Jack Buehring
Mr. Zinselmeyer
Modern African History
November 28, 2017
Country Case Studies
The colonial legacy of Rwanda, Angola, and South Africa caused internal conflict because it set the stage for a lack of political precedence, ethnic tensions, and government corruption.
Rwanda shocked the world in 1994 when the Hutu ethnic group began genocide on the Tutsi minority group. While Germany and a Belgian, former rulers of Rwanda, did little to stop the genocide, they did a lot to fuel the ethnic tensions in the small country. It is extremely difficult for an outsider to separate the two groups from each other, as both speak Kinyarwanda, look physically identical, and the intermarriage between the two groups had only furthered the confusion of separating the two groups. Ancient legends tell a story that explains the pre-colonial class system, in which the Twa, a small minority population, were the outcasts, the Hutu’s servants, and the Tutsi aristocrats. As Catholic missionaries spread across Rwanda, they encouraged mostly self-subsistent Hutu farmers to grow cash crops like coffee and educated many Hutus in Western schools. When the death of the mwami, or king, in 1959 sparked a bloody revolution of the Hutu over the Tutsi. Three years later, when the Rwandans gained independence, the political precedence of Tutsi rule over the Hutu had flipped, and the Hutu now had political control. Ethnic competition for political power resulted in violence, during which hundreds of thousands of Tutsi fled to adjacent countries like Uganda and Tanzania. The Rwandan Patriotic Front was a military group formed in Uganda by ethnic Tutsis to take back the Hutu-controlled government that the Belgians had left them with. This group attempted to regain Tutsi control of Rwanda in 1992, and what followed was the horrible ethnic genocide of Tutsis by the Rwandan government. The Tutsis and the Hutus were similar people before the colonial war. They were merely divided by class, with the Tutsi ruling over the Hutu. After the Belgians entered Rwanda, they immediately destroyed whatever political precedence the Tutsis had and replaced it with Hutu people who sympathized with the Belgian cause, leading to the horrible divide and genocide between two ethnic groups that were never really different from each other in Rwanda.
In South Africa, the internal struggle was not between two indigenous ethnicities, but rather a struggle between the English settlers and the African natives. When the colony of South Africa was established by England, swarms of British immigrants, mostly male, settled in South Africa. They brought with them attitudes of superiority against darker-colored peoples that resulted from the European expansion and growth of the slave trade. Makes far outnumbered their female counterparts, and what resulted was three-quarters of the children born to slave women at the Cape up to 1671 were of mixed descent. The English are notorious for failing to recognize mixed children as true “English,” and what resulted was a confusion of belonging for the mixed children, further completing the ethnic difference between the two groups. The “Bastards,” as they are known as, were normally excluded from white society and increasingly confined to inferior roles. When South Africa gained independence, an apartheid, or a political system of institutionalized racism, was established. The extremely racist political systems fall in 1994 has since only increased racial division and tension between the native Africans and the whites. Since the native Africans took democratic control all the way up to today, white farmers have been innocently killed in what many are calling a genocide against the English settlers. Of course, none of this racial tension or genocide would have ever taken without the English settlement and establishment of South Africa as a colony. The colonial roots of racism facilitated the tensions between the two ethnic groups in the South Africa.
Angola is different from the previous two countries because the tensions between groups were not ethnic, but rather political. Angola was ruled by Portugal until 1975 when its independence triggered a three-way war for power that is one of the longest wars in African history. The three parties were funded by different international countries who sought influence in the oil-rich country. The MPLA was a communist party backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. The ties to Cuba were so close that Cubans fought in Angola for the MPLA. They sought to add yet another communist puppet during the Cold War with the United States and the free world. The FNLA was a party backed by Zaire, current day Congo D.R., and various other African nations. Their leader was educated in the capital of Zaire and many Congolese soldiers fought on Angolan soil for the FNLA. UNITA was the third fighting force, and they were supported by the United States and South Africa. Their leader, Jonas Savimbi, was Western-educated at the University of Lisbon in Portugal and broke off of the FNLA to start his own party, and actually ended up getting funding from China, which enraged the Soviets. The damage that the Angolan Civil War had on Angola was immense. The fate of their country was in the hands of international alliances, and they were divided into three political parties, not to mention all the different ethnic groups that live in Angola. The lack of political precedence that Angola was faced with after Portugal packed up and left in 1975 left a power vacuum so big that the country fought for twenty-seven years to decide who would claim it. The internal corruption and manipulation only deepens the lack of national unity and makes the issue a lot harder to fix.
In conclusion, the colonial inaction of Africa, an event that has completely progressed, still affects the fate of Africa in a huge way. It left the budding countries with no blueprints on how to rule over the diverse crowd of people under a country of which the people feel no connection to. With no guidance, Africa tried to keep up with the fully mature global market, but its failure to do so spiraled it into more chaos and instability. It placed different ethnicities against each other in a race for the potential for large masses of money, power, and resources that many African nations hold. However, government corruption has ruined the future of Africa. Its corruption compels lower funding, which spirals into more corruption. The private investors interested in the industrial future of Africa are scared off by the whole continents failure to secure political stability and destroy corruption. Looking at the past of Africa, we see a continent focused on a monoculture society that could never thrive in the modern global market. Colonisation has set the stage for the failure of Africa for a long time, and as Africa matures, or at least attempts to reach thyme economic prowess that the United States and China have, they are kept down by neo-colonialism. The independent former colonies of European nations have the language and tradition of primarily trading with its parent, and thus, Africa has not diversified its market enough to thrive. The lack of a national unity, which stems from the lack of political precedence, has further divided the countries as they seek to find one goal and stick with it for a long time. political revolutions are very common in Africa, for example, Zimbabwe just took their president, Robert Mugabe, out of power and plan to elect a new leader to move the country to a new direction. As we evaluate Africa and its struggles, we must never forget its past, one of submission to more powerful foreigners and transformation into a monoculture and simplicity that currently plagues the continent as it attempts to reintroduce itself into the global market as the diverse and resource-filled continent that it is.