ABSTRACT

This work has surveyed what might initially appear to be an unwieldy variety of wars with no common themes – anti-colonial liberation wars, inter-nation wars, civil wars and ethnic secessionist or purely factional uprisings. Only a few approximate to accepted Western concepts of war, that is, warfare between armies of nation states or European civil war, generally tidy, organized wars with front lines and structured, uniformed armies. In fewer still have generally agreed Western “principles of war” – a strategy directed towards a clear objective, the offensive, overall unity of command, mass and concentration of forces, manoeuvre, surprise, security, simplicity and administration/ logistics – played the guiding parts. The European conceptual distinction between conventional war and low-intensity warfare with lower casualty rates is also inappropriate in African conditions, as the events set out in the last chapter showed. The warfare in Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire and elsewhere was low-intensity in terms of the numbers actually engaged in the fighting and the simplicity of their weaponry; the death totals are those of conventional war. African warfare also is generally a much more improvised business, as previous chapters have set out. The “strike where we can with what we can” approach of ZANLA, for example, was much more effective than the Soviet-style strategy of ZIPRA. Terror and massacre have been major, psychological warfare, weapons carried to extremes even exceeding those of the Nazis or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Professional soldiers in armies have become factions and have been supplanted or challenged by illdisciplined militias who have no respect for rules or laws governing the conduct of war. Only the Nigerian civil war, the Uganda–Tanzania war and South Africa’s warfare in Angola at all resemble the wars of Europe.