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INTRODUCTION
Violence as politics in eastern Africa, 1940–1990: legacy, agency, contingency
David M. Andersona and Øystein H. Rolandsenb
a Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK bPeace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway
Over the 50 years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state, and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the 50 years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This article focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries – Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania.
It has become a commonplace in the analysis of Africas’s experience since 1990 to contend that the ending of the Cold War brought an era of greater conflict to the continent.1 It is easy to see why such an idea prevails. Genocide in Rwanda in 1994, as well as the Great Congo War that followed, was undoubtedly the most devastatingly destructive armed struggle ever seen in Africa, the reverberations of which continue to destabilise the Great Lakes region some two decades on.2 The collapse of Somalia in 1991, coming so speedily after the fall of the Berlin Wall, also reinforced the idea that removing the constraints of Cold War alliances risked plunging Africa into multiple power struggles as factions vied for control and power in the ‘new’ post-nationalist order.3 By the closing years of the century, bloody civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone gave rise to similarly portentous analyses in West Africa,4 while in southern Africa, war had again flared in Angola amid fears that the country would be tipped into another prolonged resource conflict.5 While ‘weak states’ seemed most vulnerable amid the catastrophic changes of the 1990s, even the continent’s more stable countries, where civil war and rebellion were avoided, saw upsurges of political violence as the push for the imposition of multiparty democracy and the liberalisation of the economy brought new kinds of political competition.6 By the end of the 1990s, Africa did indeed appear to be a continent in turmoil – and its cause was most widely believed to lie in the ending of the Cold War and the political reconfiguration this had brought.
But the ‘upsurge’ in conflict in the 1990s was in fact an illusion in many parts of the continent.7 Indeed, to view the conclusion of the Cold War as a rupture that gave rise to greater violence risks the implication that the Cold War itself had acted as a break on conflict in earlier decades. This article and the collection of articles that accompany it present an alternative interpretation of the background of Africa’s current conflicts and prevalence of state violence, looking specifically at the historical experience of eastern Africa. The argument seeks to promote a stronger understanding of conflict and violence over the second half of the twentieth century in this region, setting the post-Cold War years in historical context. The conflicts that emerged in this region in the 1990s were significant and real enough, but they were not directly the product of the end of the Cold War. Elements of these conflicts were shaped by the new post-Cold War dynamics, to be sure, but the violence that emerged was no more destructive or characteristically different from the many other violent struggles that had taken place in the years before 1990. Eastern Africa’s wars in the 1990s had their roots in deeper historical experience.8 By 1990, eastern Africa was already a region scarred and marked by political violence of various hues and of considerable proportions: this was a region whose people had already been widely affected by the displacement and instabilities that war and insurrection brings.
From the 1940s, eastern Africa’s history had been marked first by the rise of nationalism and the struggle for independence, this then overlapping with and being enveloped by the Cold War from the end of the 1950s. Nationalism was itself violent in many countries in the region, especially where colonialists had resisted the push for self-determination, and the Cold War brought many proxy wars to eastern Africa, as East and West fought out their differences most spectacularly in Congo and the Horn of Africa, and on a lesser scale elsewhere. In these years, international support for local insurrection was easy to obtain: destabilisation was a political ploy that governments within and beyond Africa were prepared to engage in.9 The West armed and trained the armies of their allies in Africa, while the Soviets supported liberation movements in guerrilla camps dotted all over the continent. Arms and munitions had flooded into eastern Africa long before the ending of the Cold War emptied the post-Soviet armouries of Belarus and Ukraine, and lowered the costs of violence across the globe. African states themselves deployed violence in very direct and forceful means against their internal enemies over these years before 1990, and were able to do so with relatively little criticism from within the continent or beyond.10 While the Cold War gripped this region, violence was too often the first, and not the last resort, in the politics of eastern Africa. If we are to comprehend the character and causes of eastern Africa’s violence in the 1990s, then, it is first necessary to begin by examining the violence of the Cold War years and the history of this region from 1940 to 1990.
The articles gathered here remind us of how significant, widespread and dramatic that violence was in eastern Africa. In these years, to put the matter succinctly, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state in eastern Africa. It was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. It is important therefore not only to reset the balance between the violence of this period and the impact of the ending of the Cold War, but also to ask why it was that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the 50 years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency?
This article offers an introduction and regional overview to these questions, which the accompanying articles will discuss and illuminate in fuller detail and greater depth. We begin with a regional overview of the politics of violence in the 50 tumultuous years before 1990. Legacy, agency and contingency are most often used to explain this prevalence of violence in eastern Africa, but each of these approaches is insufficient, in that none can capture or relate the extent to which violence became a normal and accepted practice in the region. Instead, we outline an analytical approach which centres on the discursive practices that allowed the social construction of violence, and thus rendered ‘acceptable’ by its practitioners11 – what Peterson and Taylor have termed ‘exhortation’ in the case of Uganda.12
The tumultuous years, 1940–1990
The extent of political tumult in eastern Africa over this period must first be appreciated. Between 1940 and 1965, every country in the region of greater eastern Africa experienced a liberation struggle of one kind or another as imperial occupation and colonialism came to an end. Ethiopia and Eritrea threw off Italian rule in the campaign of resistance during the Second World War, the former to reclaim its independence and the latter to be placed under British Military Administration before being returned to Ethiopian control in 1951. Sudan achieved its independence from British rule in 1956, to be followed by Somaliland in 1960, Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962 and Pemba/Zanzibar in 1963. In all these countries, nationalist movements had led the push for non-violent liberation. Kenya came to independence in 1963 after the Mau Mau uprising against the British, a bloody counter-insurgency and a draconian State of Emergency that lasted eight years (from 1952 to 1960). Rwanda and Burundi were liberated from Belgian control in 1960, both experiencing grim episodes of ethnic conflict amid their nationalist struggle that would prove a harbinger of much worse to come, and in the same year of 1960, Italian Somalia achieved self-government and immediately unified with Somaliland to form the Somali Republic. Djibouti was the last territory in this region to be liberated, achieving independence only in 1977, after corrupt plebiscites on the French Territories of the Afars and the Issas in 1958 and 1967, respectively, had stalled the nationalist movement.
Violence was a feature in several of these liberations, most notably in Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda, but it was only during the post-colonial years that violent conflicts came to mark the entire region. Let us survey this history of political violence over these years in the six principal countries of eastern Africa that feature in this volume – Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
Ethiopia and Sudan had the worst of it. In Sudan, the first signs of violent troubles came only two years after independence when, in October 1958, a coup led by General Abboud introduced the harsh suppression of urban elites and a militarisation of local government structures. Organised armed opposition soon emerged, reaching civil war proportions in South Sudan by 1963.13 A relatively peaceful revolution in October 1964 and the subsequent introduction of elected government did not bring an end to state violence or to the civil war.14 Massacres of southerners took place in Khartoum in December 1964 and in southern towns in 1965. From then until 1971, there was a steady escalation of the civil war. Violence and insecurity continued even after 1972, when a second military dictator, Jafar Nimeiri, signed a peace agreement with the Anya-Nya rebels. By the early 1980s, a second and more severe rebellion in the south turned this into Africa’s most prolonged and bloody civil war. With massive displacements of population and the wholesale militarisation of parts of the south as well as northern peripheries, the war impacted on every level of Sudanese society.15 A peace agreement was signed in 2005, and after a referendum, South Sudan seceded to independence in 2011.16
Ethiopia’s experience was equally painful and protracted. Demands for separation and regional autonomy – in Eritrea, Tigray, Orom...
