After the colonial hangover and decades of civil war, a new, democratic Africa is emerging

By PETER HAWTHORNE

t the turn of the century the European powers were still in the scramble for Africa. Kitchener had stormed the gates of Khartoum, French troops were fighting insurgents in Morocco, the seven-month siege of Mafeking was broken. A hundred years later, the possessors of the past have come and gone and the continent is unfettered from colonialism. For better or for worse, Africa is finally its own master.

It has been a long and painful march to freedom, the African people weighed down beneath the yoke of historical circumstance and benumbed by some 400 years of a slave trade that only ended around 1850. Africa was a vast jousting ground on which swashbuckling empire builders merrily fought over the spoils of conquest. Colonialism was a way of life, the colonies something that the commanders of Europe liked to wear like campaign medals. Pacifying the natives--as Mussolini did in Abyssinia or General Lothar van Trotha did in exterminating almost the entire Herero tribe in what is now Namibia--was all part of the game.

Consumptive young men like Cecil John Rhodes went out to the crisp, clean air of Africa for their health and troublesome scions of the wealthy were given an allowance and dispatched out of sight to the Dark Continent. World figures, hunters and explorers--one of them a popular U.S. President, Theodore "Teddy'' Roosevelt--visited Africa to be captured in sepiatone prints, a foot planted proudly on a big game carcass and half-naked gun bearers in the background. Rhodes and his pioneers forged new trails into southern and central Africa, while the Highlands of Kenya echoed with the mischief-making of landowners, white hunters and carefree playboys.

And then came what was, at first, only a promise of freedom: the League of Nations' mandated protectorates after World War I that allowed the colonialists to continue their rule in conditions of increasing exploitation and neglect. But, burdened with their own needs after World War II, the European powers cut loose their colonies--or were driven from them. The groundswell of liberation swept over India, Burma, Indonesia and Indochina and was felt in Africa even before Harold Macmillan's famous "wind of change" speech in Cape Town in 1960.

Kwame Nkrumah was the first to break the chains of colonialism--leading the Gold Coast to become independent Ghana in 1957. He was also one of the first liberation African leaders to fall dramatically from power, ousted in a 1966 coup while in Beijing being wooed by the Chinese. With Ghana's independence, the colonial retreat was on. By the early '60s most British and French African possessions had been handed over to the forces of black nationalism in a transition that was often accompanied by appalling atrocity. The horrors of the Mau Mau, the nightmare left behind in the Congo (which became Zaire in 1971) by Belgium's headlong rush to abandon it, the madness of Uganda's Idi Amin, the Biafra tribal carnage and later the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi--there was hardly an African state that didn't have blood smeared across its passport to freedom. During the past 35 years the record of African governance includes more than 70 coups, most of them military takeovers, throughout Africa's independent states. Despots like the late Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire bled their countries even more efficiently than had their colonial czars.

Caught up in the cold war, Africa had little chance for stability. When a left-wing government in Lisbon hastily pulled Portugal out of Angola and Mozambique, leaving the way open for black Marxist rule, the scene was set for more than 15 years of civil war. In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the settler war against Russian and Chinese-backed black nationalist guerrillas lasted almost as long. As part of its strategy for survival, South Africa's anti-communist white government sought to destabilize its opposing "front line" black states, a strategy that ended only with the end of apartheid and majority rule in 1994.

Africa's salvation lies partly with the end of the cold war, when countries that had been caught up in the East bloc's political imperialism began to realize what little benefit it had been to them and how better they were on their own. But it also has to do with the demise of apartheid and the qualities of a man of great historic significance, Nelson Mandela.

The end of apartheid meant that Africa--whose past unity, such as it was, had been based on making common cause for the downfall of the South African regime--is now able to redirect its energies to internal recovery and growth. As the powerhouse of sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa is taking the lead in a continent where it was once a pariah. The drama of South Africa's transformation created a palpable sense of belonging in the Africa of today. And more: in Mandela Africa has found a new beacon--not the burning ambition of the angry, anti-colonial, would-be-Messiah Nkrumah, but the shining light of what South Africa's President-to-be, Thabo Mbeki, predicts will be an African renaissance at the beginning of the new millennium.