Although knowledge of pre-colonial African history is somewhat limited given that most African languages did not utilize a written script until the late nineteenth century, sources such as oral tradition, archaeology and a few documentary records authored by literate visitors have revealed some important trends. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa was inhabited by settled agricultural, pastoral and iron-using societies over 2000 years ago. These African communities were involved in intercontinental trading systems for a very long time. During the first millennium, the camel caravans of the Trans-Sahara network connected West Africa with the Mediterranean milieu of North Africa, the Middle East and Europe and Arab ships in the Indian Ocean traded between the coasts of East Africa, Arabia and Asia. Beginning in the early 1500s CE, European and colonial American oceanic slave traders began to acquire captives from African powers along the West African coast and shipped them across the Atlantic where they worked (often to death) the plantation economy of the “New World.” As West African states became dependent on imported firearms that could only be obtained through exporting captives, the Atlantic slave trade resulted in increased warfare in the region. Around the same time, seafaring Portuguese pushed into the Indian Ocean where they displaced Arab merchant sailors as carriers of regional goods and dominated parts of the East African coast. During the early 1800s, abolitionist Britain used its naval supremacy to suppress the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and, in turn, West Africa became an important source of raw materials such as palm oil and rubber for the rising industries of Western Europe and North America. Ironically, this meant an increased use of slaves to produce these commodities within West Africa, which also became the scene of a series of Islamic holy wars resulting in the rise of large interior empires such as Sokoto and Tukolor. With the demise of the oceanic slave trade out of West Africa, international slaving expanded to East Africa during the nineteenth century with firearm equipped Swahili-Arab caravans securing captives and ivory from interior warlords and then transporting these to the coast for export. As happened earlier on the west side of the continent, the growth of the slave trade caused much suffering and displacement among East African people.
Before around 1880, most African people lived in independent and diverse societies ranging from highly centralized kingdoms such as Buganda in East Africa to decentralized communities such as those of the Igbo in West Africa. By the late nineteenth century there was already a long history of European intrusion in Africa but it had been limited by tropical disease and the existence of powerful African societies. Up to around 1880, the European colonial presence in Africa amounted to a series of coastal enclaves in the West and East, and to some settler colonies such as those of the British and Boers in the far south and the French in Algeria in the north. The African societies of the interior were completely independent and had little direct contact with Europeans.
During the 1880s and 1890s, in a process called the “Scramble for Africa,” almost all the continent came under the colonial rule of European powers such as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. This rapid conquest was impelled by a mix of strategic and economic motives, informed by extreme racism, nationalism and evangelical Christianity, and facilitated by new Western technologies such as steam-powered ships and trains, medical treatments for tropical disease and rapid-firing guns such as the Maxim. The first European invasions of the “scramble” period included the 1881 French seizure of Tunisia, which was justified as protecting the neighboring colony of Algeria, and the 1882 British occupation of Egypt, which secured the Suez Canal – vital for British shipping to and from India. At the 1884 Berlin Conference, European officials planned the partition of Africa and agreed on a principle of “effect occupation,” which meant that territorial claims had to be ratified by agents on the ground. While some African communities came under European rule through negotiation and treaty, many were invaded and defeated by European-led armies, mainly composed of African troops. To some extent, the sudden arrival of colonizers from a newly unified Germany in parts of Africa prompted the older colonial powers such as Britain and France quickly to formalize control over hitherto vaguely understood spheres of influence. In southern Africa, the discovery of precious minerals – diamonds in the late 1860s and gold in the late 1880s – stimulated the rapid growth of established settler states at the expense of African kingdoms such as the Zulu and Pedi, and caused conflict between Britain and local Boer republics. In central Africa, Belgian king Leopold II used the abolition of the slave trade and scientific exploration as excuses to orchestrate the private colonization of the Congo River Basin, which he called the Congo Free State and from which his locally recruited Force Publique brutally extorted rubber. Beginning in Senegal in the mid-1800s, French colonialism in West Africa gradually pushed eastward across the interior Sahel and Sahara during the 1880s and 1890s defeating the large Tukolor and Mandinka empires. Along the West African coast, British, French and German traders and agents responded to a worldwide depression in the 1870s by seeking to seize sources of raw materials so as to cut costs. Although the British and Egyptians had been expelled from Sudan by an Islamist movement led by the Mahdi in the 1880s, the British reconquered Sudan in the 1890s as control of this territory was seen as important in securing Egypt. In East Africa, British and German agents raced inland toward the agriculturally rich Buganda Kingdom, which was taken by the former at the start of the 1890s.
In much of Africa, the colonial conquest of the late nineteenth century was initiated by chartered companies formed by wealthy European businessmen with established economic interests in parts of the continent and who gained permission to rule territory on behalf of their home governments. The Cape-based British mining magnate Cecil Rhodes formed the British South Africa Company, which, during the 1890s, took control of what became the settler territory of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the copper-mining colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Around the same time, parts of East Africa were similarly conquered by Carl Peters’ German East Africa Company and William Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company. In West Africa, George Goldie’s Royal Niger Company brought part of what became Nigeria under British rule. While these chartered companies arranged the military invasions of parts of Africa and built the first colonial economic infrastructure, they found it difficult to survive financially and the colonies they founded were eventually all taken over by the governments of the colonial powers.
After the “scramble,” the only parts of Africa that remained outside European colonial rule were Ethiopia and Liberia. Although the Italians took possession of Eritrea on the strategically important Red Sea coast in 1889, their invasion of the hinterland empire of Ethiopia ended in disaster at the 1896 Battle of Adowa. Ethiopia was arguably Africa’s most powerful independent state and Italy was among the weakest of the European invaders. In West Africa the Republic of Liberia, established by freed black slaves from the United States earlier in the nineteenth century and under US protection, remained outside European control and during the “Scramble” era it formalized its frontiers with neighboring French and British colonies. Liberia was similar to neighboring European colonies as it developed a colonial economy based on the extraction of raw materials and mistreatment of indigenous people.
Although warfare was certainly nothing new in African history, the continent experienced protracted and intense violence throughout the twentieth century with very few areas remaining unaffected. The first four decades of the century, the 1900s to 1930s, were characterized by continued wars of colonial conquest and suppression of widespread African rebellions incited by colonial taxation, exploitation and oppression. Within this period, the German reaction to African uprisings in South West Africa (now Namibia) can be understood as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Both world wars (1914–18 and 1939–45) dominated the colonial era, involving military campaigns fought throughout parts of Africa by rival European powers, and more broadly the mobilization of African military manpower and the extraction of African resources that supported the global struggles of the combatants. While World War I generally strengthened colonial rule in Africa and finalized the colonial division of the continent, World War II informed the rise of African nationalism and demands for independence in the 1950s. From the 1950s to 1980s, African insurgents fought a series of wars against the colonial rulers such as the British in Kenya and the French in Algeria, and against white minority settler regimes in Southern Africa. Most African colonies became independent states through negotiation between outgoing colonial powers and emerging African politicians but a few key wars shaped the process. The optimism of the 1960s that post-colonial Africa would become a peaceful and prosperous continent was quickly disappointed by a wave of military coups and the outbreak of different types of wars. Civil wars began as separatist movements challenged the new African states that had inherited problematic borders and stark regional disparities created during the colonial era. Adopting the practices of late colonial counterinsurgency campaigns, many post-colonial African states responded to insurgency by herding civilians into squalid concentration camps euphemistically termed “protected villages.” Direct state-versus-state conflicts occurred less frequently given that most African governments wished to maintain the existing state structures. That said, it became sadly common for post-colonial African governments to fight each other indirectly through backing rebel groups in each other’s territories.
From around 1960 to 1990, the global Cold War was superimposed on Africa’s civil and inter-state conflicts as the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, tried to undermine each other by arming rival African forces, whether governments or insurgents. Africa became the venue for a number of major proxy conflicts of the larger Cold War. The superpowers and their allies shipped many billions of dollars’-worth of weapons to Africa, which increased the destructiveness and deadliness of conflict. At the start of the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, authoritarian African regimes lost their superpower support and therefore dissolved, which led to a rash of civil wars between factions that sustained themselves by exporting valuable resources to the world market and pressganging child soldiers. This post-Cold War era also saw the rise of Islamist militancy as an increasingly important, though certainly not entirely new, factor in African conflicts in the Maghreb, West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Direct international military intervention represented an important theme in Cold War and post-Cold War Africa as, for example, France sought to uphold its neocolonial influence and international governmental organizations, including African regional groupings and the United Nations, dispatched peacekeeping forces to conflict zones. As the twentieth century came to a close, Africa experienced the world’s deadliest genocide since the end of World War II, which took place in Rwanda, and the largest single armed conflict in the continent’s history, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was invaded by neighboring countries that backed local warring groups and looted resources in what became called “Africa’s World War” (1998–2002).
In studying the many wars of twentieth-century Africa, it is important to consider several stereotypes of the continent and its people. There is an unfortunate tendency in the popular media to explain conflicts in Africa as resulting from what is seen as the inherent violence of African society and by allegedly primordial conflicts between African ethnic groups, which are often described as “tribal warfare.” Such views are unhelpful in understanding armed conflict in Africa as they offer no specific or accurate explanations. While ethnic identity has been used to mobilize people during African wars, the causes of such conflicts are generally the same as in other parts of the world and are related to struggles over political power and resources. As this book demonstrates, war in twentieth-century Africa can be explained in terms of the overused Clausewitzian phrase “politics by other means.” The equally inaccurate reverse of the stereotype of innate African violence is the myth that Africa was a peaceful and idyllic place before the arrival of Europeans, upon whom all Africa’s subsequent problems can be blamed. It is well established that warfare was as common in pre-colonial Africa as it was among similarly complex societies elsewhere in the world. While colonial rule was established and maintained through violence and created the framework for future conflict, post-colonial African leaders were (are) autonomous agents and many of them made decisions based on incredibly selfish motives and caused considerable misery. Of course, not all African leaders have been bad, and the continent has produced a few visionaries, such as Nelson Mandela. Lastly, some might say that examining warfare in twentieth-century Africa will reinforce the previously mentioned and inaccurate image of Africans as inherently violent. For many years, this myopic view caused many historians and other scholars of Africa to neglect the study of warfare, which has meant that the continent’s military history has been generally underdeveloped until fairly recently. No one can deny that twentieth-century Africa witnessed very many destructive and deadly wars, with some large countries, for example Angola and Sudan, experiencing five consecutive decades of armed strife. For too long, far too many African people have experienced the horrific effects of war – such as violence, displacement, food insecurity, psychological trauma and lack of education and basic health care. Ignoring the historical causes, conduct and consequences of wars in modern Africa will only contribute to similar tragedies continuing well into the twenty-first century.
