R1.12 Modern developments in Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe (circa 1945–2020)

After 1945 the six countries of this study moved from colonial rule, or imperial rule in Ethiopia, to independence, and then through single-party rule, military coups, civil war, economic crisis and attempts at democracy. Together they show the range of ways in which post-colonial African states developed, from Tunisia’s early social reforms and Zambia’s peaceful transfer of power in 1991 to the collapse of the Somali state in the same year.

Independent Africa after 1945: shared patterns

The six countries had very different histories. Ethiopia was an ancient empire that had been occupied by Italy only from 1936 to 1941. Tunisia and Niger were French territories, Somalia was formed from British and Italian colonies, and Zambia and Zimbabwe were British colonies in central Africa with powerful white settler communities. Despite these differences, their political histories after independence followed patterns seen across the continent.

The table of the six countries shows how few of them kept a competitive political system for long after independence. Three broad phases can be traced across the continent.

Single-party states and military regimes

In the first phase, from independence to the 1980s, most African states became one-party states or military regimes. Leaders argued that new nations divided by ethnicity, region and religion needed unity more than opposition, that development needed a strong state, and that competitive parties would simply organise ethnic rivalries. Some, such as Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, claimed that a single party could still be democratic if voters chose between candidates inside it.

Where civilian rulers failed, armies often took over. A coup d’état is the sudden, illegal seizure of power by a small group, usually from within the army. The political scientist Patrick McGowan counted 80 successful coups in the 48 states of sub-Saharan Africa between 1956 and 2001, as well as 108 failed attempts. Military rulers usually claimed they would end corruption and hand back power, but many stayed for decades.

The Cold War and debt

In the second phase, the Cold War and the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s shaped what rulers could do. The United States and the Soviet Union supplied arms and aid to friendly regimes regardless of how they treated their people. At the same time, falling prices for exports such as copper and groundnuts, oil-price rises in 1973 and 1979 and heavy borrowing left most states in debt. To get new loans they had to accept structural adjustment programmes from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank: cuts in state spending and subsidies, devaluation, and the sale of state companies.

Democratisation and its limits

The third phase began around 1989–1990. The end of the Cold War removed the superpowers’ reasons to protect friendly dictators, and Western donors began to link aid to elections and "good governance". In a speech at La Baule in June 1990, President François Mitterrand of France told African leaders that French aid would favour countries moving towards democracy. Inside Africa, unions, churches, students and professionals protested against falling living standards and corruption. Between 1990 and 1994 most African states held multi-party elections, but the results ranged from genuine changes of government to elections that kept the same rulers in power.

The six countries also faced external involvement through African and international organisations. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), founded in Addis Ababa in 1963, defended the borders inherited from colonial rule and the principle of non-interference in member states’ affairs. Its successor, the African Union (AU), launched in 2002 and also based in Addis Ababa, gave itself the right to intervene in cases of genocide and war crimes and to suspend governments that came to power through coups. The United Nations provided famine relief, peacekeeping and sanctions, most dramatically in Somalia and Rhodesia.

Ethiopia: from empire to revolution and federation

Ethiopia is the only one of the six countries that was never a colony in the usual sense. The empire had defeated Italy at Adwa in 1896, and Italian occupation lasted only five years. Its modern history is therefore one of an old imperial state that was overthrown by a revolution in 1974, ruled by a Marxist military government until 1991, and then rebuilt as an ethnic federation dominated by one coalition. The chronology of Ethiopia from 1941 to 2020 shows these three regimes and the crises that ended each of them.

Haile Selassie’s absolute monarchy, 1941–1974

Emperor Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa in May 1941 after British and Ethiopian forces drove out the Italians. He set out to build a centralised, modern state under his own control. Ministries, a national army and a growing school system replaced the power of regional nobles, and Ethiopia’s prestige rose abroad: it was a founding member of the United Nations and in 1963 hosted the founding conference of the OAU.

Political modernisation did not reach the throne itself. The revised constitution of 1955 created an elected lower house of parliament but left the emperor in control of ministers, the army, the courts and the Senate.

By virtue of His Imperial Blood, as well as by the anointing which He has received, the person of the Emperor is sacred, His dignity is inviolable and His power indisputable.

Revised Constitution of the Empire of Ethiopia, Article 4, 4 November 1955, as quoted by the Ethiopian historian Bahru Zewde in A History of Modern Ethiopia (2nd edition, 2001). The constitution was written to present Ethiopia as a modern state to foreign governments, yet its language rested the emperor’s authority on blood and religion, not on the people. Bahru calls it a legal charter for absolutism, which is why the source is valuable evidence for the nature of the imperial regime.

Two problems grew under the emperor. The first was land. In the south, much of the land conquered in the late nineteenth century was held by nobles, officials and the Orthodox Church and worked by tenant farmers who handed over a large share of their harvest. Students in Addis Ababa took up the slogan "land to the tiller" in the 1960s. The second was Eritrea, the former Italian colony on the Red Sea coast. The UN federated it with Ethiopia in 1952; the emperor steadily removed its autonomy and annexed it in 1962. An armed independence struggle had already begun in 1961 and lasted thirty years.

The first open challenge came from inside the elite. On 13 December 1960, while the emperor was abroad, the commander of the Imperial Bodyguard, Mengistu Neway, and his brother Germame, a reforming provincial governor, seized power in Addis Ababa. Loyal army units crushed the coup within days. Its failure showed that reform from within was blocked, and it inspired the student movement that grew through the 1960s.

The emperor’s survival owed much to the United States. An agreement of 1953 gave the Americans a large communications base, Kagnew Station, at Asmara in Eritrea, and in return Ethiopia became the main recipient of US military aid in sub-Saharan Africa until the mid-1970s. American weapons and training built up the army that kept the emperor in power, and that later overthrew him.

The revolution of 1974 and the Derg

The monarchy collapsed in 1974 after a famine it tried to hide. Drought in Wollo and Tigray in 1972–1973 killed between about 40,000 and 200,000 people, a range that reflects the lack of reliable records. The government concealed the famine until a British television documentary by Jonathan Dimbleby, broadcast in October 1973, made it known abroad. In early 1974 a sharp rise in fuel prices, following the oil crisis, led to strikes by taxi drivers and teachers, student demonstrations and, from February, mutinies by soldiers protesting about pay and conditions.

The causes of the fall of the monarchy shown in the diagram combined long-term weakness with a sudden loss of support among almost every group in the capital. In June 1974 representatives of army and police units formed a committee, known as the Derg (Amharic for "committee"). Over the summer it arrested the emperor’s ministers one by one, and on 12 September 1974 it deposed Haile Selassie himself. The night before, Ethiopian television had shown the famine documentary, cut together with scenes of palace banquets.

The Derg quickly turned against its own critics. On 23 November 1974, known as "Bloody Saturday", it executed about 60 former officials and officers without trial. The same night its first chairman, General Aman Andom, who had opposed the executions and a harder line in Eritrea, was killed when soldiers came to arrest him. Haile Selassie died in custody in August 1975. In March 1975 the Derg nationalised all rural land and in July all urban land and rented houses, ending the landlord class at a stroke; students were sent to the countryside in the zemecha (campaign) to explain the reform and organise peasant associations.

Mengistu, Marxism-Leninism and the Red Terror

Major Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged as the strongest figure in the Derg. On 3 February 1977 he had the chairman, General Teferi Banti, and his rivals shot in a meeting, and became head of state. The Derg declared Marxism-Leninism its ideology, created a vanguard party, the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, in 1984, and proclaimed the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1987.

Marxist civilian groups opposed military rule. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) assassinated Derg supporters in 1976–1977; the Derg answered with the Red Terror of 1977–1978. Neighbourhood defence squads (kebele guards) arrested, tortured and killed suspected opponents, many of them students and teenagers, and bodies were left in the streets. Estimates of the dead range from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand. In 2006 an Ethiopian court convicted Mengistu of genocide in his absence; by then he was living in exile in Zimbabwe.

The propaganda portrait shows the image of unity and progress that the regime projected. In practice, Mengistu’s power rested on the army, the security services and the support of the Soviet Union, which sent weapons worth billions of dollars, and Cuba, which sent troops. Soviet support came after the Somali invasion of the Ogaden in July 1977; by March 1978 Ethiopian, Cuban and Soviet forces had driven the Somali army out.

The anti-people and anti-revolutionary attack and plot being perpetrated for the last two years by neighbouring reactionary ruling classes in collaboration with international imperialism has been strengthened more than ever and aggravated to the stage of interference in the internal affairs and armed intervention in Ethiopia.

Mengistu Haile Mariam, address to the nation on foreign intervention, 12 April 1977, published by the Ministry of Information and National Guidance, Addis Ababa. Mengistu was speaking about attacks from Sudan and the Eritrean fronts, three months before the Somali invasion. The speech blames every threat on "imperialism" and "reactionary" neighbours, which shows how the Derg used outside danger and Marxist language to rally support and to present internal opponents as foreign agents.

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Famine, civil war and the fall of the Derg, 1983–1991

The famine of 1983–1985 was the worst in Ethiopia’s modern history. Estimates of deaths range from about 300,000 to 1 million. Drought struck the north, but the famine was concentrated in Tigray and Wollo, where the government was fighting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Eritrean fronts. The army blocked trade and food movements into rebel areas, the state forced farmers to sell grain at low fixed prices, and the government spent heavily on celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution in September 1984 while the crisis grew. Television reports by the BBC in October 1984 led to a vast international response, including the Live Aid concerts of 13 July 1985.

The government used the famine to move people. In 1984–1986 about 600,000 people were taken from the north to the south-west in a resettlement programme that Médecins Sans Frontières, expelled for criticising it, said had caused up to 100,000 deaths. From 1985 a villagisation campaign moved millions of farmers into planned villages. Both policies weakened rebel support in the north as much as they relieved hunger.

Ethiopia faced several regional rebellions at once: besides the Eritrean fronts and the TPLF, the Oromo Liberation Front and Somali movements in the Ogaden fought the government. From 1988 the Derg lost the war, and in May 1989 senior officers tried to overthrow Mengistu while he was abroad; the coup failed and its leaders were killed or executed. Eritrean forces destroyed a large army at Afabet in March 1988; the TPLF took Tigray in 1989 and formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) with allied movements. Soviet aid was cut back as Mikhail Gorbachev ended Soviet commitments abroad. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe on 21 May 1991, and EPRDF forces entered Addis Ababa on 28 May, after talks in London brokered by the United States.

The EPRDF: ethnic federalism and the dominant party, 1991–2018

The EPRDF, led by the TPLF’s Meles Zenawi, promised democracy and self-determination for Ethiopia’s many peoples. A Transitional Charter in July 1991 recognised the right of each nation to self-determination; Eritrea voted for independence in a UN-observed referendum in April 1993 and became independent on 24 May 1993. The constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, adopted in December 1994 and in force from 1995, divided the country into regional states drawn largely along ethnic and language lines.

Every Nation, Nationality and People in Ethiopia has an unconditional right to self-determination, including the right to secession.

Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1995), Article 39(1), English text published by the Constitute Project. Written by a movement whose own fighters came from Tigray, the clause answered the grievances of peoples who felt conquered by the old empire. Critics argue that it made ethnicity the basis of all politics and that the right of secession was never meant to be used while the EPRDF controlled every region.

In practice, the EPRDF ruled as a dominant party. It and its allies won almost every seat in the elections of 1995, 2000 and 2010, and all 547 seats in 2015. The exception was May 2005, when opposition parties made large gains and won every seat in Addis Ababa; after protests against the official results, security forces killed 193 civilians, according to the government’s own inquiry, and opposition leaders were jailed. Laws of 2009 on charities and on terrorism were used to restrict human rights groups and imprison journalists.

The EPRDF was also challenged by war. A border dispute with Eritrea over the town of Badme led to a war in 1998–2000 that killed an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people. It ended with the Algiers Agreement of December 2000 and a UN peacekeeping mission, but Ethiopia refused to accept the border commission’s ruling of 2002 and the two states stayed in a state of "no war, no peace" until 2018.

Abroad, the EPRDF became a close partner of the United States in the "war on terror" after 2001, invaded Somalia in December 2006 with American support, and became one of the largest contributors of troops to UN and AU peacekeeping missions, in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia. Addis Ababa remained the diplomatic capital of Africa: the African Union kept its headquarters there, in a new building paid for and built by China and opened in 2012. The Renaissance Dam, by contrast, led to a long dispute with Egypt and Sudan, which feared for their share of the Nile’s water.

Protest and the rise of Abiy Ahmed, 2015–2020

From 2014–2015, protests spread among the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest group, against plans to expand Addis Ababa into Oromia, land seizures and the dominance of Tigrayans in the security forces; Amhara protests followed in 2016. Hundreds of protesters were killed and states of emergency were declared in October 2016 and February 2018. The EPRDF’s own Oromo and Amhara parties sided with the protesters, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned, and on 2 April 2018 Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo, became prime minister.

Abiy released thousands of political prisoners, allowed exiled opposition groups to return, lifted bans on websites and appointed a cabinet in which half the ministers were women. In July 2018 he signed a peace declaration with Eritrea, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. In December 2019 he merged the EPRDF’s parties into a single Prosperity Party; the TPLF refused to join. When elections were postponed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tigray held its own election, and on 4 November 2020 fighting between federal and Tigrayan forces began a devastating war.

Economic growth in Ethiopia

Under the emperor the economy depended on coffee and subsistence farming. The Derg’s nationalisation of land and business, state farms and fixed grain prices, together with war and famine, kept growth low and unstable. After 1991 the EPRDF kept land in state ownership but opened parts of the economy to private and foreign investment.

From about 2004 Meles Zenawi pursued the model of a developmental state, in which the state directs investment into infrastructure and industry, as South Korea and Taiwan had done. The Growth and Transformation Plans (2010–2015 and 2015–2020) built roads, power stations and industrial parks, such as Hawassa (opened 2016), which made clothing for export. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, begun in 2011 and paid for largely by Ethiopians through bonds, was planned to be Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam. Chinese loans and contractors built the Addis Ababa light railway (2015) and the electric railway to the port of Djibouti (opened 2016–2018). Ethiopian Airlines, owned by the state, became the largest airline in Africa.

The chart of Ethiopia’s growth shows the result. Real GDP grew by about 10 per cent a year on average from 2004 to 2019, and the share of people living below the national poverty line fell from about 44 per cent in 2000 to about 24 per cent in 2016 (World Bank). Growth had limits. It was driven by public investment funded by debt; foreign-currency shortages and inflation grew after 2015; the state telecommunications monopoly kept mobile phone and internet use among the lowest in Africa; and the leasing of land to investors displaced pastoralists and farmers in regions such as Gambella.

Social challenges in Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s population grew from about 21 million in 1960 to about 119 million in 2020, the second largest in Africa. The chart of fertility in Niger, Ethiopia and Tunisia shows that Ethiopian fertility began to fall only in the 1990s. Famine returned in 2002–2003, but on a smaller scale: from 2005 the Productive Safety Net Programme paid millions of rural households in cash or food for public work, and the Health Extension Programme from 2003 trained tens of thousands of women as village health workers. Child mortality fell by about two-thirds between 1990 and 2012.

Education expanded quickly after 1991, yet only about half of adults could read in the late 2010s (UNESCO estimates). Women faced early marriage and female genital mutilation, both common in rural areas though falling, and few women held senior posts until Abiy’s cabinet of 2018 and the appointment of Sahle-Work Zewde as president in October 2018. Marginalised groups included pastoralists in the Somali, Afar and Gambella regions, where the killing of several hundred Anuak civilians in December 2003 and later counter-insurgency in the Somali region were documented by human rights organisations.

Niger: single party, soldiers and fragile democracy

Niger is a vast, landlocked country in the Sahel, the dry belt south of the Sahara, where most people live by farming and herding in the narrow southern strip. It was part of French West Africa until 1960. Its history after independence was dominated by the army, which seized power four times between 1974 and 2010, and by the struggle to survive drought, poverty and very rapid population growth. The timeline of Niger’s regimes sets out this sequence.

Colonial legacy and the suppression of Sawaba, 1957–1960

French rule left Niger with almost no educated elite, a few hundred kilometres of paved road and an economy based on groundnuts and livestock. Politics before independence was shaped by France. In 1957 the left-wing party Sawaba ("freedom" in Hausa), led by Djibo Bakary, won the territorial elections and Bakary became head of the government council. In September 1958 he campaigned for a "No" vote in General de Gaulle’s referendum on the French Community, which would have meant immediate independence, as Guinea chose. The French administration openly backed the "Yes" campaign, and about 78 per cent voted Yes in a vote marked by irregularities.

Bakary resigned, Sawaba lost the elections of December 1958 to Hamani Diori’s Parti Progressiste Nigérien (PPN), and in 1959 the party was banned and Bakary went into exile. When Niger became independent on 3 August 1960, Diori ruled a one-party state closely tied to France, which kept troops in the country, ran its finances through the CFA franc and controlled the development of uranium. Sawaba’s guerrilla raids from neighbouring countries in 1964, and a grenade attack on Diori in 1965, were crushed. The historian Klaas van Walraven sees Sawaba as the suppressed alternative of Nigerien history, a popular movement destroyed by the alliance of France and a local elite.

Drought and the coup of 1974

The Sahel drought of 1968–1974 destroyed harvests and killed a large share of Niger’s livestock. Diori’s government was accused of corruption and favouritism in the distribution of food aid. On 15 April 1974 Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché, the army chief of staff, overthrew Diori; Diori’s wife was killed in the fighting. A Supreme Military Council suspended the constitution and banned political parties.

Kountché’s regime was helped by uranium. The mine at Arlit, run by SOMAÏR, a company controlled by the French atomic energy commission, began production in 1971, and a second mine at Akouta (COMINAK) followed in 1978. Uranium prices were high in the 1970s, and the revenue paid for roads, schools and the expansion of the state. When world uranium prices collapsed in the early 1980s, the boom ended; Niger borrowed, and from 1983 it accepted structural adjustment programmes from the IMF and World Bank that cut public spending and jobs.

The National Conference and the democratic experiment, 1990–1996

Kountché died in 1987. His successor, Colonel Ali Saibou, created a single party, the Mouvement National pour la Société de Développement (MNSD), in 1989. Pressure for change came from below. In February 1990 security forces killed students protesting against cuts to university grants in Niamey; the trade union federation organised general strikes; and Mitterrand’s La Baule speech of June 1990 told France’s client states that aid would favour reform. In 1990 Saibou agreed to multi-party politics.

From July to November 1991 a National Conference of about 1,200 delegates from parties, unions, students, the army and civil society met in Niamey. Following the example of Benin in 1990, it declared itself sovereign, stripped Saibou of most of his powers, appointed a transitional government and drew up a new constitution, approved in December 1992. In 1993 Mahamane Ousmane won the presidency in Niger’s first competitive multi-party elections.

Coups and civilian failure, 1996–2011

The new system proved unstable. Ousmane’s coalition broke up, and after the elections of 1995 he was forced to share power with a prime minister from the rival MNSD; the two blocked each other’s decisions for a year. On 27 January 1996 Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara seized power, citing this paralysis, and won a presidential election in July 1996 that observers condemned as rigged. On 9 April 1999 Baré was killed by members of his own presidential guard. The new military leaders organised elections within months, won by Mamadou Tandja of the MNSD.

Tandja’s two terms (1999–2009) were the longest period of constitutional rule in Niger’s history to that point. But as his second and final term ended, he dissolved parliament and the Constitutional Court and held a referendum in August 2009 on a new constitution that let him stay in office. His supporters called the campaign Tazartché ("continuity" in Hausa). The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) suspended Niger, and on 18 February 2010 soldiers led by Major Salou Djibo overthrew Tandja. This time the junta handed power to an elected president within a year: Mahamadou Issoufou won the election of 2011 and a second term in 2016, although the main opposition candidate campaigned from prison.

Data: dates and leaders from standard reference works; reasons as stated by the coup leaders at the time.

The table of Niger’s coups shows that military takeovers followed failures of civilian government in each case, but the army was also an actor with its own interests: officers expected a share of power, and each successful coup made the next one more likely.

Rebellion, insurgency and the environment

Niger’s northern deserts are home to the Tuareg, pastoral people who felt excluded from power and from the wealth of the uranium mines on their land. After soldiers killed civilians in reprisal for an attack at Tchin-Tabaraden in May 1990, a Tuareg rebellion lasted until a peace agreement in 1995 promised decentralisation and the integration of fighters into the army. A second rebellion, by the Niger Movement for Justice, followed in 2007–2009. Drought and desertification sharpened conflicts between herders and farmers over land and water across the Sahel.

From 2015 Niger faced jihadist insurgencies on two borders: Boko Haram, from Nigeria, in the Diffa region, and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara around Tillabéri, near Mali. At Tongo Tongo in October 2017 four US soldiers and at least four Nigerien soldiers were killed in an ambush; at Inates in December 2019, 71 Nigerien soldiers died in a single attack.

Economic development and social challenges in Niger

Development depended on a few exports, uranium and, from 2011, oil from the Agadem field, refined by a Chinese-built refinery at Zinder. Most people remained subsistence farmers exposed to drought, and food crises returned in 2005 and 2010. Remittances from migrants in Nigeria, Libya and elsewhere were an important source of income.

The fertility chart shows Niger’s central social challenge. With about seven to eight births per woman until 2010, the highest fertility in the world, the population grew from about 3.5 million in 1960 to about 24 million in 2020, so that schools, clinics and farmland could not keep pace. Only about a third of adults could read in the late 2010s, and girls were far less likely than boys to attend school. Three-quarters of women were married before the age of 18, among the highest rates of child marriage recorded anywhere (UNICEF). Hereditary slavery survived among some groups; it was made a criminal offence in 2003, and in 2008 the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled that Niger had failed to protect Hadijatou Mani, a woman sold into slavery as a child.

External involvement in Niger

France remained the most important outside power. French companies (from 2001 Areva, later Orano) ran the uranium mines that supplied French nuclear power stations, a relationship critics described as neo-colonial. From 2013–2014 French forces fought jihadist groups across the Sahel in Operations Serval and Barkhane, with bases in Niamey, and the United States built a drone base at Agadez. The European Union paid Niger to stop migrants crossing the Sahara towards Libya and the Mediterranean, and a law of 2015 made transporting migrants a crime, hurting the economy of Agadez. ECOWAS and the African Union suspended Niger after Tandja’s referendum and the coup of 2010, and helped to arrange the return to elected rule in 2011.

Somalia: from union to state collapse and reconstruction

Somalia is unusual in Africa because almost all its people share one language, one religion (Sunni Islam) and a sense of common descent. Its politics was divided not by ethnicity but by clan: Somalis belong to large clan families (Darod, Hawiye, Dir and Isaaq, Rahanweyn) that are divided into clans and sub-clans. The Somali state built after 1960 became a military dictatorship in 1969 and collapsed completely in 1991; for the next two decades Somalia was the clearest example in the world of a country without an effective central government.

Independence, Pan-Somali nationalism and civilian rule, 1960–1969

British Somaliland became independent on 26 June 1960 and joined the former Italian colony, a UN trust territory since 1950, to form the Somali Republic on 1 July 1960. The new state inherited two different legal and administrative systems and a capital, Mogadishu, in the south. Many Somalis still lived outside its borders: in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District and in French Somaliland (later Djibouti). The five-pointed star on the Somali flag stood for these five Somali territories, and Pan-Somalism, the aim of uniting them, became the national ideology. It led to border clashes with Ethiopia in 1964 and to support for the guerrilla Shifta War in northern Kenya (1963–1967).

Parliamentary democracy lasted nine years. Elections were free but chaotic: in 1969 more than 60 parties, most of them vehicles for single clans, contested 123 seats, and deputies switched sides in return for money and posts. On 15 October 1969 President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke was shot dead by one of his bodyguards; six days later, on 21 October, the army under General Mohamed Siad Barre took power without resistance.

Siad Barre’s "scientific socialism", 1969–1977

Barre’s Supreme Revolutionary Council banned parties, suspended the constitution and in 1970 declared scientific socialism, a Marxist programme adapted to Islam and Somali society. Banks, foreign companies and much trade were nationalised. The regime officially banned clanism and in 1971 publicly burned effigies representing clan loyalty. Its most lasting reform was cultural: in October 1972 Somali, which had no agreed script, was given an official written form based on the Latin alphabet, and in 1973–1975 the government closed schools and sent students and teachers to the countryside to teach the nomadic population to read.

The regime also showed its harsh side. A Family Law of January 1975 gave women equal rights of inheritance; when religious scholars preached against it, ten were executed. A Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union in 1974 gave the Soviets a naval base at Berbera in return for arms that made the Somali army one of the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1976 Barre created a ruling party, the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party, and a cult of personality grew around the "Father of the Nation".

The Ogaden War and the switch of alliances, 1977–1978

In 1977, with Ethiopia weakened by revolution, the Red Terror and the Eritrean war, Barre sent the army to support the Western Somali Liberation Front in the Ogaden. Somali forces invaded in July 1977 and by September controlled most of the region. The Soviet Union, which had begun to arm the Derg, refused to back the invasion; in November 1977 Barre expelled Soviet advisers. A Soviet airlift of weapons and about 15,000 Cuban troops then turned the war, and by March 1978 the Somali army had been driven back across the border.

The diagram of the switch of alliances shows how far outside powers shaped the war. Somalia, which had begun the war as a Soviet client, ended it alone; in 1980 the United States gained access to Berbera and began to supply Barre with military and economic aid. Defeat had heavy consequences at home. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Ogaden arrived in Somalia, foreign aid became a major source of the state’s income, and officers blamed Barre for the defeat.

Clan rule, rebellion and collapse, 1978–1991

After a failed coup by officers from the Majeerteen clan in April 1978, Barre ruled increasingly through a narrow alliance of his own Marehan clan, his mother’s clan and his son-in-law’s clan, and used the army against communities he regarded as disloyal. Opposition movements formed on clan lines: the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF, mainly Majeerteen) in 1978, the Somali National Movement (SNM, mainly Isaaq, in the north) in 1981 and the United Somali Congress (USC, mainly Hawiye, in the centre) in 1989.

When the SNM attacked Hargeisa and Burao in May 1988, government forces bombed and shelled both cities, killing many thousands of Isaaq civilians and driving hundreds of thousands into Ethiopia. Estimates of the dead range from about 50,000 to 100,000 or more; many Somalilanders and some scholars describe the campaign as genocide. Western donors, more concerned about human rights now that the Cold War was ending, cut aid. In late 1990 USC fighters reached Mogadishu, and on 26 January 1991 Barre fled the capital.

The causes of the collapse in the diagram explain why the fall of Barre did not lead to a new government. The movements that defeated him represented different clans and had no common programme. In Mogadishu the USC split between the followers of General Mohamed Farah Aideed and those of Ali Mahdi Mohamed, both Hawiye, and their militias fought over the city. In the north the SNM declared the independent Republic of Somaliland on 18 May 1991; it built a stable government and held elections, but no state recognised it.

Famine and UN intervention, 1991–1995

War, looting and drought produced famine in 1991–1992, worst in the farming areas of the south between the Juba and Shabelle rivers. Estimates of deaths range from about 220,000 to 300,000. A small UN mission, UNOSOM I, was sent in April 1992 but could not protect food supplies from militias. In December 1992 the Security Council took the unprecedented step of authorising force for humanitarian purposes.

Determining that the magnitude of the human tragedy caused by the conflict in Somalia, further exacerbated by the obstacles being created to the distribution of humanitarian assistance, constitutes a threat to international peace and security, … [the Council] authorizes the Secretary-General and Member States cooperating to implement the offer referred to in paragraph 8 above to use all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia.

United Nations Security Council, Resolution 794, adopted unanimously on 3 December 1992. The resolution was drafted to justify something new: the use of force inside a member state, without its government’s consent, because a humanitarian disaster was declared a threat to peace. The "offer" in paragraph 8 was the United States’ offer of troops, so the source also shows how far UN action depended on a superpower.

The US-led Unified Task Force (UNITAF), Operation Restore Hope, with about 37,000 troops, secured ports and roads and allowed food to reach the starving. In May 1993 it handed over to UNOSOM II, which was given the wider task of disarming militias and rebuilding the state. This brought it into conflict with Aideed: 24 Pakistani peacekeepers were killed in June 1993, and on 3–4 October 1993 an American attempt to capture Aideed’s lieutenants in Mogadishu ended in the Battle of Mogadishu, in which 18 US soldiers and several hundred Somalis, many of them civilians, were killed. The United States withdrew its forces in March 1994, and the last UN troops left in March 1995.

Rebuilding a state, 2000–2020

More than a dozen peace conferences followed. The Arta conference in Djibouti (2000) created a Transitional National Government and introduced the 4.5 formula, which shared seats equally between the four major clan families and gave half a share to minority groups. A Transitional Federal Government (TFG) formed in Kenya in 2004 could not enter Mogadishu. In June 2006 the Islamic Courts Union, an alliance of local sharia courts and militias, took the capital and briefly brought order. Ethiopia, backed by the United States, which feared the Courts’ links to jihadists, invaded in December 2006 and installed the TFG.

The Ethiopian occupation fed the rise of al-Shabaab ("the youth"), the Courts’ militant youth wing, which joined al-Qaeda in 2012. In 2007 the African Union sent a peacekeeping force, AMISOM, authorised by UN Security Council Resolution 1744; by the 2010s it had more than 20,000 troops from Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Ethiopia and other states, and drove al-Shabaab out of Mogadishu in 2011. A provisional constitution and the Federal Government of Somalia were created in 2012, with federal member states such as Puntland (autonomous since 1998) and Jubaland. Its presidents, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (2012–2017) and Mohamed Abdullahi "Farmaajo" (2017–2022), were chosen by a parliament selected through clan elders, not by a popular vote. Al-Shabaab continued to control much of the countryside and carried out mass-casualty attacks, including the truck bombing in Mogadishu on 14 October 2017, which killed 587 people.

Economy and society without a state

Somalia’s economy survived the collapse of the state through private enterprise. Livestock exports to the Gulf states continued; money sent home by the large Somali diaspora, estimated at more than 1 billion dollars a year by the 2010s, supported many families; and private companies provided telephones, electricity and money transfer. Hormuud Telecom’s EVC Plus, launched in 2009, made Somalia one of the heaviest users of mobile money in the world, partly because there was no trusted national currency or banking system. Piracy off the Somali coast, which peaked in 2009–2011, showed the other side of statelessness.

Social conditions remained among the worst in the world. A drought in 2010–2011 turned into famine in the south because al-Shabaab blocked many aid agencies and food prices soared: a study by the UN’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit and FEWS NET estimated that about 258,000 people died between October 2010 and April 2012, half of them children under five. By 2020 about 2.6 million Somalis were internally displaced. Almost all women had undergone female genital mutilation, and minority groups such as the Bantu Somalis of the south, who were not protected by a major clan, suffered most in the famines and wars.

Tunisia: Bourguiba, Ben Ali and the road to 2011

Tunisia, a small country on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, followed a different path from the other five. It combined authoritarian rule by a single party with some of the most far-reaching social reforms in the Arab world, an educated population and a diversified economy. These features help to explain both the long survival of its authoritarian regimes and the success of its democratic transition after 2011. The chronology of Tunisia from 1956 to 2019 shows the sequence.

Bourguiba and the winning of independence

Tunisia was a French protectorate from 1881: the bey (the monarch) remained in place but French officials governed. The nationalist Neo-Destour party was founded in 1934 by Habib Bourguiba, a lawyer educated in Paris, who spent many of the next twenty years in French prisons. The party built a mass organisation with branches across the country and an alliance with the trade union federation, the UGTT, founded in 1946. After armed resistance in 1952–1954, France granted internal autonomy in 1955 and full independence on 20 March 1956.

Independence also brought a struggle within the nationalist movement. Salah Ben Youssef, the Neo-Destour’s secretary-general, denounced the autonomy agreement of 1955 as a betrayal and called for armed struggle alongside Algeria in the name of Arab nationalism. Bourguiba had him expelled from the party, and his supporters were defeated in a short civil conflict in 1955–1956 with French help. Ben Youssef fled abroad and was assassinated in Frankfurt in 1961, almost certainly on the orders of the Tunisian government. Bourguiba’s victory over the "Youssefists" established the pattern of his rule: rivals were not tolerated.

Building a single-party republic, 1956–1969

As prime minister from April 1956, Bourguiba moved quickly. On 25 July 1957 the Constituent Assembly abolished the monarchy and made him president; the constitution of 1959 gave the president very wide powers. The Communist Party was banned in 1963, and in 1964 the Neo-Destour was renamed the Socialist Destourian Party (PSD), the only legal party. Bourguiba presented himself as the "Supreme Combatant" who had won independence and was now leading a struggle against underdevelopment.

The most radical reforms concerned society. The Code of Personal Status of 13 August 1956 abolished polygamy, made the consent of both partners a condition of marriage and replaced a husband’s right to repudiate his wife with divorce through the courts, open to both. Religious courts and the property of religious endowments were brought under state control, and the old Zitouna mosque-university was absorbed into a modern state university. Education became a priority: by the 1970s most children attended school, and girls were educated almost as widely as boys. A family-planning programme began in 1966, and in 1973 Tunisia legalised abortion. The chart of fertility in Niger, Ethiopia and Tunisia shows the result: from about seven births per woman in the early 1960s to about two by 2000.

Bourguiba was also willing to confront France. In July 1961 Tunisian forces besieged the French naval base at Bizerte, which France had kept after independence. French paratroopers counter-attacked, and several hundred Tunisians, perhaps more than a thousand, were killed. The Bizerte crisis damaged relations for two years, but the last French troops left Bizerte in October 1963.

In economic policy, Bourguiba backed the "Destourian socialism" of his minister Ahmed Ben Salah from 1964. Land, trade and some industry were organised into state-run cooperatives. When Ben Salah tried to extend cooperatives to all farmland in 1969, landowners and farmers resisted and riots broke out; Bourguiba dismissed him in September 1969, and he was tried and imprisoned. By making Ben Salah carry the blame for a policy he had himself supported, Bourguiba protected his own authority as the founder of the nation.

Liberalisation and crisis, 1970–1987

Under Prime Minister Hédi Nouira (1970–1980) Tunisia changed direction. Private enterprise and foreign investment were encouraged, and a law of 1972 created tax-free zones for factories producing for export, mainly clothing for the European market. With tourism, phosphates from Gafsa and oil, the economy grew strongly in the 1970s. Politically, however, the regime hardened. In March 1975 the National Assembly made Bourguiba president for life.

Economic liberalisation widened inequality between the coast and the interior, and the UGTT, led by Habib Achour, became the main channel for discontent. On 26 January 1978 it called the first general strike since independence; the army opened fire, and the official toll of about 50 dead is far lower than other estimates. In January 1980 armed men trained in Libya attacked the town of Gafsa. In December 1983 and January 1984 the doubling of bread prices under an IMF-backed austerity plan set off riots across the country, especially in the poor south and interior; after dozens of deaths, Bourguiba cancelled the price rise on television.

Religious opposition grew in the same years. The Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI), founded in 1981 by Rached Ghannouchi and Abdelfattah Mourou, attracted students and the urban poor. Its leaders were jailed in 1981 and again in 1987. By 1987 Bourguiba, aged 84, was increasingly erratic, and his insistence that the Islamist leaders be retried and executed alarmed the ruling elite.

Ben Ali’s police state, 1987–2010

On 7 November 1987 Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had doctors declare Bourguiba unfit to govern and took over as president. His early promises of pluralism, the National Pact of 1988 and the renaming of the ruling party as the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), did not last. After independent candidates backed by the Islamist movement, now called Ennahda, won about 15 per cent of the vote in April 1989, the regime crushed the movement in 1990–1992, and Ben Ali was re-elected with more than 99 per cent of the vote in 1989, 1994 and 1999.

The Ben Ali system combined surveillance, censorship and control of the courts with economic growth of about 5 per cent a year. Tunisia accepted an IMF structural adjustment programme in 1986, signed an Association Agreement with the European Union in 1995 that gradually opened its markets, and was praised by international lenders as a model reformer. Behind the growth, the families of Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi took control of large parts of the economy, and youth unemployment, especially among graduates in the interior, kept rising. These grievances came to the surface in the protests of the Gafsa mining basin in 2008 and in the revolution that began in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010.

Democracy and its difficulties, 2011–2020

After Ben Ali fled on 14 January 2011, Tunisia held free elections for a Constituent Assembly in October 2011, in which Ennahda became the largest party. After two political assassinations in 2013, the National Dialogue Quartet, led by the UGTT, brokered a compromise: a technocratic government and the constitution of 26 January 2014. Free parliamentary and presidential elections followed in late 2014, and Beji Caïd Essebsi of the secular Nidaa Tounes became president. The Quartet received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

Democracy did not solve the economic problems that had caused the revolution. Terrorist attacks on the Bardo Museum and a beach resort at Sousse in 2015 killed 60 people, most of them foreign tourists, and tourism collapsed. The war in neighbouring Libya brought arms, refugees and a jihadist raid on the border town of Ben Guerdane in March 2016. Growth was slow, unemployment stayed at about 15 per cent and much higher among graduates, and Tunisia borrowed from the IMF in 2013 and 2016 on condition of spending cuts. Disillusion with the parties brought the election of Kaïs Saïed, a law professor with no party, as president in October 2019 with about 73 per cent of the vote in the run-off.

Social change and continuing inequalities

Tunisia’s social record was the strongest of the six countries. Most adults could read by 2020, women made up a majority of university students, and Article 46 of the 2014 constitution committed the state to equal representation of women in elected bodies. A law of 2017 criminalised domestic violence, and in the same year a government circular of 1973 that had barred Muslim Tunisian women from marrying non-Muslim men was withdrawn. An attempt to give women equal inheritance rights in 2018 stalled in parliament. The deepest inequality was regional: the interior governorates such as Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine and Gafsa had far higher poverty and unemployment than the coast, as they had since the colonial period.

The table comparing Bourguiba and Ben Ali shows strong continuity: both ruled through a dominant party and repression, and both claimed legitimacy through modernisation. The main change was in the source of power, from a nationalist leader’s personal authority to a security state.

Zambia: Kaunda’s one-party state and the peaceful transfer of 1991

Zambia, the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia, became independent on 24 October 1964 under Kenneth Kaunda of the United National Independence Party (UNIP). It is best known for two things: an economy built almost entirely on copper, and the peaceful transfer of power in 1991, when Kaunda accepted defeat in a free election after 27 years in office. Between the two came eighteen years of one-party rule.

The colonial inheritance

Northern Rhodesia’s wealth came from the Copperbelt, where British and American companies mined copper from the late 1920s. From 1953 to 1963 the colony was joined with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in the Central African Federation, dominated by white settlers in Southern Rhodesia; Africans in the north believed, with reason, that copper revenues were spent on the south. At independence Zambia had fewer than a hundred African university graduates, an economy controlled by foreign mining companies and white managers, and transport routes that ran through white-ruled Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique.

Independence came after a campaign of mass protest and civil disobedience by UNIP, which Kaunda led from 1960; he had broken with Harry Nkumbula’s more moderate African National Congress (ANC) in 1958. The ANC remained strong in the south of the country. In 1964, just before independence, the government also fought a short war against the Lumpa Church of the prophet Alice Lenshina, whose followers refused to join UNIP or pay taxes; about 700 people or more were killed.

Humanism and the economic reforms of 1968–1969

Kaunda set out his ideology of Zambian Humanism in 1967. It drew on Christianity and on an idealised picture of African village life, in which the community cared for every member and "man" was at the centre of all policy. In practice it justified a large role for the state. Under the Mulungushi Reforms of April 1968 the state took a 51 per cent share in major companies, and in the Matero Reforms of August 1969 it took 51 per cent of the copper mines. The state corporations later merged into Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM, 1982).

So those of us who are leaders of our people must not only think about the importance of man, it must be an obsession. … We must remember we are not elected kings, and that if we believe so much in the importance of man, we must not devise artificial methods of bottling his feelings.

Kenneth Kaunda, "African Development and Foreign Aid", speech of 18 March 1966, as published in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook (Fordham University), which describes it as delivered at the opening of the University of Zambia. Kaunda was speaking to an educated audience as other African governments fell to coups, and he presented himself as a democrat guided by Humanism. Read against the banning of opposition parties six years later, the source is valuable evidence of the gap between the ideals leaders proclaimed and the systems they built.

The one-party state, 1972–1991

Political competition grew more dangerous after 1968. UNIP was divided along regional and ethnic lines, and in 1971 Simon Kapwepwe, the former vice-president and a leader of the Bemba-speaking north, formed the United Progressive Party (UPP), which threatened UNIP in its own heartland. In February 1972 the UPP was banned and Kapwepwe and many of his supporters were detained. Kaunda announced that Zambia would become a "one-party participatory democracy"; a commission chaired by Mainza Chona drew up the details, and in December 1972 the constitution was amended to make UNIP the only legal party. By the Choma Declaration of 27 June 1973, Nkumbula agreed to bring the ANC into UNIP, and the new constitution came into force in August 1973.

Kaunda justified the one-party state as the way to end violence between parties and ethnic groups and to unite the nation for development. Voters could still choose between UNIP candidates in parliamentary elections, but the presidential election offered only a "yes" or "no" vote for Kaunda, and the party’s Central Committee was made superior to the cabinet. Critics argue that the decisive motive was UNIP’s fear of losing power to the UPP, and that the one-party state turned UNIP into a patronage machine controlled by the president.

Copper, the liberation wars and economic decline

Zambia’s economy rose and fell with the world price of copper, which provided more than 90 per cent of export earnings. In the first decade high prices paid for schools, hospitals and the new University of Zambia. Then two shocks hit together. After Ian Smith’s UDI in Rhodesia in 1965, Zambia joined UN sanctions; Rhodesia closed the border in 1973, and Zambia had to send copper by longer and costlier routes. China built the 1,860-kilometre TAZARA railway from the Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, completed in 1975, with an interest-free loan. In 1975 the copper price collapsed and the oil price had already quadrupled.

Zambia also paid a price for its foreign policy. As one of the Frontline States, it hosted the liberation movements of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and South Africa, and Rhodesian and South African forces raided targets in Zambia in the late 1970s and 1980s. With falling export earnings, Zambia borrowed heavily and became one of the most indebted countries in the world relative to its income. Living standards fell through the 1980s. The government subsidised maize meal, the staple food, to keep the urban population loyal, but could not afford to do so.

The IMF’s conditions brought crisis. When the government removed the maize meal subsidy in December 1986, riots in the Copperbelt left about fifteen people dead and the decision was reversed. In May 1987 Kaunda broke with the IMF and launched his own recovery programme, but he returned to the Fund in 1989. In June 1990 the price of maize meal more than doubled; riots in Lusaka killed about thirty people, and on 30 June a junior officer, Lieutenant Mwamba Luchembe, announced on the radio that the army had overthrown Kaunda. The coup failed within hours, but crowds celebrated in the streets.

The return to multi-party democracy, 1990–1991

The causes in the diagram came together in 1990. In July 1990 a conference of opposition figures, businessmen, lawyers, church leaders and trade unionists founded the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). Its chairman, Frederick Chiluba, led the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), whose members in the mines and towns had suffered most from the economic crisis. The Catholic and Protestant churches gave the movement moral authority. Kaunda first proposed a referendum on multi-party politics, then abandoned it and in December 1990 amended the constitution to allow other parties.

In the election of 31 October 1991, observed by international monitors including the Carter Center, Chiluba won about 76 per cent of the presidential vote and the MMD won 125 of the 150 seats in parliament. Kaunda accepted defeat at once and handed over power on 2 November. It was one of the first times in sub-Saharan Africa that a ruling party had been voted out and a founding president had left office peacefully.

Data: official results of the Electoral Commission of Zambia, 1991, as reported by the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute observer mission.

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After 1991: reform, corruption and copper booms

Chiluba’s governments carried out a sweeping structural adjustment programme, ending subsidies and selling most state companies. ZCCM was broken up and sold in 1997–2000. Thousands of mine workers lost their jobs, and many Zambians felt that the mines had been sold too cheaply. Democracy also had limits: a constitutional amendment of 1996 barred anyone whose parents were not both born in Zambia from standing for president, which excluded Kaunda, and in 2001 Chiluba tried to change the constitution to allow himself a third term, backing down only after protests by churches, students, lawyers and members of his own party.

His successor, Levy Mwanawasa (2002–2008), prosecuted Chiluba for corruption and qualified for debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative in 2005, which cancelled most of Zambia’s foreign debt. A rise in world copper prices driven by Chinese demand brought growth of 5–10 per cent a year from 2003 to 2012. Chinese companies became major investors, but accidents and violence at Chinese-owned mines, including an explosion at Chambishi in 2005 that killed about fifty workers and the shooting of miners by Chinese managers at Collum mine in 2010, made Chinese involvement a political issue. Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front, who campaigned against Chinese employers, won the presidency in 2011, the second peaceful defeat of a ruling party.

Under Edgar Lungu (2015–2021) Zambia moved back towards authoritarian practice: the opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema was arrested on treason charges in 2017, newspapers were closed and protests restricted. Heavy borrowing for roads and airports, much of it from Chinese lenders and international bond markets, left a new debt crisis, and in November 2020 Zambia became the first African country to default on its debt during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social challenges in Zambia

HIV/AIDS was the gravest social challenge. By the mid-1990s about 14 per cent of adults were infected, and life expectancy fell by about ten years between 1980 and the late 1990s, as the chart of life expectancy in Zambia and Zimbabwe shows. Hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned, and teachers, nurses and mine workers died in large numbers. Treatment with antiretroviral drugs, paid for largely by international programmes, spread from 2004, and life expectancy recovered. Adult literacy rose to about 80 per cent by 2020 (UNESCO estimates), but poverty remained high, especially in rural areas, and women were poorly represented in parliament and in formal employment.

Zimbabwe: liberation war, Mugabe and the crisis of the 2000s

Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, sixteen years after Zambia, because a white settler minority fought to keep power. The country’s politics after independence were shaped by that war: the ruling party, ZANU-PF, claimed the right to govern as the movement that had liberated the nation, and the unresolved question of land owned by white farmers became the centre of the crisis of the 2000s. The chronology of Zimbabwe from 1965 to 2019 traces these developments.

Colonial legacies: land and settler rule

Southern Rhodesia was conquered by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in the 1890s and became a self-governing British colony controlled by white settlers in 1923. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the land by race: about half, including most of the best-watered farmland, was reserved for whites, who were never more than about 5 per cent of the population, while Africans were confined to crowded "native reserves" and purchase areas. Later laws forced Africans off "white" land and controlled how they farmed. In 1980 about 6,000 white commercial farmers still owned roughly 40 per cent of the country’s farmland.

African nationalism grew from the 1950s. Joshua Nkomo led the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), founded in 1961; in 1963 a group of younger leaders broke away to form the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), led first by Ndabaningi Sithole and, from 1975–1977, by Robert Mugabe. The split had an ethnic dimension that mattered later: ZAPU’s strongest support came from the Ndebele-speaking south-west (Matabeleland), ZANU’s from the Shona-speaking majority.

UDI and the liberation war, 1965–1980

When Britain insisted on progress towards majority rule before independence, the Rhodesian Front government of Ian Smith issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965. Britain refused to use force but called on the UN, which imposed its first-ever mandatory economic sanctions in 1966 and made them comprehensive in 1968. South Africa and Portuguese Mozambique helped Rhodesia evade them.

The nationalists turned to armed struggle, known as the Second Chimurenga (the First Chimurenga was the risings of 1896–1897). ZANU’s army, ZANLA, was trained and armed mainly by China and from 1975 operated from bases in independent Mozambique; ZAPU’s army, ZIPRA, was supported by the Soviet Union and based in Zambia. The war escalated from 1972, and about 30,000 people were killed by 1979. An "internal settlement" with moderate African leaders in 1978–1979 produced the short-lived state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia under Bishop Abel Muzorewa, but the war continued. Exhausted by the war and pressed by South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique, all sides agreed to a constitution at the Lancaster House Agreement talks in London in December 1979.

The agreement had two clauses that shaped the future: white voters kept 20 of the 100 seats in parliament for seven years, and land could be bought for redistribution for ten years only on a willing buyer, willing seller basis, with Britain promising to help pay. In the elections of February 1980 ZANU-PF won 57 of the 80 common-roll seats, and Mugabe became prime minister of independent Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980.

If yesterday I fought as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you. Is it not folly, therefore, that in these circumstances anybody should seek to revive the wounds and grievances of the past? The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten.

Robert Mugabe, broadcast speech on the eve of independence, 17 April 1980, as reprinted in Speeches through the years, a collection of his speeches (Marxists Internet Archive). Mugabe spoke to reassure white farmers, businesses and civil servants whose skills the new state needed, and foreign governments whose aid it hoped for. The policy of reconciliation was real in the 1980s, but the speech is also evidence of its limits: it promised forgiveness to former enemies at the same moment that the new government began to treat ZAPU, its rival in the liberation struggle, as a threat.

Gukurahundi and the de facto one-party state, 1980–1990

Tension between ZANU-PF and ZAPU grew quickly. After arms caches were found on ZAPU properties in 1982, Nkomo was dismissed from the government and some former ZIPRA fighters deserted. The government sent the Fifth Brigade, an army unit trained by North Korea and loyal to Mugabe, into Matabeleland and the Midlands. The operation was called Gukurahundi, a Shona word for the early rain that washes away the chaff. Between 1983 and 1987 the Fifth Brigade and other security forces killed thousands of Ndebele civilians. No full count exists: researchers have documented several thousand named victims, and the most widely cited estimate of the total is about 20,000. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Legal Resources Foundation documented the killings, torture and starvation in Breaking the Silence, a report completed in 1997 that the government never accepted.

The violence ended with the Unity Accord of 22 December 1987, by which ZAPU merged into ZANU-PF. Zimbabwe became a de facto one-party state, and at the end of 1987 Mugabe became executive president, combining the posts of head of state and head of government. He wanted a legal one-party state, but opposition within the party and the fall of single-party regimes in Eastern Europe led ZANU-PF to drop the plan in 1990.

Economic growth, adjustment and decline, 1980–1999

The 1980s brought real achievements. Zimbabwe inherited the most diversified economy in the region after South Africa, with manufacturing, mining and commercial farming. The government expanded schools and clinics rapidly: primary school enrolment roughly doubled in the first years of independence, and by the 1990s Zimbabwe had one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. Life expectancy rose to about 61 years by the mid-1980s. Land redistribution, however, moved slowly, and the best land remained in white hands.

From 1991 the government accepted an Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) backed by the IMF and World Bank. Trade was liberalised and public spending cut; a severe drought in 1992 caused the economy to shrink, and many workers lost their jobs. In 1997 the government, under pressure from veterans of the liberation war, paid each of about 50,000 veterans a lump sum and promised pensions without a budget to pay for them. On 14 November 1997, "Black Friday", the Zimbabwe dollar lost about three-quarters of its value in a single day. In 1998 Mugabe sent troops to support Laurent Kabila in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at great cost.

The challenge from the MDC and the land seizures, 1999–2008

In September 1999 the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, founded the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), with support from urban workers, students, churches and many white farmers. In February 2000 voters rejected a new constitution proposed by the government, which would have extended presidential powers and allowed land to be taken without compensation; it was ZANU-PF’s first national defeat.

From February 2000, within days of the referendum result, groups of war veterans and ZANU-PF supporters occupied white-owned farms, and the government made the seizures official as the "fast-track" land reform programme. About 4,000 white farmers lost their land, together with many of the farm workers, often of Malawian or Mozambican descent, who lived on it. Supporters presented the programme as the completion of the liberation struggle, the "Third Chimurenga". Critics saw it as a political strategy to punish the MDC’s supporters and reward the ruling party’s.

The chain of causes shows how the economic crisis grew out of political decisions. Commercial farm output and exports of tobacco, the main foreign-currency earner, collapsed; the land was redistributed without credit, title deeds or support; foreign investors left; and the government printed money to fund its spending. According to World Bank data, the economy roughly halved in size between 1999 and 2008. Official inflation reached 231 million per cent a year in July 2008, and the economist Steve Hanke estimated it at 89.7 sextillion per cent in mid-November 2008. In April 2009 the government abandoned its own currency.

Political repression grew with the crisis. Elections in 2000, 2002 and 2005 were marked by violence against MDC supporters. In May 2005 Operation Murambatsvina ("drive out the rubbish") demolished informal homes and markets in the cities, where the MDC was strongest; a UN report by Anna Tibaijuka estimated that about 700,000 people lost their homes, livelihoods or both. In the elections of March 2008 Tsvangirai won more votes than Mugabe in the first round (47.9 to 43.2 per cent officially), but not a majority. A campaign of violence before the run-off killed many MDC supporters, and Tsvangirai withdrew; Mugabe was declared the winner in June 2008.

Power-sharing and the fall of Mugabe, 2008–2019

Under pressure from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and mediation by South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, ZANU-PF and the two MDC factions signed the Global Political Agreement on 15 September 2008. A Government of National Unity was formed in February 2009, with Tsvangirai as prime minister. Using the US dollar ended hyperinflation, and the economy grew strongly in 2009–2012. A new constitution, approved by referendum in 2013, limited presidents to two terms in future, but ZANU-PF won the 2013 elections decisively and the unity government ended.

The end of Mugabe’s rule came from inside ZANU-PF. A struggle to succeed the 93-year-old president divided the party between the faction of Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a veteran of the liberation war with close links to the army, and a younger faction around Mugabe’s wife Grace. When Mugabe dismissed Mnangagwa on 6 November 2017, the army took control of Harare on 15 November in what it called "Operation Restore Legacy", refusing to call it a coup. Facing impeachment by his own party, Mugabe resigned on 21 November 2017, and Mnangagwa became president. The election of July 2018, which he won narrowly, was followed by the shooting of six people by soldiers in Harare on 1 August; protests against fuel price rises in January 2019 were also violently suppressed. Mugabe died in September 2019.

External involvement in Zimbabwe

Outside powers shaped Zimbabwe at every stage. Britain negotiated the end of minority rule at Lancaster House, and China and the Soviet Union armed the two guerrilla armies. In the 1980s apartheid South Africa destabilised its new neighbour by sabotage, raids and support for dissidents, while Zimbabwe’s army fought in Mozambique to protect its trade route to the sea. After 2000 Western governments condemned the land seizures and electoral violence: the European Union imposed targeted sanctions on ZANU-PF leaders in 2002, the United States passed the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act in 2001, and the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe, which left it in 2003. Mugabe answered by presenting the crisis as a struggle against British neocolonialism and turned to China under a "Look East" policy. South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki preferred "quiet diplomacy", avoiding public criticism, and SADC and the AU, not the West, brokered the settlement of 2008.

Social challenges in Zimbabwe

The life expectancy chart shows the effect of the AIDS epidemic on both Zambia and Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, adult HIV prevalence peaked at well over 20 per cent in the mid-1990s (UNAIDS estimates), and life expectancy fell from about 61 years in 1985 to about 45 in the early 2000s. The collapse of the health service after 2000 made things worse: a cholera epidemic in 2008–2009 infected about 98,000 people and killed more than 4,000 (WHO). Estimates suggest that between 2 and 3 million Zimbabweans emigrated, mainly to South Africa and Britain, taking teachers, nurses and doctors with them. Women were the majority of smallholder farmers but held few land titles, and the Ndebele of Matabeleland remained marginalised, with the Gukurahundi still officially unacknowledged in 2020.

Comparing the six countries

The same six themes run through the history of every one of the countries. Comparing them shows which factors were general across the continent and which were specific to one country.

Why did authoritarian rule emerge?

Four kinds of explanation appear in every case, in different proportions. Colonial legacies include authoritarian colonial administration, which ruled by decree and treated opposition as sedition; borders that grouped rival peoples together (Somalia’s two colonies, Ethiopia’s conquered south, Eritrea); settler economies that left land and wealth in few hands (Zimbabwe, Zambia); and economic dependence on the former colonial power (Niger, Tunisia). Independence and resistance movements often became ruling parties that treated their leadership of the struggle as a permanent right to govern: the Neo-Destour, UNIP, ZANU-PF and the TPLF-led EPRDF. Individuals mattered most where institutions were weakest: Bourguiba’s presidency for life, Barre’s clan rule, Mengistu’s seizure of the Derg and Tandja’s Tazartché were personal choices. Ideologies, Marxism-Leninism in Ethiopia and Somalia, Humanism in Zambia, Bourguibism in Tunisia, and the liberation-war nationalism of ZANU-PF, justified one-party rule as the path to unity and development.

The table of the origins of authoritarian rule suggests that colonial legacies created the conditions in every case, while the timing and form of authoritarianism depended on leaders and on the movements they led. Where liberation movements were strong (Tunisia, Zambia, Zimbabwe), a dominant civilian party emerged; where they were weak or divided (Niger, Somalia), the army filled the gap.

Why did multi-party democracy return in the 1980s and 1990s, and how far did it succeed?

Four factors pushed all six countries towards multi-party politics: foreign influence (the end of the Cold War, donor conditions, Mitterrand’s La Baule speech, IMF and World Bank pressure); the failures of single-party states, above all economic decline and corruption; ideological change, as Marxism-Leninism lost credibility after 1989 and liberal democracy and human rights became the language of donors and activists; and popular and elite support for reform, from unions, churches, students and professionals, and from members of the ruling elite who saw that change was coming.

Bratton and van de Walle’s comparison of African transitions suggests why the outcomes differed: protest from below started most transitions, and foreign pressure mainly decided how fast rulers gave way. Where a strong civil society, above all organised labour, existed, as in Zambia, it could win; where the regime controlled the army and the economy, as in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, elections became a tool of the ruling party.

What explains economic growth and development?

Political stability and reform explain most of the contrasts. Growth was strongest when governments were stable and pursued consistent policies (Ethiopia from 2004, Tunisia in the 1970s and 1990s, Zambia from 2002, Zimbabwe in the 1980s) and collapsed with war or political crisis (Ethiopia in the 1980s, Somalia after 1988, Zimbabwe after 2000). Individuals and entrepreneurs mattered in different ways: Meles Zenawi’s developmental state, Nouira’s opening to exports in Tunisia, and in Somalia the business people who ran telecoms, money transfer and trade without a state. Investment in infrastructure came from the state, from China (TAZARA, the Djibouti railway, Chinese loans to Zambia) and from foreign mining companies. Technology helped late developers: mobile phones and mobile money in Somalia, hydroelectric dams in Ethiopia, and export factories in Tunisia, while Ethiopia’s telecoms monopoly showed how state control could slow its spread.

What were the main social challenges?

• Health, disease and famine. Famine killed hundreds of thousands in Ethiopia (1983–1985) and Somalia (1991–1992 and 2010–2012), and threatened Niger (1973–1974, 2005, 2010). HIV/AIDS cut life expectancy by more than a decade in Zambia and Zimbabwe. In every famine, war or government policy decided who died.

• Education and illiteracy. Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe expanded schooling quickly after independence and reached high adult literacy; Ethiopia, Niger and Somalia remained among the least literate countries in the world, with women far less likely to read than men.

• Demographics. Populations grew fastest in Niger and Ethiopia, where fertility stayed high; Tunisia’s fertility fell to about two children per woman by 2000. Rapid growth meant a young population and pressure on land, jobs and services.

• Gender inequality and marginalised groups. Tunisia’s Code of Personal Status was exceptional; child marriage in Niger, female genital mutilation in Somalia and Ethiopia, and limited land rights for women in Zimbabwe show the scale of inequality elsewhere. Marginalised groups included the Isaaq in Somalia, the Tuareg in Niger, the Ndebele in Zimbabwe, pastoralists and ethnic minorities in Ethiopia, and the people of Tunisia’s interior.

What caused coups and civil wars?

Coups and civil wars almost always had several causes. Ethnic and clan tensions were central in Somalia and important in Ethiopia (Eritrea, Tigray, Oromia) and Zimbabwe (Gukurahundi), though in each case leaders used and sharpened identities as much as they inherited them. Economic problems and inequality prepared the ground for coups in Niger (1974) and the coup attempt in Zambia (1990), and for rebellion by marginalised regions. Environmental factors, especially drought, discredited governments in Niger in 1974 and Ethiopia in 1974, and turned conflict into famine. Failures of civilian governments, corruption, deadlock and leaders’ attempts to stay in power, were the reasons given for the coups in Somalia (1969) and Niger (1996, 2010).

What was the impact of external involvement?

International rivalries and destabilisation were strongest in the Horn of Africa, where the superpowers armed Ethiopia and Somalia in turn, and in southern Africa, where Rhodesia and South Africa raided Zambia and Zimbabwe and sponsored rebel movements in neighbouring states. Neocolonialism, a term popularised by Kwame Nkrumah in 1965 for continued economic control by former colonial powers, describes France’s grip on Niger’s uranium and the CFA franc, and is the charge African leaders made against IMF and World Bank conditions; Mugabe used it to dismiss Western criticism after 2000. The African Union became more active than the OAU: it sent AMISOM to Somalia (2007), suspended Niger after the coup of 2010, and backed SADC’s mediation in Zimbabwe in 2008. The United Nations imposed sanctions on Rhodesia, intervened in Somalia (1992–1995), kept the peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea (2000–2008) and fed millions through its agencies, such as the World Food Programme and UNICEF.

External involvement did both harm and good. Superpower arms prolonged wars in Ethiopia and Somalia and protected dictators; IMF conditions caused hardship and riots in Zambia, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. Yet famine relief saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Ethiopia and Somalia, UN sanctions and British-led negotiations helped end white minority rule in Zimbabwe, debt relief transformed Zambia’s finances in 2005, and AU and UN forces made a federal government in Somalia possible.

Perspectives and debates

Why did post-colonial African states become authoritarian?

Political scientists and historians have offered several general explanations, each of which fits some of the six countries better than others. Robert Bates, in Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981), argued that governments kept power by favouring the cities: state marketing boards paid farmers low prices for crops and used the profits to subsidise urban food, jobs and industry, because urban crowds could topple governments and scattered farmers could not. Zambia’s maize subsidies and the riots of 1986 and 1990 fit this model closely.

Jean-François Bayart, in The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (1989; English 1993), argued that the state was the main route to wealth, so that politics was a struggle by elites to "eat" from it, a form of patrimonialism, and share the proceeds with their followers. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, in Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (1999), went further, arguing that weak formal institutions served the interests of rulers who governed through personal networks. Jeffrey Herbst, in States and Power in Africa (2000), stressed geography: with low population densities and borders drawn by colonial powers, African states found it hard to extend control over their whole territory, a point that fits Niger’s desert north and Somalia well.

Critics of these approaches argue that they generalise about a whole continent and underplay ideology, history and agency. Specialists in each country have offered their own perspectives.

Weighing the perspectives

The perspectives can be weighed by asking what each explains and what it leaves out. Structural approaches (Bates, Herbst) explain why authoritarian rule was common, but not why Zambia’s ruling party accepted defeat in 1991 while Zimbabwe’s did not; for that, the strength of organised labour and the choices of leaders matter, as Larmer and Bratton and van de Walle suggest. Clan explanations of Somalia explain the form of conflict, while Kapteijns and others show that leaders chose to mobilise clan identity. Debates about Zimbabwe’s land reform show how the evidence used changes the judgement: national export figures show collapse, while local studies like Scoones’s show many new farmers succeeding.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the emergence of authoritarian rule

Paper 3: the move to multi-party democracy

Paper 3: economic growth

Paper 3: coups and civil wars

Paper 3: external involvement

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how colonial legacies, independence movements, individual leaders and ideologies contributed to authoritarian rule in each of the six countries.

• To do:

  I can describe Haile Selassie’s absolute monarchy and explain why it fell in 1974.

• To do:

  I can explain how Mengistu took control of the Derg and describe the Red Terror, the famine of 1983–1985 and the fall of the regime in 1991.

• To do:

  I can explain ethnic federalism and the EPRDF’s dominant-party rule, and assess Ethiopia’s developmental state and its growth after 2004.

• To do:

  I can outline Niger’s single-party state, its coups of 1974, 1996, 1999 and 2010, and the National Conference of 1991.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of uranium, drought, population growth and France in Niger’s development.

• To do:

  I can explain Pan-Somalism, Siad Barre’s scientific socialism, the Ogaden War and the switch of superpower alliances.

• To do:

  I can explain why the Somali state collapsed in 1991 and assess UN and AU intervention in Somalia.

• To do:

  I can explain how Bourguiba built a single-party republic while carrying out major social reforms, and outline Ben Ali’s rule to 2010.

• To do:

  I can outline Tunisia’s transition after 2011 and its political, economic and social difficulties to 2020.

• To do:

  I can explain why Zambia became a one-party state in 1972–1973 and why it returned to multi-party democracy in 1990–1991.