[14], In a complex civil war with outside interventions, Soviet military aid went to the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA). Cold War Alliances& Leaders. The South African government's stand found support in the Portuguese colonial regimes of Angola and Mozambique, which hung on until 1975, and the white government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), which only yielded to majority rule in 1980.All these regimes equated political opposition with a desire to overthrow capitalism and nationalise the private sector. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev rejected the idea of a revolutionary takeover of the South African government, and advocated a negotiated settlement. under Agostinho Neto and Eduardo dos Santos. The Nixon administration was working behind the scenes with Sadat to bolster his plans to send the Russians home, which they did in July 1972. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on In the early 1960s the KGB cultivated Kwame Nkrumah, charismatic first prime minister then president of independent Ghana, only to discover (by breaking Ghanaian wireless codes) that he and his cronies were squirrelling away Soviet subsidies. March 30, 1946. The West was willing to turn a blind eye to institutionalised racism and minority rule government, if that meant keeping commercial and mining investments safe from nationalisation. In other places, such as Madagascar, Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, and Zimbabwe, leaders of independent regimes merely claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, without usually developing policies consistent with a firm commitment to a particular ideological or institutional persuasion. This is an excellent treatment of the origins and development of communism or socialism on the African continent. The United States offered Africas new rulers what they needed to keep power: modern security systems. After 1962, it fought hard to prevent communist China from developing its own countervailing presence. The 1956 Suez Crisis is widely remembered as a critical event in post-war British history, which helped bring to an end the era of Britain as a global empire and superpower. Newly independent nations such as Angola, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provided the stages for some of the most bloody proxy battles between East and West, as the United States, apartheid-era South Africa and China tried to prevent the spread of communism in the global south, while Cuba and the Eastern Bloc sought to support it. In this they were discreetly supported by most of Western Europe and America. The list of external actors also includes the other Scandinavian countries, Yugoslavia, Moscows Eastern European clients, Egypt, and the Peoples Republic of China. He went into exile, followed by 1,000 of his Soviet advisors. For 40 years, the apartheid regime had presented itself as a bastion against communism a stance that had secured it a steady flow of western arms. The Cold War in Africa had ended. The Cuban missile crisis showed that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the others retaliation (and thus of mutual atomic annihilation). Without France, what would you be or do? This was the view of many French people, and of many of the 700,000 European settlers (colons) in Algeria who enjoyed the advantages of French citizenship. (1985). The Cold War had solidified by 1947-48, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe. Both powers had called on their African subjects to fight for them, and the response had been impressive: more than one million Africans fought in Europe, north Africa and the far east, and were repeatedly told that they were risking their lives for freedom and democracy. NATO has renewed itself and re-united As African movements attracted international solidarity, filmmakers went to support them, both by making films and by training filmmakers. The big players never fought each other head-on, but instead sponsored wars between their clients in Africa (and, indeed, in Asia) so that large swathes of the continent became war zones in which predominately locally recruited soldiers did the fighting. The action by Britain and France, following Nassers nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July, was ostensibly launched to halt fighting between Egypt and Israel, which had invaded the Sinai Peninsula a week earlier. From 1960, the Soviet Union became involved in several Marxist, African struggles, providing political support, weapons and military training, including to the People's Movement for the Liberation. North and South Vietnam In September 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam's independence from France, beginning a war that pitted Ho's communist -led Viet Minh. Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to unravel. The Soviet Union, too, hoped to fill that power vacuum, posing as the patron and armourer of colonial liberation movements. Angola is a country in southwest Africa. In the late 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Nationalist movements more closely aligned with the major Communist regimes, the USSR and China, did not begin to surface until the 1970s, particularly in Lusophone Africa (Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau) and Ethiopia, where liberation revolutionary movements developed. Southeast Asia. under Mengistu Haile Mariam, following By the late 1950s, however, Paris and London, which had by far the two largest colonial empires in Africa, were ready to make concessions to the Africans growing demands for self-determination. Soon after, Mixinge became one of the tens of thousands of Africans to travel to Cuba for schooling. Orwell understood it as a nuclear stalemate between super-states: each possessed weapons of mass destruction and was capable of annihilating the other. The United States threw its weight behind the rival party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), in co-operation with South Africa. For its part, the United States helped overthrow a left-wing government in Guatemala (1954), supported an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba (1961), invaded the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), and undertook a long (196475) and unsuccessful effort to prevent communist North Vietnam from bringing South Vietnam under its rule (see Vietnam War). [16], The South African government evoked the term rooi gevaar to refer the political and military threat posed by the Soviet Union's support for the guerrilla wings of anti-apartheid movements such as SWAPO and the ANC. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. By midnight, British and French troops had secured the canal zone and sparked fury from the United States and the Soviet Union. Many members of the Non-Aligned Movement (which brought together governments and liberation movements from across the Global South) saw both Soviet and Cuban intervention as another form of colonialism, a sentiment echoed in some accounts from Angola at the time. The Soviet Union, too, played an important role in the development of African cinema, training some of the continents most celebrated filmmakers in Moscow, including Ousmene Sembene,Souleymane Cisse and Abderrahmane Sissako. Throughout the ferocious Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s, Moscow provided military, technical and material assistance to the FLN, and trained hundreds of its military leaders in the USSR. Young, Crawford. United States participation in the Southeast Asia War resulted from the policy of "containment," which aimed to prevent communism from expanding beyond its early Cold War borders. The CIA wrote off Nkrumah as a vain opportunist and playboy, and in 1966 were believed to have been involved in a coup that toppled him from power. Communism in Africa. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism Online. The Cuban camp was the brightest and cleanest place in the neighbourhood, and they were known as being hardworking, friendly, fair and fun. 1950s / Cold War. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. In Kenyas villages, for example, young demobbed soldiers expressed their new confidence by scoffing at their chiefs and tribal elders. Communist societies believed in redistributing wealth (taking from the rich and giving to the poor) and promoted workers and state-run economies. Liberation movements across southern Africa were sustained by the Soviet Union and Cuba, which sent large contingents of troops to support independence fighters. Now they had to contemplate using violent means. The following day, a huge sea and air assault, supporting landings of British tanks and marines, succeeded in taking the port. Friedland, William H., and Carl G. Rosberg Jr., eds. The first is that Communism has made its gains in a comparatively short period of time. termed the "Cold War" but is, in reality, a war in which, in Africa, much heat is engendered. First, much like in Vietnam, American leaders, such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believed that a Communist takeover in Angola would lead to a "domino effect" in the rest of southern Africa. Idahosa, P.L.E. The Populist Dimension to African Political Thought: Critical Essays in Reconstruction and Retrieval. The article is particularly useful in understanding the history of Communist parties and movements throughout Africa. The upshot was that the countrys resources remained an asset of the west, and the DRC endured five years of civil war. But Fidel Castro knew that the US, reeling from its messy withdrawal from Vietnam, would not be drawn openly into another foreign war. March 1, 2023, 6:08 PM. One way by which the Soviets could win friends in the continent, as well as spread the Marxist-Leninist gospel among its future leaders, was to offer scholarships for Africans to study at universities in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. The Cold War truly began to break down during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, who changed the more totalitarian aspects of the Soviet government and tried to democratize its political system. Following a coup in 1965, he stayed in power until 1997 and amassed a personal fortune estimated at several billion US dollars by siphoning off the nations wealth. Afrocommunism. In the liberation struggles, film was a tool not only to document ongoing struggles and spread propaganda, but to inspire a sense of post-colonial, national identity. The Soviet Union withdrew its Ambassador after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Communist nations, dominated by the Soviet Union and China, withdraw from the global economic system. ", Harry Brind, "Soviet policy in the Horn of Africa. Cold War conflicts played havoc with African politics. Abboud declared himself an enemy of communism and of the Soviet-supported Nasser. Since most nations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia had already chosen sides, Kennedy and Krushchev both looked to Africa as the next Cold War battleground. Almost 450,000 Cubans served in Angola between 1975 and 1991, according to historian Edward George, not only in the military but also as much-needed doctors, teachers and technicians. same time he systematically stripped his country of its wealth and resources. The Cold War had solidified by 194748, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe. [2] In the Comintern, the chief spokesmen for Africa were whites from the Communist Party of South Africa. For NATO the war in Ukraine meant a revival in its fortunes. [12] Operating independently from the Kremlin, Fidel Castro turned Algeria into Cuba's first and closest ally in Africa between 1961 and 1965. As Soviet and American patronage (and arms) spread across the continent, Nyerere warned that a second scramble for Africa by Russia and its satellites was under way. In Somalia, Mohammed Siad Barre had seized power in a coup in 1969 and had declared Somalia a socialist republic. Krim Belkacem, who served in the French army and was later a partisan leader and a minister in the provisional Algerian government before independence, spoke for many veterans when he declared: My brother returned from Europe with medals and frostbitten feet! Expand or collapse the "in this article" section, The Congo (Now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), 19601965, War in the Portuguese Colonies, 19611975, European Communist Countries Other Than the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Art, Art History, and the Study of Africa, British Colonial Rule in Sub-Saharan Africa, Communism, Marxist-Leninism, and Socialism in Africa, Development of Early Farming and Pastoralism, Early States And State Formation In Africa, Eastern Africa and the South Asian Diaspora, Great Lakes States of Eastern Africa, The, Health, Medicine, and the Study of Africa, Historiography and Methods of African History, Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern Slave Trades, Kongo and the Coastal States of West Central Africa. US-backed rebels came to Cuban shores in what became a high-profile embarrassment for the US known as the "Bay of Pigs." Outside of China and the USSR, Cubaan island about the size of Floridawas perhaps the most influential communist nation during the Cold War. What were practiced were hybrid forms of socialism, including some that eclectically borrowed from Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theory. There was no great Soviet strategy for taking over Africa, and generally the Soviet Union was under informed about history, political structures and the needs of the countries it supported. It will not include, therefore, one of Africas greatest human dramas, the Nigerian civil war (19671970), because the two superpowers supported the federal government in Lagos. The conflicts in both countries ended in 1974 with Portugal throwing in the towel. Coming as it did on the heels of the end of the First Indochinese War, the Algerian conflict further emboldened national liberation forces throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world, a region of increasing importance to policymakers in Washington and . End of the World War II. The years following the end of the Second World War saw both the start of the Cold War between the west and the eastern bloc, and the break-up of empires as colonies across Africa and Asia strove for independence. Havana provided military and civilian assistance. [33][34] During the 1980s, a convoluted series of arms sales involving the Stasi, the Danish ship Pia Vesta, and Manuel Noriega of Panama ultimately aimed to transfer Soviet arms and military vehicles to South Africa. driving the others to use guerilla tactics to resist communist rule. Nato also armed two colonial powers, France and Portugal, in their struggles against nationalist insurgents in Algeria, Angola and Mozambique. Algeria strongly supported the Palestinian cause, and when Moscow was lukewarm in support of the Six-Day War in 1967, Algeria refused to let the Soviets build a naval base at Mers El Kbir. At times, however, realpolitik acted as a brake. A rival government, the "Free Republic of the Congo", was founded in the eastern city of Stanleyville by Lumumba supporters, led by Antoine Gizenga. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. There are also political reasons that parts of this history have been airbrushed from mainstream retellings of the Cold War not just in the West but also in Russia, which sought to downplay Cubas role compared to that of the USSR, and even Angola, where former adversaries of the MPLA mainly the USA and China have become the most important trading partners, as Christabelle Peters points out. For its part the Soviet Union was happy to give military support to the governments of Angola and Mozambique and to the ANC. Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend. Russian commentators turned scornful of the Ethiopian regime. Keller, Edmond J., and Donald Rothschild, eds. Why not here?. While this nation has a predominantly black population, for most of the 20th century it was ruled by a white African minority . In 1961, the ANC and the SACP created a joint military wing, known as the "Spear of the Nation." Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Their main aim was not socialist revolution, but to be free of military aggression from South Africa and see independence with majority rule throughout the continent. In 1988 he salvaged what he could in an agreement with the United States, by which all Soviet and Cuban forces would withdraw from the continent, and South Africa pulled out of Namibia, which was granted independence in 1990. In 1989, the Soviet Union cannot face numerous revolts, the Berlin wall is destroyed and Germany is reunited. Third it wanted to undermine Western/NATO influence. In 1962 the Soviet Union began to secretly install missiles in Cuba to launch attacks on U.S. cities. Nelson Mandela: a symbol of the struggle against racism. Infuriated by Soviet support for the Ethiopians, Somalia annulled its treaty with the Soviet Union and expelled all Soviet advisors in the country. The USSR and Cubas involvement in countries like Angola and Ethiopia has dark episodes too, and has been heavily criticised. However, these alliances were made primarily because they offered material support to the movement or dominant party in a regime, rather than being based on a clear and consistent acceptance of the guiding ideology of either the Western or Communist partner. However President John F. Kennedy and his Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver tried even harder than Khrushchev. Picture Information. Second it wanted to gain a voice in African affairs, primarily by supporting local communist parties, and providing economic and military aid to the governments. Two small countries deserve pride of place: Cuba, which sent tens of thousands of soldiers to southern Africa, and Sweden, which gave vital economic assistance to African liberation movements. The Zairean leader PresidentJoseph Please subscribe or login. The unity in the communist bloc was unraveling throughout the 1960s and 70s as a split occurred between China and the Soviet Union. Once these movements assumed power, they were termed Afro-Marxist regimes (Ottaway and Ottaway 1986, Keller and Rothchild 1987, Munslow 1986). South Africa considered the Soviet Union an enemy because it financially and militarily supported communism on the African continent. The Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, giving rise to 15 newly independent nations, including a Russia with an anticommunist leader. The highlights this week: A recently concluded Chinese Communist Party leadership meeting offered some hints about an impending . In truth, though, it marked a turning point the end of direct actions by western powers in Africa, replaced by conflicts that spread across the continent as the west and the Soviet Union tussled for influence in newly or soon-to-be independent African nations: a proxy Cold War described as a second scramble for Africa. Castros commitment to Angola was integral to a strategy that would extend the struggle for independence to neighbouring South West Africa (later Namibia) and Rhodesia (today, Zimbabwe). All thanks to the Putin regime's invasion of Ukraine. 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