ABSTRACT
In Africa, communal conflicts were the driving force behind the spectacle of state collapse in Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Zaire, and, to some extent, Liberia and Sierra Leone. They surely brought Nigeria to the brink of collapse in 1994. In South Africa, where the state has robust institutions, the Zulu factor posed a grave threat to the 1990-1993 democratic transformation (Johnston, 1998, p. 129). Timothy Sisk and Andrew Reynolds (1998, p. 1) have noted that between 1992 and 1994, more than twenty sub-Saharan countries experienced democratic transitions; however, several have suffered reversals. Angola, Sierra-Leone, Burundi, Niger, The Gambia, and Uganda were failed cases. Eritrea is at war with Ethiopia while Zimbabwe is limping under the authoritarian rule of Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Indeed, the situation is similar to what obtained in the early years of independence when secessionist movements emerged in eighteen out of fifty two states (Young, 1993, p. 29). The difference is
that, in the past, the rival superpowers were as opposed to political recognition of ethnicity as was the dominant social science scholarship of the period. This encouraged states to adopt hegemonic controls that involved outright suppression of ethnic claims or co-optation of key elites of dissenting groups, if the former proved too costly or ineffective.
