Sorry for taking a while, Srijita...I was under a bit of stress this weekend and never got around to doing this. But now that it's passed, mostly, I'll answer all this. And thanks for the interest.
Srijita wrote:You mention Africa's colonial legacy. I recall reading about the postcolonial fallout in the Congo, as part of my research for a novel with a flashback to Dag Hammarskjöld's death, but knew little of the background of Sudan and Somalia. To what extent do you think western colonialism and subsequent political machinations are responsible for the problems in Africa as a whole?
Oh, the colonial powers did many things to screw up Africa. For one thing, if you take a look at a map of Africa, the countries are pretty much all creations of the colonies. Those boundaries, for the most part, are identical to the boundaries of the colonies. Said boundaries take no account of social and political units that had existed in Africa prior to colonialism. As such, you had communities, resources, and ethnic groups split and lumped arbitrarily by the colonial powers. Some examples...Tanzania has over 400 ethnic groups living in its borders and many of them have people in the countries surrounding Tanzania as well. The Somali people are split among several countries, including Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and others in eastern Africa. Some countries, such as Niger, were left with few natural resources and little arable land. For the most part, these are fragmented societies. Add to that other problems...colonial powers, by intention and accident, favored some ethnic groups over others. They needed Africans to administer the colonies, and inevitably, certain groups got educated and access to the state and power while others did not, thus creating an unbalanced and generally self-interested bureaucratic elite in the post-colonial era.
Additionally, Europeans had never intended to develop Africa economically or politically. They had never really done anything to bring most Africans into politics, so state institutions had no links to civil society. Once independence came, state institutions were too weak to garner any legitimacy from the people, and they also lacked the capacity to enforce centralized rule effectively. Most leaders, to keep their fragmented countries unified, had to buy off local and regional leaders to keep them from causing trouble. Economically, the Europeans wanted one thing from Africa and that was money. Most infrastructure was designed for resource extraction, not development. Africa countries were thus left with weak economies dependent on one or two goods and today, are STILL dependent on the export of primary goods (i.e., minerals, lumber, cash crops) to Europe.
Add to that the fact that most African leaders failed to effectively address these problems (these were not insurmountable), and what you have in the post-colonial era is instability in most countries. Most of Africa is underdeveloped. From independence to modern times, there have military coups, secession movements (like Katanga, which tried to secede from the Congo), irredentism (uniting all people in an ethnic group under one country's flag) like you have in Somalia (which is ranked number 1 in the failed states index), failed economies, and few hopes for political pluralism in most countries. But do take note that democracy is beginning to take hold in some countries where it hadn't existed before, notably Ghana and Nigeria. There are still many military rulers and personal dictatorships in Africa. The thing is that these ethnic conflicts are not about age-old hatreds. It's about economics, politics, power and inequality thereof between groups in the same state.
Srijita wrote:I'd also be fascinated to hear your opinion on why Botswana has succeeded in maintaining a democratic government and achieving relative economic prosperity. Religious and/or racial homogeneity? Absence of religious fundamentalism? Smooth original transition from colonial to self-government?
This is basically the central question of my thesis, and I haven't yet fully answered it yet because I haven't gotten a lot on Botswana's colonial history (but I got a source today, yay!) I know some things though, and later I can answer this in more detail if you like. But in short...first of all, Botswana is ethnically homogeneous compared to most African countries. 79% of the people in Botswana are Tswana, which is composed of 18 or so separate subgroups. 11% are the Kalanga people. 3% are the Bushmen (or Basarwa) of the Kalahari desert. The remaining 7% are foreigners. And for its size, Botswana has a low population. In terms of economics, Botswana has enormous deposits of diamonds and some other minerals as well as some good land for cattle ranching, so their economy has been stable if reliant on diamonds. Leaders in Botswana after independence (1966) also pursued non racial policies and promoted a Batswana identity over individual groups. And unlike in most countries, this worked in rhetoric AND in practice, because Botswana was fairly homogeneous. It had also been taken under British protection by request of the Batswana people, because of fears of encroachment from South Africa. Colonial government was built on British centralization and indigenous rule. There were no groups that had an advantage in accessing the spoils of the state, no divide and rule tactics. Eventually, this led to government including two advisory councils, one for the British and one for the Africans, and these were later regularized as part of the government. The councils merged after World War II, and in 1961, was expanded into a legislative body. Diamond revenue was used to actually develop the state institutions and the whole economy, not given to a few leaders to keep them from rebelling. It also wasn't subject to the economic exploitation that others suffered. So in short the British protected Botswana while allowing them some self-government. Botswana slowly adopted British institutions and civil society grew around that rather than being forcefully imposed (and thus likely to fail). So it had a longer history of parliamentary democracy that still flourishes today, without any racially based political parties.