ABSTRACT
Africa's race for arms, as an extension of east-west rivalries, brought new dangers of conflict in a continent where dozens of inherited frontiers were in dispute. The militarization of Africa by the end of the 1970s threatened crushing new burdens for its swiftly swelling population. The general military picture in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1970s revealed that all the major outside powers had varying forms of collaborative agreements with key countries of the continent. The Horn of Africa, after the ravages of a revolution in the mid-1970s that saw Ethiopia and Somalia exchange their superpower sponsors, remained an arena for the practice of realpolitik. Western Sahara, decolonized by Spain in 1975, became the object of bitter dispute among its three neighbours, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. Central Africa, with fifty million people and fabled resources of rareearth minerals, became a setting for east-west competition from the dawn of African independence.
