Africa

• Introduction

North Africa

• Chapter 1 Algeria: Revolution and the Sahara
• Chapter 2 Egypt: The Gift of the Nile
• Chapter 3 Libya: Desert Kingdom to Modern Turmoil
• Chapter 4 Morocco: Kingdom at the Crossroads
• Chapter 5 Tunisia: From Carthage to Revolution
• Chapter 6 Western Sahara: A Disputed Desert
• Chapter 7 Sudan: Where the Nile Divides

West Africa

• Chapter 8 Benin: Legacy of Dahomey
• Chapter 9 Burkina Faso: Heart of the Sahel
• Chapter 10 Cabo Verde: Islands of the Atlantic
• Chapter 11 Côte d'Ivoire: Cocoa and Conflict
• Chapter 12 Gambia: River of Trade
• Chapter 13 Ghana: Gold Coast to Independence
• Chapter 14 Guinea: Defiance and Resources
• Chapter 15 Guinea-Bissau: Struggle for Freedom
• Chapter 16 Liberia: America’s African Experiment
• Chapter 17 Mali: Empire of Gold and Learning
• Chapter 18 Mauritania: Sands and Nomads
• Chapter 19 Niger: Sahelian Crossroads
• Chapter 20 Nigeria: Giant of Africa
• Chapter 21 Senegal: Gateway of West Africa
• Chapter 22 Sierra Leone: Freetown and Conflict
• Chapter 23 Togo: A Narrow Colonial Legacy

Central Africa

• Chapter 24 Angola: Oil, War, and Recovery
• Chapter 25 Cameroon: Africa in Miniature
• Chapter 26 Central African Republic: Rich Land, Fragile State
• Chapter 27 Chad: Desert and Division
• Chapter 28 Republic of the Congo: River and Rainforest
• Chapter 29 Democratic Republic of the Congo: Wealth and Turmoil
• Chapter 30 Equatorial Guinea: Oil and Isolation
• Chapter 31 Gabon: Forest and Stability
• Chapter 32 São Tomé and Príncipe: Cocoa Isles

East Africa

• Chapter 33 Burundi: Kingdoms and Conflict
• Chapter 34 Comoros: Islands of Many Worlds
• Chapter 35 Djibouti: Gateway to the Red Sea
• Chapter 36 Eritrea: Nation Forged in War
• Chapter 37 Ethiopia: Empire of Origins
• Chapter 38 Kenya: Highlands and Horizons
• Chapter 39 Madagascar: Island of Unique Worlds
• Chapter 40 Malawi: Lake and Nation
• Chapter 41 Mauritius: Island of Diversity
• Chapter 42 Mozambique: Coast of Trade and Struggle
• Chapter 43 Rwanda: From Tragedy to Renewal
• Chapter 44 Seychelles: Isles of the Indian Ocean
• Chapter 45 Somalia: Trade, Clan, and Collapse
• Chapter 46 South Sudan: A New Nation
• Chapter 47 Tanzania: Union of Lands
• Chapter 48 Uganda: Kingdoms and Change
• Chapter 49 Zambia: Copper and Calm
• Chapter 50 Zimbabwe: Legacy of Great Zimbabwe

Southern Africa

• Chapter 51 Botswana: Diamonds and Stability

• Chapter 52 Eswatini: Kingdom of Tradition

• Chapter 53 Lesotho: Mountain Kingdom

• Chapter 54 Namibia: Desert and Memory

• Chapter 55 South Africa: From Apartheid to Nation

• Afterword

To speak of "the history of Africa" is to embark upon an exercise in magnificent, perhaps even foolhardy, ambition. The very name "Africa" is a simplification, a label of convenience for a landmass of staggering proportions and bewildering diversity. It is a continent that could comfortably contain all of China, India, the contiguous United States, Japan, and the whole of Europe, with room to spare. Within this immense space, covering about 20% of Earth's total land area, live well over a billion people, who today speak an estimated two thousand distinct languages. Africa is not a country. It is a world.

The name itself, "Africa," is an import. The Romans first used it to describe a small province in what is now modern-day Tunisia, possibly naming it after a local Berber tribe they called the Afri. Over centuries, as maps were redrawn and knowledge of the world expanded, the name stretched to encompass the entire continent. Various other theories for the name's origin exist, from Greek words for "without cold" to Phoenician terms for "dust," but all agree that the name was applied from the outside. This is a fitting, if accidental, metaphor. For much of modern history, the narrative of Africa has been written by others, its complexities smoothed over, its internal dynamics ignored, and its past often treated as a prelude to European arrival.

This book seeks to push against that simplification. Its purpose is not to tell a single story of Africa, for no such thing exists. Instead, it is to tell fifty-five stories. This is a journey through fifty-five distinct paths of history, one for each of the internationally recognized countries and the one disputed territory that comprise the continent today. Each chapter is a self-contained history, an exploration of the unique trajectory of a particular place, from its earliest human inhabitants to its contemporary challenges and triumphs. While themes will inevitably echo across chapters—the rise and fall of empires, the transformative power of trade, the trauma of colonialism, and the complexities of independence—each nation’s story is its own.

This country-by-country approach is deliberate. While the borders of modern African states are largely a product of colonial convenience, drawn by European diplomats in the late 19th century with little knowledge of the peoples or terrain they were dividing, they are also the primary reality of the continent today. These nations are the arenas in which political life unfolds, identities are forged, and futures are debated. To understand the Africa of the 21st century, one must understand the histories of Algeria and Angola, of Egypt and Eswatini, of São Tomé and Príncipe and South Sudan.

Our journey begins, as all human stories must, in Africa. The continent is, in the most literal sense, the birthplace of humanity. In the fossil-rich landscapes of East and Southern Africa, in places now known as the Cradle of Humankind, the story of our species began. Discoveries like "Mrs. Ples," a 2.3-million-year-old skull found in South Africa, and the even older remains in Kenya's Tugen Hills, provide tangible links to our earliest ancestors. For millennia upon millennia, Africa was the sole stage of human evolution. This deep, almost unfathomable, timeline is the foundation upon which every subsequent chapter of its history is built. It is a history that, for most of its duration, was not written down but spoken, sung, and remembered.

To write a history of Africa is to confront the challenge of sources. For much of the continent's past, history was a matter of oral tradition, meticulously maintained and passed down through generations. In West Africa, the griots—hereditary storytellers, historians, and musicians—were the custodians of the past, their memories serving as the archives of entire kingdoms. Their epics, genealogies, and proverbs were not mere entertainment; they were the essential fabric of social and political life, preserving the histories of heroes, the lessons of past events, and a community's sense of self. These oral histories, combined with the evidence of archaeology and linguistics, are the primary tools for understanding the pre-colonial past. They reveal not a static, unchanging continent, but one of constant movement, innovation, and political experimentation.

Long before the arrival of Europeans, Africa was a continent of empires, kingdoms, and city-states. While ancient Egypt's monuments are the most famous, they were far from the only great civilization. To the south, in modern-day Sudan, the Kingdom of Kush built its own pyramids and at one point even conquered and ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty. In the Ethiopian highlands, the Aksumite Empire grew wealthy as a major trading power connecting Africa with the Roman Empire and Arabia, becoming one of the first major empires in the world to adopt Christianity. In West Africa, a succession of powerful empires—Ghana, Mali, and Songhai—controlled the lucrative trans-Saharan trade routes, their wealth in gold becoming legendary throughout the Islamic and European worlds. Timbuktu, a key city in the Mali and Songhai empires, became a celebrated center for Islamic scholarship, its libraries and university attracting scholars from far and wide. In the south, the stone enclosures of Great Zimbabwe stand as a silent testament to another powerful trading kingdom. These are but a few of the thousands of different states and polities that existed across the continent, from large, structured empires to smaller, village-based systems.

The continent was never isolated. For centuries, the Sahara was less a barrier and more of a sea of sand, crossed by camel caravans that linked West Africa to the Mediterranean world. These routes carried not just gold, salt, and other goods, but also ideas, technologies, and beliefs, most notably Islam, which spread peacefully along these commercial arteries. Simultaneously, the Indian Ocean coast was part of a vibrant maritime trading world, connecting East Africa with Arabia, Persia, India, and even China. The Swahili city-states that dotted this coast, like Kilwa and Mombasa, became cosmopolitan centers of commerce and culture.

This intricate tapestry of trade and interaction was violently reconfigured by the arrival of European powers. The Portuguese, arriving in the 15th century, sought to control the existing trade routes, but it was the monstrous logic of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that would irrevocably scar the continent. For over four centuries, millions of Africans were forcibly captured, chained, and transported across the ocean to labor on the plantations of the Americas. This was not a sidebar to African history; it was a demographic and psychological catastrophe that depopulated vast regions, fueled cycles of violence between states, and shattered countless communities. The full weight of this tragedy hangs over the history of many of the nations covered in this book, particularly in West and Central Africa.

If the slave trade was a long and brutal tragedy, the "Scramble for Africa" in the late 19th century was a sudden and convulsive one. As late as the 1870s, European control in Africa was limited to about 10%, mostly along the coasts. Yet within a few decades, driven by economic greed, nationalistic rivalries, and a misguided sense of civilizing mission, a handful of European powers had carved up virtually the entire continent among themselves. This process was given a veneer of legitimacy by the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where European leaders met to establish rules for the partition, effectively giving a green light to the conquest and colonization of a continent. They drew lines on maps, dividing ethnic groups, lumping rivals together, and creating artificial territories that paid no heed to the realities on the ground. The British Prime Minister at the time, Lord Salisbury, wryly admitted, "we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were."

Colonial rule, whether British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, or German, was an enterprise of extraction. Its primary purpose was to benefit the colonizing power. While colonial governments built some infrastructure, like railways and ports, these were typically designed to get resources out of the country, not to foster internal development. Colonialism imposed new political systems, new languages, new economies, and new social hierarchies. It was a period of profound disruption and often brutal oppression, but it was also met with constant resistance, from armed uprisings to the formation of early political and labor movements. This shared experience of subjugation, and the struggle against it, would become a powerful unifying force in the 20th century.

The end of the Second World War signaled the beginning of the end for the colonial empires. Across Africa, a wave of independence movements gained momentum, led by a new generation of nationalist leaders. The path to freedom varied dramatically. For some, like Ghana in 1957, independence came through peaceful political negotiation. For others, such as Algeria or Angola, it was won only after long and bloody wars of liberation. By the mid-1960s, most of the continent had thrown off direct colonial rule. This was a moment of immense hope and possibility, a "Year of Africa" in 1960 when seventeen nations gained their independence.

However, the dawn of independence did not erase the legacy of the past. The new nations were immediately confronted with a daunting array of challenges. They had to build a sense of national unity among diverse peoples who had been artificially grouped together by colonial borders. They inherited economies designed for export, not self-sufficiency, and often remained dependent on their former colonial rulers. The political institutions left behind by the Europeans were often fragile and ill-suited to local contexts. Many new governments struggled with political instability, corruption, and the immense task of providing education, healthcare, and economic opportunity to their citizens. The Cold War also turned Africa into a proxy battleground for the United States and the Soviet Union, who propped up friendly dictators and fueled devastating civil wars.

The post-colonial era has been a complex and often turbulent period, a story of both profound disappointment and remarkable resilience. It has seen the tragedy of the Rwandan genocide and the long civil war in the Congo, the rise of authoritarian regimes, and the struggles with debt and disease. But it has also seen the triumph of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the emergence of vibrant democracies in countries like Botswana and Ghana, rapid economic growth in many quarters, and a stunning explosion of cultural creativity in music, literature, and film that has captivated the world.

This book navigates these fifty-five separate histories, acknowledging the common threads without losing sight of the unique character of each nation. It is a story told in many languages, set in every imaginable landscape, from the deserts of the Sahara to the rainforests of the Congo Basin, from the savannas of the Serengeti to the bustling metropolises of Lagos and Cairo. It is a story of kings and traders, of farmers and nomads, of anti-colonial freedom fighters and post-independence presidents, and of the ordinary people whose lives have shaped, and been shaped by, these grand historical forces. The journey ahead is a long one, but it is a necessary one for anyone who wishes to understand the world we live in today. Africa's fifty-five paths through history are not separate from the story of the world; they are, and always have been, essential to it.

The story of Algeria is a story of resistance. It is etched into the desert landscapes of the vast Sahara and woven through the narrow, winding streets of the Casbah in Algiers. It is a history defined by a succession of invaders and the resilience of a people who, time and again, have asserted their own identity against formidable odds. From the ancient Berber kingdoms to the long and brutal struggle for independence from France, the Algerian path has been one of conflict, adaptation, and an unyielding quest for sovereignty.

Long before the arrival of Phoenician traders, Roman legionaries, or Arab armies, the land that is now Algeria was the domain of the Imazighen, or Berbers, the indigenous peoples of North Africa. Their presence is ancient, marked by distinctive languages, traditions, and a deep connection to the often-harsh environment. They were not a single, unified entity but a collection of tribes and confederations, farmers in the fertile coastal plains and skilled nomadic pastoralists in the interior. In the third century BCE, two powerful Berber kingdoms emerged: the Masaesyli in the west and the Massylii in the east. It was a leader of the Massylii, Masinissa, who would play a decisive role in the great power struggles of the Mediterranean, siding with Rome against Carthage in the Punic Wars and uniting the kingdoms into a single, powerful Numidian state that flourished for over a century. Numidian cavalry, renowned for its speed and skill, became a legendary component of the Roman military machine.

Roman influence, however, eventually turned to direct control. Following a period as a client state, the emperor Claudius formally annexed the region around 44 CE, dividing it into two provinces: Mauretania Caesariensis, with its capital at modern-day Cherchell, and Mauretania Tingitana further to the west. Roman rule brought centuries of relative stability and prosperity to the coastal regions. Cities like Timgad, Djémila, and Tipasa were built, complete with forums, theaters, and triumphal arches, their ruins today standing as impressive testaments to a period of deep integration into the Roman world. Agriculture flourished, with North Africa becoming a vital source of grain for the empire. Yet, Roman control was largely confined to the coastal plains and the high plateaus. In the mountainous interior and the Saharan fringes, Berber tribes maintained their autonomy, periodically clashing with the legions at the empire's edge.

As the Western Roman Empire crumbled in the 5th century, a new power swept across the Mediterranean. In 429, some 80,000 Vandals, a Germanic tribe, crossed from Spain into North Africa. Led by their king, Gaiseric, they carved out a kingdom, capturing the great city of Carthage in 439 and establishing a naval power that would even sack Rome itself in 455. The Vandal period was one of disruption. Their rule was often harsh, particularly towards the Catholic population, as the Vandals adhered to the Arian form of Christianity. Their kingdom, however, proved to be short-lived. In 533, the Byzantine general Belisarius landed in North Africa with a powerful army, swiftly defeating the Vandals and restoring the region to Roman (now Eastern Roman, or Byzantine) rule within a year. Byzantine control, however, was tenuous. Hampered by military mutinies, official corruption, and the vast distances from their capital in Constantinople, their authority was largely limited to the coastal areas, with many inland regions reverting to the control of independent Berber kingdoms.

The 7th century brought a new and transformative force from the east: the armies of Islam. The Arab conquest of the Maghreb was a protracted affair, beginning in the 640s and taking nearly 70 years to complete. Initial raids gave way to full-scale invasion under the Umayyad Caliphate. The Byzantine forces were defeated, and Arab armies, led by figures like Uqba ibn Nafi, pushed west across Algeria, reaching the Atlantic by 682. The conquest was not without fierce resistance from the Berber tribes. Leaders such as Kusayla and the legendary warrior queen Dihya, known as al-Kahina, led powerful, though ultimately unsuccessful, campaigns against the invaders. The conquest, however, was not simply one of military subjugation. Over time, the majority of the Berber population converted to Islam, and the Arabic language began to spread, profoundly reshaping the cultural and religious landscape. The synthesis of Arab and Berber cultures would come to define the Maghreb.

For the next several centuries, Algeria was ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties. After breaking away from the Umayyad Caliphate following the Berber Revolt of 740, the region saw the rise of local powers. Dynasties like the Zirids and the Hammadids established sophisticated kingdoms, founding new capitals and fostering a vibrant cultural and intellectual life. They were followed by the Almoravids and then the Almohads, powerful Berber empires that, at their height, controlled a vast territory stretching from Spain to Libya. During this period, the Kingdom of Tlemcen, under the Zayanid dynasty, controlled the central Maghreb for over 300 years, maintaining a precarious hold over the region until the arrival of a new power in the 16th century.

The arrival of the Ottoman Turks was spurred by the growing power of Spain, which had established several coastal strongholds in North Africa. The privateer brothers Aruj and Hayreddin, known in Europe as the Barbarossas, offered their services to the Ottoman Sultan. In 1516, they established what would become the Regency of Algiers, a semi-independent state that was nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire but in practice enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. For three centuries, Algiers became a formidable naval power in the Mediterranean. Its corsairs, the famed Barbary pirates, waged a maritime holy war, capturing European ships and taking Christian captives for ransom or for sale in the slave markets. This activity, which formed the backbone of the Regency's economy, brought great wealth to the city but also provoked numerous punitive expeditions from European powers and the young United States. The city of Algiers itself was transformed into a heavily fortified stronghold, its casbah a maze of narrow streets and defensive structures. The Regency was governed by a military elite of Janissaries, known as the Odjak, and ruled by a series of Pashas, Aghas, and finally Deys, who were elected by their fellow officers.

The Regency's power began to wane in the early 19th century as European navies grew stronger and the profitability of piracy declined. Internally, the state was weakened by political intrigue and revolts. It was a diplomatic slight, however, that provided the pretext for its final downfall. In 1827, in an argument over an unpaid debt for a shipment of wheat supplied to the French army decades earlier, the Dey, Hussein, struck the French consul on the arm with his fly-whisk. King Charles X of France, seeking to bolster his own flagging popularity at home with a military victory, seized upon the "Fan Affair." After a three-year blockade, France launched a full-scale invasion. On June 14, 1830, a French expeditionary force of 34,000 soldiers landed west of Algiers. The city surrendered on July 5th.

The French had expected a swift and easy conquest, but they were sorely mistaken. What followed was a long and exceptionally brutal period of pacification and colonization that would last for decades. French forces met fierce resistance from the interior, most notably from the charismatic scholar and warrior Emir Abdelkader. From 1832 to 1847, Abdelkader led a powerful confederation of tribes in a skillful guerrilla war against the French, establishing a nascent Algerian state in the western and central parts of the country. The French response was ruthless, employing "scorched earth" tactics that involved the massacre of civilians, the destruction of crops, and the confiscation of land. Eventually, overwhelmed by superior French numbers and firepower, Abdelkader was forced to surrender.

With the defeat of Abdelkader, France solidified its control, but the nature of its rule was fundamentally different from that in many of its other colonies. Algeria was not simply a colony; it was legally and administratively incorporated into France itself, divided into three departments. This, however, was a legal fiction that masked a deeply divided reality. A large population of European settlers, known as colons or pieds-noirs (black feet), began to arrive, encouraged by the French government to seize the best agricultural land. By the mid-20th century, they numbered around one million and dominated the political and economic life of the country. The indigenous Muslim population, meanwhile, was relegated to a second-class status. They were French subjects, not citizens, denied political rights, and subjected to a separate and discriminatory legal code.

The simmering resentment of the Muslim population occasionally boiled over into open revolt, but it was not until the mid-20th century that a coordinated, modern nationalist movement began to take shape. The event that is often seen as a turning point was the Sétif massacre of May 8, 1945. On the day that Europe celebrated its victory over Nazi Germany, Algerian nationalists held a demonstration to demand independence. The protest turned violent, and in the subsequent crackdown by French authorities and settler militias, thousands of Muslims were killed. The event radicalized a generation of Algerians and convinced many that independence could only be won through armed struggle.

On November 1, 1954, a new organization, the National Liberation Front (FLN), launched a coordinated series of attacks across Algeria, signaling the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. It was a conflict of extraordinary brutality, characterized by guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and the widespread use of torture by both sides. The FLN and its military wing, the National Liberation Army (ALN), targeted not only French military and police but also civilians, both European and Muslim, who were deemed collaborators. The French army responded with a massive counter-insurgency campaign, deploying hundreds of thousands of troops and employing tactics of collective punishment and systematic torture.

One of the most intense and infamous episodes of the war was the Battle of Algiers, which began in late 1956. The FLN, under commanders like Larbi Ben M'hidi and Saadi Yacef, launched a campaign of urban terrorism in the capital, targeting cafés, restaurants, and other public places frequented by Europeans. The French response was to give full powers to General Jacques Massu and his elite paratroopers, who were tasked with dismantling the FLN's network in the city. Through a systematic campaign of arrests, interrogations under torture, and extrajudicial killings, the French military succeeded in breaking the FLN's organization in Algiers. The battle was a tactical victory for the French, but a strategic disaster. The brutal methods employed exposed the moral bankruptcy of the French colonial project, sparking outrage in France and around the world and galvanizing support for the Algerian cause.

The war dragged on for nearly eight years, causing immense suffering and deep divisions, not just in Algeria but within France itself. The conflict precipitated the collapse of the French Fourth Republic and the return to power of Charles de Gaulle. Recognizing that the war was unwinnable and was tearing France apart, de Gaulle began a process of disengagement, opening negotiations with the FLN. This move was fiercely opposed by many in the French military and the pied-noir community, who formed a terrorist organization, the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), to fight against Algerian independence, launching a campaign of bombings and assassinations in both Algeria and France.

Despite the violence, negotiations between the French government and the FLN's provisional government concluded with the signing of the Évian Accords on March 18, 1962. The accords established a ceasefire and laid out the terms for Algerian self-determination. In a referendum on July 1, 1962, the Algerian people voted overwhelmingly for independence, which was formally declared on July 5th. The end of the war triggered a massive and panicked exodus of the pieds-noirs, with some 900,000 fleeing to France in the space of a few months. It also saw brutal reprisals against the harkis, Algerians who had served as auxiliaries in the French army, thousands of whom were massacred by the victorious FLN.

Independence was won, but the new nation faced enormous challenges. The war had left deep scars, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Algerians. The country was politically fractured, and the FLN, which had been a broad front during the war, quickly consolidated its power, establishing a one-party state. Ahmed Ben Bella became the first president, but he was overthrown in a bloodless coup in 1965 by his defense minister, Colonel Houari Boumediene. Boumediene established an authoritarian, socialist-oriented government. He embarked on a program of state-led industrialization, nationalizing the crucial oil and gas industry in 1971, and pursued a policy of non-alignment on the international stage, becoming a prominent voice for the developing world.

Boumediene ruled until his death in 1978. His successors continued the FLN's one-party rule, but by the 1980s, the state-controlled economy was stagnating, and social unrest was growing. A sharp drop in oil prices in the mid-1980s plunged the country into a severe economic crisis. In October 1988, widespread riots erupted, forcing the government to introduce political reforms and a new constitution that allowed for a multi-party system. The first free elections were held in 1991, and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a newly formed Islamist party, won a decisive victory in the first round.

Fearing the establishment of an Islamic state, the Algerian military intervened, canceling the elections, forcing the president to resign, and banning the FIS. This move plunged Algeria into a devastating civil war that would last for the better part of a decade. The conflict, known as the "Black Decade," was fought between the military-backed government and various Islamist guerrilla groups. It was a period of horrific violence, marked by massacres, bombings, and assassinations, which left an estimated 200,000 people dead.

The violence began to subside in the late 1990s, particularly after Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a former foreign minister under Boumediene, was elected president in 1999. His government offered amnesty to many former militants, and a national referendum on a "Civil Concord" plan helped to bring the conflict to a close. Bouteflika would go on to dominate Algerian politics for the next two decades, winning four consecutive elections. His long rule provided a degree of stability, and high oil prices fueled economic growth. However, it was also characterized by political stagnation, corruption, and a lack of economic diversification.

By 2019, patience with the aging and ailing president had run out. When Bouteflika announced his intention to run for a fifth term, it sparked massive, peaceful protests across the country. This leaderless, youth-driven movement, known as the Hirak, demanded not just Bouteflika's resignation but a fundamental overhaul of the entire political system that had been in place since independence. The sheer scale and persistence of the protests forced the military to intervene, and Bouteflika resigned in April 2019. The Hirak movement represented a profound moment of national reawakening, a new chapter in Algeria's long history of struggle for self-determination. The journey that began in the mountains of Numidia and continued through the long night of colonial rule and the traumas of civil war had entered a new, uncertain, but hopeful phase.