The reigning and perhaps the most enduring orthodoxy, widely accepted among Political Science scholars and popular within the broad Social Science community, is that Africa is a post-colonial society, made up of...

The idea of writing this book came to me after one of the series of seminars tagged “brainstorming sessions” held at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, Nigeria. In contributing to the discussion, I had cynically submitted that there are no states in Africa, in the strict Westphalian sense, but only the shells or caricatures that the departed colonial...

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence leader, aptly ~summarizes the basic condition of most African countries which, though...

This chapter examines the origin, nature, historical mission and role, as well as the actual character of the state system—in other words, the entire political architecture—that colonial rule created and eventually bequeathed to Africa at independence as the post-colonial state. In reality, it is difficult to understand fully the...

Until the outcomes of the Second World War forced a rethink of the continuation of colonial...

~The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) was compelled, at the end of the Second World War, by the outcomes of that war to begin considering the inevitability of granting independence to its colonies in Asia and Africa, an act that would signify the inexorable winding...

The very close and intimate relationships that France forged and has largely maintained with its former colonies in Africa (La Francafrique as is generally known) for more than five decades can only be understood against the backdrop of France’s own predilection for power and global relevance after the Second World War. France had undoubtedly emerged from that war as a much weaker...

Portugal’s African territories were some of the last countries on the continent to secure political independence from foreign imperialist domination. And this did not happen until the middle of the 1970s, clearly a decade and a half after most of their continental neighbors had become sovereign independent nation-states. Portugal, being relatively less developed compared to the other...

Not being a colonial power in the proper tradition in Africa, the United States had no deep historical relationship with the African continent until after the Second World War when the colonies began to gain independence. Even by the time of the independence of most of the African countries in the early 1960s, seventeen of them in 1960 alone, the United States still did not have a specific foreign policy thrust toward Africa as a whole even though it established bilateral relations and maintained diplomatic presence in many African capitals. It was perhaps contented that its major European allies who were also members of NATO were the ones firmly in charge of the continent which had for centuries been the exclusive Western sphere of domination and control. However, because African independence coincided with the height of the Cold War, the continent, according to Crawford Young, was necessarily ~perceived as a “diplomatic battlefield.”

As we have made copiously clear in chapters 1 and 2 on the grant of independence, creating the colonies into viable and enduring nation-states was the furthest thing from the thoughts of the colonial powers. Britain was as guilty of this as every other colonial power. Britain’s colonial policies were merely emblematic of the general attitude of all the metropolitan countries to their African possessions. If Nigeria never really made it to becoming a real organic nation, we must not forget that that was the fulfillment of the actual intention of its progenitors. It would have been a surprise if it had actually become a nation, rather than “a mere geographical expression” that Chief Obafemi Awolowo said it was.

Before its summary decapitation by armed northern-based Tuareg separatists and their jihadist supporters in 2012, the vast but sparsely populated, landlocked West African country of Mali had a rather checkered history. From the time of its colonization by France, it was never a territory that was even remotely destined for united existence. As was common with balkanization of colonized Africa into individual territorial possessions of the respective metropolitan powers, French colonization also forcibly corralled several disparate ethnic, linguistic and racial groups, with distinctive cultures and sometimes without previous history of close interactions, into a single territorial compact for the sole purpose of plunder.

The People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria is a North African country that shares its coastal boundary with the Mediterranean Sea. It is the largest Arab country in Africa and by far the largest French colony in Africa as well. It can be described as the quintessential French settler-colony in Africa,...

The Central African country known as the Democratic Republic of Congo has since its independence been one of Africa’s failed or non-performing states. Wracked by violent internal divisions at independence, it was never able to attain proper and enduring statehood because its inherent internal contradictions fatally hobbled it from being an effective modern nation-state. According to Duncan...

Mozambique, formerly known as Portuguese East Africa, one of Portugal’s African possessions that obtained independence in the mid-1970s after a prolonged armed struggle (the others being Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), was an archetypal Portuguese colony. Like Portugal’s other possessions in Africa, Mozambique was not regarded as a colony in the conventional sense but a mere...

The analyses in the preceding chapters have succeeded in debunking the long-held notion of African post-colonial states—exposed the falsehood that the territorial states became post-colonies once they achieved independence. The so-called...

It is to Nkrumah’s conception of neo-colonialism as it relates to Africa that we must logically turn to understand the plight of the illusive post-colonial states on the continent. His firm conclusion, which indubitably describes the African state, is that “the essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward...

W. Alade Fawole is professor in the Department of International Relations at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He has taught Nigerian and African politics and Nigeria’s foreign policy at Obafemi Awolowo ­University and was, at various times, visiting professor at the University of Ibadan and Osun State University, Nigeria; visiting fellow at...

Series Editor: Olayiwola Abegunrin, Howard University