Independence

After the war, African nations rapidly became independent. Ethiopia was recognized as a leader among nations and became a founding member of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Ironically, what brought down Haile Selassie was not the Italian invasion but enemies from within: he was deposed and executed by Communist rebels who took over the country in the 1970s.

Ethiopia's problems were just one example of the turmoil that rocked the continent in the decades following independence. There were literally hundreds of civil wars throughout Africa, and the continent was subjected to numerous

Under Nelson Mandela's leadership, the black majority gained control of South Africa in the 1990s.

Reuters/Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.

Dictatorships. One of the worst was in the nation of Uganda (oo-GAHN-dah): settled by the Bantu in ancient times and later colonized by Britain, Uganda in the 1970s was ruled by Idi Amin (EE-dee ah-MEEN; c. 1925-), a military officer with the heart of a serial killer.

Much of the planet remained largely ignorant of these problems. As far as most white Europeans and Americans were concerned, Africa's importance had ended as soon as whites left.

Though black Africans were still being sold as slaves by the Arab rulers of the Sudan in the 1990s, this excited little moral outrage in the West; in fact, the only African problems that attracted much attention, in fact, were “black-white” conflicts, most notably the controversy over apartheid (uh-PAHR-tide) in South Africa.

Under apartheid, a system of dividing people by race, nonwhite South Africans became a permanent

Underclass. Not only were they forced into lower economic positions than whites, but they could not move around the country freely or use any of the same facilities—for instance, bathrooms—as whites. It was worse than segregation, which prevailed in the American South prior to the 1960s. It compared with aspects of the Indian caste system. Ironically, many Indians in South Africa became victims of apartheid as well. Lowest of all were black South Africans, the descendants of the Bantu people who had once claimed the land from the original inhabitants.

Under the leadership of Nelson Mandela (mahn-DEH-lah; 1918-), apartheid was overthrown and the black majority gained control of the country in the early 1990s. Other positive events happened around the same time: with the downfall of the Soviet Union, Communism came to an end in Ethiopia and other African nations as well. Ethnic tension, however, remained high. Unlike the black-white problems in South Africa, these were not conflicts that outsiders could readily