For Africa as a whole, the final decade of the twentieth century saw little to justify the heady hopes held by many well-wishers at the end of the 1980s. True, the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union and of its empire in Eastern Europe had provided the indispensable condition for a radical change of regime in South Africa, from a white minority government to a democracy based on universal suffrage. Elsewhere, however, the partial disengagement of the two world superpowers did little to stabilize the internal divisions within African countries. To the contrary, it often set the scene for a sharp increase in civil violence, both in countries or regions that had already experienced Cold War conflicts and in those that up till then had remained relatively peaceful.

The Ashes of the Cold War in Angola and the Horn of Africa

In Angola, Jonas Savimbi continued – and even intensified – his twenty years of conflict with the MPLA government in Luanda by buying sophisticated weaponry and equipment from a circle of willing suppliers, who delivered them by air direct to his military headquarters in the bush in exchange for the diamonds mined in his political enclave in the southern part of the country. The MPLA government, deprived now of its Cuban mercenaries and Russian weapons, had to rearm itself by spending most of the royalties which it was receiving from its offshore oilfields – revenues which might otherwise have helped to reconstruct a war-torn economy.