Frontiersmen:
Warfare in Africa since 1950

Book Review

Reviews by "Old Duffer"

Anthony Clayton for UCL

Clayton wrote the excellent Longman on the wars of French de-colonisation. In this book he continues his trademark style – a clear exposition reducing events to key passages with an analysis of the main features. He approaches the rich subject in eight chapters. The first covers the independence wars to 1962 where the French yield most of their empire in Tunisia, Morocco and most impressively in Algeria, the British abandon Egypt and fight Mau Mau in Kenya, with the first stirrings in Angola.

In the independence wars to 1980 Clayton sees the arrival of a few key weapons aiding insurgency (mines, the AK-47, the RPG-7 and the SAM-7). The battlegrounds are those of the Portuguese Empire. Clayton rates the Portuguese commanders highly and records the loss of opportunity that occurred after the fall of the Caetano government. The insurgency in Western Sahara and Zimbabwe begin to take effect. The wars of integration and disintegration 1960 to 1980 "celebrates" the arrival of non-eurocentric warfare (putting aside the rascist view that the Afrikaaners are not Africans). The wars in the old Belgian colonies (Congo-Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi) are covered; the Sudan starts to collapse; Ethiopia goes from corruption to communism; Nigeria crushes secession in Biafra; Chadian factions war; Lesotho seethes; Ethiopia and Somalia fight (with Cuban support); Tanzania invades Uganda; Egypt invades Libya and sundry minor slaughters (I remember the purge of Arabs in Zanzibar from this era).

Southern Africa to 1983 covers the battles of the frontiers as the immensely skilful SADF kept the pot bubbling against its external enemies in many campaigns, and established the murderous RENAMO the better to chastise some of them. The wars in Southern Africa to 1997 then progress into the internal war (mixed up – still – with Angola), the Inkatha War (a war of succession), the inter-factional wars (and big power involvement) in Angola and Mozambique. The conclusion to all of which is that the natures of these wars left societies crime-ridden and corrupt. The wars of integration and disintegration 1980 to 1997 see the true beginning of Hobbesian horror. The Eriterian and Tigre insurgencies, the Chad wars, the POLISARIO campaigns in the Western Sahara, the Muslim-Christian wars of the Sudan, the Algerian-Islamicist wars, Zimbabwe (the 5th Brigade), Uganda, Somalia (and here come the Americans), the genocide of Burundi and Rwanda leading neatly into Zaire with the Kabila invasion. Off to Sierra Leone and Liberia for more horrors.

What is Clayton's conclusion after dissecting so skilfully (he reads like The Economist)? Not that Africa is incorrigible and bound to tribalism. Rather that the nature of Africa is that of many internal frontiers and that the population driven by poverty must war over internal resources or drive into the frontiers to take them off their neighbours. If Europe has not seen the like since the Thirty Years War that is Europe's good luck (the horrors of the Eastern Front in the last war being managed by "states" – mostly). That the unit of resource-control is often an ethnicity is not to say that all these campaigns are tribal. The state is no longer the unit of political or military control, it is more the playing field than it is the player. The catalogue of slaughter, terror, rape, famine and greed (together with foreign incompetence) is not exclusively African either; Bosnia could so easily be substituted for Burundi. As a hobby that concerns itself with war and its unpleasant handmaidens one might have expected more games on the topic – is it perhaps shame that has prevented this?

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© Copyright 1999 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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