Module 3: Africa in Crisis
Monday 2 – Friday 6 July
Professor Julian Cobbing
Department of History
Overview
The realisation that Africa was in crisis developed rather suddenly in the 1980s when the optimism that had accompanied African decolonisation in the 1960s faded as a result of the Ethiopian famine of 1983-84 and an African debt crisis that put a brake on any serious hopes of economic development. Since then the situation in Africa has worsened. In the words of Peter Schwab (writing in 2001): ‘overall, sub-Saharan Africa, in the past decade, has been visited by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine and Death – who have begun their mad, desolating course over the heads of humanity.’
In this module, we examine some of the key causes, symptoms and events of the crisis, including the catastrophes in Rwanda and Sudan, and HIV-AIDS in Africa.
Seminar Programme
1. The ‘Gatekeeper’ State and Its Pathology
This is the foundational topic without which the other seminar themes make little sense.
Are sub-Saharan states true nation states or something else?
2. Population Increase, Famine and Food Dependency
Why are fertility and demographic growth rates so high in Africa, and what are the consequences? Why is it that most African countries are dependent on food imports to help feed their growing urban populations?
3. HIV-AIDS in Africa
Is AIDS an African disease? Why has HIV-AIDS spread more rapidly and destructively in Africa than anywhere else in the world? Why is the pandemic at its most serious in South Africa, the continent’s richest country?
4. The Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath in Congo-Kinshasa
What combination of social and political stresses can result in the mass killing of 15% of a country’s population under the eyes of the UN and with no international intervention? How was the genocide organised and carried out, and by which sections of the Rwandan elite?
Why was the mainly Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front of Paul Kagame compelled for its own security to conduct further operations in eastern Congo-Kinshasa, and how did that trigger the Congo civil war of 1996–2003 (sometimes called Africa’s ‘First World War’)?
5. ‘The Coming Anarchy’? The Ongoing War in Western Sudan
How far do the themes of Robert Kaplan’s famous article ‘The Coming Anarchy’, published in early 1994 in reaction to wars in west Africa, apply to the wars in western Sudan? What is driving the Arab vs black African war in Darfur?
