ABSTRACT
If military history was until fairly recently viewed in some Western academic circles as the bastard child of the profession, its African subset was even more of an outcast. Warfare was a permanent feature of life in precolonial Africa, and it affected all levels of society. The most common form of war in this period was the "raid", actions carried out by the autonomous villages that grouped most of the precolonial population and that gave Africans a reputation as "frontiersmen". The French imposed conscription on their West African dependencies and by the end of the First World War had deployed around two hundred thousand African troops on the Western Front. The African war of decolonization that has attracted the most attention is the Mau Mau Rebellion in the British colony of Kenya in 1952-1960. Interstate warfare increased in the 1980s with the outbreak of a civil war in Angola that ended up as an international struggle with Cold War implications.
