Yekutiel Gershoni

The Changing Pattern of Military Takeovers in Sub-Saharan Africa

During the years between 1958 and 1987, the African continent saw 143 actual and attempted military takeovers. Most followed a single scenario: Rebel troops surrounded key positions in the capital, arrested or executed the head of state, and quickly established a new government without shaking the countrys administrative and economic infrastructure. During the late 1980s, African rulers who had achieved their positions by taking over the capital were well aware that they could be overthrown by the same means. To protect their regimes, they concentrated most of the states meager resources and their well-trained loyal troops in the capital, leaving the periphery uncontrolled. Coup plotters in Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda exploited the lack of authority in the peripheries of their respective countries, built up rebel forces in the border areas, and from there advanced toward their capitals. This new strategy resulted in prolonged civil wars that consumed human lives and devastated the economy and the society. Two coups in Liberia, a failed one in 1985 and a successful one in 1989, are paradigms that demonstrate the changing pattern of coup styles in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Liberia's underdevelopment--in spite of the struggle : a personal analysis of the underlying reasons for Liberia's underdevelopment

This text examines Liberias struggle for economic and personal freedom and the accompanying de-development. Horton guides readers through Liberias history to his inevitable conclusion: Blacks must not blame their ills entirely on colonialism or apartheid.

Christians and Muslims in Nineteenth Century Liberia: From Ideological Antagonism to Practical Toleration

Abstract Liberia was established, among others, as a Christian nation that would spearhead the spreading of the gospel to the black continent. This endeavor had the potential to bring about a collision between the Liberian settlers and the other imported monotheistic religion that had already been proselytizing in large areas of West Africa for centuries, namely Islam. This article analyzes the process by which the harsh reality defeated the Christian enterprise, turning the initial ideological antagonism into practical cooperation. It also discusses the initiative to formalize the relations between the two religions within a political framework and the reason for its failure. Relying on available sources, the article traces the penetration first of Islam, and later, in the nineteenth century, of Christianity into Liberia, and analyzes the consequences of the encounter between these religions.

African-American Models in African Politics

World War I brought important changes in the status of Africans vis-a-vis the colonial powers and eroded their erstwhile acceptance of colonial rule. During the war, Africa was a battleground for competing European interests, and Africans contributed significantly to the war effort both as soldiers and laborers. The dependence of the colonial powers on their contribution opened up unprecedented opportunities for Africans to demand economic, social and political reforms and, moreover, convinced them that they had earned the right to do so.

African Cultural Nationalism: Contrasting Views of the African-American Myth

Unlike Africans in East-Central and Southern Africa, West Africans enjoyed several centuries of a mutually beneficial relationship with Europeans before a similar process of ‘decremental deprivation’ forced them to seek succor in the African-American myth. This relationship, along with the relative availability of information about America and the existence of a well-established western-educated elite, was behind the very different response of the West Africans to the decremental deprivation they too suffered at the hands of the Europeans in the late nineteenth century, as well as behind the different version they adapted of the African-American myth and the different uses they made of it.

Africans and African-American Educational Models

Just as World War I catapulted Africans into a fervor of political activity bolstered by the African-American myth, so too it ushered in massive changes in African education influenced by the myth. Up through the early part of the twentieth century, education in Africa was largely the province of the missionaries, who used it as a powerful means of attracting converts. By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa had an extensive network of missionary-operated elementary schools, seminaries, technical schools, teacher-training colleges and some secondary schools, which provided western education for hundreds of thousands of Africans.1

The South African Liberal Movement and the Model of the American South

In South Africa the African-American myth was adapted by both blacks and whites in the country’s tiny liberal movement. Like believers in other parts of the continent, South African liberals looked to America for solutions to the problems created by white rule. The liberal movement was concentrated in the larger towns, especially Johannesburg and Cape Town, where whites and Africans intermingled in large numbers. It consisted of people of both races held together by a general liberal ethos. South African liberals rejected the prevailing social-Darwinist view that consigned Africans to a fixed place on the lower rungs of the social and biological hierarchy and strove to establish a society that would permit Africans social and economic mobility. At the same time, they were essentially a highly moderate movement. They borrowed the slogan of Cecil Rhodes, the Cape Prime Minister who promised in 1897 ‘equal rights for all civilized men’.1 The liberals focused on securing the rights not of all Africans, but of only the relatively limited number of Africans who were civilized, in the sense that they possessed western education and property.

African Millenarianism and the African-American Myth

Europeans arrived in significant numbers in East-Central and parts of Southern Africa only in the nineteenth century, about three hundred years later than in West Africa and the Cape. The fertile land, clement climate and relative freedom from disease in Nyasaland and Southern and Northern Rhodesia attracted European farmer-settlers alongside the British colonial authorities. The white settlers formed a privileged class exploiting the African natives. A similar dichotomy between newly arrived, privileged white settlers and exploited natives existed in the Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State, where the settlers formed their own government. In all these places, the white settlers wreaked havoc with the Africans’ lives. Riding roughshod over traditional African laws and legal systems, they confiscated Africans’ most fertile lands, prohibited African farmers from using modem agricultural methods, restricted the growth of cash crops, imposed forced labor on Africans, and, in general, made every effort to keep Africans down as a permanent class of cheap, subservient labor.

The Shape and Shaping of the African-American Myth

Africans throughout the continent had access to information about their brethren in the New World. Distance, geographical barriers, illiteracy and the lack of efficient means of communication never prevented the flow of information from America to Africa. Though the distribution was uneven, information about America and African-Americans reached Africans even in the remotest parts of the continent. Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Africa was recipient of a steady stream of correspondence, newspapers, periodicals and books from and about the New World, sent from America or brought in by visitors, seamen, churchmen, agents of African-American organizations, and others. To the written documentation were added oral reports, spread by African and foreign sailors who stopped at the ports and by migrant laborers and peddlers who traveled from village to village, region to region. In the twentieth century, these sources of information were supplemented by films. Africans who traveled to America or read about African-Americans were better informed; those who received information second and third-hand were less accurately informed.