Istwa Nou

The borders of independent Africa were drawn in European capitals between the 1880s and the 1900s, and they cut through communities that shared a language, a history and a set of relatives. Peoples with no reason to form one state were expected to run one at once. When African leaders founded the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 they wrote the permanence of those borders into it, reasoning that opening any single line to argument would open all of them and produce a generation of war. The same governments inherited a colonial state built on force and answerable to nobody, and they used it as they found it. Parliaments with several parties were discarded quickly as unworkable, and by the early 1970s the single party state was normal, with Tanzania and Zambia keeping a limited local vote while most of the rest could only be changed by soldiers. The Big Man at the head of the one party held people by handing out money and posts, which is how ambitious men had built followings a century before.

Drought settled over the Sahel from the early 1970s and held, from Mauritania and Mali east to Sudan and Ethiopia. Famine followed, and it fell on countries already fighting civil wars or moving their own farmers by force. By the 1980s agriculture sat at the centre of the crisis. Several states had become net importers of food and depended on aid to buy it. Land grew scarce, farmers pushed into pasture and into ground that made them ill, and herders and cultivators fought over what was left. The young left for the cities, and slums spread around Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Political sovereignty had arrived without economic sovereignty. Populations watched their governing elites take what there was, welcomed the coups of the 1960s and 1970s, then watched the soldiers fail as well. By the early 1990s governments were accepting structural adjustment from the IMF and the World Bank: shrink the state, free trade and currency, and take instruction on the rest.