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Military Intervention in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Claude Welch
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Extract

During the Nigerian civil war. Punch published a four-panel cartoon whose simplicity elegantly portrayed a common view of Africa’s future. The first panel depicted an outline map of the continent; the second showed another outline map, this one inscribed with colonial frontiers. Panel 3 contained the outline map, crisscrossed with a crazy-quilt of borders. The final panel showed a heap of fragments at the bottom, the continent having disintegrated.

Cartoonists enjoy the liberty to lampoon or to caricature, yet their exaggerations must be based on fact, or on a shared perception of fact. By the year 2000, will the cartoonist’s version, widely shared when printed, have become reality?

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , Winter 1978 , pp. 40 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978 

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References

Notes

1. Huntington, Samuel P., The Soldier and The State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 97 Google Scholar.

2. Zartman, I. William, International Relations in the New Africa (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 196 Google Scholar.

3. Ibid., p. 116.

4. The most significant was the Belgian-encouraged secession of Katanga, which further roiled the complex Congolese political scene. The importance of ethnic solidarity in the proclamation of Biafra needs no comment here. For commentary on Western Africa border disputes to 1966, see Zartman, pp. 105-116.

5. Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 13 Google Scholar.

6. van der Berghe, Pierre, “The Military and Politics in Africa,” in Welch, Claude E. Jr., ed.. Soldier and State in Africa (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 261 Google Scholar.