Besides her natural beauty, the scenery and the climate, and her abundant wildlife and natural resources, Africa is probably best known as the homeland of hundreds of millions of people who live in abject poverty. Millions are wracked by disease and blinded by ignorance. And just as many go hungry every day. But there is something else which also distinguishes Africa: lack of unity among her people. That is one of the main reasons why they were conquered by foreigners, and why Africa is still weak and poor today. There is no other continent which is endowed with so much in terms of natural resources. But there is also no other continent where it has been so easy for foreigners to take what does not belong to them. This book began as a self-examination of the African personality in an attempt to understand Africa's place in the world, especially in relation to the West.

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This work focuses on the early years of independence and the problems African countries faced soon after the end of colonial rule. Many of those problems still exist today. They include poverty and underdevelopment; adoption of alien ideologies and economic and political systems; structural flaws of the modern African state and its institutions inherited at independence; nation-building, democratization, national integration, and ethnoregional rivalries among others. It is also a historical study of the continent since the partition of Africa by the imperial powers and of the struggle for independence. It also focuses on the continent's demographic composition, shedding some light on the complexity and diversity of the world's second largest continent. The history of Africa's indigenous peoples and their earliest contact with foreigners provides a background to this telescopic survey. The sixties was one of the most important decades in the history of Africa and this work provides a balanced perspective on those years when Africans celebrated the end of colonial rule on their continent. It is a compact study covering a vast expanse of territory from the advent of imperial rule to the attainment of sovereign status for African countries during the sixties and the problems they faced in those years. As a demographic portrait, it excels in depicting the continent as a tapestry that reflects the racial diversity and multiethnic composition of this vast land mass, the second largest after Asia. And as a historical and political analysis, it addresses some of the most important issues in the post-colonial era including the Cold War, with the Congo figuring prominently in the analysis as thefirst theatre of combat and super-power rivalry in the early sixties on the African continent. The dawn of freedom provided opportunities and challenges for the young African nations as they tried to modernize and consolidate their independence in a world dominated by major powers and contending ideologies. It was a rude awakening to the harsh realities of nationhood. One of these was the desire by the major powers to turn African countries into client states as the two ideological camps, East and West, competed for world domination. As Julius Nyerere warned, "We are not going to allow our friends to choose our enemies for us." One of the most contentious grounds for this hegemonic control was, of course, the Congo, right in the middle of the continent. It became the bleeding heart of Africa as the country was turned into a combat theatre mainly between the surrogate forces of the West and the Congolese nationalist forces supported by a number of African countries and by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The Congo imbroglio since the turbulent sixties mainly as a result of foreign intrigue and intervention is one of the most important subjects addressed in this book. And it raises serious questions that have profound implications even today for a continent mired in conflict; this time ignited by the Africans themselves in many - but not in all - cases. Yet, prospects for the world's poorest and most embattled continent are not bleak if Africans seek their own solutions to their own problems in this post-Cold War era of globalization dominated by the industrialized nations. The book includes many photos from the early sixties, the dawn of a new era when Africancountries won independence, which Oginga Odinga described as "Not Yet Uhuru."

This is a historical narrative and analysis of the unconstitutional changes of government in most West African countries where military rule became institutionalised more than in any other part of the continent from the sixties to the nineties. There is no specific reason why the region has suffered from usurpation of power by soldiers more than any other part of the continent, besides the desire by soldiers to rule, recently demonstrated by coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, Guinea in 2021, and Burkina Faso in 2022. Governments in West Africa are no more unstable or weaker than their counterparts in other parts of the continent. Overthrowing governments became a continental phenomenon when military rulers went on to legitimise their their seizure of power through rigged elections by turning themselves into civilian rulers. They “civilianised” themselves, not only to claim that they were no longer military rulers but were democratically elected leaders; a manipulation of power that triggered counter-coups by their opponents to end their rule, resulting in many deaths in many countries where this violent change took place. Military rule in Africa started soon after independence in the sixties. The most ambitious goals in the postcolonial era were consolidation of the state and nation building with varying degrees of success in different parts of the continent. Military rulers proved to be no better than their civilian counterparts they had replaced. In most cases, they were even worse and used coercive power of the state to perpetuate themselves in office just as their civilian counterparts did. The result was consolidation of the state as an instrument of oppression, the most oppressive apparatus being the executive branch itself, invested with all the powers, which evolved into the imperial presidency, a phenomenon that persists in some African countries legitimised through rigged elections enabling leaders to remain in office under the guise of democracy “in the name of the people.”