ABSTRACT
Africa was being divided up into many ‘colonies’, meaning territories ruled directly and dictatorially by European governments, along frontiers fixed between the European powers. The colonial period of direct, non-African rule was thus a process of imperialist dispossession. When the colonial period at last was over, and the Europeans had withdrawn, African peoples had to decide how best to build their new governments and settle their affairs. In the many troubles of the 1990s, after the formal end of the colonial period, new African thinkers have looked back on their forebears and perceived the same truths. Unleashed by the anarchic influences of greed and crime, military or quasi-military autocracies installed by this or that ‘strong man’ and his clients have bitten deep into Africa’s customs and capacities for honest and effective self-government. The freedoms for self-government won by the nationalists of half a century ago were supposed and intended to introduce the ethos and the attitudes of a genuine democracy.
