ABSTRACT

It has now been more than half a century since the newly independent states of sub-Saharan Africa first emerged onto the world stage as independent nations, beginning a process of political liberation that spanned nearly 40 years. The bulk of the continent threw off the shackles of colonial rule between the mid-1950s and late 1960s, with the fall of the Portuguese empire in 1974 sparking the later decolonizations in southern Africa, culminating in the ending of apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994. The prospects for the political development and economic growth of Africa’s ‘new’ nations has remained a key element in scholarship on the region ever since, highlighted most recently in the creation of Africa’s two youngest nations – the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia in the 1990s, and South Sudan’s separation from its northern neighbour in 2011.