Introduction: African Politics since Independence

Abstract

Africa is a vast and diverse continent, comprising fifty or (if the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic is included) fifty-one independent states. With only a few exceptions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Liberia, they 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 witness 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 probably exceeding 100 million — contrasts sharply with the Gambia which, with an area of just over four thousand square miles and a population of approximately 600,000, was once (in pre-independence days) described as ‘an eel wriggling its way through a slab of French territory—.