The Fire Behind the Smoke: External Sources of Ethnic Conflicts in Africa

Abstract

Summary Eghosa E. Osaghae, ‘The Fire Behind the Smoke: External Sources of Ethnic Conflicts in Africa’, Forum for Development Studies, 1995:1, pp. 5–27. This article makes a strong case for examining the interventions and meddling of foreign powers and interests as an underlying factor in explaining ethnic conflicts in Africa. It argues and demonstrates that these external sources of conflicts are deeply historically and structurally entrenched, dating back, in most cases, to the first contacts between African groups and outsider powers in the immediate pre-colonial period. They therefore need to be studied in terms of the continuities and changes that have attended the transitions from the pre-colonial to the colonial and, finally, the post-colonial periods if the full impact of external sources of conflicts is to be properly analysed. The article concludes that these external sources often shape the internal dynamics of ethnic conflicts and that the interplay of internal and external sources of conflict needs to be closely examined.