Part V:
Post-Independence Africa
mid-
to late 20th century
African Timelines Table of Contents History, Orature, Literature, & Film
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Part V: Post-Independence Africa & Contemporary Trends
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Short Cuts on this
web page to brief Discussions on:
Kofi Awoonor | Chinua Achebe:
Things Fall Apart |
Neocolonialism, Negritude
Movement Wanes
& Disillusionment & Critique
|
Anti-Apartheid
Literature | Nelson Mandela |
Flora
Nwapa's Efuru, African Women Break
Their Silence & Ama Ata Aidoo |
Cheikh Anta Diop | Ngugi
wa Thiong'o | the Question of
Languages & Audiences;
Access, Censorship & Exile | African Cinema
| Africa in the News Today |
In Memoriam:
Leopold Sédhar
Senghor
|
Routes to Independence in Africa
(Dr.
Jim Jones, African History courses at West Chester Univ., Pennsylvania)
with in-depth discussion of Four Case
Studies: Algeria: A Settler
Colony; Egypt: A Modernized Colony;
Gold
Coast (Ghana): A Non-Settler Colony; &
Belgian
Congo: A Colony Unprepared: http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his311/lectures/4cases.htm
|
|
| 1957 | GHANA
BECOMES FIRST INDEPENDENT BLACK STATE IN AFRICA under
Kwame Nkrumah through Gandhi-inspired rallies, boycotts,
and strikes, forcing the British to transfer power over
the former colony of the Gold Coast.
|
| 1957-1958 | Ghana's
Kofi Awoonor, respected African poet and critic, begins
systematically collecting and translating (into English)
traditional African oral art forms and orature, such as
Ewe dirges. These he would weave into contemporary
experience in his poetry and fiction (e.g. Night
of My Blood, 1985; This Earth, My
Brother, 1971], seeking to recover/reinvent
pre-colonial traditional African culture and orature, and
to affirm the continuity with indigenous creative forms
as the key to survival. The last four decades of the 20th
century have seen intensified efforts by anthropologists,
historians, artists and others to preserve, collect,
record, translate, and publish African oratures.
|
| 1958 | Chinua Achebe (Nigeria):
Things
Fall Apart, written in "African English,"
examines Western civilization's threat to traditional
values and reaches a large, diverse international
audience. Like many other African writers, Achebe
integrates his people’s rich oral traditions in his
writing. African artists, writers, and filmmakers
continue to draw upon the inspiration of African oral
arts traditions in their work today.
|
| 1958 | All-African People's
Conference: Resolution on Imperialism and
Colonialism, Accra, December 5-13, 1958 - Primary Text
available from Paul Halsall's Modern History Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1958-aapc-res1.html |
| 1954 – 1962 | French
colonies (Francophone Africa) oppose continued French
rule despite concessions, though many are eager to maintain
economic and cultural ties to France--except in Algeria,
with a white settler population of 1 million. Bitterly
vicious civil war in Algeria ensues until independence is
gained in 1962, six years after Morocco and Tunisia had
received independence.
|
| 1961 | Franz
Fanon’s
enormously influential Les damnes de
la terre [trans. into English as The
Damned in 1963; as The Wretched of the Earth in 1965, with
an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre]
examines the psychological and material costs of
colonization in the midst of the bitter Algerian war for
independence (1954-1962).
|
| 1960 |
Sierra Leone's William Conton publishes
African,
accentuating cultural differences experienced by a young
African educated in England.
|
| 1960 | D.T. Niane publishes Soundjata ou l’Epoque Mandiginue, a written French translation of the Sundjata oral epic as performed by modern Mande djeliba (griot) Djeli Mamdou Kouyate, passed from djeliba to djeliba in his family for 700 years; in 1965, translated into English as Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, by G. D. Pickett |
| 1958 | White [Dutch-descent] Afrikaners officially gain independence from Great Britain in South Africa. |
| Late 50s – early 60s | Anti-Apartheid Literature: The effects of South African
racial policy on private lives increasingly treated in
works of internationally known white South African
writers in English, including Doris Lessing (Children
of Violence series); novelist and short-story
writer Nadine Gordimer, and playwright Athol Fugard.
|
| 1963 | Dennis Brutus, prominent black South African poet
(exiled and now living in the U.S.), depicts the effects of racial
repression on everyday life, life in prison, in urban slums, in exile in Sirens Knuckles Boots--also themes in later works Letters
to Martha (1969), Stubborn Hope (1978).
|
| 1964 | Nelson
Mandela, on
trial for sabotage with other ANC leaders before the
Pretoria Supreme Court, delivers his eloquent and
courageous Speech
from the Dock* before he is imprisoned for the next 25
years in the notorious South African prison Robben Island.
|
| 1960 - 1961 |
Zaire
(formerly Belgian Congo, the richest European colony in Africa &
setting of Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness) becomes independent from Belgium in
1960. Then in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi),
"charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba was ... martyred in
1961, with the connivance of the [U.S.] Central Intelligence Agency and a thirty-year-old Congolese colonel
who would soon become President of the country, Joseph Deséré Mobutu."
(Bill Berkeley, "Zaire: An African Horror
Story," The Atlantic Monthly, August 1993; rpt. Atlantic
Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/rwanda/zaire.htm Berkeley's article explores "how, through a regime of corruption, violence, and shrewd manipulation, Mobutu ... managed to keep a grip on power since he first took over Zaire, with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1960s, . . . despite (or perhaps thanks to) a state of near anarchy in which inflation has reached more than 6,000 percent and unemployment has stood at 80 percent." |
| 1962 | Algeria (of Arab and Berber peoples) wins independence from France; over 900,000 white settlers leave the newly independent nation. |
| 1963 | Multi-ethnic
Kenya (East Africa) declares independence from British.
Charter of the Organisation of African Unity, May 25 1963, Primary document available from Paul Halsall's Modern History
Sourcebook: |
| 1963, 1964 | East Africans produce important autobiographical works, such as Kenyans Josiah Kariuki’s Mau Mau Detainee (1963), and R. Mugo Gatheru’s Child of Two Worlds (1964). |
| mid-60s | Most former European colonies in Africa gain independence and European colonial era effectively ends. NEOCOLONIALISM, however, plagues many new African nations: Western economic and cultural dominance, and African leaders’ and parties’ corruption intensify the multiple problems facing the new nations. (As Achebe points out (in his interview with Bill Moyers: see Hum 211 African Film), colonial rule does not teach subjects how to rule themselves). Indigenous ethnic groups often feel stronger loyalty to traditional cultural ties and geographical homelands than to the arbitrary political boundary lines, first drawn by European colonizers, of independent African states. |
| 1965 | Rhodesia: Unilateral Declaration of Independence Documents, 1965,
Primary documents available from Paul Halsall's Modern History
Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1965Rhodesia-UDI.html
|
| 1960s – 1970s | Negritude movement wanes after most African colonies achieve independence, and a new generation of African writers and intellectuals (e.g. Wole Soyinka in Myth, Literature and the African World, 1976) sharply criticized Negritude concepts, which they felt reinforced racial stereotypes and were largely irrelevant to the new problems facing post-colonial Africa. Negritude poets had "defended the humanity of those whose humanity had been denied on the basis of race, a step that was unquestionably necessary," but in so doing they idealized the precolonial past and affirmed an racial essence they claimed was "natural" to Africans (e.g. love of nature, rhythm, spirituality) (Julien in Martin and O’Meara 300). |
| DISILLUSIONMENT & CRITIQUE: Increasingly in post-independence Africa, arts and literatures of disillusionment and protest develop against neocolonial abuses and corrupt African political systems, leaders, and military regimes. | |
|
1965 & 1966 |
Wole Soyinka’s
novel The Interpreters
(1965), a satirical analysis of modern Nigeria and its
ancient traditions, is one of several works that
establish Soyinka as an outspoken critic of Nigeria's
military regime. Achebe’s A Man
of the People (1966) is a political
satire on corruption in an unnamed African country.
|
| 1966 | Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar translated into Swahili in 1966 by
Tanzania's then president, Julius Nyerere, still a widely
read work in East Africa. In
the same era, Jean Joseph Rabéarivelo, who had modeled
earlier poems on French symbolist writings, turns to
brilliant use of the native vernacular ballad form of
Madagascar.
|
| 1966 | Flora
Nwapa's Efuru is the first novel published
by a woman writer in Nigeria, a pioneer in breaking the
silence of black African female writers in English,
regarding their lives, and the tensions between
women’s desires and the strictures of African
womanhood, at the same time that many male writers
portray precolonial Africa as a golden age.
|
|
AFRICAN WOMEN BREAK THEIR SILENCE: From the early chorus of
African voices denouncing colonialism, female voices were
absent. "The ‘first generation’ of male
writers critique the imperial and colonial project for
its racism and oppression, but they nonetheless (and not
unlike the European objects of their critique) portray
these matters as they pertain to men, and they formulate
a vision of independence or of utopias in which women are
either goddesses, such as muses and idealized mothers, or
mere helpmates." Powerful new African women writers
since Nwapa, including Ama
Ata Aidoo Bessie Head, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, have filled the silences surrounding African women’s lives and perspectives, and writing by women has developed rapidly in recent years (Julien in Martin and O’Meara 300-301). Third
World & Third World Women (Nicola Graves, Postcolonial Studies at
Emory Univ.): African
Women Writers (George A. Smathers Libraries, Univ. of Florida): |
|
| 1968 |
Ayi Kwei Armah, Ghanaian novelist, depicted
the end of the regime of Ghana's president Kwame Nkrumah
in
The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born
a novel of disillusionment and alienation. Social
criticism also marks the work of Sembene Ousmane,
Senegalese filmmaker and author of Gods Bits of
Wood (1970), and Mongo
Beti, Cameroonian author of The Poor Christ of
Bomba (1956).
|
| 1968 |
Malian Yambo Ouologuem writes the
controversial Le Devoir de violence (1968;
trans. in English as Bound to Violence in
1971), of the fictionalized West African empire Nakem
from 13th c. to 1947, drawing on
oral traditions and Islamic chronicles of the Songhai
Empire to challenge versions of the African past, and
criticize the African elites still ruling the modern
Sahel region despite independence. Ouologuem negates
Negritude’s claim of African pre-colonial goodness
and seems to assert instead an inherent African violence.
|
| 1968 | James Ngugi [who
later adopted the traditional Gikuyu name Ngugi
wa Thiong'o],
Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong call for
"the Abolition of the English Department" at
the University of Nairobi, Kenya, arguing that a
Department of African Literature and Languages be set up
in its place featuring study of the African "oral
tradition, which is our primary root."
|
| late 1960s - late 1970s | Popular
genre painting--"acrylics or oils on canvas reclaimed from flour
sacking"--by self-educated Shaba artists flourished in urban, industrial
Katanga region of Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
The paintings "recalled ancestral origins, colonial history, the fight
for independence, post-colonial struggles for power, and the
predicaments of urban African life." Foremost among these painters
was Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, who completed, in 1973-1974, a "complete
History of Zaire in one hundred pictures and a narrative."
Tshibumba and his work are the subject
of
Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire, by
Johannes Fabian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
as well as "The history of Zaire as told and
painted by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu in conversation with Johannes Fabian,"
Archives of Popular Swahili 2.1 (6 Nov. 1998) -
Language and Popular Culture in Africa |
| 1970s | Portugal
loses African colonies, including Angola and Mozambique.
|
| 1971 | Ama Ata Aidoo
(Ghana) "Certain Winds from the
South" [rpt. In African Short Stories ], from
her early collection of short stories No
Sweetness Here, voices women’s concerns as they
face problems of urbanization, Westernization, sexism,
absence of husbands and fathers, prostitution, clashing
values and expectations. Aidoo is also a playwright [Dilemma
of a Ghost, 1971; Anowa,
1980] and novelist [Our
Sister Killjoy, 1966; Changes—A
Love Story, 1991].
A significant development in post-independence
African literature is the emergence of African women
writers like Aidoo, Flora Nwapa, Mariama Ba, Eno Obong,
Aminata Sow Fall, Awa Keita, and Khady Sylla.
|
| 1974 | Kofi Awoonor (Ghana) publishes Guardians of the Sacred Wood: Ewe Poetry. |
| 1975 | Wole Soyinka
(Nigeria), writing in English
but drawing inspiration from Yoruba myths, produces a
considerable body of poetry and plays, such as Death
and the King's Horseman (1975).
|
| 1976 | Cheikh
Anta Diop
(Senegal, 1923-1986), one of the great African
intellectuals of the 20th
century, publishes the influential and controversial
book, The African Origin of
Civilization, his project to
"identify the distortions [about African history] we
have learned and correct them for future
generations" (Asante and Abarry 113). Diop’s
body of work has altered the historiography of Africa, as
well as scholarship in anthropology, Egyptology, physics,
sociology, and politics.
|
| 1977 | Bessie
Head (Botswana; b. South Africa) publishes "Snapshots of
a Wedding" in The Collector of Treasures. Rpt.
in African Short Stories],
one of her fictions of
village life in rural Botswana. Head’s
earlier novels When Rain Clouds Gather
(1968), Maru (1971), and A
Question of Power (1974), capture her
experience of discrimination into tightly constructed
art, and reveal interlocking oppressions of race, gender,
and a patriarchal God.
|
| 1977 | Ngugi wa Thiong’o publishes Petals of Blood, a major novel in English attacking present-day Kenyan society, joining his earlier novels [Weep Not, Child, 1964; The River Between, 1965; A Grain of Wheat, 1967], short stories, and plays dealing with many aspects of Kenyan lives within colonialism and neocolonialism, the impact of Christianity and Westernized education, the cultural practice of excision, religious conflict and collective struggle. ["Minutes of Glory," from Secret Lives - rpt. in African Short Stories.] Forced into exile from Kenya since 1982 when many Kenyan students and teachers were imprisoned, Ngugi lived in Europe, pursuing an interest in filmmaking and publishing children’s stories. As of 1998, Ngugi wa Thiong'o is Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies, and Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages, at New York University. |
THE
QUESTION OF LANGUAGES & AUDIENCES: Ngugi’s next play, critical of the
Kenyan government, landed him in prison and led him to
adopt his native Gikuyu, rather than the colonizer’s
language English, in his future creative works. Ngugi has championed the
controversial position that true African literature and
orature must be written/spoken/performed in African
languages for African peoples. Ngugi’s turn to plays reflects the
conviction that performance media like theater, cinema,
television, or radio are best suited for authors wishing
to reach large, non-literate indigenous audiences—a
position shared by many African filmmakers, though
ironically, African films attract larger audiences abroad
than in their native Africa. Achebe leads other African writers
who continue to write creative works in European
languages, Africanized and "appropriated" for
African purposes and themes. Achebe discusses the issue of
writing in a foreign language in "The African Writer
and the English Language," from Morning
Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975).
As Julien points out, "foreign publishers and
(paying) readerships, and still lower literacy rates in
national than in European languages, militat[e] against
the use of African languages. But there are indeed many
thriving African-language literatures, such as those in
Yoruba, Swahili, Poular, and Zulu, and these will
continue to grow" (Julien in Martin and O’Meara 303-304).
|
| ACCESS, CENSORSHIP, &
EXILE: "Within Africa, college
students in…Cote d’Ivoire may, in fact, have never
read Ngugi of Kenya, either because of francocentric and
anglocentric educational legacies, or because they cannot
afford to buy books, were books available. American
students have far greater access to African literature
than do most African students. Books by African writers
are likewise more likely to be published and marketed in
Paris and London than in Dakar or Lagos; or those
published in major overseas capitals are more likely to
garner international acclaim" (Julien in Martin and
O’Meara 305). "One of the terrible, ironic testimonies to the vitality of African literature, to its resolute denunciation of all forms of domination, is the fact that writers—Kofi Awoonor, Mongo Beti, Bessie Head, Dennis Brutus, Nuruddin Farah, Jack Mapanje, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka, to name some of the most prominent—are routinely censored and forced into exile, when they are not incarcerated and tortured. African writers often wander, teach, and write on foreign shores because they cannot do so at home" (Julien in Martin and O’Meara 304-305).
|
|
NADINE GORDIMER ON FREE SPEECH &
CENSORSHIP: "While we
rejoice at new freedom for writers in many
countries long denied it, and work for freedom
for writers in those countries where the many
devices of censorship still prevail, we must also
remember that writers are never freed of the
past. Censorship is never over for those who have
experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination
that affects the individual who has suffered it,
forever. Where censorship appears to be swept
away in the rubble of toppled regimes, let us
make sure that it does not rise again to the
demands of some future regime, for the
generations of writers who will grow up, anywhere
in the new world in the making. As African
National Congress Secretary of Culture Barbara
Maskela has said bluntly, and surely for all of
us: "We are not prepared to see culture
become a case of arrested development, frozen at
the point of liberation. Nor will we be content
with a culture vulnerable to becoming the fiefdom
of some future oppressive ruling
class.’"—from Gordimer’s
speech entitled "Censorship and Its
Aftermath," June 1990. [Contemporary authors
(1981- 1991); Detroit : Gale Research Co.(1992
)].
Claiming
Art/Reclaiming Space: Post Apartheid Art from
South Africa |
| 1979 | Mazisi Kunene publishes Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic, in the oral tradition of the great Zulu praise singers of Zulu kings, reflecting the post-independence period of African nationalism, a Pan-Africanist vision of union and romanticization of the past. |
| 1979 | Buchi
Emecheta (Nigeria),
in The Joys of Motherhood,
its title ironic, examines marriage and family in the
village and colonial city from a woman’s
perspective.
|
| 1980 | Zimbabwe
(formerly Southern Rhodesia) gains independence from
large white settler population after years of
hostilities.
|
The soil of our country South
Africa is destined to be the scene
of the fiercest fight and the sharpest struggles
to rid our continent of the last vestiges of white minority rule.
--Nelson Mandela, June
1980
(qtd. "Racism" Bloomsbury
Thematic Dictionary of Quotations, Bloomsbury,
1997)
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/208688
| 1970s –1980s | Police
state of South African white minority rulers hardens to
maintain blatantly racist and inequitable system of apartheid, resulting violence, hostilities,
strikes, massacres headlined worldwide. [Map] South Africa: Black
Homelands
(CIA 1982, Univ. of
Pennsylvania): |
| 1982 | Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"…. & the Boys (1982; for a description of the film version, see Hum 211 African Films), joins his earlier plays, such as The Blood Knot (1961), Boesman and Lena (1969), Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1976, co-authored with black South Africans John Kani and Winston Ntshona) in openly defying South African government policies, presenting spare dramas of survivors ensnared in apartheid. |
| 1984 | J. M. Coetzee, author of The Life and Times of Michael K. (1984), is one of many white South Africans writing in both Afrikaans and English, including poets D. J. Opperman and Breyten Breytenbach; their themes are concerned particularly with the damaging effects of the apartheid policy. |
| 1985 | Breyten Breytenbach, formerly a supporter of Afrikaner nationalism now in exile in Paris, writes The Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985) in English; renouncing his native language Afrikaans in this unflinching exploration of the effects of his seven years in South African prisons on charges of terrorism. |
| 1985 | Chinua Achebe and C. L. Innes, eds., publish African Short Stories, a collection of short fiction by African writers from all over the continent. |
| 1985 | African Cinema: Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Souleymane Cisse (Mali), and other leaders of African cinema, create WAFCO (West African Film Corp.), advocating inter-African film as an instrument of education, change, cultural preservation and revival, and the most effective way to reach indigenous non-literate African audiences |
|
FESPACO (Festival of Pan-African Cinema),
the most important pan-African film festival Yeelen (Mali, 1987),
dir. Soulemane Cisse, shown
at 10th FESPACO |
|
| 1986 | Nigerian poet-dramatist-prose writer Wole Soyinka awarded
the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature; fellow Nigerian John
Pepper Clark uses Ijaw myths and social situations in
poetry and plays, and poet-novelist Gabriel Okara, author
of The Voice, concentrates
exclusively on African characters and values.
|
| 1988 | Egyptian novelist and
short story writer Nabuib Mahfouz awarded the 1988 Nobel
Prize in Literature, the first prizewinning writer
with Arabic as
his native tongue.
|
| 1988 | Tsisi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) publishes Nervous Conditions, a rebellious young
woman’s coming of age story, moving from countryside
to city, struggling against racism, classism, and sexism
in colonial Rhodesia.
|
| 1990 | I Is a Long-Memoried
Woman (UK, Frances Anne Soloman,
dir.), based on the Diasporic poetry of Grace Nichols
(Guyana-UK).
|
"I have cherished the ideal of a
democratic and free society
in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunites
...if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
--Nelson Mandela, Speech,
11 Feb 1990, after
his release from prison.
Mandela was reiterating his words at his trial in 1964
(qtd. "Racism" Bloomsbury
Thematic Dictionary of Quotations, Bloomsbury,
1997)
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/208688
| 1990 | Dramatic freeing of long-time
black political prisoner Nelson Mandela by Afrikaner President de Klerk in
South Africa. Ethnic violence erupts between Zulu and
Xhosa factions and bitter rivalries evident among South
African black majority groups and white Nationalist
groups.
|
| 1991 | South
African Nadine Gordimer wins the Nobel Prize for
Literature (official
Nobel Foundation site with photo & biography of Gordimer:
http://www.nobel.se/laureates/literature-1991.html ), noting "her work
comprises novels and short stories in which the
consequences of apartheid form the central theme." (Gordimer authored short story
"The
Bridegroom" rpt. in African
Short Stories)
|
| 1991 1993 |
Apartheid
is abolished, and South Africa begins preparing for
multiracial elections. Mandela and de Klerk are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their leadership towards a democratic South Africa.
|
| 1994 | In South Africa’s first multiracial elections in April, Nelson Mandela is elected President, instituting black majority rule. |
| 1992 |
Afrique, Je Te Plumerai,
dir. Jean-Marie Teno
(Cameroon). See Hum 211 African Films & Film Contexts |
| 1993 | An Aroma of Coffee by Dany Laferriere (Haiti-Canada) . |
| 1994 | Leaf and Bone: African Praise Poetry, ed. Judith Gleason. |
| 1994 |
Keita: The Heritage of
the Griot , dir. Dani Kouyate (Burkina Faso). See Hum 211 African Films |
Map of The
"New" Africa, 1990
(Ralph
et al's World Civilizations, Examination Chapters, W. W. Norton):
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/worldciv/resource/newafric.htm
"Consider the map of
the world, with its 190 or so countries,
each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map,
with which all of us have
grown up,
is generally an invention of modernism,
specifically of European
colonialism."
--Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy" Atlantic Monthly Feb.
1994
Rpt. Atlantic Online http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarcf.htm
Map of "Africa"
- 1885 from Black’s General Atlas of the World.
While this map of Scottish cartographer John
Bartholomew was being printed in Edinburgh,
"representatives of the major European powers were gathered in
Berlin
poring over similar maps and drawing lines on them—
lines that would become the political boundaries for colonial empires
that would dominate African history for the next 75 years.
Teaching with Maps, Newberry Library,
2000
http://www.newberry.org/nl/smith/teachers/notesafrica.html
| 1994
|
The Hutus massacre up to a million Tutsis in Rwanda;
then fearing reprisals from the new Tutsi government, more than a million Hutu refugees fled Rwanda
in a panicked mass migration that captured the world's attention.
500,000 Hutu refugees streamed back into Rwanda to escape fighting in Zaire, "yet another episode in the increasingly long history of tension and warfare between the Hutus and the Tutsis -- and of the West's equivocation about whether to intervene." "Violence and Unrest in Central Africa," 22 Nov. 1996, Atlantic Online / Flashbacks: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/rwanda/rwanda.htm
"While tensions between Hutus and Tutsis created the recent refugee crisis, the civil unrest caused by Zairean rebels trying to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko was the spark. Bill Berkeley's "Zaire: An African Horror Story" (August, 1993) explored how, through a regime of corruption, violence, and shrewd manipulation, Mobutu has managed to keep a grip on power since he first took over Zaire, with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1960s." |
|
"Africa now... Yes, there's disappointment, pain, sorrow. But I say to myself, when was it in the last 500 years that Africa has not been in great pain and sorrow and disappointment? The answer is, very rarely. "There's an Igbo proverb that says of a particular kind of rodent we have--the grass cutter, which when chewing through the grass makes a lot of noise--even if there's only one of them left, you'll hear this sound. That's a rather grim kind of hope, but the alternative is to give up and kill yourself. I don't like that option. "You celebrate whatever achievement you can. Somebody asked me recently how I could talk about African literature as a celebration in view of Africa's problems. I said that I'm simply basing my attitude on something very old in my culture. We had celebrations where there were carvings of the white district officer, of the earth goddess, of the gods of thunder and of smallpox. If you don't bring terrifying characters into your celebration, they'll be out there plotting something else. You bring them in and keep an eye on them." --Chinua Achebe, qtd. "Chinua
Achebe: Views of Home from Afar" |
|
| 1999 | South Africa's second
democratic elections were free of violence and disorder.
The ANC (African Nation Congress) wins another commanding
victory, some attributing this fact to Nelson Mandela's
efforts to foster racial reconciliation and peaceful
transition. Mandela's hand-picked successor Thabo Mbeki
assumes the national presidency in the face of
formidable challenges posed by the 21st century.
For some headline news reports, see:
|
|
African Impact: Africa's
100 Best Books of the 20th Century |
|
| 2000 |
|
| 2001 | After 38 years in existence, the Organisation for African Unity (OAU: http://www.oau-oua.org/ ) is replaced by the African Union, loosely modeled on the European Union. The Pan-African Movement says that the creation of the African Union brings the dream of a common African currency, foreign policy, defense structure and economic program closer to reality. |
|
|
|
In
Memoriam: Leopold Sédhar Senghor |
|
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Timelines Bibliography:
Sources & Resources for Further Study
COCC Home > Cora Agatucci Home > Classes > HUM 211 Home > African Timelines > Part V: Post-Independence Africa & Contemporary Trends
African
Timelines Table of Contents
History,
Orature, Literature, & Film
Part I | Part II
| Part III |
Part IV
| Part V | Works Cited
| Bibliography
You are here:
African
Timelines Part V:
Post-Independence Africa
mid-
to late 20th century
URL of this
webpage:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/timelines/htimeline5.htm
Last updated:
02 January 2010
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2010, Cora Agatucci, Professor of English
Humanities Department,
Central Oregon
Community College
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