ABSTRACT
In retrospect, however, it must be said that in most African countries the happy anticipations were not fulfilled. Freed from the constraints of Soviet competition, the western democracies heaved sighs of relief and steadily pared their aid budgets. The Soviet disengagement from Africa itself began in 1989, when the Russians decided to cease the supply of arms to the Ethiopian government of General Mengistu and to pay off the Cuban mercenaries attached to his forces. It is true that not many African governments of the 1990s could truthfully be described as democratic. Nearly all of them existed to keep in power very small political elites, increasingly devoid of political ideas themselves and deeply suspicious of others who claimed to have some. Unsurprisingly, it was in the towns of Africa that the dreaded AIDS virus found its most active centres of dissemination. At the same time AIDS, even running at its current levels, scarcely made a dent in Africa's demographic explosion.
