1960s–1990s: (Building the Nation — Polity: The Colonial Legacy of Unaccountability and Force, Nineteenth-Century Rivalries Resurgent in Twentieth-Century Dr…

1960s–1990s: (Building the Nation — Polity: The Colonial Legacy of Unaccountability and Force, Nineteenth-Century Rivalries Resurgent in Twentieth-Century Dress, Big Men as the Perpetuation of Nineteenth-Century Political Entrepreneurialism, Artificial Boundaries Slicing Through Communities, the OAU’s 1963 Decision to Preserve Colonial Borders as Sacred, the Failure of Multi-Party Parliamentary Systems, and the Rise of One-Party States as the Norm by the 1970s): The political challenges confronting new nation-states — internal unity, failure of democracy, and preeminence of the military — were interconnected. The colonial state established patterns of competition and domination through ethnicity, region, or religion, and precedents for unaccountability and force, all utilized by independent governments. Yet to attribute internal strains solely to colonial misrule is to neglect the formative developments of the nineteenth century — much ferocious competition for political space was a continuation of evolving nineteenth-century struggles. The emergence of Big Men — charismatic leaders at the head of dominant parties — was the perpetuation in new formats of nineteenth-century political and military entrepreneurialism, adventurers attracting people through their ability to distribute largesse. Among the most fundamental problems was the artificiality of the territories themselves — borders created in the 1880s–1900s sliced through communities bound by history, culture, and language, while peoples were squeezed into territories created for European convenience and expected to transform geographical units into functioning nation-states virtually overnight. The violence attending African political processes since independence was entirely predictable given that the European nation-state itself had required centuries of upheaval. In founding the OAU in 1963, member-states enshrined the absolute sanctity of colonial boundaries, recognizing that to open them for renegotiation would invite a generation of bloodbath. African leaders quickly rejected multi-party parliamentary systems as unworkable — one-party states became the norm by the early 1970s, and while a few like Tanzania and Zambia maintained limited local democracy, more commonly single-party rule led to oppressive authoritarianism removable only by force.