Democracy’s rise in South Africa was part of a trend toward elected civilian rule that swept through sub-Saharan Africa after 1990. The end of the Cold War that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990 transformed Africa’s relations with Russia and the United States. Both superpowers had treated Africa as a Cold War battleground, and both had given large-scale military and financial aid to their allies to undermine rivals. Communism’s collapse in Europe brought an abrupt end to Communist aid to Russia’s African clients. Since the world was no longer divided between allies of the United States and of the Soviet Union, U.S. support for pro-Western dictators, no matter how corrupt or repressive, declined as well. But the decrease in support for dictators left a power vacuum in which ethnic conflicts intensified, with often-disastrous results.

For instance, in the early 1990s the United States cut off decades of support for the anticommunist General Mobutu Sese Seko (1930–1997), who seized power in 1965 in Zaire (the former Belgian Congo, renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997) and looted the country. Opposition groups toppled the dying tyrant in 1997, and a civil war ensued that left an estimated 5.4 million dead by 2007. Hundreds of thousands more have died in the years since, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.

The agreement by national independence leaders across the continent to respect colonial borders prevented one kind of violence, but resulted in another. In countries whose national boundaries had been created by colonial powers irrespective of historic divisions, political parties were often based on ethnicity and kinship. The armed forces, too, were often dominated by a single ethnic group. At times, ethnic strife boiled over into deep violence, such as the genocides of ethnic Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi in 1972 and by Tutsis of Hutus in 1993 and 1994 in Rwanda, which left hundreds of thousands dead. In Kenya disputes about the legitimacy of the 2007 re-election of Mwai Kibaki left hundreds dead before the National Accord and Reconciliation Act in 2008 ended the violence. A test of the alternative to preserving national boundaries came amid efforts to ease tensions that had created famine and hardship in Sudan. In 2011, 98 percent of the electorate in southern Sudan voted to break away and form a new country, South Sudan. The early promise of peace after separation has been challenged by increased ethnic and political violence in South Sudan.

Amid these conflicts, political and economic reform has occurred in other African nations where years of mismanagement and repression had delegitimized one-party rule. Above all, the strength of the democratic opposition rested on a growing class of educated urban Africans. Postindependence governments enthusiastically expanded opportunities in education, especially higher education. In Cameroon, for example, the number of students graduating from the national university jumped from 213 in 1961 to 10,000 in 1982 and 41,000 in 1992.5 The growing middle class of educated professionals — generally pragmatic, moderate, and open to new ideas — chafed at the ostentatious privilege of tiny closed elites and pressed for political reforms that would democratize social and economic opportunities. Thus after 1990 sub-Saharan Africa accompanied the global trend toward liberalization and human rights.