What the Fall of the Berlin Wall Meant to Africa

How can you people do a story about the fall of the Berlin wall and not EVEN mention the Late President Reagan? You should be ashamed!!!!!!!!!!!!

Congo took part in WW2?
And would you shut up with your Reagan? That dude may have finished the USSR, but he also finished the middle class in america. What you'd rather have - weaker Russia, or more money? :)

"The Soviet Union, dealing with it's own collapse, also stopped support for Mozambique's government and Angolan rebels, plunging both countries into long-lasting bloody civil wars."

-Those civil wars, perhaps more than any other events, signified the African front DURING the Cold War (remember the Cubans in Angola in the 1970s?), and were already well underway when the Soviet Union collapsed. Mozambique's 16-year war, in fact, ended in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union's demise.
-Jonas Savimbi of the Angolan UNITA rebels, bankrolled by the US and South Africa, would surely roll over in his grave at the suggestion that he was financed by Moscow. And surely you don't mean Holden Roberto's FNLA, also backed by the US.

Please correct these inaccuracies. I used to work at ABCNews and I care deeply about the quality of the network's reporting, especially when it comes to news out of Africa.

The wars in Africa were never for any political and economic freedom of the people but for the political and economic domination and subjugation of the majority by a historically self-appointed minority. The wars were naturally ended as a consequence of an apparent achievement of a hegemonic goal over which the wars were waged. As we talk today, there is more poverty, disease, and mortality in Africa than there was in the 1960s when African people largely depended on local economies for their livelihoods. This happens in a background where self-appointed outsiders are declaring some African countries are resgistering economic growths as poverty deepens while profits from their corporations are flowing back home. The wars did not stop because the cold war had come to and end but because the perpetrators of the wars knew they would otherwise face defeat as a historical inevitability if they would fight freedom movements. Their real goals would also be unmasked. The cold war was a good excuse for wars in Arica. It made sense for the perpetrators of the wars to stop wastage of resources in wars and intensify efforts at the real historical goals!

'Robert Britton' (above comment) is right -- Ms. Hughes should have mentioned Pres. Reagan... above all for his tireless efforts to prop up the South African apartheid regime!!!

This 'piece' is riddled with errors and scandalous 'reinterpretations' (e.g., the US ad UK "disdaining" the apartheid system, lol!). Incredibly shoddy work...
amazing how much junk Ms. Hughes managed to fit into a few hundred words masquerading as a serious piece about the effects of the Berlin Wall's fall on the continent (!) of Africa! One senses she was tempted to put it into a fortune cookie...

Mr. Okhiambo's analysis of the real purpose of the so-called Great Powers involvement in proxy wars in Africa during the so-called Cold War is very incisive. I feel that he is being (unintentionally, of course) a little too kind to the West.

Western involvement in Sub Saharan Africa goes back about 500 years, long before anyone had even invented communism, and for, the most part, it's involvement is an unrelenting horror story morphing easily catastrophe to the next over the centuries;from the widespread destruction and disorder created by the slave trade, through King Leopold's mass murder of at least 5 million people in the Congo to feed the west's insatiable appettite for its raw materials, followed by the German's attempt to kill off both of the major ethnic groups of Namibia, and continued by Western support of murderous racist white minority governments throughout southern Africa and murderous black despots elsewhere. The proxy wars of Cold War cost millions of African lives and delayed and soured the process of decolonization in Africa while people free of the colonial yoke in Asia and elsewhere built societies and economies.

Having learned nothing, from its five centuries of involvement in Africa, the West is embarking on the process of making Africa into a battleground between Islam and Christianity and between Chinese multi-nationals and their western counterparts. I hope that the peoples of Africa, and their leaders have learned and are up to the challenges that they face in the 21st century