With decolonisation gathering pace in Africa in the late 1950s, the superpowers gained an increasing interest in the region and tried to secure the allegiance of the emerging and newly independent states in the Cold War. This struggle first affected West Africa, where the decolonisation wave took shape.
In this module, you will study Africa’s Cold War from the late 1950s to the end of Apartheid in South Africa with a sub-regional focus on West, East, and Southern Africa. This will allow you to learn that the different Cold War crises and conflicts on the African continent saw – in addition to that of the superpowers – the involvement of the former colonial powers, the People’s Republic of China, as well as of lesser powers of the Western and the Eastern bloc. Moreover, it will become evident that African leaders and countries were not mere passive recipients of external policies, but they often played an active and influential role in the East-West struggle in and beyond their continent. Thereby, you will have the opportunity to engage with a truly international corpus of primary sources, such as the digital archive of the Cold War International History Project, and the growing literature on the Cold War in Africa in the fields of African, International, and Military History.