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'The Old Roots of Africa’s New Wars' Stephen Ellis*
Summary
Quite a few of Africa’s civil wars, which have drawn such attention recently, date back to the period before the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, an increase in the number of violent conflicts can be observed since 1990. The common roots of the older and of the new African wars lie in the political system of post-colonial states. From the beginning politics was stamped with clientism and oriented towards getting a share of the resources controlled by the state. Individual groups sought to obtain these sinecures and to exclude their rivals. That is, clientistic politics obeys the logic of a zero-sum game or, to put it another way, the logic of war. It was always a “militarized” politics. At the beginning, African regimes had sufficient means at their disposal to maintain an effective system of patronage. That was not least due to the financial support which they received from the great powers associated with them in the context of the Cold War. These governments also usually had sufficient means to keep in check violent insurrections. With the end of the Cold War the inflow of resources to a large extent dried up. Economic decline, often coupled with bad (both home-made as well as internationally imposed) policies, went one step further, reducing the controlling power of the government as well as causing dissatisfaction to grow, and intensifying the struggle for wealth within the framework of the clientielistic political model. An important role was also played by the expectations, unrealistic over the long term, formed during the extraordinary period of global prosperity of the first post-colonial decades. Post-colonial Africa was oriented towards a modern Western economic and social model which proved unsustainable. In the struggle for ever scarcer sources of wealth the activation of ethnic feelings of affiliation became a proven and obvious means of mobilization. This has nothing to do with a relapse into pre-national forms of social organization in the sense of a collapse of national societies. Rather the activation of ethnic identity serves the struggle for power in the multi-ethnic state or for the resources controlled by it. Violent politics, once the transition to it has been made, creates its own, self-reinforcing dynamic. It must remain an open question whether the current period of violence-based political conflict, with its immensely high costs is preparing the ground for a more peaceful way of organizing society – as it has once done in Europe.
*Stephen Ellis; Historiker; Afrika-Studienzentrum, Universität Leiden;
ellis@fsw.leidenuniv.nl (published in International Politics and Society 2/2003)
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