The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  He divided Muslim societies into two diametrically opposed camps: those that belonged to the party of God and those belonging to the party of Satan. There was no middle ground. The only alternative to jahiliyya was hakimiyyat Allah – the absolute sovereignty of God – which required the imposition of Islamic law derived from the texts of the Koran and the Sunna. Muslims, said Qutb, needed to look back to the time of the Prophet and the first Salafi elders to rediscover the pure doctrines of Islam. An Islamic system of government was not just a matter of choice; it was a divine commandment.

  Because of the repressive nature of un-Islamic regimes, no attempt to change them from within by using existing systems would succeed. Hence the only way to implement a new Islamic order was through jihad. Qutb urged Muslim youths to form a vanguard (talia) ready to launch a holy war against the modern jahili system and those who supported it. The only homeland a Muslim should cherish was not a piece of land but the whole Dar-al-Islam – the Abode of Islam. Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar-al-Harb – the Abode of War. Those Muslims who refused to participate or wavered were to be counted among the enemies of God.

  Qutb was released from prison in 1964, but was arrested again the following year, accused of plotting to overthrow the state, largely on the basis of his own writings, and hanged in 1966. Acclaimed a martyr to the cause, he was venerated as a father-figure by Muslim extremist movements around the world. His book Signs became a bestseller and was reprinted five times.

  When Nasser died from a heart attack in 1970 at the age of fiftytwo, there were genuine outpourings of grief. Four million people attended his funeral in Cairo, many feeling that Egypt had been left an orphaned nation. Yet the state he bequeathed was in dire straits. Though he remained an idol to the masses, his regime had degenerated into a personal dictatorship that stifled any hint of opposition or dissent, whether from the Muslim Brotherhood or from any other quarter. His plans to lead a socialist revolution had encumbered Egypt with a bloated public sector, huge debts, high inflation and chronic consumer shortages. Most disastrous of all was Egypt’s humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War in 1967 which resulted in Israel’s occupation of Sinai, the loss of the Sinai oilfields and the closure of the Suez Canal.

  His successor, Anwar al-Sadat, a Free Officers colleague, endeavoured to escape from Nasser’s shadow and bolster his own position by cultivating the support of Islamic groups. He appropriated the title of ‘Believer-President’, arranged for the mass media to cover his prayers at mosques and began and ended his speeches with verses from the Koran. He also encouraged the growth of Islamic student associations, promoted Islamic courses in schools and reached a modus vivendi with the Muslim Brotherhood, allowing it to function publicly once more, on condition that it forswore violence.

  But the rapprochement soon turned sour. The Muslim Brotherhood denounced Sadat’s ‘open-door’ economic policy – ‘infitah’ – that opened the way to market forces and brought an influx of Western businessmen. And it vilified him for signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. In protests throughout Egypt, demonstrators denounced the accord as the treasonous act of an ‘unbeliever’.

  Sadat, in turn, reacted to growing opposition by resorting to authoritarian rule and outright repression. He publicly castigated the Muslim Brotherhood for abusing its newfound freedoms and warned that he would not tolerate ‘those who try to tamper with the high interests of the state under the guise of religion’. In September 1981, he ordered the arrest of more than 1,500 civic and political leaders including senior members of the Brotherhood and other Islamic activists. A few weeks later, as he was reviewing a military parade, Sadat was gunned down by army members of a jihadist group, Jamaat al-Jihad.

  Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, a former air force commander, hunted down the jihadists but allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to develop as part of the mainstream of public life. In a change of strategy, the Brotherhood’s leaders began to invoke the language of democracy and human rights, transforming itself into a significant force in political, economic and social activity with the aim of converting Egypt into an Islamic state by evolutionary steps. Individual members stood for election to parliament, using the slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ and calling for the implementation of Islamic law. In 1987, Brotherhood candidates won 17 per cent of the vote and emerged as the largest opposition bloc to Mubarak’s government. The Brotherhood developed an extensive network of banks, investment houses, factories and agribusinesses. It gained control of trade unions, student groups, municipalities and several professional syndicates – lawyers, doctors, engineers and journalists. Its social service network was often far more effective than the government’s.

  While the Brotherhood sought to advance the Islamic cause by mainstream methods, jihadist groups pursued their own agenda of revolutionary violence. During the 1990s, the ranks of the jihadists in Egypt were bolstered by the return of combat-hardened veterans from the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Their targets included government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians and burned Christian shops and churches. They bombed banks and government buildings and theatres, video stores and bookshops popularising Western culture. Small towns and villages as well as large cities were caught up in the violence.

  Mubarak reacted to the jihadist campaign with a massive crackdown, using emergency laws to detain thousands without trial and setting up military councils to try civilians with no right of appeal. As well as targeting extremists, he took the opportunity to curb mainstream Islamic opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, insisting that it was part of the Islamist onslaught.

  Mubarak’s strategy of repression largely succeeded in crushing violent Islamist opposition. But the Islamic tide nevertheless continued to rise. The revival took hold not only among the mass of impoverished Egyptians but among middle classes. Islamic institutions proliferated across the country, providing an alternative system of schools, clinics, hospitals and social welfare. Islamic values, codes of conduct and dress became part of mainstream society. Cairo, once renowned for its multicultural, cosmopolitan and secular character, took on an increasingly Islamic hue.

  The military-backed regime in Algeria faced an even more formidable challenge. For more than two decades after independence from France in 1962, the military hierarchy had successfully enforced a one-party dictatorship that gave a select group of officers and business allies not only a monopoly of power but most of the wealth generated by lucrative ties and ‘trade commissions’ with foreign companies. Living in exclusive neighbourhoods high in the hills above Algiers, this rich elite came to be known simply as ‘Le Pouvoir’.

  But in the bidonvilles and working-class areas below, grievances over rising unemployment, poor housing, overcrowding, consumer shortages and price rises steadily festered, culminating in 1988 in riots that spread to cities and towns across Algeria. The riots broke the mould of Algerian politics. Opting for reform rather than repression, ‘Le Pouvoir’ agreed to allow multi-party politics. Almost overnight, a host of political parties and civic groups sprang up.

  Leading the pack was the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), an ambitious Islamist organisation aiming to gain power in order to transform Algeria into an Islamic state. In provincial and municipal elections in 1990, the FIS made impressive gains, winning landslide majorities in virtually all major cities. In the first round of national assembly elections in December 1991, it gained an overwhelming victory, taking 47 per cent of the vote. A second round was expected to confirm the FIS’s lead. But it never took place. In January 1992, the army command seized control, claiming that once the Islamists gained power, they could never be trusted to give it up; they were, said a spokesman, seeking ‘to use democracy in order to destroy democracy’.

  The generals next set out to crush the FIS altogether, banning it as an organisation, introducing a state of emergency, detaining thousand
s of members in prison camps in the Sahara, removing dissident imams from mosques, shutting down newspapers and closing down town halls. The military crackdown led Algeria into a nightmare of violence. Islamist militants embarked on a campaign of assassination, bombing and sabotage intended to force the government to accept Islamist claims to power. The military retaliated with death squads, torture and ‘disappearances’. For year after year, the Islamist insurgency gripped Algeria, degenerating into indiscriminate slaughter. Both sides committed atrocities. Over a ten-year period, more than 100,000 people died.

  Though the insurgency eventually lost much of its momentum, Algeria was condemned to live with a low-level conflict. The violence seemed to suit both the Islamist rebels and the military. Islamist ‘emirs’ profited heavily from extortion, protection rackets and smuggling. The military were able to justify extending the state of emergency and restricting opposition, thereby protecting the system of control that had made the ruling elite wealthy and powerful and given them all the patronage they needed to maintain their grip on power.

  Sudan experienced several periods of militant Islamic rule but was eventually torn apart by it. In 1983, Sudan’s military ruler, Gaafar Numeiri, in an attempt to broaden the base of his northern support, decreed Sudan henceforth to be an Islamic republic subject to sharia law. Government officials and military commanders were required to give a pledge of allegiance to Numeiri as a Muslim ruler. In the same arbitrary manner, Numeiri dissolved the regional government of southern Sudan which had been set up under the terms of a peace agreement between the north and the south in 1972 to bring an end to ten years of civil war. The result was to provoke another round of civil war. Southern rebels called not for secession but for a united, secular Sudan, free of Islamist rule.

  Popular discontent in the north over unemployment, shortages, inflation and rampant corruption led to Numeiri’s downfall in 1985, but the next government, led by Sadiq al-Mahdi, a grandson of the fabled Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed, pursued the same Islamist agenda as before and prosecuted the war in the south with the same ferocity. To counter rebel attacks, the Khartoum government armed Baggara Arab militias and licensed them to raid and plunder at will in Dinka and Nuer areas of the south just as their forefathers had done in the nineteenth century. Khartoum also followed the age-old custom of exploiting divisions and rivalries among southern groups, arming tribal militias to attack rebel factions. ‘Aktul ab-abid bil abid’ was the saying – ‘kill the slave through the slave’. The rebellion nevertheless continued to spread. When Sadiq showed signs of being willing to compromise over the introduction of Islamic law as part of a peace deal, he was overthrown in 1989 by army militants. ‘Khartoum will never go back to being a secular capital,’ the coup leader, General Omar al-Bashir, declared.

  Assisted by zealots in the National Islamic Front, Bashir turned Sudan into a totalitarian Islamist dictatorship. One institution after another – the army, the civil service, the judiciary, the universities, trade unions and professional associations – was purged of dissent. The press was rigidly controlled. Hundreds of politicians, journalists and other professionals were detained without trial; many were tortured. A new Islamic code provided for public hanging or crucifixion for armed robbery; execution by stoning for adultery; and death for apostasy. Tight restrictions were placed on music, dancing, wedding celebrations and women’s activities. Religion became in effect a method of repression.

  The war in the south was officially declared a jihad and waged with indiscriminate brutality. A fatwa issued by religious scholars in Khartoum granted conscripts sent to the south ‘the freedom of killing’. A new factor lay behind the north’s relentless assault on the south. As a result of oil discoveries in the Upper Nile region, the south had acquired a strategic significance. At a ceremony in 1999 marking the opening of a pipeline connecting the Upper Nile oilfields to the Red Sea coast, Bashir described oil exports as a reward from God for ‘Sudan’s faithfulness’. With new funds at his disposal, Bashir embarked on a massive military spending spree.

  As well as enforcing their own brand of Islamic rule on Sudan, Bashir and his mentors in the National Islamic Front provided an operational base for jihadists and other militant groups in the Muslim world, inspired by the idea of establishing an ‘Islamist International’. Islamist activists from Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia were offered sanctuary and provided with diplomatic passports. Libyans trained in Sudan attempted to assassinate Gaddafi in 1993 and launched attacks in Libya in 1995. Egyptian jihadists based in Sudan tried to assassinate Mubarak in 1995 during a visit he made to Ethiopia. Eritrean insurgents used Khartoum as their headquarters. The Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden arrived in Khartoum in 1991 and spent five years in Sudan incubating his al-Qa’eda network. Bomb attacks on United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were carried out by ‘sleeper’ cells planted by al-Qa’eda in 1994.

  Denounced by African leaders and in the West as a rogue regime supporting terrorism, Bashir’s government began to change course, spurning former friends such as Osama bin Laden and other militant Islamists. In September 2001, after al-Qa’eda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Bashir, desperate to avoid retaliation, hastened to pledge cooperation with US measures aimed at al-Qa’eda and other terrorist organisations.

  Under the threat of sanctions, he also became amenable to the idea of negotiating an end to the war with rebels in the south. By 2002, the war had resulted in two million people dead and four million displaced. With the United States playing a leading role as intermediary, a peace deal was signed in 2002 and finalised in 2004 according the south the right to self-determination. After a six-year interim period beginning in January 2005, southerners were to choose in a referendum whether to remain a part of a united Sudan or set up an independent state.

  The gains made by rebels in the south in their dealings with Khartoum encouraged dissident groups in other parts of Sudan to press their own demands. In several areas of the north – Darfur in the west and Beja territory in the Red Sea hills – there was deep resentment of the years of neglect and indifference to local development shown by Khartoum’s ruling elite. Darfur was also beset by an age-old conflict over land between nomadic Arab pastoralists and ‘settled’ African agriculturalists. During the 1980s, as a result of drought and desertification, the conflict intensified. Arab pastoralists moved southwards from the arid north of Darfur into areas occupied by black Muslim tribes – the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa – precipitating a series of violent clashes.

  Rather than working to defuse tensions, the Khartoum government sided with the Arab pastoralists, providing them with arms. When a Darfur rebel group launched its own insurgency, protesting against Khartoum’s failure to provide protection against Arab raiders and demanding a share in central government, Bashir reacted with a savage campaign of ethnic cleansing intended to drive out the local population and replace it with Arab settlers, a tactic he had used previously in southern Sudan. Arab militias known as janjaweed were licensed to kill, loot and rape at will. They burned to the ground hundreds of villages, killed thousands of tribesmen, abducted children and stole cattle. Both sides were involved in indiscriminate massacres. When United Nations agencies tried to intervene, Bashir blocked their efforts. For more than a year the killing went on unimpeded until international outrage forced Bashir to rein in the janjaweed. By 2010, it was estimated that 300,000 had died and three million been made homeless. Bashir was subsequently indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges ranging from genocide to mass murder, rape and torture.

  Southern Sudan was meanwhile slipping from his grasp. In a referendum in 2011, having tasted freedom from northern rule for six years, southerners voted overwhelmingly to secede and establish an independent state. Despite oil, its prospects were pitiful. South Sudan was launched as a state with few roads, schools or health facilities, no industry, a chronic lack of skills and a government consisting of rival rebel factions that had often fought each other during thirty
years of civil war.

  In northern Nigeria, an upsurge in militant Islamism grew out of widespread discontent over the central government’s failure to deal with mass poverty, unemployment and crime in the region. While Nigeria’s ruling elite squandered billions of dollars on corruption and mismanagement, many regional states in the north suffered from neglect. More than two-thirds of the population there lived in abject poverty compared to one-third in the south. In the 1980s, as law enforcement disintegrated, militant Muslim groups agitated for the introduction of more stringent sharia measures. A Muslim sect led by a preacher known as ‘Maitatsine’ – ‘the one who curses’ – mobilised the young urban poor in a series of uprisings, first in Kano and later in Yola, Kaduna and Maiduguri, in which thousands died. Clashes between Muslim and Christian communities flared up time and again in Middle Belt states that straddled the divide between the Muslim north and the Christian south.

  Religious tensions in the north intensified in 1999 after a Christian politician was elected as president and hundreds of northern army officers associated with the previous military regime were removed from office. Smarting from the loss of political power, northern leaders raised fears of a Christian ‘hidden agenda’ and used sharia as a weapon to reassert northern solidarity. Hitherto, about three-quarters of the northern penal code had been based on sharia law, including such matters as marriage and divorce. In 1999, the newly elected governor of Zamfara, an impoverished state in the far north, announced that the state would adopt sharia law as its sole legal system, citing Saudi Arabia as his model. Sharia law would apply to all criminal cases and to sentencing, with penalties that would include flogging and stoning. Sharia, he said, was necessary to restore clean living to a decadent society. Eleven other northern states followed Zamfara’s lead, provoking violent protests.