Finally, Africans were disappointed that the dream of
a united Africa was not realized. Most Africans felt a
shared sense of continuing victimization at the hands
of the West and were convinced that independence had
not ended Western interference in and domination of
African affairs. Many African leaders were angered when
Western powers, led by the United States, conspired
to overthrow the radical Congolese politician Patrice
Lumumba in Zaire in the early 1960s. The episode reinforced
their desire to form the Organization of African
Unity as a means of reducing Western influence. But aside
from agreeing to adopt a neutral stance during the Cold
War, African states had difficulty achieving a united position
on many issues, and their disagreements left the region
vulnerable to external influence and even led to
conflict. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, border
disputes festered in many areas of the continent and in
some cases—as with Morocco and a rebel movement in
the Western Sahara and between Kenya and Uganda—
flared into outright war.
Even within many African nations, the concept of nationhood
was undermined by the renascent force of regionalism
or tribalism. Nigeria, with the largest population
on the continent, was rent by civil strife during the
late 1960s when dissident Ibo groups in the southeast attempted
unsuccessfully to form the independent state of
Biafra. Ethnic conflicts broke out among hostile territorial
groups in Zimbabwe (the former Southern Rhodesia)
and in several nations in Central Africa. In Kenya, Luo
tribal leader Tom Mboya was assassinated, presumably
because rival groups feared that he would be selected to
succeed the charismatic Kikuyu president Jomo Kenyatta.
Another force undermining nationalism in Africa was
pan-Islamism. Its prime exponent in Africa was Egyptian
president Gamal Abdel Nasser. After Nasser’s death in
1970, the torch of Islamic unity in Africa passed to
Libyan president Muammar Qadhafi, whose ambitions to
create a greater Muslim nation in the Sahara under his
authority led to conflict with neighboring Chad. The Islamic
resurgence also surfaced in Ethiopia, where Muslim
tribesmen in Eritrea (the former Italian colony of Eritrea
had been joined with Ethiopia in 1952) rebelled against
the Marxist regime of Colonel Mengistu in Addis Ababa.
World History
