ABSTRACT
By June 1978 the magnitude of the Soviet Union’s involvement in Africa left little doubt that it was the result of a deliberate strategy. The last scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century was, at least nominally, ended by the Treaty of Berlin in 1884, which allocated spheres of influence between competing colonial powers. The critical cases in Black Africa, which have given Russia, in particular, the cue, began with the civil war in Angola in 1975-1976. Earlier interest had been based upon the general revolutionary assumption that oppressed African peoples would rise against colonial authority everywhere. Apart from the Congo, Guinea provided the Russians with their first real experience of the unpredictability of Africa. The absence of Communist parties in Africa forced the Soviet Union to trust apparently bourgeois African leaders to lead their populations towards socialism.
