Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy, Ph.D. for Scholars Online
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Chapter 30: Africa and the Middle East Since 1945
Mon, Apr 28, 2014
62. Tue, Apr 29, 2014
This chapter is not badly written, but it is very complex. It brings us to a lot of material that has contemporary relevance: the tumultuous history of Africa and the Middle East since World War II has left a legacy of troubled states, populations in extreme poverty, and vast animosities and hostilities that are far from settled. The United States still has troops in Afghanistan and Iraq that attests to the underlying dissatisfaction in the Islamic world with the way things have gone over the last half century. It is also a period that I at least (DrMcM) remember personally — I was in junior high school as the Six-Day War unfolded in 1967. There was enormous global apprehension about where this crisis would lead; some of the lands taken by Israel at the time (including the Gaza Strip) have not been returned, and remain seething beds of hostility and mutual recrimination on the part of just about everyone. Underlying the latest wave of hostilities and terrorism are resentments that go back for millennia.
We’ll take the chapter in two distinct sections — first the stepwise liberation of the African colonial holdings of the European powers, and then the Middle East. The two are interconnected, inevitably, especially in the northern part of Africa, which is largely Islamic thanks to the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. But sub-Saharan Africa offers a welter of its own problems, and is largely overlooked by contemporary news coverage, until something becomes vastly and cinematically disastrous. There are places to look: the recent film “Hotel Rwanda” is a powerful and unflinching look at the horrors of the Tutsi-Hutu clashes that savaged central Africa for the better part of a generation, and reduced civil order to the barest shell, but I do caution anyone that it is a brutal and upsetting film.
One of the problems of sub-Saharan Africa is rooted in the fact that most of them were, when they were first liberated, set up as democracies among people who had been mostly excluded from the task of governing while the areas were under colonial control. Accordingly most of them were inexperienced, and they fell back inevitably on the power structures they already knew and understood on their own terms — largely tribal ones. The tribal delineations crossed national boundaries, and several of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century were fought across several nations — not between the nations, but between parties in each nation representing tribal interests. This makes it virtually impossible for most Western-trained minds to understand fully, and virtually impossible to engage with any of the conventional forms of diplomacy. We are today still battling with Somali pirates, for example, who make the Indian Ocean a perilous place for mid-sized vessels.
These conflicts are perhaps of political origin, but tracing their sources is difficult, and assigning blame probably fruitless. All of them have been vastly exacerbated by human issues on a scale unknown in the West. Hunger is an ever-present spectre: millions of Africans die every year of starvation. Clean drinking water is not something that can be taken for granted: many populations are chronically afflicted by various forms of dysentery that could be virtually eliminated if there were merely access to non-toxic water. Africa has also been afflicted with several epidemics that are very hard to appreciate from here as well: AIDS apparently began in central Africa, and there are parts of the continent where it affects more than half of the population. Treatment has been hampered severely by the politics of AIDS, which entails broad denial that it is even a problem in some states. The Congo also was hit by an outbreak of ebola — a viral infection that moves quickly and is fatal in about 90% of all cases. Malaria is endemic in most of the southern part of Africa. It is borne by mosquitos and affects a vast proportion of the population. It can be treated, but it is not always diagnosed in time, and has a wasting effect that diminishes the function of blood cells and is usually fatal if not caught in time.
Not all the news is bad. There are steps that have been taken to address these issues, and some of them are showing fruit. Water treatment has progressed in some areas, and medical breakthroughs and improvments in sanitation have enabled some local improvements; but there is still vast work to be done.
South Africa, which as recently as the 1990s was still held under the racial policy known as apartheid (Afrikaans for “separation”) was a powder-keg ready to explode from 1948-1994. Apartheid was never without its opponents; intellectuals in South Africa denounced it, and it was globally denounced by an ever-widening circle of nations: Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country depicts its operations from the inside. Hendrik Verwoerd, often called the "Architect of Apartheid”, was assassinated in the government house of assembly in Sept. 1966. Outspoken black opponents of apartheid like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu were subjected to imprisonment and various forms of oppression. But apartheid was dismantled successfully and, for the most part, without violence, under President Frederik Willem de Klerk. South Africa is not without some remaining vestiges of that policy, but has achieved a striking level of integration and civil cooperation in a remarkably short time.
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