Politically the Middle East and Africa are interconnected. This has not always been understood by sub-Saharan Africans. In his more parochial days (and before the break-up between Egypt and Syria) Chief Awolowo of Nigeria once asserted: 'The United Arab Republic, the pet creature of Nasser, which has one foot in Africa and another in the Middle East, is the very antithesis of a workable African community.'3

Awolowo feared Arab North Africa becoming an appendage of Arab Asia and turning its back on black Africa. But the balance of preponderance between Arab Africa and Arab Asia is in Africa's favour. As Boutros-Ghali put in a book published in 1963, 'It must not be forgotten that 60 per cent of the Arab community and 72 per cent of the Arab land are in Africa. In other words, it is easier to think of the rest of the Arab world as an extension of Arab Africa than the other way round. Pan-Africanism is a paradox because it is a link between exclusive African nationalism and Asian nationalism.

It was neither the Arabs nor the black Africans who first awoke to the realization that the Middle East and Africa were interconnected: it was the white settlers within Africa and European imperial powers themselves. When the Egyptian Revolution took place in 1952, the British colonial government in the Sudan, ostensibly sharing power with Egypt in a condominium, was deeply disturbed. The British Governor in Uganda was in touch with British authorities in the Sudan, as well as with fellow governors in Kenya and Tanganyika and the British Resident in Zanzibar. Concern about the consequences of the Egyptian revolution was sensed by white settlers and white governments in black Africa well beyond the Nile Valley as well.

The increasingly radical socialist and nationalist policies of Nasser confirmed the initial apprehension among white settlers in Kenya, the Rhodesias, South Africa, the Portuguese colonies and Algeria. Nasser's open support for African nationalists, as well as his increasing 'flirtation' with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and other communist countries, deepened the anxieties of the white settlers, and of colonial governments. Indeed the Anglo-French attack on the Suez Canal in November 1956 was partly motivated by a desire to topple Nasser and thus make the task of colonial government easier.

As soon as he had effectively supplanted Neguib as leader of Egypt, Nasser proceeded to give material and propaganda support to a variety of nationalist groups both south of the Sahara and in the Maghrib. Egypt opened her educational doors to students from other African countries, providing scholarships in subjects ranging from engineering to theology. Some scholarships were for children to come to Egypt to complete secondary school. Others were for militant insurrectionists from places such as Algeria. Cameroon and South Africa. In particular Nasser gave considerable assistance to the FLN, the main Algerian nationalist revolutionary movement. Egypt provided the FLN with arms and finance and with venues for conferences. Cairo Radio's Swahili service encouraged the ‘Mau Mau' movement at the height of the Kenya Emergency.

 

Figure 60: Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, left, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the signing of a peace treaty in Washington, D.C., in 1979. United States President Jimmy Carter, center, helped negotiate the treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Nasser's support for black nationalist movements helped to change the attitudes of black Africans towards North Africa and the Middle East. These attitudes were at first either indifferent or hostile. In Eastern African schools especially, the Arab record in the slave trade featured prominently in history books, and the British liked to justify their colonial presence by arguing that the original motivation was to suppress the Arab slave trade. With one stroke colonial policy-makers could both discredit the Arabs and Islam as a religion, and at the same time give their own presence a high moral justification. But the steady pressure of Nasser's example as a radical nationalist President plus Cairo Radio steadily cleared up black African misconceptions of the Arab role in African history and helped to draw Arab Africans and black Africans together in spirit.

Nasser's radical form of nationalism inspired the African masses all over the continent. It did not commend itself to all of Africa's new leaders. Nasser was an active member of the Casablanca bloc of radical African states, consisting of Egypt, Morocco, Ghana, Guinea and Mali, against the more conservative Monrovia bloc. These two blocs flourished between 1961 and 1963.

Nasser supported the radical Lumumba against his Western-backed rivals in the Congo. The Casablanca bloc collapsed because of growing differences between its members. Morocco soon found itself out of place in the radical bloc of African states. This traditional monarchical polity was radical only in foreign policy, in its militant support for independence movements throughout the continent. But the conservative domestic policies of King Muhammad V and, after his death in 1961, his son Hassan II, contrasted sharply with the socialist revolutions then being undertaken in Ghana, Guinea and Mali.

Nasser's initial close relations with Morocco were weakened by the death of Muhammad whom he admired, and destroyed in 1963 when border fighting flared up between Morocco and Algeria, and Nasser expressed support for the republican and socialist Algerians. Then also, in 1963, Nasser refused to support Nkrumah's plans for a unitary government for Africa, preferring the loose association of independent states that eventually emerged in the form of the OAU.

Egyptian-Algerian relations developed along lines of mutual respect as well as shared ideology such as socialism, nationalism and neutralism. The governments of President Ben Bella (1962-5) and Houari Boumedienne (since 1965) were grateful to Nasser for his aid in their fight for independence- But the Algerians largely owed their ultimate victory not to Nasser but to their own efforts. Thus, unlike some other Arab states, such as Syria and Yemen, Algeria has never suffered from an inferiority complex about Egypt's dominant position in the Arab world. Moreover Algeria has never regarded Egypt as a rival or a threat.

Nasser supported Tunisia's bid for independence (won in 1956), but Egypt and Tunisia were soon at odds on ideological grounds. President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia was progressive but pro-Western; his socialism took the form of secularization of Islam rather than, as in Egypt, the extension of state control to industry. Bourguiba also feared Egypt's domination of the Arab League from 1958. Relations between Nasser and Bourguiba only improved when Nasser expressed full Egyptian support for Tunisia's attack on the French naval base at Bizerta in 1961.

The Libyan coup of 1969 that overthrew the conservative King Idris and brought to power the Nasserite army officer Colonel Mu'ammar Gadafi paradoxically posed a threat to Nasserism. Gadafi, the new Nasser, believed like his mentor that the army would both make revolution and lead it. The Free Officer movement that planned revolution in Libya and the Revolutionary Command Council that has ruled the country since the coup were directly modelled on Egyptian precedents.

Like Nasser, Gadafi was determined to develop and transform his country and regenerate and unite the Arab world. But Gadafi's adherence to Islamic fundamentalism and his turning of Libya into a theocracy was a challenge to Nasser's example of reform through a secularized political state. Gadafi stated:

'There is no contradiction between religious consciousness and political decisions.' Nasser disagreed with this, as he would have disagreed with Gadafi's Third Theory rejecting both capitalism and communism as Western ideas and postulating a middle course between these two ideologies based on Koranic doctrine. However, Nasser did not live to dispute with Gadafi, as he certainly would have done. It was left to Sadat to bear the brunt of Gadafi's fanatical devotion to principle and rejection of pragmatism.

Nasser died in 1970 of a heart attack, brought on by his exertions in trying to make peace in the Jordanian civil war between King Hussein's army and Palestinian guerillas. Nasserism had been on the wane for some time. Nationalism was triumphant almost everywhere in Africa outside the white south by 1966; thereafter Cairo's clarion call to political liberation was less urgently relevant. Nasser's brand of socialism seemed tame by comparison with the more Marxist forms of socialism experimented with in the 1960s in a number of new African states.

By the late 1960s both pan-Arabisrn and pan-Africanism had lost their early momentum. By 1970 the battle with Israel seemed to be lost. Thus Nasser outlived Nasserism. However, Nasser's funeral was an occasion for a massive out- pouring of genuine emotion. The tumultuous crowds forgot his failings and failures and recognized his immense achievement in breaking Egypt's dependence on the West and pulling fellahin out of the worst of their poverty.

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3 See Awolowo. Awo, Autobiography, p. 312,