ABSTRACT
Grim crisis during the 1980s cast a sombre light over the real achievements and gains of independence. That kind of shadow was nothing new in the ups and downs of any continent's long-term history. But now in Africa this crisis seemed as new as it was generally unexpected, no doubt because of the high optimism of the earlier independence years. The white man's world tended to bewail the fate of the black man's continent while forgetting the catastrophes through which the white man's world had itself been obliged to pass, during the Second World War, less than fifty years earlier.
