Introduction: African Politics since Independence

Abstract

Africa is a vast and diverse continent, comprising fifty-one independent states (this number increases to fifty-three if the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic and South Africa are included, and will increase to fifty-five if two other states in the process of formation — Eritrea and Northern Somalia — secure international recognition. With only a few exceptions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Liberia, these are ‘new’ states: most of them achieved independence in 1960, which was the annus mirabilis of African independence, or within a few years of that date. To lump these states together and talk about ‘African politics’ is somewhat misleading because there are important differences between them. There is, for example, a wide cultural gap between the North African states and the Black African states south of the Sahara. The geographic and demographic differences are often striking, as witnessed by the huge Sudan and Zaire on the one hand and the tiny Rwanda, Burundi and Swaziland on the other; within West Africa, oil-rich Nigeria — four times the size of Britain and with a population exceeding 100 million — contrasts sharply with the Gambia which, with an area of just over four thousand square miles and a population of approximately 900 000, was once (in pre-independence days) described as ‘an eel wriggling its way through a slab of French territory’.