", Aryeh Y. Yodfat, "The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa,", Diana L. Ohlbaum, "Ethiopia and the Construction of Soviet Identity, 1974-1991. Some students were shocked by conditions in Moscow, which was summed up by one African visitor as having no cars, no cafes, no good clothes or good food. Malcolm Rifkind writes the Eastern superpower lacks the ideological grounding to cause international tensions akin to the Soviet Union. Castro had learned from Guatemala, and was able to thwart a coup attempt in 1961. Communist ideas have been prevalent in Africa since at least the early 20th century. In Somalia, Mohammed Siad Barre had seized power in a coup in 1969 and had declared Somalia a socialist republic. Most incidents came during the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union battled for influence across the continent. The USA have a story of backup Coup d'tat in the countries of Latin America, support for anti-communist dictatorships such as Indonesia or Phillipines and millitary invasions as in Vietnam. [1] It did not appear right for revolution because it was almost entirely controlled by European imperial powers, with the peasantry under the political control of tribal leaders, and low levels of proletarian consciousness in the small working-class. In the late 1970s, Cold War confrontations really flared in southern Africa, but also picked up steam in the Americas. By 1965, Cuba became a fully communist country and developed close ties to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, giving rise to 15 newly independent nations, including a Russia with an anticommunist leader. In 1961, the ANC and the SACP created a joint military wing, known as the "Spear of the Nation." The Cold War was an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II. ", Larry C. Napper, "The Arab Autumn of 1984: A Case Study of Soviet Middle East Diplomacy. After 1945, the pace of change quickened. Picture Information. forces in African countries, th e Cold War actors institutionali zed a violent political culture in postcolonial Africa. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Under the glare of international public opinion, colonial rule could be justified only through economic aid to uplift the natives, and this would add to the financial burden on the metropoles. New York: Africana, 1986. As US president Dwight D Eisenhower explained to Winston Churchill in 1954: We are falsely pictured as the exploiters of people, the Soviets as their champions. It would be foolhardy, he warned, to ignore the fierce and growing spirit of nationalism spreading across Africa and Asia. Please subscribe or login. Lumumba was taken captive and subsequently executed in 1961. But, as in the neighbouring DRC, Soviet support alone was not enough to secure power. The Soviet Union and Cuba provided weapons and training camps for African National Congress guerrillas fighting black oppression by the apartheid government. "The explosion of African studies in the Soviet Union. Neither Britain nor France would acknowledge their weaknesses. The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc, the Socialist Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed during the Cold War (1947-1991). AFRICAN Second it wanted to gain a voice in African affairs, primarily by supporting local communist parties, and providing economic and military aid to the governments. One Kremlin official, Anatoly Adamishin, spoke for many others when he asked: Why, with all our problems, did we have to get involved [in Africa]? We could not afford it. Angola alone owed the Soviet Union US$5bn, which it could not repay. Your country's customs office can offer more details, or . From the 1960s, cinema was one of the most important aspects of the alliances between Cuba, the USSR and African liberation movements. Britain was anxious that power in Africa was handed to dependable politicians. It has been reported that between 1963 and 1969 the United States Agency for International Development spent US$3.3m delivering radios and small arms to African police forces and instructing them in strike-breaking, riot control and investigating sedition. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were quick to exploit the myriad difficulties that accompanied decolonisation in Africa. The one-party states that replaced colonial administrations were handed the apparatus of domestic coercion. Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces soldiers, however did not engage in combat, and after the overthrow of Castro's friend Ben Bella, Cuba cut back its involvement. This award-winning book provides a useful framework for analyzing various forms of socialist ideologies and institutional choice in Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s. First, much like in Vietnam, American leaders, such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believed that a Communist takeover in Angola would lead to a "domino effect" in the rest of southern Africa. former adversaries of the MPLA mainly the USA and China have become the most important trading partners, as Christabelle Peters points out. In these colonies, jailing, torturing, and killing Africans was routine, but not on a large scale, except in Madagascar (19471948) and Kenya (19521956), where there were major revolts; neither received outside assistance. Stevens, Christopher. Abboud declared himself an enemy of communism and of the Soviet-supported Nasser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Fear of Communism haunted the white minority government of South Africa from the 1950's to the collapse of single party rule in Eastern Europe in 1989. Fidel Castro referred to the ties of blood and history that linked the two nations a large percentage of the enslaved Africans brought to the island to work on coffee and sugar plantations hailed from Angola. Now they had to contemplate using violent means.Aside from military aid, the Soviet Union also offered a number of educational scholarships to young people, mainly in the former English and Portuguese territories.But the Soviet Union gave little in the way of aid or trade. Although It is argued that populist thinkers Nyerere, Cabral, and Fanon shared a common passion for a brand of socialism that was democratic and rooted in precolonial traditions as well as in Marxist-Leninist theory. communism was very attractive to people in a region where mineral and . At the same time, what they liked about Soviet-style socialism was not so much the notion of a proletarian revolution, but rather of the need for the role a disciplined vanguard party. However, the African nationalist movement was led by the better educated young middle-class that had little exposure to communism or socialism. Perhaps the most influential anticolonial thinker of the time was Frantz Fanon, a professional psychiatrist and philosopher. This resulted in the widespread popularity of the ideas of Pan-Africanists from America, Europe, and the Caribbean, such as George Padmore and W.E.B. Dubois and the proponents of the concept of Ngritude as espoused by Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Aim Csaire of Martinique. US and Soviet intelligence agencies played kingmakers, financing and overseeing coups to install biddable rulers. Most socialist systems today are participatory democracies. There was a sense of freedom, of liberation, as palpable in the streets as in the Mozambicans we met, remembers anthropologist Nadine Wanono, then a student of French cultural ethnographer, Jean Rouch, with whom she travelled to Mozambique in 1978, to teach Super 8 film techniques to FRELIMOs post-independence government. There was alarm in Washington, where CIA director Allen Dulles suspected that Lumumba was a Castro or worse, and the CIA moved in, supplied with dollars and a hitman instructed to assassinate Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba threatened the nationalisation of foreign businesses, and looked to the Soviet Union for assistance. under Agostinho Neto and Eduardo dos Santos. Since most nations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia had already chosen sides, Kennedy and Krushchev both looked to Africa as the next Cold War battleground. Rather, in 1956, they attempted to recover their old influence by their joint invasion of Egypt. Historically, communism on the continent was strongest in Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and South Africa, which had significant European settlement, but such ideas remained foreign to the African masses until the principles of Marxism-Leninism became popular among intellectuals around the time of World War I ( Drew 2014 ). Cuba had already been providing low-level support to the MPLA since 1965, when Che Guevara was in the Congo, but from 1975, the game had changed. All thanks to the Putin regime's invasion of Ukraine. "Soviet training and research programs for Africa." James Mulira, "The role of the Soviet Union in the decolonization process of Africa: from Lenin to Brezhnev. In the late 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Fear of Communism. . The first appearances of communist ideas in Africa were introduced by European workers in newly industrializing colonies with a significant concentration of settlers. For its part, the United States helped overthrow a left-wing government in Guatemala (1954), supported an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba (1961), invaded the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), and undertook a long (196475) and unsuccessful effort to prevent communist North Vietnam from bringing South Vietnam under its rule (see Vietnam War). In 1986 Gorbachev rejected the idea of a revolutionary takeover of the South African government, and advocated a negotiated settlement. in Africa. Ginor, Isabella, and Gideon Remez. The defeat fatally undermined the apartheid regime, and Nelson Mandela would declare: We are deeply indebted to the Cuban people for the selfless contribution they made to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle in our region we will never forget those who stood by us in the darkest years of our struggle against apartheid.. In 1954 the Algerian Front de Libration Nationale (National Liberation Front) began an uprising that triggered an eight-year partisan war of attrition in which more than a million died, most of them Arabs. Angola During the Cold War: Background . Drew provides an excellent account of the development of both the Algerian and South African Communist parties over time. March 30, 1946. and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick. Newly independent nations such as Angola, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provided the stages for some of the most bloody proxy battles between East and West, as the United States, apartheid-era South Africa and China tried to prevent the spread of communism in the global south, while Cuba and the Eastern Bloc sought to support it. By 1963 Guinea had shifted away from Moscow into a closer friendship with Washington. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. 1950s / Cold War. Available online by subscription. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. From 1960, the Soviet Union became involved in several Marxist, African struggles, providing political support, weapons and military training, including to the Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in their fight against the Portuguese. It exposes the shortcomings of so-called African socialism in practice. the revolution in 1974. declared a Marxist Leninist state in 1974, under Mathieu Kerekou. Cold War conflicts played havoc with African politics. Joseph Stalin had a fleeting interest in claiming the former Italian colony of Tripolitania in modern-day Libya, but the NATO containment policy blocked those efforts. * Somalia * human resources had been so ruthlessly exploited for the sake of profit Russian commentators turned scornful of the Ethiopian regime. This bibliographical essay focuses on the Cold War crises in Africa. Still, after the crisis, the Soviets were determined not to be humiliated by their military inferiority again, and they began a buildup of conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years. The way forward for Africa in the aftermath of the Cold War - the decades-long struggle for supremacy between communist Soviet Union and capitalist US - was uncertain. Nkrumah was a pan-Africanist the goals of an independent and united Africa took precedence over the socialist revolution. A large number of foreign countries at least 36 according to Edward George intervened in a significant way in Angolas civil war, which did not end until 2002. became a Marxist Leninist state in 1970, It was evident from the very beginning of African independence that individual leaders accepted a form of socialism based on the humanistic aspects of that ideology. The chapters in this book offer analyses of the socialist strategies of African liberation movements that assumed control of independent governments and common problems they have faced in the process of transitioning from colonial domination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. [3], After 1953, the continent underwent a rapid process of decolonization, whereby nearly all the colonies became independent nations. It meant a return to the Cold War. Matusevich, Maxim. A rival government, the "Free Republic of the Congo", was founded in the eastern city of Stanleyville by Lumumba supporters, led by Antoine Gizenga. [29], In the 15-year Western Sahara War, the Soviet Union supported the Polisario Front and sent arms via Algeria. ", Philip E. Muehlenbeck, "Kennedy and Toure: A success in personal diplomacy. [4] Soviet leaders, beginning with Nikita Khrushchev, were excited by the enthusiastic young black Africans who first came to Moscow for a major youth festival in 1957. The Americans and the British worried that Soviet domination in eastern Europe might be permanent. He emphasised that these links placed a burden of debt upon Cubans that they were duty-bound to repay.. In 1977 the Soviets attempted to unseat Neto, whom they now distrusted. The Soviets, on the other hand, were determined to maintain control of eastern Europe in order to safeguard against any possible renewed threat from Germany, and they were intent on spreading communism worldwide, largely for ideological reasons. Thus, the Soviet Union sent troops to preserve communist rule in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979). The invasion of Port Said, and the operation to capture the Suez Canal, was launched. However, most of its attempts to spread Communism were initially focused on Europe and this did not prevent Lenin and Stalin from trying to force all the former territories of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. Within a week, the country dissolved into anarchy after the army mutinied. Africans were losers in the Cold War. Soviet and Warsaw Pact aircraft, arms and advisors were flown in to prop up his government. His corruption, like that of so many others of his kind, weakened economies and stifled growth. There were only four independent states: Liberia, de facto a US protectorate; Egypt, nominally independent but occupied by British troops; Ethiopia, eager to establish a close relationship with the United States; and white-ruled South Africa. It was waged mainly on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and lasted until 1991. Increasingly complex international relationships developed as a result, and smaller countries became more resistant to superpower cajoling. The first is that Communism has made its gains in a comparatively short period of time. There, everyone was equal! [26], Moscows public embrace of Mengistu troubled Siad Barre's pro-Communist regime in Somalia. The big question: Is Africa a prisoner of its past? Get 6 issues for 19.99 and receive a 10 gift card* PLUS free access to HistoryExtra.com, Save 70% on the shop price when you subscribe today - Get 13 issues for just $49.99 + FREE access to HistoryExtra.com, Snuffed out democracies and poisoned toothpaste: how the Cold War wreaked havoc in post-colonial Africa, Cold War conflicts played havoc with African politics and snuffed out many fledgling democracies, The CIA brought dollars - and a hitman with poisoned toothpaste. [5] In the early 1960s the KGB and the GRU began focusing more intelligence operations on Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Underlying this common policy was the cynical maxim reputedly uttered by US president Franklin D Roosevelt about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garca, but equally applicable to any of the rivals chosen African despots He may be a son of a bitch, but hes our son of a bitch.. At the same time, the United States imposed a ban on all trade with Cuba. The Cold War reached its peak in 194853. [32], Despite the widely reported Soviet support for the ANC and otherwise liberation movements, the Soviet Union also engaged in some trade with South Africa during the apartheid era, mostly involving arms and some mineral resources. Afro-Marxist Regimes: Ideology and Public Policy. In 1988 he salvaged what he could in an agreement with the United States, by which all Soviet and Cuban forces would withdraw from the continent, and South Africa pulled out of Namibia, which was granted independence in 1990. The confrontation that followed, known as the Cuban missile crisis, brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. If African movements and parties after independence allied themselves with the United States, China, or the Soviet Union, they were labeled as either capitalist or communist (Young 1982, Idahosa 2004, Rosberg and Callaghy 1979, Friedland and Rosberg 1964). Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on Soviets and Americans were not the only outside actors on the stage of decolonization. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1987. Washington followed suit. Both powers tended to suborn corruptible local strongmen with military backgrounds and authoritarian instincts. [18], In the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser began to follow an anti-imperialist policy that earned him enthusiastic support from the Communist government of the USSR. This was prudent: at this stage there was no knowing who would win the Cold War. The Soviet Union agreed to fund its new ally and hoped that Ethiopia and Somalia could form a communist federation. A product of the Cold War, the Southeast Asia War (1961-1973) began with communist attempts to overthrow non-communist governments in the region. Two small countries deserve pride of place: Cuba, which sent tens of thousands of soldiers to southern Africa, and Sweden, which gave vital economic assistance to African liberation movements. The 15 new states are: Russia Estonia Latvia Now they had to contemplate using violent means. In fact, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, described NATO as 'brain dead' in 2019. The link was not copied. Anti-Communism informed almost every aspect of the South African government's foreign policy and much of its domestic policy. under Siad Barre. The Gizenga regime was crushed in early 1962. in the footsteps of the Soviet Union. Edited by Stephen A. Smith. This is an excellent treatment of the origins and development of communism or socialism on the African continent. For its part the Soviet Union was happy to give military support to the governments of Angola and Mozambique and to the ANC. Lawrence James is a historian and author of Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016), This content first appeared in issue 3 of BBC World Histories magazine, Save up to 49% AND your choice of gift card worth 10* when you subscribe BBC History Magazine or BBC History Revealed PLUS! Nationalisation of foreign businesses, and was able to thwart a coup in 1969 had. Informed almost every aspect of the concept of Ngritude as espoused by Leopold Senghor Senegal... Guinea had shifted away from Moscow into a closer friendship with Washington Union supported the Polisario Front and arms. Bibliographical essay focuses on the Cold War, when the US and Soviet intelligence agencies played kingmakers, financing overseeing... South African government, and looked to the governments of angola and Mozambique and to Soviet! 1950S, both the Algerian and South African communist parties over time replaced colonial administrations handed. 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