1994 gives Africa the rainbow nation and the Rwandan genocide

The end of colonial rule did not clear the board. African states came out of it carrying colonial administration, colonial economies and colonial borders, and at the same time older arrangements returned that colonial rule had only held down. A large share of what gets called a postcolonial problem is a nineteenth century one, above all the militarisation of politics that spread across the continent before any European army settled there. The Cold War made this worse, starting some conflicts, extending others, and giving Western governments a stated reason to fund rulers they could not otherwise have defended. Economic weakness ran back further, through colonial extraction to the terms of nineteenth century legitimate commerce and behind that to the Atlantic slave trade. Government by patronage drew on precolonial practice while distorting it. One year holds the whole ambiguity. In 1994 South Africans of every description voted together for the first time, and in the same months about eight hundred thousand people were killed in Rwanda in a hundred days.

The general instructions prepared by the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs before the ministerial conference on the Alliance for Progress in June 1961 set the American objective in Haiti as keeping the country in our camp, and the line of action as living with Duvalier. Dean Rusk, who called Haiti the cesspool of the western hemisphere and its government enormously repugnant, argued for support anyway, on the ground that a Castro type regime might be no worse for Haitians and would be bad for the United States. Adolph Berle argued the opposite case and lost. What Duvalier delivered was concrete. Communists in Haiti were hunted actively. He offered Eisenhower and then Kennedy a military base in Haiti to replace Guantanamo. During the missile crisis he let American ships patrol Haitian waters to enforce the blockade of Cuba. His vote at Punta del Este gave Kennedy the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States.

In a footnote added to the 1963 edition of his history, and stressed again in his later lectures, C. L. R. James distinguished the Jacobins from the sansculottes and mapped that distinction onto the Haitian conflict. The Jacobins he treats as authoritarian enlightened despots, while the sansculottes wanted a dictatorship over the aristocracy and a free democratic state among themselves. On this reading the labourers who rose against Toussaint were not simply avengers, they wanted to hold the former masters down while governing themselves democratically. Ciccariello-Maher uses the point to argue that repressing an avowed enemy is compatible with popular democracy and does not forfeit any future claim to universal equality. He notes that this distinction is missing from Buck-Morss, who treats every identity based opposition as brutality feeding an endless cycle of victim and aggressor.

From 1955 the British in Kenya accepted that the colony had to change and began consolidating African holdings and issuing title under a new Kikuyu settlement scheme. They left untouched the grievance that had produced Mau Mau. Land went to men classified as loyal and the landless got nothing. Then the Hola Camp killings came out, detainees beaten to death in a system that treated Mau Mau as a disease to be washed out of the mind. The revelations disgusted British opinion. Harold Macmillan had already begun doubting that colonies paid for themselves, and now they were costing him votes. Multiracial power sharing was dropped in favour of African majority rule, the nationalist parties were legalised, and Jomo Kenyatta came out of prison to lead KANU and take Kenya to independence in 1963. In the last months Britain bought more than a million acres from departing European farmers for redistribution. Seller and buyer both had to be willing, so the buyers were men who already owned land.