Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times:
It could be argued that the UN power-politics of the 1970s, the
ugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the
organization by Hammarskjold and his school, were responsible for
prolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years. According to one
authority, the failure to take international action in 1972, when the
nature of the regime was already glaringly apparent, cost the lives of
200,000 Ugandans. Britain bore a heavy responsibility. The src
records revealed how important the ‘Stansted whisky run’ was to the
regime. British appeasement reached its nadir in June 1975 when
Amin threatened to execute a British lecturer, Denis Hills, for calling
him ‘a village tyrant’. James Callaghan, a weak Prime Minister even
by the standards of the 1970s, sent out General Sir Chandos Blair
with a letter from the Queen begging for clemency, and later he flew
to Kampala himself. But he allowed the Stansted run to continue
until 4 March 1979, the very eve of Amin’s overthrow. The only
government to emerge with credit was Israel’s, which acted vigo-
rously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an
airliner at Entebbe in June 1976.
Most African states actually supported Amin, in accordance with
the old Latin- American principle of ‘Caudillos stick together’. Des-
pite the revelations of his genocidal atrocities by his ex-ministers, the
oau elected him its president and all except three of its members
attended the oau summit he held in Kampala. Nyerere objected, not
so much on moral grounds as because he was an Obote ally and
rightly feared an Amin invasion. ‘By meeting in Kampala,’ he
protested, ‘the heads of state of the oau are giving respectability to
one of the most murderous administrations in Africa.’ Furious, the
oau even considered a motion condemning Tanzania. The heads of
state showered Amin with congratulations during the summit when,
having consumed parts of his earlier wife, he married a new one, a
go-go dancer from his Suicide Mechanized Unit. They applauded
when Amin was carried on a litter by four white businessmen, a
Swede holding a parasol over his head, and when the Ugandan Air
Force made a demonstration bombing on Lake Victoria against a
target labelled ‘Cape Town’ (the bombs all missed and the Air Force
commander was murdered as soon as the delegates had left), oau
heads of state again gave Amin a warm reception in 1977, and there
was no criticism of Amin whatever by the oau until 1978; even then
it was muted. 87
Most members of the UN, where the Afro-Asian-Arab and Soviet
blocs formed a majority, behaved equally cynically. As chairman of
the oau, he addressed the General Assembly on 1 October 1975 in a
rabid speech which denounced the ‘Zionist-US conspiracy’ and
called not only for the expulsion of Israel but for its ‘extinction’ (i.e.
genocide). The Assembly gave him a standing ovation when he
arrived, applauded him throughout, and again rose to its feet when
he left. The following day the UN Secretary-General and the President
of the General Assembly gave a public dinner in Amin’s honour. 88
Attempts to raise Uganda’s violation of human rights at the UN in
1976 and 1977 were blocked by African votes, which rendered Amin
the same service at the Commonwealth Conference in 1977. Even
when he invaded Tanzania on 30 October 1978, an act which led to
his downfall five months later, the oau refused to condemn him and
told Nyerere to accept mediation. For once the Tanzanian socialist
dictator dropped his verbal guard:
Since Amin usurped power he has murdered more people than Smith in
Rhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is this tendency in
Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans …. Being
black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans. 89
That, indeed, was the consequence of the morally relativistic
principle introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans
was not the UN’s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking
the UN had given him a licence for mass-murder, indeed genocide.
The Amin regime was made possible by the philosophy of the
Bandung generation as well as by the re-emergent barbarism of
Africa. But within a year of his fall history was being rewritten. It
was claimed the applause which greeted him at the UN was ‘ironic’.
The terror was being linked to ‘imperialism’. 90 Nor did Uganda’s
sorrows end when Tanzania’s ‘army of liberation’ arrived, with
Obote in its baggage. The first thing the Tanzanians did when they
got to Kampala was to loot it. Though Amin himself was given
sanctuary in the Muslim world (Libya, then Saudi Arabia), his tribal
forces continued to occupy and terrorize part of the country. With
Nyerere’s armed backing Obote ‘won’ the 1980s elections. Obote’s
upc party and the Nyerere-controlled ‘military commission’ gerry-
mandered constituency boundaries; illegally declared 17 seats un-
contested upc victories; killed one opposition (Democratic Party)
candidate and beat up others; illegally removed fourteen returning
officers who were not upc stooges; sacked the Chief Justice and
other officials to intimidate the judiciary; and finally, after it became
clear on election night that the dp was nevertheless winning,
announced on the official radio that all results would be ‘vetted’ by
the military — whereupon the secretary to the election commission
fled for his life. The army subsequently destroyed evidence of dp
victories and Obote was declared the winner. 91 The result was
regional and tribal civil war; and mass-terrorism by three undisci-
plined and mostly unpaid ‘armies’ prolonged indefinitely the agony
of Churchill’s ‘fairy-tale land’. 92
The case of Uganda illustrated the tendency of post-colonial
Africa, from the mid-1960s onwards, to engage in internal and
external wars, and for both the oau and the UN, far from arbitrating
such disputes, to exacerbate the drift to violence. This was not
fortuitous. The militarization of the oau began at Addis Ababa in
1963, when passive resistance was renounced, force was adopted as
the means to end the remaining colonial regimes and a ‘liberation
committee’ was formed with Tanzania in the chair. The next year, at
Cairo, it was the ex-pacifist Nyerere who called for the expulsion of
Portugal by force, and in 1965 it was his second-in-command,
Rashidi Kawawa, who told the UN Committee on Colonialism in Dar
es Salaam that its function was identical with that of the oau
committee, ‘two liberation committees of historical importance in
the struggle against colonialism’. M.Coulibaly of Mali, the UN
chairman, at first protested: the UN could not be identified with a
regional military body, he said. Then he capitulated, and his commit-
tee ruled that it was legitimate for any state to use force to expel the
Portuguese. This was the first time the UN had committed itself to the
military as opposed to the peaceful solution of political problems.
Four months later, in November 1965, Nyerere persuaded the oau
to extend the principle to Rhodesia. 93
With both the UN and the oau not merely endorsing but inciting,
indeed commanding, violence, individual African states employed it
increasingly to resolve their inter-tribal civil wars and frontier
disputes, which colonialism had frozen. Africa appears to have the
greatest linguistic and ethnic variety of any continent. Of the
forty-one independent states, only Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Lesotho
and Somalia were basically homogeneous, and even these had debat-
able borders. 94 Most African civil wars, since they involve trans-
frontier tribal conflicts, tend to become foreign wars also. One of the
earliest of them, the 1958 Hutu race-revolt in Rwanda against their
Tutsi overlords, involved Burindi, and this pattern was repeated three
times over the next fifteen years. The revolt of the Polisarios against
Morocco and Mauritania, the struggle between northern Muslims
and southern Christians in Chad, the civil wars in Angola, the Sudan
and Nigeria, five of the longer and more serious conflicts, all
involved foreign intervention. The UN and the oau, not surprisingly,
proved wholly unable to arbitrate these conflicts. A typical example
was the partition in December 1975 of the old Spanish Sahara
between Morocco and Mauritania, which recalled the partitions of
Poland in the eighteenth century (or in 1939). Algeria was left out,
and thereupon backed the Polisario insurgents. The UN passed two
mutually exclusive resolutions, one supporting Morocco, the other
Algeria. The oau has never seriously attempted to enforce its
primary maxim that states should not interfere in each other’s
internal affairs, except (interestingly enough) in the case of Amin’s
Uganda. It failed to censure Gadafy of Libya for his attempts to
overthrow Sadat in Egypt, Niheimi in the Sudan, Bourguiba in
Tunisia, Francis Tombalbaye and Felix Malloum in Chad and his
blatant intervention in half a dozen other states. Nor was the oau
able to prevent incursions by non-African powers, since nobody
wanted to repeat the Congo’s disastrous involvement with the un,
and it was the individual states themselves which invited the help of
foreign troops, as did Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania with Britain and
the Ivory Coast, Gabon and Senegal with France. 94
The trans-border complexities increased markedly after 1973-4
when Soviet Russia, with its satellite Cuba, first committed large
numbers of troops to the African theatre. A case in point was
Ethiopia, where the old Emperor Haile Selasse had run a semi-feudal,
semi-liberal regime by a careful balance of foreign help. The Indians
trained his army, the British and Norwegians the navy, the Swedes
the air force, the French ran the railway, the Australians the hotels, the
Yugoslavs the port, the Russians the oil refinery, the Bulgars his
fishing fleet, the Italians the breweries, the Czechs the shoe factories
and the Japanese the textile mills. 95 The Russians seized their chance
to overthrow the old man in 1974 – he was smothered to death with
a pillow — and gain a monopoly of influence, dropping their
Somalian protege in the process. The worst that could be said about
the Emperor’s censorship was that he had cut the death of the King
from Macbeth; after his fall Shakespeare was no longer performed at
all. The regime became totalitarian, massacred its opponents by the
tens of thousands, and engaged in large-scale frontier wars which
continued into the 1980s. After Russia extended the Cold War to
Africa, it became the classic theatre of Realpolitik, of abrupt
formations and reversals of alliances, and of the principle ‘my
enemy’s enemy is my friend’. A characteristic instance was the
Katangan invasion of Zaire across the Angolan frontier in 1977—8,
with the Communists, replacing the ‘imperialist secessionists’ of
1960, helping the Katangans with Cuban and Russian troops, and
Morocco and France backing Zaire.
The thirty-odd civil and foreign wars the new African states fought
in their first two decades produced a swelling total of refugees. By
1970 there were a million of whose existence the un was statistically
aware. The figure leapt to 4.5 million in 1978, plus 2 million
described as ‘unsettled’ after returning to their home country. In
1980 there were 2,740,300 UN-recorded refugees in seventeen Afri-
can countries, plus 2 million ‘displaced persons’, the vast majority of
them the result of the military activities of Soviet Russia, Cuba and
Libya. 96 The possibility of a significant proportion of these people
being resettled was remote. By the early 1980s, all the newly
independent states, with the exception of the Ivory Coast, Kenya and
the three oil-bearing territories, Algeria, Libya and Nigeria, were
poorer than under the colonial system. Some had moved out of the
market economy altogether.
In these circumstances, the quite rapid material progress which
had been a feature of the final phase of colonialism, 1945-60, was
reversed. Though independence was fertile in regional pacts, such as
the six-power Casablanca Group, the fifteen-power Monrovia
Group and the Brazzaville Twelve, these were largely verbal
agreements for political purposes, and they proved ephemeral.
Meanwhile the specific and practical inter-state arrangements for
currencies, transport and communications were disrupted or lapsed.
Wars, ’emergencies’ and the shutting of frontiers disrupted road and
rail links. Rolling-stock was not renewed. Roads deteriorated. Travel
patterns tended to revert to those of the 1890s, with links chiefly
between the coastal cities (though by air rather than by sea) but with
little long-distance movement inland. Mobility became patchy and
unreliable. In the late 1970s, the greatest traffic jams so far contrived
by man took place not in the advanced West but in Lagos: it was said
that the head of state, General Mohammed, died because he could
not solve the jam even for himself and his car got stuck at the same
time, 8 am, each morning, making it easy to plan his murder. In
1976, after the Nigerian government had ordered 18 million tons of
cement, the approaches to Lagos harbour were jammed by nearly
five hundred ships, and by the time most of them landed their cargo
it was unusable. 97
But in many inland areas, even in Nigeria, land traffic declined. As
one account put it, ‘More and more of the observable life of Africa
takes place within twenty miles of its three dozen international
airports.’ 98 With the decline in air traffic control standards and the
frequent closings of internal air-space, it often became easier and
cheaper to travel between African capitals via Europe than direct.
The same was true of phone-links: for instance, it was impossible to
phone Abidjan from Monrovia, four hundred miles away, except
through Europe or North America. The suggestion was made that
this decline actually benefited authoritarian governments by immobi-
lizing critics, for most African governments maintained for their
exclusive use military transport and communications networks on
the Iron Curtain model. But the state suffered too. In 1982 the Chad
ambassador in Brussels complained he had not heard from his
government for more than a year. 99
Equally marked was the deterioration in medical standards. The
progress made in eliminating malaria, which had been spectacular in
the late 1940s and 1950s, was reversed, who’s twenty-year pro-
gramme launched in 1958 was a failure. By the end of the 1970s
there were 200 million cases in the world and 1 billion people living
in malaria-risk areas. The reversal was by no means confined to
Africa; results in Central America and Asia were in some ways even
more disappointing. 100 But the late 1970s saw a disquieting increase
in malarial cases returning from African capitals where the disease
had been stamped out in the 1950s. 101 The return of traditional
scourges reflected the growth of malnutrition and famine, the
breakdown of public health and hospital services and the shortage of
qualified doctors. In 1976 who reversed its policy and announced
that henceforth ‘village healers’ would be employed in rural health
services, though a distinction was still made between African-type
midwives, bonesetters and herbalists, on the one hand, and ‘witch-
doctors’ using ‘spells and superstitions’ on the other. In 1977,
however, this distinction was dropped and ‘witch-doctors’, patro-
nized by 90 per cent of the rural population, were given the same
status as scientifically trained practitioners. 102 In Lagos, within the
penumbra of the world’s largest traffic-jam, a joint teaching-hospital
was opened for doctors practising medicine and ‘healing’.
The varied but on balance sombre pattern of the African continent
a generation after independence was reflected in the following
summary of events in the last year of the 1970s decade and the first
of the 1980s. For 1979: Sudan: attempted coup. Morocco: War in
Western Sahara against Polisario guerrillas cost £750,000 a day.
Ethiopia: 20,000 Cubans plus Ethiopian troops were fighting wars
on three fronts against Eritrea and Somalia, where refugees passed
the 1 million mark. Djibouti: uprising in Adar region. Kenya:
successful multi-party elections. Tanzania: 40,000 troops invaded
Uganda, when Amin, supported by 2,500 troops from Libya, was
ousted. Ghana: coup by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. Three
former heads of state and many other politicians executed by
firing-squad; public floggings and canings of corrupt citizens; police
strike; country declared officially bankrupt. Nigeria: return to
civilian rule. Liberia: food riots; seventy killed. Senegal: z fourth
legal party created. Mauritania: coup. Ould Salack, who had ousted
Ould Daddah in 1978, ousted in turn by Ould Hardallah. Peace
signed with Polisario guerrillas. Mali: single-party elections. Guinea:
release of political prisoners, including Archbishop of Conakry.
Benin: single-party elections. Togo: single-party elections; political
show-trials of so-called ‘Brazilian elitists’. Cameroon: attempted
coup followed by small massacre. Chad: civil war. People’s Republic
of Congo: coup. Equatorial Guinea: overthrow of dictator Macias.
Central African Republic: overthrow of Bokassa. Zaire: most major
roads reported unusable; two-thirds of road vehicles unusable for
lack of spare parts; Benguela railway closed; 38 per cent of foreign
exchange earmarked for debt-servicing; 42 per cent of under-fives
suffering from malnutrition. Burundi: fifty-two missionaries ex-
pelled for ‘subversion’. Guinea-Bissau: revenue covered only 65 per
cent of expenditure. Cape Verde: over 90 per cent of food consumed
imported. Mozambique: death-penalty extended to sabotage, terror-
ism and mercenary activities; many political executions; President
Machel attacked men with long hair and women with tight clothes.
Catholic and Anglican churches closed. Angola: civil war. Zambia:
many political arrests. Malawi: import controls. Zimbabwe: end of
white rule after decade of civil war; 20,000 dead. Namibia: guerrilla
warfare. Lesotho: guerrilla warfare. Swaziland: economy under
pressure from refugees. Botswana: ditto. South Africa: guerrilla
warfare.
In 1980: Sudan: one-party elections. Tunisia: attempted coup.
Morocco: war against Polisario. Algeria: Soviet-style concentration
on heavy industry abandoned as failure. Ethiopia: Soviet helicopter
gunships used against Somalis, Oromo, Gallas and other non-
Amharic races. Somalia: refugees pass 1.5 million mark. Tanzania:
Nyerere, sole candidate, elected president; famine. Zanzibar: at-
tempted coup. Uganda: cost of maintaining 20,000 Tanzania army
of occupation, plus 6,000 Uganda army, rose to 37 per cent of
revenue; fifty political murders a week in Kampala; famine. Ghana:
114 per cent inflation; universities closed. Nigeria: attempted coup;
1,000 killed. Gambia: opposition parties banned; many arrests.
Liberia: coup; many executions by firing-squad. Senegal: voluntary
retirement of Senghor after twenty-year rule. Mauritania: coup:
Ould Hardallah ousted by Ould Louly. Mali: schools on strike;
economy described as ‘catastrophic’. Guinea-financed coup in
Bissau, following dispute over oil-rights. Ivory Coast: one-party
elections. Upper Volta: coup. Niger: invasion by Libyan-financed
nomads. Benin: President Kerekou ‘converted’ to Islam during visit
to Gadafi. Cameroon: economy under pressure by refugees from
Chad. Chad: civil war and invasion by Libya. Zaire: Mobutu
declared 4 February: ‘As long as I live I will never tolerate the
creation of another party.’ Guinea-Bissau: coup. Sao Tome:
threatened invasion by exiles; 1,000 Angolans and 100 Cubans
moved in. Angola: civil war. Zambia: attempted coup. Zimbabwe:
British-supervised free elections. Namibia: guerrilla war. Lesotho:
invasion by ‘Lesotho Liberation Army’. South Africa: guerrilla
warfare. 103
The summary conceals many nuances. But it confirms a down-
trend in the recurrent cycle of interest in Africa. The first cycle, what
might be called the Rhodes period, ran from the 1880s up to the First
World War, when many believed Africa’s resources would be the
mainstay of future European prosperity. This was briefly sustained in
the early 1920s, then evaporated. A further cycle of interest began in
the late 1940s and reached its peak in the early 1960s, during the
transfer from colonial rule to independence. It began to collapse with
militarization in the late 1960s. By the early 1980s it was dead: that
is, the interest of the outside world in Africa was confined largely to
certain major primary producers, especially Nigeria and South
Africa. By then it was apparent that the great bulk of the continent
had become and would remain politically unstable and incapable of
self-sustained economic growth, or even of a place within the
international economy. Africa had become simply a place for
proxy wars, like Spain in the 1930s. In Africa, the professional
political caste and the omnicompetent state had proved costly and
sanguinary failures. We must now examine to what extent the same
pattern had been repeated in Asia, especially in the two stricken
giants which housed nearly half the world’s population, China and
India.
