1970s to 2000s · Africanspan
The AK-47 ends the African state's monopoly on force
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From the 1980s the professional armies that African states inherited from colonial rule faced guerrilla forces armed as well as they were. Cheap automatic weapons, the AK-47 above all, broke a monopoly on firepower that governments had held since the 1890s. Movements that fought with surplus rifles in the 1960s had machine guns and rocket launchers twenty years later. Revolt in southern Sudan became the longest war on the continent. Eritreans fought thirty years for independence under the EPLF, while the TPLF in Ethiopia looked to Albania for a Marxism outside both blocs; their coalition brought down the Ethiopian dictatorship in 1991. Museveni's fighters took Kampala in 1986 and the RPF took power in Rwanda in 1994 as the genocide ran. All of them are still in office. Uganda's no-party system grew intolerant, Kagame used the genocide to close off argument, and Eritrea became one of the most repressive states on the continent. In Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone the gunmen had no politics at all.
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