1960s to 1990s · Africanspan
Mobutu, Amin, Bokassa and Banda each keep power inside a family
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Rulers of the new African states held power the way a man holds a rope in a current, tightly and for his own. Office went to relatives, to men from the home province, to allies who spoke the same language, and any opposition was treated as a conspiracy. Between the 1960s and the 1980s Mobutu held Zaire, Idi Amin held Uganda, Bokassa crowned himself emperor in the Central African Republic, Kenya passed from Kenyatta to Moi, Rawlings took Ghana and Banda had himself made president for life in Malawi. Several of them had sponsors. Britain regarded Amin as preferable to the left leaning Obote. France favoured Bokassa at the start. In Ethiopia the removal of Haile Selassie in 1974 produced Mengistu and the Dergue, which ran a political terror, moved whole populations by force, deepened the war in Eritrea and presided over the worst drought in a century. From the 1980s populations pushed back, and states broken by debt had less capacity to hold them down. The foreign sponsors mostly stayed where they were.
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