ABSTRACT
The grass grows tall from May to October in much of Africa south of the Sahara. So huge fires race across the savannas and turn whole forests into walls of flame. French and Cubans alike maintained and used thousands of well-armed air and land strike-forces in support of countries willing to be their hosts. In the northern half of the continent there were wars in the Western Sahara, Chad and, of course, in the Horn itself. The conflict in Western Sahara, suspected depository for a trove of strategic minerals, at times brought Algeria near to war with Morocco, which sought to annex the former Spanish territory. The watershed in European relations with the Americans came in the mid-1950s. The late Gamal Abdel Nasser, then president of Egypt, accepted a Soviet offer of arms at a time when the British were still occupying the Suez Canal zone.
