Fifty years after the end of colonial rule, Africa's liberation leaders have much to account for, but they are not solely responsible for the state of the continent

In the twilight of colonial rule, Accra, capital of newly-independent Ghana, was a crucible of continental anti-colonialist politics. Ghana’s independence in March 1957, the first in anglophone Africa, inspired nationalists around the continent. When in December 1958, Kwame Nkrumah’s government organised the All Africa People’s Conference, it brought Africa’s 
nationalist movements together for the first time. 


Delegates from nationalist parties in 28 African countries came to Accra. Dominating the room was a banner in the shape of Africa reading: “HANDS OFF AFRICA! AFRICA MUST BE FREE!” The delegates immersed themselves in liberation politics, debated the merits of political violence, how to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and above all how to develop a “United States of Africa”.


Accra was a defining moment for African nationalism. Many delegates went on to lead their countries to freedom, and beyond – Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kenneth Kaunda, Kamuzu Banda and others. They would dominate Africa’s political landscape for a generation. Their personal strengths and weaknesses would help shape much of independent Africa.


Events moved quickly after Accra. In the next three years, France would lose the war in Algeria and cede independence to most of its colonies in West and Central Africa. Paris modified its old colonial currency zone: the CFA in Colonies Françaises d’Afrique would now stand for Communauté 
Financière d’Afrique, a symbolic shift which has worked to France’s commercial advantage until today, with Paris underwriting the currencies of 14 African states.


With leaders such as Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Léopold Senghor serving as French ministers and legislators, Paris 
engineered a much closer integration of African politicians into its metropolitan system than other colonial powers wanted or attempted. In time, that integration degenerated into the mutually-corrupting relations of Françafrique paraded through the courtrooms of Paris in recent months.


North African states, with the exception of Algeria, 
negotiated independence deals in the 1950s and had sharply differing perspectives on relations with the rest of Africa: Algeria’s Ben Bella and Egypt’s Abdul Nasser encouraged the militancy of Pan-Africanism while Morocco and Tunisia took more conservative lines.


Belgium, surprised in 1960 by the riots in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville) that showed African fury with years of colonial depredations, was bounced into ceding independence to Congo and then tried to undermine it by encouraging mineral-rich Katanga to secede.


Britain, which had granted home rule to Ghana and 
Nigeria in 1951, came under growing pressure from African nationalists, its own Labour Party and the US government to speed up decolonisation. Disclosure of atrocities in Kenya at the end of the Mau Mau war reinforced the pressure. 


Addressing South Africa’s whites-only parliament in 
February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan showed he got the message: “The most striking of all the 
impressions I have formed…is of the strength of this 
African national consciousness. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact...and our national policies must take account of it.”


This speech set the stage for Britain’s rituals of decolonisation: constitutional negotiations at Lancaster House and an industry of flag, anthem, currency and coat-of-arms production for the new nations. But it was clear the nationalist leaders were inheriting a set of contradictions. 


“When nationalism is framed by fighting an outsider, your enemy is clearly identifiable,” explains Nigerian 
historian Toyin Falola. “Pan-Africanism had been a reaction of resistance. Anti-colonialism was a reaction against domination. Now there was no enemy and the question was whether these ideals of resistance could build a nation.”


Fifty years on, what is the nationalist legacy? Many 
Africans from Lagos to Nairobi and Johannesburg see poor leadership as the biggest problem in their countries. The wave of reforms has produced political parties that are mainly ethnic 
vehicles. Corruption within the political class looks entrenched.

Africa’s nationalists were battling with formidable forces. The colonial state served the imperial centre, and the nationalist task was to reinvent these states as viable nations. “When you don’t have a common language or a shared history as 
European nationalism did, the task of building a new nation is massive,” observes Cambridge historian John Lonsdale. “It was tempting to use the tools [the colonialists] had left behind.” 


From the mid-1950s, Africa had become a theatre for the Cold War. Unlike Western Europe, where few bullets were fired during 40 years of the East-West stand-off, in Africa hundreds of thousands would die in proxy wars sponsored by superpowers. The communist powers identified the newly-independent countries of Asia and Africa as potential allies.


“Russia and China became key in supporting states in the Non-Aligned Movement,” says Oxford historian David Anderson, author of a forthcoming book on the Cold War in Africa. “The Russians and the Chinese didn’t deny it but argued that they were backing nationalist freedom struggles.” During that period, China and Russia began approaching the rising stars of the nationalist movement, as did the United States and its allies.


“The Americans came to the party late,” says Anderson. “They were always chasing to catch up. But in the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration was concerned that Africa was going to go communist. However, when they got involved in Vietnam, Africa became less important. They continued to support people like Mobutu [Sese Seko] but they didn’t care what he did. ‘He’s a thug but he’s our thug’ – that’s the phrase that keeps coming up in the documents.” 


Two Cold War incidents in the early 1960s underline its disruptive effects. In January 1961, seven months after he became Prime Minister in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba was arrested and assassinated in the midst of a political crisis, on orders from the army chief Mobutu. Mobutu was heavily backed by the USA and Belgium, which feared Lumumba’s radicalism and losing their grip on the country’s mineral riches. In East Africa in 1964, an army mutiny sponsored by East Germany, which led to violent revolution in Zanzibar and spread first to Nyerere’s Tanganyika and then to Kenya and Uganda, was quelled only when the new leaders leaders ironically requested British intervention.


In Kenya, conservatives in President Jomo Kenyatta’s 
Kenya African National Union (KANU) relied heavily on 
British support to counter the party’s leftists, led by vice-president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. In 1968, KANU conservatives asked Britain to provide a secretary to the national security committee to combat communist infiltration. Ethnic politics was intertwined with Cold War rivalries and KANU’s 
conservatives did not want a Kenyan appointee lest it be seen to favour particular ethnic interests.


In Ghana, Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) had to negotiate a different set of local and geopolitical pressures. The CPP emerged principally to campaign against British rule which had favoured chiefs loyal to the colonial regime and allowed them to benefit disproportionately from cocoa export revenues at the expense of 
peasant farmers.


Having seen the vulnerability of commodity-export 
dependent economies during the Great Depression, Nkrumah wanted to modernise the economy with processing facilities for cocoa, gold and bauxite. He used the Cocoa Marketing Board to counter the chiefs’ local power and raised foreign capital to build the Akosombo Dam on the world’s largest man-made lake.  Nkrumah sold the electricity cheaply to US company 
Kaiser Aluminium but could not persuade it to invest in the integrated aluminium industry that was a key part of his industrialisation strategy. Meanwhile, global economic swings cut Ghana’s commodity export revenues and social protests grew. As Nkrumah suppressed dissent ruthlessly, his conservative opponents at home and abroad plotted his overthrow.


For the nationalists, the great crime was acting as an agent of neocolonialism, and many regimes used the label to justify arbitrary repression. Popular Kenyan politician Tom Mboya was assassinated after a whispering campaign suggested he was a CIA agent. Authorities have never revealed who was behind his death in July 1969.


Of all the Cold War theatres in Africa, the conflicts between Ethiopia and Somalia show most starkly its damaging long-term effects. The Ethiopian and Somali armies were built on Cold War largesse while Emperor Haile Selassie and Siad Barre exploited their countries’ apparent strategic value. By 1970, the two countries had the biggest armies in Africa, although they ranked among the continent’s poorest. The Soviet Union, which had initially backed Somalia’s Barre, switched sides to support the Mengistu Haile Mariam 1975 coup against Emperor Selassie, because Moscow considered Barre to be uncooperative.


At stake was a listening post in Eritrea, then part of 
Ethiopia. The USA considered it critical to its Middle East strategy. However, Washington also saw Somalia, with its 3,000 km coastline, as a vital post to monitor Soviet activity in the Gulf of Aden. “The Soviets never believed that Ethiopia was socialist,” says Anderson. “There was a great debate within the Politburo over whether the USSR should be supporting him. Money was thrown at Mengistu to learn to be a ‘good socialist’. The Russians were very worried about the Red Terror [campaign] and how it could be used to tarnish their ideology.”


In 1977, the Cold War proxy rivalry between Ethiopia and Somalia precipitated the Ogaden war. Just over a decade later as the Cold War ended, support for the two strongmen was suddenly withdrawn, leading to the collapse of their regimes. The US assistant secretary for Africa, Chester Crocker, called Robert Mugabe and asked him whether he could accommodate Mengistu as an exile. Crocker attempted to repay the favour by pressing Western governments for a more intelligent policy towards Zimbabwe. 


Somalia was less fortunate. As the food and military aid – used as patronage to win clan support – ran out, Barre’s regime collapsed. “America’s interest in Ethiopia by the 1980s had radically changed,” says Anderson. Now there was satellite technology. There was little use for a listening post.”


The Cold War alignments during the liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique continued to haunt Africa after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Mozambique, where Portugal and South Africa backed insurgents, had its first free elections in 1994. The civil war in Angola lasted until the killing of Jonas Savimbi, protégé of China, the USA and apartheid South Africa, in 2002. Rivalries exacerbated by Cold War alignments contributed to continuing conflicts in Liberia and Congo. 


The main beneficiaries of the Cold War were corrupt authoritarians such as Mobutu Sese Seko who was allowed to borrow – and steal – more than $10bn from the IMF and the World Bank with Western backing. After Mobutu fled in 1997, the Congolese were left owing billions from which they had received no benefit.


Cold War sponsorship of tyrants covered up emerging contradictions in Africa: it financed the nationalist leaders’ politics and hid their failure to cultivate an enduring sense of nationhood and pan-Africanist spirit. 


“Can you build a country in the absence of history?” asks Ugandan writer and filmmaker, Kalundi Serumaga. “The failure of modern Africa is actually a failure of the projection of European ideas onto Africa. I am beginning to think that we can make an analogous situation with the post-Soviet Balkans. The corruption and attendant barbarity were/are the same. It is just that people look for weird and exotic explanations for simple corrupt behaviour.”


Africa’s retreat from the nationalist project reveals itself in many ways. As commodity prices crashed, economies started to shrink and debts soared in the early 1980s, the undertakers in the form of the IMF and World Bank moved in.


Two decades on, the political classes are benefiting from a new order of economic liberalism and impressive GDP growth figures. Yet the millions who have fallen through the floor lost even their minimal access to healthcare and education, and are turning to ethnic networks to survive. Now this competition for scarce resources, often ethnically defined, drives post-nationalist politics that call for devolution and more local control. While the beneficiaries of an exhausted nationalist agenda desperately shore up their centralised authoritarian states, it will be these growing demands for devolution that help define the politics of the next 50 years.