Gerard Prunier

The Somali people are fiercely nationalistic. Colonialism split them into five segments divided between four different powers. Thus decolonisation and pan-Somalism became synonymous.In 1960 a partial reunification took place between British Somaliland and Somalia Italiana. ''Africa Confidential'' wrote at the time that the new Somali state would never be beset by tribal division but this discounted the existence of powerful clans within Somali society and the persistence of colonial administrative cultures. The collapse of parliamentary democracy in 1969 and the resulting army—and clanic— dictatorship that followed led to a civil war in the ‘perfect’ national state. It lasted fourteen years in the ‘British’ North and is still raging today in the ‘Italian’ South.Somaliland ‘re-birthed’ itself through an enormous solo effort but the viable nation so recreated within its former colonial borders was never internationally recognised and still struggles to exist economically and diplomatically.This book recounts an African success story where the peace so widely acclaimed by the international community has had no reward but its own lonely achievement.

France is the only country that never decolonised its colonies, emotionally, financially or strategically. In the aftermath of losing the Second World War, notwithstanding de Gaulle''s attempts to convince his people otherwise, the French knew the game was up. (The Resistance fighters were heroes; but heroes are lonely.) For France, after 1945, the Second World War blended into the early Cold War, which Paris jumped into the day before it began. It fought in Indochina, and lost again. The independence war dragged on in Algeria. Then France lost there, too--painfully, with millions of its ordinary citizens expelled to a homeland that many of them hardly knew. But Sub-Saharan Africa was still there. France produced a postcolonial antidote: ''Françafrique'', France''s sphere of influence (or ''backyard'') over its former West and Central African colonies. France loved Africa. Some Frenchmen died for ''Françafrique''; others made millions from it. The entire toxic edifice is now crumbling away. Young Africans are happy about this--but not so many of their parents, who often live in France. In his inimitable style, Gérard Prunier recounts a tragic transcultural saga, with one leg in the past and one in the future: the end of ''Françafrique''.