The safari is now finished. For at least a year and a half I have been sending out announcements concerning my project to write a complete history of Africa. Well, the ninth and last paper in the series, "The Independence Years," has just gone up. This one covers the last forty years, 1965 to 2005.
I thought that some of the other history papers I had written, like Chapter 16 of the Middle Eastern series, were long, but this one is my longest yet! The original manuscript came out to 86 pages in WordPerfect, and it took two hours just to run the spell-check. Finally, I had to divide it into two parts so that my search engine could index it.
My apologies in advance to you dial-up users. This time I had to cover what was happening in fifty-three nations, compared with eighteen nations in the Middle East, thirty-six in Europe and eleven in Southeast Asia. And most of Africa's nations don't have a recent history that is dull and peaceful, like Canada or Switzerland; the last forty years have been "interesting times," in the Chinese sense of the expression. Let the record show that when I started building this website, I promised to deliver the story of "the rise and fall of just about everybody," and at least in the case of Africa, I succeeded! I think I've earned a vacation for the rest of the year, yes?
Here are the URLS and the topics covered:
Part I
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af09a.htmlIndependence: Tying Up the Loose Ends
Civil War in the Ex-Portuguese Empire
Who Owns the Western Sahara?
One-Man Rule: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
North Africa Takes a Military Road
(includes special sections on Tunisia & Egypt, Algeria, Somalia & Sudan, Libya and Mauritania)
Nigeria: The Great Underachiever
The Island at the End of the World
The Horn of Africa: Horn of Famine
(includes special sections on Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia)
Part II
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af09b.htmlSouthern Africa: The Fall of Apartheid
(includes special sections on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Southwest Africa/Namibia)
Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo: Still the Dark Heart of Africa
America's Stepchild and Her Anarchic Neighbors
(includes special sections on Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone)
The Islamist Menace
Starting Over Again With the African Union
Modern African Demographics
The Challenges Facing Modern Africa
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And here are the other papers in this series, in case you haven't seen them yet:
Chapter 1: The Original Africans
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af01.htmlChapter 2: Valley of the Pharaohs (Egypt before 654 B.C.)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/egypt.htmlChapter 3: Carthage (814 to 264 B.C.)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/carthage.htmlChapter 4: Africa in the Classical Era (654 B.C. to 641 A.D.)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af04.htmlChapter 5: The Trading Kingdoms (641 to 1415 A.D.)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af05.htmlChapter 6: The Forest Kingdoms (1415 to 1795)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af06.htmlChapter 7: The Dark Continent Partitioned (1795 to 1914)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af07.htmlChapter 8: "Wind of Change" (1914 to 1965)
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/af08.htmlSpecial Feature: A List of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and the Kings of Ancient Nubia
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/pharaoh.htmlEnjoy!