Africa

The African continent, stretching from the Sahara desert in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, is an immense and diverse region of the world. It is in Africa that homo sapiens sapiens first evolved, and Africa played an integral role in the birth of civilization, in the Nile valley of Egypt and through that country's links of uncertain nature with the region of Ethiopia. By the First Millennium of the Common Era, interior west Africa had begun to develop complex kingdoms, while the Bantu-speaking population originally native to what is now the Biafran-Camerounais border began its steady migration south and east, to eventually colonize all of southern and eastern Africa. Following the conquest of Egypt and North Africa by the Islamic Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries, the Islamic religion and Arabic language began to slowly gain ground at the expense of the indigenous Berber and Coptic languages and their variants of Christianity. In the 13th and 14th centuries, some of the kingdoms of the West African interior had begun to adopt Islam, as had many of the trading city-states along the East African coast. The Kingdom of Mali was particularly renowned for its prosperous economy and lively court culture.

Beginning in the late 15th century, and continuing until well into the 19th century, Africa was subjected to the slave trade. Following the European discovery and conquest of the Americas, the various European colonizers -- particularly Portugal, France, and England -- began the large-scale purchase of millions of Africans via cooperative states located along the Atlantic coast. From European outposts, slaves were shipped out in the millions and sold to the highest bidder in the Americas. At least ten million Africans, taken all along the African coast from West Africa to Angola, may have been shipped to the Americas. Despite appalling mortality rates, enough Africans survived -- particularly in northern Brazil, the North American mainland, and the Caribbean -- to eventually create an African diaspora in their new homeland. Even though the slave trade provided some advantages to those Africans who collaborated with European slavers, in the long run it depopulated many of the states of the West African interior, and left Africa exposed to foreign imperialists.

Centuries of contact and exchange between Europeans and Africans had culminated by the mid-19th century in the large-scale European colonization of Africa. Although Britain's acquisition of the Cape Province could be used to define British as the first modern colonial power in Africa, France actually was the first European state to embark on the colonization of all of Africa, particularly under the Second Empire. By the time of the 1885 international Berlin Conference, most of Africa's colonial frontiers had been settled. While Germany, Italy, Brazil, Egypt, and even Spain all gained international recognition of their own colonial holdings, France and Britain ended up controlling by far the largest portions of Africa. Broadly speaking, France controlled almost all of the territory of western and central Africa to the north of the Congo basin, while Britain controlled most of the rest. Yorubaland was an interesting anomaly, as its unification in the 1820's under the city-state of Ife led directly to the adoption of a program of selective modernization comparable only to that of Japan. The traditional Yoruba religion was codified and the Muslim Yoruba city-state of Ilorin was subjugated, a written Yoruba language was created using modified Roman script, and efforts were made to develop a modern military and army. Although Yorubaland eventually became a British protectorate, in practice Yorubaland remained internally self-governing, if a convenient source for skilled and highly motivated troops to fight all over the British Empire.

The first generation of Western colonialism in Africa was marked by sternly repressive policies, aimed at transforming the colonies into cheap sources of tropical and mineral raw materials for industrializing national economies. African political activity was sternly repressed, and every effort made to maintain the colonial status quo. Beginning in the First World War, this began to change. African manpower and resources were needed by the Allies to fight the Germans, and in order to acquire these vital supplies, the French and the British had to make at least some concessions to their African colonial subjects. The Franco-British campaigns of conquest against the German colonies of Cameroun and Namibia demonstrated to Africans that the overthrow of colonial rule was possible, and that given a strong enough African population, Africans could one day regain their political independence.

In the half-century between the end of the First World War and the beginning of African decolonization in the 1960's, the colonial status quo changed dramatically. In the French territories, a growing French-educated middle class in West Africa and Gabon began to agitate for the same degree of self-government allowed by the French empire to metropolitan French (or French-populated) provinces. In the British territories -- particularly in Sierra Leone, Yorubaland, Kwazulu, and East Africa -- strong senses of national identity motivated Africans in their desire for self-rule. In the Second World War, Africans uniformly demonstrated their courage to Europeans in a hundred battles against Nazi Germany, and through African resources and soldiers the League was able to prevent first the Nazi, then the Soviet, conquest of central Europe. Through the deaths of African soldiers in the passes of the Tyrol and the fields of Hesse, Africans were finally able to win European acceptance.

Almost immediately after the end of the Second World War, first French West Africa and Gabon, then Yorubaland, Sierra Leone, and Biafra, acquired self-government, complete with national parliaments and legal systems. As time progressed, more colonial territories -- French Cameroun and Madagascar, British Botswana and the Zimbabwes -- began to acquire the trappings of self-government, while those territories already self-governing began to acquire even more power. In 1957, the French empire was transformed into the French Community, a nominal French-headed federation that included almost all of the French African territories as autonomous members. Change in the British empire in Africa was less marked -- the Union of South Africa remained a conservative and oppressive country run by the white minority of seven million despite British entreaties, while British settlers in East Africa often threatened to derail the gradual widening of East African self-government. Nonetheless, plans were made and enacted to allow Africans to live under democratic local governments, and to establish regional confederations in British East and southern Africa. Italy devoted little attention to preparing its African territories for self-government, and accordingly was condemned by the League.

In the 1960's, change in Africa accelerated sharply. In part, this was because of the growing penetration of the community-based model of development in Africa. Developed more or less simultaneously in West Africa, south India, and Angola, community-based development focused on the provision of basic health care and educational services to people in rural communities in ways acceptable to local cultures, with the aim of producing a healthy and literate population able to participate in political and economic modernization and enfranchising human rights. These programs did soon lead to rapid improvements in living standards wherever they were implemented, preparing the way for the introduction of modern methods of agriculture and the arrival of mass culture. However, they had the unintended side-effect of bringing the peasantries of Africa into national societies. In the East African Community, for instance, community-based education programs tended with few exceptions to teach in the Swahili language, a local trade language common to many of the different ethnolinguistic groups of East Africa. Soon, this usage of Swahili far beyond its traditional areas on the Indian Ocean seacoast helped to reinforce the concept of a common East African identity, often defined in anti-colonial terms.

At the same time, political change accelerated. Although events in Asia and the Middle East had an influence on Africans, probably the most significant example for Africans was the successful 1961 transition of Angola to full independence. As Angola proved that an independent African state could both maintain a profitable and peaceful relationship with its former colonizer and continue development, many Africans elsewhere in the continent wanted to emulate Angola. At the same time, political pressure applied by Britain and the League against the discriminatory racial regime of the Union of South Africa began to pay off, with the African majority's incorporation into the white-run economic system.

The first African state to gain independence was the Congolese Federation, in 1969. In the three years that followed, the Congo was quickly followed by the rest of the African continent. The French Community in Africa collapsed as its component states peacefully detached themselves from France, while the states of eastern and southern Africa joined the British Commonwealth of Nations as full members. The Italian colonial empire in East Africa fell apart more violently, with Tigrean and Somali civil wars and unrest among the Ethiopian and Eritrean peasantries, but Egyptian influence acted as a stabilizing factor. By 1972, all of Africa had become completely free member-states of the League.

The first decade of independence saw fantastic achievements in most of the states of Africa. In the Union of South Africa, an African middle class expanded immensely and came to acquire equal status with that country's whites. Lusophone Angola and Francophone West Africa and Gabon slowly began to industrialize, and the three countries' investment in education and health care began to have a noticeable effect on national statistics. Many former British colonies -- particularly Yorubaland in western Africa, and Botswana, Matabeleland, and Zimbabwe in southern Africa -- experienced the same process of modernization and growth. Despite occasional fits of growth, most of the East African Community did not experience the economic boom experienced elsewhere in the continent, though it did manage to succeed handsomely in establishing effective Community-wide mass education programs. In all of the continent, only Congo and former Italian East Africa failed to make any significant progress in maintaining or even raising living standards.

By the early 1980's, Africa seemed to be on the verge of an economic miracle. Southern Africa began to coalesce as a cohesive economic bloc, while coastal West Africa and Yorubaland seemed on the verge of a full-scale industrial revolution like that of Egypt, Korea or Mexico one generation ago. The East African Community likewise showed promise, and even the Congo saw some political stability. Absent the Third World War, the 1980's might have been just as prosperous for Africa as the previous decade. As it was, they were devastating.

Like most of the Southern Hemisphere, Africa escaped even the most perfunctory targeting of weapons of mass destruction. Most unfortunately, though, Africa was highly dependent upon food exports from the European Confederation, partly because of Africa's concentration on non-consumable crops grown for export, partly because of the shift towards urbanization and non-agricultural work. Following the decimation of the Ukrainian grain crop, almost all of Africa was thrown back on its own resources, as the food exporters of the First and Second Worlds conserved their own food for themselves. As a result of this, famine strode across the African continent, in the winter of 1982 and 1983. Angola and South Africa were spared the rigours of the winter, both thanks to their close relations with Brazil and their own productive agricultural economies. Many of the smaller, and more progressive, countries of southern Africa -- especially Botswana, Swaziland, and Ndebeleland -- were likewise able to avoid famine through strict rationing, and their larger neighbours received some food from their more fortunate neighbours. Gabon was unique in Africa in that it had the foreign exchange that it needed to buy the remaining grain exports on the international market. In all, outside of southern Africa half of the African population died of famine, of subsequent epidemics, and of the expected political strife. This figure reached an appalling 80% in Congo, as the crisis quickly escalated into a Hobbesian civil war that ended up destroying organized society across the former federation.

Even though all Africa was prostrate, most African governments were barely able to avoid a complete collapse of society, and were able to spare the urban populations of their countries from the worst effects of the famine. This imbalance between favoured urban areas and devastated rural hinterlands would later prove to be a major political problem in African countries. Just as Flagellants took advantage of Europe's 14th century decimation in the Black Death to wreak havoc, so did many revolutionary organizations -- Christian millenarians in Côte d'Or, Linbiaoist rebels in Tanganyika, pro-Iranian Islamists in Somalia -- try to overthrow the existing order, blamed for the unprecedented calamity. By 1985, Africa had recovered some measure of stability, though through sheer exhaustion more than anything else.

The process of recovery was slow. At times, many Africans and non-Africans alike despaired that Africa could ever be restored to its pre-War prosperity. Many even believed that even as the First and Second Worlds recovered, Africa would remain perpetually trapped in Third World status. Although there did seem to be proof of this, these prognosticators ignored Africa's many strength. The continent was unique, for instance, in completely avoiding any kind of targeting with weapons of mass destruction, and unlike elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter of 1982-3 and fallout caused relatively little ecological damage. Though the famines decimated the peasantries of western, eastern, and central Africa, the southern African peasantry wasn't destroyed; in fact, the complete disruption of rural societies across Africa allowed African governments to begin enacting the kinds of land reform necessary for long-term rural stability. Moreover, the educated middle and upper classes of Africa survived the traumas of the period mostly intact, and with few exceptions were generally reinforced in their adherence to democratic values. Perhaps most importantly, Europe and South America simply had too much interest in Africa and African developments to let the entire continent fall apart.

By the late 1980's, these factors above began to make themselves felt across Africa, as the continent gradually recovered. In the East African Community, for instance, and interior West Africa, determined national governments pushed through aggressive land-reform laws that established peasantries in both regions that were essentially free from the old oppressive land system. In coastal West Africa and Yorubaland, peasant agricultural cooperatives sponsored by governments and private agencies created localized and democratic community economies that were able to compete with plantation economies. The industrializing states of Africa -- particularly Yorubaland, Kenya, and West Africa -- were not able to expand their industries during this period of recovery, but they were able to keep them intact. In southern Africa, in the meantime, South Africa consolidated its position as one of the major exporters of rare metals and the eleventh-largest industrial economy in the world, and evolved into one of the most important trading nations in the area of the Indian Ocean.

At the same time, the worldwide influence of African cultures began to expand significantly. In part this was because of the increased access of Africans to worldwide communications media, whether through national television networks partly subsidized by the League or through the new popularity of West African literature and popular music, as such writers as Ousmene Sembène and musicians such as Youssou N'Dour and Salif Keita achieved world-wide popularity. Increasingly, the large number of African immigrants in Europe, South America, and Egypt ensured the wider penetration of African culture across the world.

Even before the Third World War, there were large communities of African professionals living in immigrant communities in France and Brazil, and three million West African and Ethiopian gastarbeitar living in the European Confederation. In the aftermath of the Third World War, the desperate need of the Tripartite Alliance states for unskilled labour and the desperate need of Africans to secure a living led to the creation of a second African diaspora, this time of voluntary immigrants. Insofar as generalizations can be made, Francophone West Africans and Camerounais tended to emigrate to Europe with Swahili-speaking East Africans, Angolans emigrated to Brazil, Yorubalanders and Biafrans were as likely to settle in the British Isles as in Brazil, southern Africans -- including many South Africans -- emigrated to South America and Australia, and Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Tigreans took up positions at the bottom of the Egyptian occupational ladder. By the mid-1990's, as many as 30 million Africans -- out of a 1985 African population of barely 200 million -- had left Africa on a more or less permanent basis. Although the new immigrants generally found themselves confined to the least popular and lowest-paying sectors of their host societies' economies, the sheer size of the migration could not help but create a greater awareness inside the Tripartite Alliance states of the cultural attributes associated with independent Africa.

As the 1990's began, certain trends could be perceived across Africa. For one, the African economic recovery was nearing completion. At first in West Africa and Botswana, then in most of the rest of the continent, living standards and per capita output slowly reached their pre-War levels, and then came to surpass them. Though this recovery spread from the peripheries of Africa towards the centre of the African continent thanks in part to foreign aid and immigrant remittances, the emergency reforms of the mid-1980's had managed to lay a foundation for future economic development.

At the same time, democracy became rooted in Africa. Land reform played an important role in this, as its destruction of archaic quasi-feudal relationships and simultaneous creation of a free peasantry across Africa strongly devoted to the democratic institutions that created the conditions of their economic enfranchisement. At the same time, the very fact of the Third World War weighed heavily upon the minds of politically conscious Africans. Was not the global holocaust precipitated by the reckless militarism of the Changist dictatorship in the United States, the ideological manias of China and Siberia, and the ethnic hatreds of Southeast Asia? Would the Third World War ever have happened if even one of the major combatants was a stable democracy? Despite the period of instability that immediately followed 1982-3, democracy had managed to implant itself firmly into African culture, both as an obviously useful foreign borrowing and as a natural outgrowth of the traditional consultative cultures of Africa. Anti-democratic appeals based on religion tended to fail due to the general condemnation of religious chauvinism, while ideological appeals of the left and right were rejected almost everywhere. Anti-democratic appeals based on ethnicity were particularly unsuccessful, in the view of the changes wrought in African demography.

Prior to the Third World War, Africa was extremely ethnically heterogenous. Although languages either implanted by colonialists or given federal status by modernizing regimes -- for instance, French in West Africa and Cameroun, Portuguese in Angola, and Swahili in the East African Community -- did gain large numbers of second-language speakers, they acquired relatively few first-language speakers, save in urban Angola. Indigenous languages in many parts of West Africa -- for instance Wolof and Asante in the Sénégalais and Côte d'Or provinces of West Africa, Lingala in western Congo, Kikuyu in Kenya, and Fang in Gabon -- showed every sign of becoming authentic national languages. The decimation of ethnolinguistic groups large and small across Africa, along with the consequent large-scale population movements, changed this. As new heterogenous populations began to gather together in lands once on the verge of developing their own national languages, almost all indigenous languages began to experience a shift towards the language of wider communication. In East Africa, this language was Swahili, while in West Africa, Cameroun, and Gabon the language was French, in Angola it was Portuguese, and in Biafra it was Ibo. By century's end, it seemed likely that save among certain favoured populations, most African indigenous languages would soon be on the verge of extinction.

In the 1990's, most of Africa outside the isolated Congo had achieved its statistical recovery from the ravages of the Third World War. Slowly at first, most of Africa outside the former Italian areas of the continent began to enter a period of rapid economic growth. The recovery of the South American and European economies to their pre-war levels of production no later than the mid-1990's, combined with the success of the Trade and Migration Pacts, led to the opening up of new markets for low-end manufactured goods and natural resources. Southern Africa's dependence upon its mineral exports proved a liability, due to the general decline in ore prices after the Third World War, but South Africa was able to draw upon its considerable industrial base to emerge as a major exporter. West Africa and Yorubaland achieved particular success, as their successful tropical crops achieved record crops that were eagerly consumed by the First World, and as many Brazilian and western European firms relocated their simple manufacturing plants to western Africa, in order to take advantage of the region's generally high level of education and low wages. The Holy Alliance invasion of Eurasia in 1998 did nothing to disturb this pattern -- if anything, after the initial scare it reinforced the African economic boom, as Europeans relocated more factories to those areas of Africa deemed defensible from a second invasion.

With few exceptions, modern Africa is an area rapidly advancing towards Second World status. Western Africa  -- including the states of West Africa, Yorubaland, Biafra, Cameroun, and Gabon -- has arguably made the most rapid social and economic progress. On the eve of independence, western Africa lacked a South African-style industrial economy, although Yorubaland and Gabon did benefit considerably from the large petroleum and natural gas deposits in both countries. Despite its poverty, though, western Africa did have several advantages over South Africa, including relatively stable democratic governments, a development model that sought explicitly to allow all residents access to basic health care and education, and a strategic location lying between South America and Europe. While Gabon settled for an economy based on a monoculture of oil exports, Yorubaland wisely invested its profit from oil exports in mass education programs and basic industrial manufactures. West Africa and Cameroun concentrated on improving the quality of life of West African and Camerounais residents and on developing stable markets for agricultural exports and basic manufactures. Biafra, in the meantime, languished under a series of corrupt and brutal military dictatorships.

Although the Gabonais economy has slid away from Second World status due to the decline in oil prices, Biafra has continued its stagnation and Cameroun has made only moderate progress, in the post-War era West Africa and Yorubaland have progressed by leaps and bounds. Yorubaland's 15 million residents -- 11 million of these ethnic Yoruba practicing traditional Yoruba religion, the remainder being Yoruba Muslim and Christian converts and Christian Biafran immigrants -- live in what is rapidly becoming an urbanized and industrialized country, with a federal constitutional monarchy that has encouraged the development of a Yoruba culture that is modern while identifiably Yoruba in language and mores. West Africa is more complex, but the federation as a whole has done reasonably well, with the coastal provinces of Senegal, Guinée, Côte d'Ivoire, and Côte d'Or emerging as prosperous, cosmopolitan and Francophone areas highly dependent on profitable exports of manufactured goods to foreign countries and even off-world. With life spans ranging from 54 years in Biafra to 69 in West Africa, and literacy rates either in French or in Yoruba no lower than 60% and rising, western African enjoy reasonably good standards of living. Save Biafra, all of western Africa has managed to develop more-or-less stable democratic systems that are largely immune to the temptations of inter-ethnic violence or international war, at the same time that it has created the environment for such brilliant African writers and musicians as Ousmène Sembène, Fela Kuti, and Alpha Blondy to achieve world preeminence. All taken, western Africa seems set to fulfill its potential in the decades to come.

By contrast, central Africa is little short of apocalyptic. Under French rule, the Congo was cruelly exploited, with up to a quarter of the Congolais population dying in the early colonial era of overwork and outright brutality before world outcry forced France to alter its colonial policies. In the generations that followed, France did little to prepare the Congolese for independence, and the 14 years of Congolese independence were marked by a series of military dictatorships prone to the massacre of ethnic minorities and dissidents that outdid each other in embezzling huge amounts of money from the national treasury and destroying the natural infrastructure. The chaos following the War and famines did in what remained of Congolais society, and of the thirty-odd million Congolais alive before the War, as few as six or seven million survived. In 2000, Congo was divided into two League mandates, West Congo and East Congo. So far, progress towards the creation of a unified and benign regime in either Congo has been limited by the region's immense poverty.

Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé e Principe are unique in Africa, since they alone remain overseas territories of their colonial powers. Both countries were colonized by their respective colonial powers, Spain and Brazil, in the late 19th century; both countries used their island territories as convenient sources of cocoa for domestic consumption and export; both countries handed the government of their islands over to corrupt and brutal colonial elites. Throughout the 20th century, many Equatorial Guineans and São Tomeans sought to emigrate either to Angola or to Gabon, a French colony created as a home for slaves freed from slave ships and free immigrants from the French Caribbean. In the 1950's and 1960's, efforts were made by the Spanish and Brazilian governments to prepare these territories for independence, but the populations of both nations feared that their fragile economies couldn't support independent states. Today, Equatorial Guinea is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain, while São Tomé e Principe is an overseas territory of Brazil. Both nations are heavily dependent upon aid from their national and confederal governments, and more than half of all people born on both islands live elsewhere, mainly in Brazil and Europe.

Southern Africa is the only region of Africa that escaped the famines and plagues associated with the Third World War elsewhere in Africa. For Lusophone Angola, this luck came as a natural consequence of its intimate political and economic relations with Brazil. Most of the rest of the region was fed from the produce of the efficient modern farms of the Federal Republic of South Africa. In the generation since the abandonment of apartheid, South Africa has approached true First World status and maintains a non-racist democratic society, but it is fragmented between an impoverished African peasantry forming half of the South African population and the remainder, primarily members of the working, middle, and upper classes made up of the two million Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, the ten million descendants of European immigrants, and ten million middle-class Africans. The strong racial component of South Africa's class structure is a burning political problem; all of South Africa's political parties are forced to address the question of how the South African peasantry can be lifted into the First World. South Africa's problems have been aggravated by the fact that South Africa's mines, long the linchpin of the South African economy, are becoming increasingly irrelevant and unproductive given the unlimited supplies of diamond, gold, and goal at low prices made newly available thanks to the ITA. As the use of labour-saving machinery in South African homes and factories makes the large numbers of unskilled but low-paid South African workers irrelevant, rich South Africans are faced with a choice between a society polarized between rich and poor, or a society beggared by a costly program of socioeconomic reform. Recent signs that South Africa may begin to prosper through its exports of manufactures to other Second World countries off-world may possibly provide a means to escape this dilemma.

Compared to the smaller states of southern Africa, though, the Republic of South Africa is prosperous. Save for Lusophone Angola, colonized by Brazil and maintaining to this day a stable democratic system and prosperous economy, southern Africa was exclusively colonized and exploited by Britain. The chiefdoms and kingdoms of southern Africa were conquered piecemeal over the course of the last quarter of the 19th century by British soldiers, advancing inland from British South Africa. There was little British settlement in the region, unlike in South Africa or even east Africa. Thus, even though Zambia and Katanga had considerable deposits of copper and other metallic ores, and Zimbabwe, Ndebeleland, Botswana had large tracts of relatively empty farmland, white settlement was quite limited. Native societies in southern Africa survived with considerably less disruption than almost anywhere else in British Africa, despite the large-scale conversions of the southern African populations to Protestant sects of Christianity, and the seasonal migration of workers to and from the mines of South Africa. In the 1950's and 1960's, the nine different protectorates and states of British southern Africa -- from north to south, Katanga, Zambia, Malawi, Barotseland, Beira, Zimbabwe, Ndebeleland, Botswana, and Swaziland -- were prepared for gradual independence, within a Southern African Community on the East African model. Only within a cohesive regional framework, it was felt, could southern Africa outside the Republic of South Africa maintain its independence in any meaningful way.

Although southern Africa has made some progress since its states gained full independence in 1970-1, with states such as Ndebeleland and most notably Botswana making Angola-like transitions to near-Second World status, in many other respects southern Africa fell quite short of its initial promise. The Southern African Community had effectively collapsed by 1976 as a result of rivalries between the different component nations, and a poisonous dispute over the region's division into democratic states (Botswana, Namibia, Ndebeleland, Zambia) and dictatorial states (Barotseland, Katanga, Malawi). By the early 1980's, all southern Africa had all been drawn into the orbit of the Union of South Africa, becoming heavily dependent on South African agricultural and industrial exports and providing only raw materials in return. As the 1990's progressed, the effects of population pressure had made themselves felt throughout southern Africa. For the first time, large numbers of southern Africans -- most peasants, but including an alarmingly large number of trained professionals -- began to emigrate, to Brazil and to the British Isles. So far, most of southern Africa has not experienced the sharp fertility declines and rapid increases in literacy that mark other African states, and the region's long-term prosperity and stability can only suffer.

The islands located to the southeast of the African continent, in the Indian Ocean, are a motley lot, united only by their common colonization by France, and their loose association in the Conseil de l'Entente de l'Océan Indien. Madagascar is by far the largest of these island states, with a land area equivalent to that of France and a population of some ten million, and also the poorest. With few exceptions, all Madagascarenes are descended from seaborne colonists from Malay-speaking areas of Southeast Asia who arrived on their new island homeland early in the First Millennium. Since then, Madagascarenes had hardly any interaction with the outside world until the beginning of the French colonial period, maintaining a collection of traditional monarchies populated by people who practiced various local religions and who grew rice for their sustenance. In its 26 years of independence since 1974, Madagascar has managed only small improvements in the standard of living of the general population, with a relatively well-educated population that nonetheless is growing so rapidly as to threaten the surviving Madagascarene rain forests. The Seychelles and Comoros are equally poor, but each have a population of little more than a hundred thousand people, all Swahili-speaking Muslims. Mauritius and Réunion are African only by virtue of their roles as entrepôts between Africa and Asia, each home to more than one million well-educated people, with a Francophone elite that rules over a highly diverse Creole-speaking population that includes the descendants of 18th century African slaves and 19th century Indian indentured labourers. The Kerguélen Islands are a sub-Antarctic archipelago that was colonized in the 1890's by the families of fishermen from Brittany and Ireland who sought to take advantage of the island's profitable off-shore fisheries; to this day, the fifteen thousand Kerguélenais comprise the only majority-white independent African state. The Conseil states are cautiously moving towards a closer union, hindered only by fears of Madagascarene domination. The general indications are that the Conseil states will experience rapid growth in their tourism and manufacturing industries, and that they will begin to converge with the rest of Africa.

The East African Community is a promising region of Africa. In the pre-colonial era, the East African coast -- including what are now the Community member states of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar -- was organized in a collection of city-states under Omani sovereignty united by their common Swahili language, while the Great Lakes region sported a collection of opulent kingdoms as advanced as any other in Africa. Most of the rest of the region -- including the animist tribals of Sudan and the denizens of Oromia -- was populated by agricultural or nomadic tribes. In the 1870's, British forces suddenly descended on the region. Within a decade of its initial conquest had conquered the entire region save for Tanganyika, which became German East Africa, and treaties signed with the Franco-Egyptians and Italians in the 1890's confirmed British sovereignty over Oromia and Sudan.

Under British colonial rule, East Africa experienced the best and worst of colonialism. Almost from the moment that the colonial period began, serious attempts were made by the liberal British colonial regime to establish simple schools for the young, and medical programs for the general population. Drawing upon British lessons taken from the Indian Raj and Yorubaland, the more substantial kingdoms of the Great Lakes area were administered indirectly, allowing them to retain a certain amount of autonomy and legitimacy. In coastal Kenya, though, African-owned lands were confiscated and given to hundreds of thousands of Indian and British immigrants, while German colonial policy in Tanganyika at times verged upon genocide. The fall of German East Africa to British colonial troops in 1915 brought an end to German misrule, and for the first time ever all of East Africa was united in a single political/territorial unit.

In the interwar era, the situation for most East Africans generally improved. Tanganyika and Zanzibar together constituted a nucleus for the expansion of a specifically East African Swahili-speaking culture, borne across the region by trade and migration. In Kenya, African discontent with British colonialism spurred a radicalization of Kenyan nationalists in Nairobi. Beginning in the 1930's, a broad-based nationalist movement spread among the dispossessed Kenyans of the new cities, and was copied elsewhere, particularly among the kingdoms of the Great Lakes and among the students of the mission schools of Sudan and Tanganyika. The cooperative movement made rapid headway in the region, and by the end of the 1940's most East Africans depended on locally-owned British East Africa was untouched by the Second World War, but many East Africans served as soldiers in the Indochinese front and took back with them the knowledge that the war was fought by Britain on behalf of suppressed peoples. The parallels with the East African situation were obvious, and were used by East African nationalists to justify the independence of their homelands, linked in some kind of federal framework akin to that emerging in Europe and South America at the same time. Against the opposition of the white minority, but with the support of independent India and British public opinion, plans for independence were made.

On the 1st of August, 1964, the member states of the new East African Community -- from north to south, Sudan, Oromia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar -- gained independence from Britain. The first 18 years of independence saw a remarkable fluorescence. Mass education and medical programs penetrated deep into the populations of East Africa, while the profits from agricultural exports and tourism fueled a modest economic boom. Living standards rose dramatically and continually across the region, which remained united in a loose federal arrangement, united by their British colonial history and by their common use of the Swahili language. Tanganyikan-born Community Prime Minister Julius Nyerere exemplified East Africa's new modernity, and became a world leader on behalf of Africans and the Third World. The Third World War devastated East Africa, leading to the death of half of its pre-War population, but East Africa's assets remained intact. In the course of the recovery from the travails of the War in the 1980's and 1990's, the East African Community quickly became one of the most influential unions in the Third World and Africa, while the rapid growth of Swahili-language use across vast swathes of the Community created the groundwork for a future homogeneous population. At the beginning of the Third Millennium, though still poor the East African Community was making amazing progress. The appointment of East African jurist Alexandra Nyerere -- prosecutor of United States president and génocidaire Chang -- to the ITA Supreme Court in late 1999 demonstrated East Africa's immense progress.

By contrast, northeastern Africa is fragmented and impoverished. Almost from the moment of Italy's unification, Italian statesmen longed to create an Italian empire in this unorganized region. Beginning in the 1880's, Italian traders began to establish themselves, with government support, along the Eritrean and Somali coasts. In the 1890's, the Italian army swiftly descended on the Horn of Africa, first upon the disunited nomads of Somaliland, then upon Ethiopia. Eritrea and Tigre were quickly seized, and in order to avoid complete conquest the Ethiopian government submitted to an Italian protectorate. Unlike in Libya, there was little Italian settlement in Italian East Africa, little foreign investment of any kind, and little foreign interest at all. Upon Italy's withdrawal from the region in 1970, Somaliland promptly collapsed into a state of multi-sided clan warfare from which it has only begun to emerge, while Eritrea and Tigre fell under the rule of oppressive Sinophile governments of national liberation and Ethiopia itself emerged as a functioning if repressive absolute monarchy. The shocks of 1982-3 devastated northeastern Africa just as it did the rest of the continent, and only Ethiopia remained intact. In the post-War era, Ethiopia has slowly begun to emerge as a more prosperous state, and in 1998-9 the Ethiopian government absorbed an influx of almost a million educated refugees from Empires-Earth's Ethiopia, as part of a desperate program to modernize Ethiopian society and prevent the steady flow of emigrants to Egypt and central Europe.

Pan-African sentiments had emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, as the first educated African classes became fully aware of their continent's colonization. It was only in the 1960's, after the French, British, and Brazilian empires collapsed, and South Africa became a democratic multi-racial state, that Pan-Africanism became a force to reckoned with. In 1972, the independent states of Africa formed the Pan-African Union, a regional organization charged with creating the conditions for a broader African union and strengthening Africa vis-à-vis the outside world, headquartered in the Gabonais capital of Libreville. The Pan-African Union slowly faded into obsolescence, as divisions between Francophone and Anglophone states and amongst southern African states became evident, and the Third World War made Pan-Africanism completely irrelevant. In the 1990's, the recovery of most of the continent has led to something of a resurgence of Pan-Africanism, this time expanded to include the large African diasporas in the Americas and Europe. This new spirit of Pan-Africanism was demonstrated by the Mandate of West Congo, founded in 2000 and governed by a consortium of Francophone states in Africa and the Caribbean.

As the Third Millennium began, the outlook for Africa seemed brighter than ever before. In April of 2000, more than a decade of lobbying by African governments finally led to the transformation of the anarchic area of the Congo into two League mandates, West Congo and East Congo. Public opinion polls revealed that the majority of the African population was content with the fact that Africa was increasingly able to participate in world affairs. As the African economic boom continues, and the countries of Francophone Africa, the East African Community, and the Federal Republic of South Africa begin to exploit the abundant opportunities for trade and cultural exchange with their neighbours on their world and others, the future for Africa looks reasonably bright -- indeed, there may be an African Renaissance.