rate faster than Hitler killed the Jews.

It is these kinds of problems of ethnicity and regionalism which the independence leaders were worried about when they came to power. And they did everything they could to keep the countries united even at the expense of democracy by neutralizing dissent regardless of whether or not government critics provided constructive criticism. Even such criticism was seen as a threat to national unity which, according to this rationale, could only be maintained under a highly centralized unitary state.

Federalism was anathema to their nationalist sensibilities. They saw it as a step in the wrong direction towards secession or national disintegration; which explains why Dr. Nkrumah in Ghana strongly resisted any attempts by the Ashanti to have a federal constitution for Ghana, and why Dr. Obote swiftly deposed Kabaka (King) Edward Frederick Mutesa II in March 1966 when the Buganda kingdom tried to secede after it failed to achieve its goal of federation for Uganda.

But in spite of the determination by African leaders to hold different ethnic groups together by coercive means in pursuit of noble goals, unity and progress, it was clear as early as the sixties that the modern African state was structurally flawed. It remained essentially colonial in terms of power distribution and institutional orientation.

Power was centralized, and the same institutions the colonial rulers used to suppress and oppress Africans were now being used by African leaders to do exactly the same thing, some times with even more vigour and brutality. Yet that was its very weakness, in spite of the illusion of strength as an oppressive apparatus.

Even the bully pulpit of the presidency was not as secure as it seemed to be, as the spate of military coups and counter-coups across the continent soon after independence clearly showed. The coups became a ritual of African politics through the decades. More than 150 African presidents and prime ministers were overthrown or assassinated from the sixties to the nineties.

Even the dawn of the second millennium witnessed a military coup on the continent. It took place on Christmas Eve in 1999, ironically, in a country that had been one of the most stable and most peaceful in Africa since independence: the Ivory Coast. And within two years, the country was divided into two.

The north was controlled by northern rebels and their supporters, mostly Muslims, who complained about discrimination and marginalization at the hands of southerners who are mostly Christian and who had dominated the government since independence in 1960; and the south, with the nation's capital and most of the country's wealth, was dominated by government supporters who were mostly Christian.

The impasse seemed to have no end as it continued beyond 2005 amidst threats of renewed fighting between the two sides, prompting the United Nations and the former colonial power France to send peacekeeping forces which created a buffer zone between the two sides.

The rebels threatened secession and a military coup if their demands were not met. But the national leaders in the south refused to meet the rebels' demands, as threats escalated on both sides, and in spite of the fact that the government came perilously close to being overthrown more than once.

The first casualty of a military takeover in Africa was President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo. He was assassinated on 13 January 1963 at the gates of the American embassy in the nationa's capital, Lome, by a group of Togololese soldiers led by a 25-year-old sergeant, Etienne Eyadema who later changed his name to Gnassingbe Eyadema.

Eyadema claimed credit for firing the shot that killed Olympio. The president tried to seek refuge at the American embassy when soldiers followed him through the streets of the capital but embassy officials refused to open the gate and let him in.

Olympio's brother-in-law Nicholas Grunitzky became president, but was ousted by Eyadema in a second military coup in 1967 on the fourth anniversary of the first military takeover.

By then, he had capped his military career in a meteoric rise – through self-promotion – from sergeant to lieutenant-colonel in less than three years, and to full general less than two years later.

He died in February 2005 after 38 years in power and earned the dubious distinction as the longest-ruling African dictator in the history of post-colonial Africa. No other leader had been in power that long. And no other African soldier had gained notoriety before him as a coup maker.

Patrice Lumumba was, of course, the first African leader to be forcibly removed from office in 1960 and was assassinated in January 1961. But his ouster was not a typical military coup; it was part of a larger plot by the West to dismember the Congo which turned the heart of Africa into a battleground between two ideological camps, East and West.

Lumumba's tenure as a national leader was one of the shortest on the continent where a number of leaders have ruled for decades, with Omar Bongo of Gabon being the longest-ruling, in power since November 1967. In 2005 he won another 7-year term and later surpassed Eyadema as the longest-serving African head of state. He also became the world's longest-ruling head of state after Cuban President Fidel Castro stepped down in November 2008.

Yet none of these leaders could legitimately claim that the states they had inherited from the colonial rulers, and which they tried to restructure to conform to their wishes, were strong institutions and solidly anchored in the masses. The Congo itself under Lumumba and after him, probably more than any other African country during the early sixties, tragically demonstrated how fragile the modern African state was.

Growing up in Tanganyika during the sixties, I remember very well the tragedy that befell the Congo, our neighbour, strategically located in the very heart of Africa. And it did, indeed, become the bleeding heart of Africa.

There is no question that foreign powers engineered the Congo crisis. But there were also inherent weaknesses in the Congo, regional and ethnic rivalries, which – even without foreign intrigue – would have posed a serious threat to the national integrity of one of Africa's largest and richest countries.

It is a tragedy that the Congo still faces today as one of the most prized territories in the second scramble for Africa led my multinational corporations – mostly Western – in collusion with corrupt African leaders and their henchmen. Foreign intrigue and locally engineered forces have destroyed the Congo.

No less tragic was the Nigerian civil war. The conflict started in July 1967 following the declaration of independence by the Eastern Region as the Republic of Biafra on May 30 the same year. The secession was triggered by the massacre of more than 50,000 Igbos and other Easterners in Northern Nigeria between July and September 1966.

However, the secessionists surrendered in January 1970 after putting up stiff resistance for three years, although they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the federal forces. Nigeria survived, of course, but at an enormous cost. About 2 million Eastern Nigerians, mostly Igbos, perished in the conflict, until then, the bloodiest in modern African history.

The majority of them died from starvation which the Nigerian federal military government used effectively as a weapon against the secessionists to starve them into submission. And Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the second most powerful man in the federal government after military head of state Yakubu Gowon, made it clear that starvation was a legitimate weapon of war, as federal forces routinely interrupted and blocked relief supplies intended for the starving victims in the secessionist region.

It was a horrendous tragedy but not unique in the history of Africa which has witnessed one tragedy after another since independence, with appalling statistics.

About 3 million people, mostly black, died in the Sudanese civil war since 1955. About 2 million died since 1983, and the rest before then from 1955 to 1972 when a ceasefire was agreed upon by the two sides. It lasted for about 10 years before the conflict erupted again in the early eighties.

The war started before Sudan won independence in 1956 and was waged by the predominantly Muslim and Arab-dominated government in the north against blacks in the south.

It ended in 2005 with the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement which included a provision for a referendum after six years in which the people of the south who are mostly black and predominantly Christian or followers of traditional religions would have a choice to vote for secession and establish their own independent state.

A ceasefire was reached in October 2002 but was broken a number of times times by the Arab-dominated government whose commitment to the peace process remained highly questionable in the following years even after the two sides started implementing a comprehensive peace agreement signed on 9 January 2005.

The main obstacle was the government's unwillingness to share power with black southerners and allow them to have self-determination and the right to vote for independence. And the government's track record in the past reinforced suspicion about Khartoum's commitment to peace.

The war between the north and the south was the longest conflict in the history of post-colonial Africa.

Tragically, another conflict in western Sudan in Darfur region started in February 2003 and claimed more than 100,000 within three years. It was triggered by the persecution of blacks by the Arabs who were being supported by the government in a region which is predominantly black like the south.

But while the conflict between the north and the south was both racial and religious, the conflict in Darfur was mostly racial and not religious since most of the people in the region are Muslim. And it continued – virtually unabated – at this writing at the beginning of 2009.

Africa has witnessed other conflicts of the same magnitude since independence. More than 1 million people died in a 16-year civil war in Mozambique from 1986 to 1992. Millions more were uprooted from their homes and ended up as internal refugees. And many fled to neighbouring countries, especially Tanzania and Malawi.

In Angola also, more than 1 million people were killed or maimed and over a million displaced in a civil war that had been going on since 1975 when the country won independence from Portugal. A peace accord was reached in 1992 between the two implacable enemies, the ruling MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). But fighting erupted again in 1998. The war ended in February 2002 after UNITA rebel leader Dr. Jonas Savimbi was shot dead by government soldiers who had been tracking him down for a long time and flushed him out of his hideout.

In Ethiopia, hundreds of thousands of people died in civil war, including the Eritrean liberation struggle which led to the independence of Eritrea in 1993 after 30 year of war between the two sides when both agreed to a referendum allowing the people of Eritrea to vote for independence. They did so overwhelmingly. But tragically, the two countries went to war in 1998 at a cost of more than 100,000 lives, fighting over a small piece of barren land: two bald-headed men fighting over a comb.

Also in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and when Eritrea was still an integral part of Ethiopia, and like in many other African countries, tens of thousands of people perished from drought and man-induced famine caused by war and government neglect; calling into question the relevance and functional utility of the modern African state as presently constituted, not only in Ethiopia and Eritrea but everywhere else across the continent. Because of concentration of power in the hands of only a few people, it is more of a liability than an asset and a compelling reason for devolution of power to the regions in order to serve the people and avert national disintegration.

That is exactly what happened in Somalia in 1991. At this writing, Somalia was still without a government, a stateless state, thanks to the brutal dictatorship of President Siad Barre who ruled from October 1969 until he was ousted in January 1991 when he fled the country, headed south, hiding in an army tank.

The country he left behind dissolved in anarchy as several clan-based factions fought for power and continued to do so for more than 10 years. They were still fighting when I wrote this in 2009.

President Siad Barre's reign of terror cost hundreds of thousands of lives during the civil war, famine and in mass executions and led to the total destruction of Somalia as a nation, the first African country to "disappear" from the map – as a functional entity – in the post-colonial period.

Rwanda narrowly escaped that fate, but only after 1 million people, mostly Tutsi, were massacred by the Hutu within a period of only three months from April to July 1994. It was the fastest massacre in modern history, five to six times faster than Hitler killed the Jews.

Only about 130,000 Tutsis survived when the genocide was abruptly stopped by an army of Tutsi exiles from Uganda; a genocide which may have been triggered by the Tutsi themselves despite accusations that the massacre was orchestrated and masterminded by the Hutu elite.

Paul Kagame, the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which first invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990, has through the years been accused by some of his former colleagues in the RPF and by others of ordering the shooting down of the plane which sparked the civil war.

Yet that does not explain how the Hutu were able to organise the killings of the Tutsi immediately after the plane was shot down and in such a systematic way across the country if the shooting of the plane was indeed ordered by Kagame.

The genocide had been planned for a long time long before the plane was shot down.

Still, this does not exonerate Kagame and the RPF as there also seems to be some evidence showing that he may indeed have ordered have ordered the downing of the plane.

And the RPF was definitely also guilty of the massacre of the Hutu after the Tutsi-dominated group took over Rwanda and went on to launch a systematic campaign of terror against the Hutu not only in Rwanda but also in Congo where they had sought refuge. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed in this campaign of terror – organised violence masterminded by Kagame and his fellow Tutsis in the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

The plane was shot down on 6 April 1994 over Kigali, Rwanda's capital, and was carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, also a Hutu, from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where they had attended peace talks to help resolve the ethnic and political conflicts in the two countries.

An estimated 1 million Tutsis streamed back into Rwanda from neighbouring countries – mainly from Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Congo – where they had been living in exile since the Hutu uprising in November 1959 which ended Tutsi domination. Now they are back on top.

The question is whether or not Rwanda, as presently constituted virtually as an ethnocracy and as a highly centralized unitary state dominated by the Tutsi minority who have been the dominant force most of the time during the past 400 years except during Belgian colonial rule and from 1962 to 1994 when the country was ruled by the Hutu, should continue to exist as one country or be partitioned along ethnic lines short of reconstituting it as a confederation.

The present structure only guarantees domination of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority. It also excludes democracy because the Tutsi fear that they will be swamped and exterminated by their enemies if genuine democratic elections are held.

The Hutu majority, now marginalized, will always win any democratic election since they outnumber the Tutsi almost 8 to 1. And it is a rational fear, but also a prescription for disaster if the Tutsi continue to use it as a rationale for monopolizing power.

Neighbouring Burundi is almost a mirror image of Rwanda. With a Hutu majority dominated by the Tutsi for centuries, Burundi also has been the scene of genocide for decades. Most of the victims have been Hutus.

In only a few months in 1972, more than 200,000 Hutus were massacred by the Tutsi who controlled the army and the government. And from October 1993 when Tutsi soldiers assassinated a democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye who was a Hutu, more than 300,000 Hutus were massacred within ten years. Ndadaye was in office for only a few months. He assumed power in June 1993 after winning the first democratic election in the country's history.

Prospects for peace improved when Pierre Nkurunziza, a Hutu, was elected and sworn in as president of Burundi in August 2005, formally ending the conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi. Under the new constitution, there would be proportional representation in the government, with the Hutu majority having 60 percent of the seats in parliament, and the Hutu minority who constitute less than 15 percent of the population, taking 40 percent of the seats to guarantee their security.

However, there was no guarantee that peace would last. One Hutu rebel group refused to sign the peace agreement. And probably many Hutus felt that they had been cheated because the Tutsi minority were over-represented in parliament and in the government in a country which is overwhelmingly Hutu.

And neighboring Congo which has been torn by conflict for years since independence in 1960 became the scene of carnage when another conflict erupted in 1998 involving armies from several African countries. About 4 million people, mostly in eastern Congo, died within five years mainly from starvation and disease. By the end of 2008, more than 5 million had perished.

The conflict was fueled by ethnic warfare among different groups in the east and by multinational corporations exploiting the country's natural resources in the Second Scramble for Africa. The central government was powerless in its attempts to restore peace to the region and did not have much control over the rest of this vast country the size of Western Europe, except in the capital Kinshasa and a few other areas.

In the western part of the continent, Liberia and Sierra Leone exploded in the early 1990s and remained in chaos for about a decade at a cost of more than 200,000 lives in each of those countries. Like in other parts of Africa torn by conflict, the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone left indelible scars as a reminder to what our countries have failed to be.

All those tragedies could have been avoided had African countries allowed democracy to flourish in order to ventilate grievances and enable the people to offer solutions to national problems without fear of persecution. And that would have, of necessity, entailed decentralization of power on federal or confederate basis to accommodate conflicting ethnic and regional interests on a continent where ethno-regional rivalries have ignited some of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. Many groups have also been denied their share of the nation's resources and have been deliberately excluded from power; an injustice that has, in many cases, led to war.

Democracy and decentralization would also have led to the evolution of a more stable, hence stronger, modern African state which would not have been preoccupied with neutralizing dissent; and would have laid the groundwork for the formation of supra-national states at the regional level in pursuit of African unity. So far, only one such macro-nation has been formed on the continent since independence: Tanzania when Tanganyika united with Zanzibar in 1964 to form one country.

The Organization of African Unity (OAU) formed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963 – which was replaced by the African Union (AU) in July 2002 – did not exactly spell out how unity would be achieved. But African countries have done a very good job defeating its purpose by instituting an oppressive ruling apparatus we call the modern African state which has its genesis in the corrupted ideals of the euphoric sixties when we were celebrating independence.

Although this book addresses the post-colonial period, it also looks in a much broader context at the origin of the modern African state as a functional machinery inherited at independence from the colonial powers who created what we now know as independent countries across the continent. There was no Uganda, Ivory Coast, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Zambia, Gambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana or any of the African countries we have today until Europeans came.

Thus, a look at the the partition of Africa is also a glimpse at the creation of the state – collectively institutions of authority over given territory – which evolved through the decades into what it is today as a ruling apparatus of the artificial nations we inherited from the colonial rulers. The work also is a panoramic view of the continent's demographic landscape.

It is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on Africa's identity as an organic whole by looking at the different racial groups which constitute the African population on a continental scale. Who are the Africans? And who are the original inhabitants of Africa? It is true that Africa is predominantly black. But are blacks the only people who are native to Africa? Are there any non-blacks indigenous to Africa?

What percentage of the African population is non-black? And what makes one indigenous? Are people who have lived on the continent for more than 1,000 years, or even for a few hundred years, now qualify to be natives? Those are just some of the questions we address in this section. And they are highly relevant to our study of the modern African state whose legitimacy is derived from its ability to accommodate, on the basis of equality, the different racial and ethnic groups in an organic entity we call the African nation.

Part two looks at the invasion of Africa by the imperial powers which led to the partition of the continent. Out of that partition emerged what we call African countries whose arbitrary boundaries divided and united us at the same time.

A number of ethnic groups and even families were split in such a way that some members of the same "tribe" or family grew up, for instance, in Togo under French rule, while others became anglicized and united with members of other "tribes" and families in the Gold Coast, now Ghana. And out of these artificial countries emerged the modern African state upon attainment of independence from the colonial powers.

Part three focuses on the period when African countries attained sovereign status and were confronted with the harsh realities of nationhood in the crucible of their new identity.

I initially had the book divided into chapters. Chapter four was supposed to take up that theme but in a much more comprehensive way chronologically from the dawn of independence during the euphoric sixties to the present as a kaleidoscopic view of a generation of triumph and tragedy for the modern African state. But I decided to develop that into another book which focuses on four decades since independence and therefore it is not included in this work.

For analytical reasons and chronological sequence, I also included in the first manuscript a study of the Lumumbist revolt against the client state of Lumumba's successors – created by and beholden to the West – during the sixties which constituted chapter four, thus preceding the continental survey in what would have been chapter five which became chapter four in my original book. And the transposition did not interrupt the flow of the narrative.

But after I wrote another book I decided, for a number of reasons, to take the chapter out of the manuscript and include it in the second edition of my other book, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era: Expanded Edition published in 2005. The same chapter constitutes a substantial part of the fourth edition of Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era published in 2008.

The last chapter in my original work dealt with case studies and focused on the fragile nature of the modern African state in the context of the sixties as well as the present in order to shed some light on its structural flaws. But like chapter four, this also was set aside for the same book focusing on four decades since independence in the sixties, tentatively entitled, Post-Colonial Africa.

Africa After Independence: Realities of Nationhood

Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile

Paperback: 252 pages

Publisher: New Africa Press (16 November 2009)

ISBN-10: 998716014X

ISBN-13: 9789987160143