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Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror . By Elizabeth Schmidt . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013. Pp. xx + 267. $80, hardback (isbn 9780521882385 ); $27, paperback (isbn 9780521709033 ).
Reviews of Books
This is an excellent history of the Cold War in Africa by one of America's leading Africanists. Only one of Elizabeth Schmidt's eight chapters, covering 15 per cent of the book, extends past the end of the US-Soviet competition in 1991, and only a quarter of that chapter summarizes the 'war on terror', the paradigm that provides the post-9/11 justification for Western intervention in African politics. Still, I would recommend this book for a course on today's interventions in Africa because it would place them in the historical context that so powerfully informs African politics. Western policymakers tend to downplay history's significance and appear to be surprised when enduring memories of the Mahdi and Gordon, Usman dan Fodio and his Fulani Jihad, the Zulu-British War, tribal conflicts, and collaboration with and resistance to colonial occupation burst into contemporary focus.
Foreign intervention was so incessant in Africa during the Cold War that despite ranging over all regions of the continent and telling many tales in good detail, this book must be a sampler rather than an encyclopedia. As Schmidt argues, it is hard to distinguish foreign involvement from intervention, because soft power and hard power have always been combined. With that definition every one of Africa's 55 countries deserves a lengthy treatment of its struggles and compromises with its former colonial master, the United States, the Warsaw Pact countries, and now China.
Schmidt shows how the United States and the colonial powers tried to prevent decolonization after the Second World War. When that proved impossible, they tried to control it, creating neo-colonial regimes whose indigenous elites preserved the trade and investment advantages, mineral rights, and often military bases that characterized colonialism. In a disturbing replay of the Congo 'Free' State of the nineteenth century (which...