UNITED NATIONS, DECOLONIZATION, AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN COLD WAR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1960-1994, THE

The history of the United Nations since 1960 is very much a history of Africa's postcolonial struggles. Prior to 1960, the UN played little role in sub-Saharan Africa (as separate from many General Assembly resolutions critical of the white-ruled state of South Africa), and until 1960 it could count only four members from the sub-Saharan region: Liberia, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Guinea. After 1960, increasing African representation enlarged the General Assembly, so much so that by 1965 the United Nations had 29 members from sub-Saharan Africa. Africa has engaged the UN more than any other region, and since 1965, African representatives to the UN have comprised the largest bloc from any continent.

The UN's involvement with Africa grew parallel to the process of decolonization. In sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations would face some its greatest Cold War-era challenges and endure several stunning failures. It would struggle with the consequences of colonial maladministration, underdevelopment, and exploitation, beginning in 1960 in the former Belgian Congo, where the United Nations embarked upon a massive, unprecedented, undertaking of peacekeeping in the midst of heightened Cold War tensions, amidst weak state institutions, in the face of a violent, unforgiving, secessionist crisis, and a predatory former colonial overseer. In South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and South West Africa (now Namibia) the United Nations confronted the ongoing legacy of white colonial settlement and the struggle for self-determination during decades of white minority rule and Cold War geopolitics. In Angola and Mozambique, the UN faced the challenge of reconstituting societies shattered by the Cold War and, in post-Cold War Somalia, the United Nations sought to respond to a massive humanitarian crisis, but soon confronted the limitations of peacekeeping and nation-building in the face of a meltdown of local civil institutions. In Rwanda, perhaps the UN's greatest failure to date, the international community's passive response, attributed to the "humanitarian fatigue" spawned by Somalia, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 800,000 people, damaging the UN's credibility in Africa and beyond. And, finally, in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the unhappy precedents of the Congo, Somalia, and Rwanda impeded an international response to a crisis involving multiple states and resulting in the deaths of perhaps as many as 2 million people - one of the worst examples of human suffering since World War II.

AFRICAN DECOLONIZATION AND THE ERA OF DAG HAMMARSKJOLD, 1953-1961

The longterm problems stemming from colonial domination in Africa, the complicated nature of decolonization, and the devastating consequences of the Cold War ensured that sub-Saharan Africa would become the United Nations' major area of involvement after 1960. The slave trade and the violent exploitation with which the European powers dominated Africa contributed to Africa's postcolonial crisis on a number of levels. The European presence in Africa was a brutal example of imperial violence, as the colonial powers often ruled Africa through the harshest of means, employing strategies of enslavement, economic exploitation, social engineering, and, at times, genocide. This violence became integral to the process of human exploitation and resource extraction employed by the European powers. Forced labor and the destruction of indigenous societies became commonplace in the quest for riches and arable land. To maintain their hold on Africa, the colonial powers created exploitative hierarchical social systems and Europeans encouraged a rigid ethnic categorization among Africa's many peoples. These systems of control persisted well after decolonization, providing many postcolonial African regimes with institutionalized systems of repression and exploitation, and many postcolonial regimes merely maintained these exploitative legacies.1

Decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa confronted the United Nations with unique problems, as the end of colonial power came relatively late to most of the region. By contrast, much of colonial Asia and the Middle East had already enjoyed at least a decade of independence when Africa began to emerge from colonialism. By the time the "winds of change" swept through Africa, the European powers had already abandoned most of their colonial enterprises elsewhere. In Asia and the Middle East, the Europeans departed after decades of repressing well-organized indigenous societies and political elites. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, European colonial power often began to recede before the emergence of organized indigenous political movements. In many areas the resulting postcolonial chaos occurred because the European powers did little to prepare the local populations for independence. Furthermore, colonial contact often exacerbated African problems, leaving behind legacies of arbitrary borders, underdeveloped infrastructure, economic exploitation, ethnic and racial divisions, and over-dependence on the production of raw materials.2