Istwa Nou

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.