Seems that one when one hears about strife in Africa, it’s almost always about internal civil wars and power struggles rather than disputes between two nations. Have two post-colonial African nations ever squared off their army, air force and navy against each other? Are there factors which make this less likely to happen than in other parts of the world?
Sure, both the First and Second Congo Wars (see wiki articles).
Hmm, was that a “conventional war” between two nations though? According to the articles, although there was some support given from neighbor countries, the activity was between different factions within the borders of Zaire (renamed Congo).
Go down the lists: List of wars: 1945–1989 - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1990%E2%80%932002
During the Cold War era and beyond, there were a lot of “conventional” two-sided wars in North Africa and East Africa and a few that would fit the bill in sub-Saharan Africa.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the lines between a “conventional” war and a civil war were often blurred because as a result of the somewhat arbitrarily-drawn colonial borders, there were often combatant entities that existed across national borders or that were essentially arms of the governments of other countries. The Congo Wars are a good example of this, being technically a series of civil wars but ones in which many neighboring countries were directly participating. There were a handful that fit your definition of “conventional” like the Uganda-Tanzania War that led to the ouster of Idi Amin, but many, many more where the situation is ambiguous.
I kind of always had the impression that outside of say… Egypt and the other Muslim N. African nations, and South Africa, the military forces were distinctly unprofessional and more or less not much different than irregular fighters anyway.
In undemocratic nations, strong armies pose a risk of coup d’etat’s. The leaders of such nations rely on elite corps of (hopefully) loyal forces to keep them in power. And given the semi-wilderness of many parts of Africa, sometimes the government has only nominal authority out in the “bush”. You have to actually have full control of your own country before thinking about going to war with others.
The Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia is what comes immediately to mind as the most conventional struggle. It’s an odd engagement in that a former U.S. client ( Ethiopia ) became a Soviet client and that two Soviet clients then found themselves in a war forcing the U.S.S.R. to chose between them. It pragmatically decided to abandon their earlier ally Somalia in favour of the one with more potential in Ethiopia. As a result Somalia became a U.S. client. It was a Cold War swap, with the Soviets generally getting the better deal.
Also basically a cold war era proxy war.
What about:
Another vote for Eritrea-Ethiopia. Very interesting country, Eritrea. Punches far above its weight.
That one is actually a really good example of what I think the OP is talking about, in that there are nearly always one or more parties in any conflict that are irregular in nature, or “foreign”. Tanzania/Uganda should be a straightforward border clash, but there you have Libya(!) Mozambique (!), the Uganda National Liberation Front (fair enough) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (WTF!?) listed as combatants.
Weak states with generally feeble militaries, led by dictators relying on backing from ‘private armies’ and ‘foreign friends’ to keep them in power mean that anytime they are genuinely fighting a war (rather than just robbing their own citizens) it gets complicated…
All the conflict data you could ever want can be found in the Uppsala Conflict Database:
No, it really varies by country. Ethiopia has a strong military, for example. Cameroon’s military isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty well organized. Chad’s politics are a mess, but their military is one heck of a machine. To give an example, they are doing the majority of the fighting against extremists in Mali.
I’m sure there are others. Those are just what come to mind.
For the OP, I believe the issue you observe is one which comes to the nature of the decolonisation and the way the first generation of post-colonial leaders, for fear of upsetting the existing political structures, viewed the colonial boundaries as sacrosanct. And that the boundaries brought together often sets of peoples and ethnicities who had no political history together before the colonial rule, which often only really was of a brief period, a generation. Since then the conflict in Africa has been largely internal to countries that did not have political histories together internally. It is about then the making of nations out of state boundaries.
I find it notable that the countries or the areas of countries that had a political history together before colonisation have gotten along better than those brought together only by the French and the English and that for one generation or two. A political and social economy existed for them, unlike others.
Whilst the Angolan Civil War was, as the name suggests, a civil war, the conflict assumed at times the nature of a conventional war between nations, especially when South Africa intervened directly into Angolan territory rather than though their local proxy UNITA.
The Battle of Cunito Cuanavale (Battle of Cuito Cuanavale - Wikipedia) was the largest and largely armoured battle in African since WW2 at the time it was fought in 1987/88. I chanced to fly over the battlefield in a light aircraft at relatively low level (well, I asked for a minor diversion as we were in the area!) when I was working in Angola about 10 years ago. You could still pick out the wrecks of armoured vehicles then.
You can add the MPLA, now largely converted into the Angola National Army, to the list of relatively impressive fighting machines on the continent.
One perhaps unexpected but lasting result of the the Russian and Cuban support for Angolan independence is that they are the chess powerhouse of Africa.
That’s not unique to Africa. On all continents, it is hard to find an example in the past century of one nation going to war against a neighbor. Honduras and El Salvador in the so-called soccer war comes to mind as a rare exception, but there was a good and justifiable reason for that – a bad call by a football referee.
In the past century, Germany and then the USA have been pretty much the only examples of nations that with little or no provocation went to nationalistic war against another sovereign state. Each of them was quick to point out their justifications, but other countries have resisted the temptation.
Once national boundaries are settled, the modern global paradigm is to pretty much learn to live with them and take care of your own affairs.
Many countries in Africa are nations in name only. Often tribes are more important and tribes can cross national borders.
Aren’t you forgetting the Soviet Union with Afghanistan and China? Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands? The conflict between Pakistan and India in Kashmir? Cyprus? Korea? Etc.
Really? The past century is littered with them.
To add to Quartz’s etc, off the tops of my head the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Soviet invasion of Finland, the Italian invasions of Ethiopia, Albania and Greece, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, invasion of China, and war with the US, Commonwealth and Dutch colonies, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
Plus what definition are you using for “little or no provocation”? Invasion or imminent invasion of your country? Well in that case throw out every country in WWI that wasn’t Serbia or Belgium or Britain/France in WW2 (how exactly was overrunning Poland going to be a threat to Liverpool?).