Some critical new factors came into play with the momentous transformations in global politics marking the end of the cold war, whose overall significance I have already stressed. A major side effect of the collapse of the Soviet bloc was that vast inventories of armaments were left in the hands of bankrupt successor states with cash-starved security forces. For a time, especially in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, weapons warehouses became mercantile bazaars, where black market arms dealers could obtain at fire sale prices large stocks of the basic armament so useful in the new African wars, especially AK47s and ammunition.
The new pattern of power seizure by armed rebels from the periphery created another huge source for the black market in weapons; this began with Uganda in 1979, followed by Chad in 1982. The pattern was repeated in Uganda in 1986, Chad again in 1990, Somalia and Ethiopia in 1991 (with two of the largest armies in Africa), both Congos in 1997, Central African Republic in 2003, and Libya in 2011. The dissolution of existing armies that resulted meant that weaponry in good part vanished into the bush. Automatic weapons became readily and inexpensively available on black markets, in contrast to the earlier postcolonial moments when few arms were obtainable in the countryside.
A corollary consequence of dissolution of existing armies was diffusion of basic military knowledge through substantial numbers of unemployed former soldiers who retreated to the countryside and whose only marketable skill was fighting. Among them were some former officers who had received advanced military training and thus some valuable skills in warfare. In the Algerian, Mali, and Niger cases, there were a small number of “Afghans” (veterans of the anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s) who offered rebel militias knowledge and experience applicable to guerrilla combat.
New forms of communication available to insurgents in remote locations added another dynamic, especially when cell phones became widely available. From the forest redoubt, negotiations could be conducted with black market weapons dealers or commodity merchants. Rebels were no longer isolated from the outside world.
Rebel organizers faced two key dilemmas: how to recruit, motivate, and discipline followers and how to finance the uprising.98 The risky choice of enlistment normally required a motivation more specific than antipathy toward a dysfunctional state; the oft-heard promise of democracy, an end to corruption, and social provisions was unlikely to suffice. A sentiment of regional or ethnic marginalization operated in a number of cases (Niger delta, Casamance, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, among others). Hope of assured subsistence might be a more direct incentive. Once incorporated into a rebel militia, isolation from the home community, fear and intimidation were potent deterrents to defection.
One of the solutions to the recruitment challenge was the kidnapping of child soldiers, first visible on a large and deliberate scale by RENAMO in Mozambique in the 1980s. Child soldiers were honed into a formidable instrument in several cases (above all Uganda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, although they were used in several other conflicts); they became a defining feature of the new conflicts, especially in external eyes. Adults might be more risk averse, with more to lose by abandoning farm, home, and community for the adventure of insurgency. Adolescents had much less to lose, and some children might find it attractive for the several reasons already noted. But they could also be abducted, and they were on a large scale in the cases cited; once severed from their communities, indoctrinated, perhaps drugged and guaranteed supernatural protection, they could be fearless and brutal soldiers.
Novel as well was the solution to the finance challenge. Rebel militias discovered new ways to finance their struggle through seizure of an array of marketable commodities of relatively high value. This almost never happened in earlier rebellions, which were funded by external assistance, confiscation of government or other assets, or support from local communities. For many of the post-1990 insurgents, traffic in diamonds, gold, tin, coltan, timber, or coffee could assure a revenue flow for rebellion. The warlords leading insurgencies became skilled operatives in illicit commerce.
In several places—Angola, Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger delta—the sums raised by looted commodities accruing to rebel militias was remarkably high. Though lucrative returns went to many intermediaries and some principals in the smuggling rackets, for the militias themselves the re sources exploited were instrumental to the violence rather than its explanation. The once-fashionable “greed not grievance” thesis has a number of convincing rebuttals.99
A striking characteristic of the new African wars was their structural stalemate; once begun, they were painfully difficult to end. In only two instances—Algeria and Angola—was the regime capable of military triumph on its own. In Rwanda in 1994 a rebel militia seized power by its own efforts, and in both Congos in 1997, incumbent regimes were ousted with decisive support from neighboring armies. But in all other cases where insurgents aspired to seize power nationally, there was no possibility of success, nor did state rulers have the capacity to eliminate them by force. Where sustained conflict has ended, external mediation has played a key and indispensable role (or a modest one at least in the case of Mali and Niger).
In several respects, the insurgencies were self-limiting. A few had only regional objectives (Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan). In other in stances, their extraordinary violence and atrocities alienated populations. The absence of a compelling ideological discourse, beyond ousting a corrupt and unpopular regime, limited their appeal, although in Algeria and Somalia a call to jihadism and integral Islam motivated some insurgents. In contrast to national liberation movements of an earlier period, the new movements made little effort to create “liberated zones” or to actually administer territory not under any state control.
In cases where insurgency continued over extended time, internal dynamics often altered its character.100 For example, in Uganda, the LRA initially had wide support in its Acholi home base, but over time its violent behavior and kidnapping of children led to disaffection and facilitated repressive action by the Ugandan army. Driven into Sudan sanctuary, the LRA increasingly became a rogue movement reflecting the bizarre character of its leader, Joseph Kony. A similar degeneration is visible in Congo-Kinshasa; the original protagonists fragmented, which provoked emergence of local defense forces (Mai-Mai). Thus a shifting alignment of militia forces emerges, their warlord commanders becoming elements in a criminal network of plunder of high-value minerals. The Liberian and Sierra Lone cases followed a similar trajectory. Invariably, the evolving nature of conflict was driven a complex of micro-level variables.101
Neighboring states pursuing their own objectives were an important source of militia supply in several cases (Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and, to a limited extent, Senegal). States would supply militias usually either in retaliation for the warring country’s suspected funneling of arms to internal dissident militias (Chad, Sudan, Uganda) or as participant in a proxy war directed at a third-party antagonist (Eritrea, for example, armed Islamist rebels in Somalia as an anti-Ethiopian gambit). Whatever the motive, the inevitable consequence was prolongation of the internal war.
The multiplication of internal wars in Africa—and the intense media attention generated by the instances of extraordinary insurgent violence (above all Liberia and Sierra Leone)—attracted high levels of international attention. So also did the spectacle of complete state dissolution in Somalia in 1991 that led to a humanitarian emergency and the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Both African and international mobilization followed, aimed at blocking insurgent takeovers, introducing peacekeeping forces, and pursuing active mediation in search of conflict resolution. ECOWAS peacekeepers played an important role in Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone; African forces were also assembled for Central African Republic, Somalia, and Sudan. A remarkably extensive roster of UN peacekeeping forces were mounted: at some stages of conflict, the UN deployed in Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mozambique, Rw
anda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan, as well as along the Eritrean-Ethiopian border. The Rwandan and Somali interventions ended badly and the inadequacies in Congo-Kinshasa were widely criticized, but in the other instances the UN played a helpful role. In Central African Republic, Chad, and Ivory Coast, French forces operated to contain conflicts or bloc insurgent takeover and then in 2011 to spearhead the Ouattara-UN operation to end the Gbagbo usurpation. A dramatic new form of external intervention unfolded in 2011, when NATO forces under UN mandate in Libya provided air cover to insurgents, eventually facilitating their victory.
Brokering peace settlements in complex emergencies had intrinsic difficulties, which bedeviled the mediators in several cases. Ending an internal war locked in stalemate inevitably involved inviting to the conference table—and thus in some respects legitimating—movements like the RUF, the NPFL, and RENAMO that were guilty of crimes against humanity. Only RENAMO really abandoned violence and accepted a minority role in civil politics. Also inherent but problematic in such bargained end to conflict is the need to incorporate some insurgent fighters into the security forces, a source of continued indiscipline, instability, and predation in the Congo-Kinshasa army.
The global preoccupation, if not obsession, with international terrorism after 2001 and the ability of its most noteworthy practitioners, Al Qaeda, to franchise regional subsidiaries intensified concerns with ungoverned space in whose interstices such groups could operate. In all these cases, lawless zones were linked to internal warfare. Somalia, southern Algeria, Tuareg regions of Mali and Niger all offered such sanctuary. Other criminal enterprises could also flourish: for example, piracy rapidly emerged and became professionalized in Somalia and to a lesser degree in lawless regions in the Niger delta, as did trans-Saharan narcotics smuggling.
The interwoven nature of the African political universe came more sharply into view in the contemporary internal warfare. A spillover effect is visible in virtually all the cases, save perhaps the Niger delta. The reciprocal entanglement of the genocidal conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi stands out; so does the participation at one stage or another of the Congo wars of eight other African armies. The protracted Angolan war against the UNITA insurgency motivated Angolan involvement in both Congos and Ivory Coast, where Savimbi had enjoyed sanctuary and support from given regimes. The linkages between some fragments of the dissidence in Tuareg regions in Mali and Niger with AQIM and the trans-Saharan narcotics trade drew in Algeria and Mauritania. Chad, Uganda, and Ethiopia were drawn into Sudan’s civil wars to the extent that they provided sanctuary and support to insurgents.
The particular activism of Libya merits special note. With an ample flow of oil revenue, a small population to service, and few if any domestic constraints on his personal diplomacy, Qadhafy enjoyed the latitude to pursue his continental visions. By the later 1970s, once his early pan-Arab ambitions were thwarted by the reticence of partner Arab states, he turned to Africa as a field for his quixotic leadership. The insurgent training camps he sponsored in Libya produced a number of the early participants in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean rebellions. His hand was also visible in internal conflicts in Chad, Central African Republic, Uganda, and Sudan, among others. More recently he had cast himself as a peacemaker, tribune, and financier of a rejuvenated pan-Africanism through the AU, subsidizing at one time or another nearly half the members.
Finally, a survey of the present African landscape reveals several positive signs. The number of active conflicts has significantly diminished from a peak in the 1990s. Not only are there fewer internal wars but they are smaller, involve fewer direct encounters by large forces, and occur in the periphery of affected countries. The insurgents tend to be more fragmented, and they are also often less disciplined fighting forces.102 Between 2000 and 2010, the only major new centers of conflict have been Ivory Coast and Nigeria; the former was resolved in 2011, and the Niger delta violence is now much reduced. Mozambique appears to be far beyond its civil war and to have healed most of its wounds. Liberia and Sierra Leone have now enjoyed several years of genuine peace, if not full reconciliation. Only Somalia currently appears beyond any hope of resolution. The Darfur conflict is likewise still at impasse in Sudan; the projected southern independence transition is fraught with perils as well as high hopes. One might suggest that there is a reverse spillover effect in the reduction of the number of active civil wars. The settlement of one relieves the pressures on neighboring states.
Civil society groups have played an important part in the reduction of levels of violence and in mitigating its effects on the population. Human rights groups, women’s organizations, peace groups, churches, and other organizations were active voices in the quest for ending the violent conflicts that imposed such high human costs on civil populations. They were also helpful participants in peace settlement negotiations.
By way of coda to this chapter, one may ask what is the legacy of an era of proliferating internal wars? At the beginning of the chapter, I mention the Tilly thesis of the historical importance of warfare in the building of the modern state. His reasoning did not apply to internal war, which does not unify and mobilize a citizenry against an external foe nor stimulate the institutionalization of a revenue-generating capacity or an enhanced administrative capability; on the contrary, institutional capacities are likely to be degraded as a state loses its control or even presence in important parts of the country and as mechanisms of plunder of natural resources that may survive the end of conflict become established. The two states that defeated insurgencies, Algeria and Angola, emerged from conflict with greatly strengthened security forces but also with habits of autocracy reinforced. They are perhaps stronger states but not necessarily in ways conducive to sustainable development or societal well-being. The two interstate wars to which the Tilly hypothesis might apply, Somalia-Ethiopia and Ethiopia-Eritrea, left in their wake arguably reinforced states in Ethiopia and especially Eritrea. In Somalia, the failed irredentist war of 1977–78 began the long decline and decay of the Siad Barre regime, leading to the 1991 state collapse. The Tilly thesis rests on European historical evidence; its exportability remains to be demonstrated.
The human costs, however, are clear. The fatality toll as direct or indirect consequence is sobering: an estimated six million in the Congo-Kinshasa wars, perhaps three million in Sudan; though these statistics are estimates rather than verified head counts and include deaths from disease, starvation, or displacement as well as military action, that the impact on the directly affected regions was calamitous cannot be doubted. The Algerian, Sierra Leonean, Liberian, Angolan, Mozambican and Somalian wars likewise saw elevated casualty figures. Especially in Angola and Mozambique, land mines were indiscriminately sown and continue to maim peasants today. Civil populations were frequent targets of militias as well as government forces. Endemic insecurity in the combat zones leaves its own traumatic legacy and a decaying public infrastructure. Only many years of renewed peace can mend the wounds.
8
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Africanism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity
The Ambiguous Triple Helix of Identity
Africans, all over the continent, without a word being spoken, either from one individual to another or from one African country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one.
—Julius Nyerere, 1960
We are dancing the frontier.
—Kivu youth group (Congo-Kinshasa), 2003
Nigerian nationality for me and my generation was an acquired taste. . . . Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting.
—Chinua Achebe, 2010
THE THREE PILLARS OF IDENTITY
The introductory citations point to the three pillars of identity this chapter will explore: Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity.1
I recollect sitting in a Wellesley College audience in 1960 mesmerized by the eloquent charisma of future president Julius Nye
rere when he uttered the words cited in the epigraph. They draw attention to a pair of aspects of Africanism: its original reference point of identity formation in the European other and its racial subtext. The visibility of the difference came not just from subjugation but also from phenotype.
The Kivu dance troupe was encountered by a pair of American academics crossing from Rwanda into Congo-Kinshasa in 2003, at the moment when an accord that promised to bring peace and reunification to the tormented country had been signed. Asked why they were dancing, the young men replied that they were “dancing the frontier,” adding that once they had completed the ritual at this crossing they planned to continue to other frontier posts to repeat the ritual. In their dance, they were performing the nation, suggesting a deeply naturalized attachment to the vast territory created by the imperial diplomacy of Belgian King Leopold II in 1885. Their performance not only celebrated a territorial “self” but also demonstrated a marked antagonism to the national “other” beyond the frontier, Rwanda. Unspoken but embedded in the ritual was a pronounced hostility toward the external enemy within, namely, populations of Rwandan origin, especially Tutsi, established within the Kivu region.
Achebe in his autobiography captures the ambivalent grip of territorial nationalism.2 Nigeria was not a compelling category in his childhood in the 1930s. It became so only with the rise of anticolonial nationalism in his youth. After a literary lifetime exposing the country’s dysfunctions in a brilliant series of novels while also celebrating his Igbo origins and after momentarily transferring his loyalty to the abortive Biafra secession, he finds his renewed Nigerian attachment “unbelievably exciting.”
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