ABSTRACT

The close of the Zimbabwe campaign marked the end of conflicts against regimes where ultimate sovereignty over a territory lay in a European capital city, Paris, Lisbon or London. There were of course countries, notably Ethiopia, whose capital claimed sovereignty over wide areas in which minority peoples lived under discrimination and who were in revolt against this status. But these conflicts were essentially the same as other post-independence conflicts in Africa, conflicts between indigenous African peoples, mostly black but some non-black. These conflicts initially concerned integrity or internal integration within the frame of the post-colonial state, but at the same time, and increasingly as time passed, the conflicts changed to local lebensraum struggles, often crude ethnic warfare designed simply to secure control of regional or local economic assets. Some conflicts reverted to nineteenth-century genocidal brutality. In both varieties war aims might be presented in ideological terms, but often, particularly in the latter variety of warfare, war aims represented nothing more than the personal fiefdom ambitions of a man or a clique not always even representative of the area concerned.