Today, although independence and freedom are the public face of modern Africa, the West - and its marketplace - still holds sway over much of the continent.
The history of 20th-century Africa is dominated by the desire of outsiders to reshape a vast, diverse continent to a Western design. This was done in three ways: colonialism, Cold War, and the supremacy of the marketplace.
Nationalist struggles against these three have defined every generation this century.
The colonial powers were Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal, with Italy, Spain and Germany as bit players. As the century opened, only two countries in Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia, had independent governments; the rest of the continent was run by European governments and companies. The colonialists came with capitalism, missionaries, teachers and settlers. They came, too, with military force. Resistance was fierce, and the Europeans sought allies among kings, emirs and chiefs, who realised co-operation could be in their interest.
Colonialism brought Europe undreamed of wealth. Rubber, ivory, copper, gold, cotton, cocoa, tobacco: all flowed out of Africa, leaving behind a newly-impoverished peasant workforce. This new economy demanded a system of migrant labour that destroyed for ever the unity of traditional communities.
The violent consequences of this rapid disruption, coupled with the paternalistic attitudes that justified white rule, began a slow-burning anger among Africans. The Depression of the Thirties plunged Africa into crisis, as its export-oriented economies were halved in value overnight. Then, in the second world war, hundreds of thousands of Africans fought in the armies of their colonisers, and brought home anti-fascist ideas that cast a new light on the subjugation in their own countries: if they had fought for freedom in Europe, why not fight for freedom at home?
The fever of anti-colonial politics spread as a handful of educated Africans returned from studies in the US and Britain. The key figure was Kwame Nkrumah, of Britain's model colony, the Gold Coast, who in 1957 became the first president of independent Ghana. Five North African countries - Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco - were already independent, but Ghana's independence and Nkrumah's pan-Africanism was an electric shock that ended 60-years of domination masquerading as helpfulness. On a wave of euphoria, independence quickly came to the whole continent, with the exception of the white settler regimes in southern Africa - South Africa, Namibia and Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The route was a mixture of political negotiation and armed struggles, such as Kenya's Mau Mau uprising.
It was to be another story of attempted domination during the Cold War, with the Soviet Union supporting almost every liberation movement in Africa. In response, the US picked key men among the freedom fighters - some of whom became heads of state, some rebel leaders - and taught them an anti-communism that became the pretext for wholesale repression.
In the process, a political vacuum was created that gave power to the military and brought coups all over Africa. The Cold War blinded the US to the forces of nationalism in Africa. The killing of Congolese nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA had a role, symbolised the ruthless way charismatic leaders were dealt with; and the destruction of Angola, by US proxies, illustrated how an entire country could be sacrificed in an anti-communist crusade, despite there being no communists in power - only a Cuban military force defending the country against South African aggression.
The Seventies and Eighties were grim decades for much of Africa. A new offensive against nationalist policies was unleashed by the World Bank and the IMF on Africa's fragile economies. Just as countries struggled with drought and the impact of two major oil price hikes, the primacy of the market and the unpicking of state structures were imposed from Washington.
As economies deteriorated, so social strains increased and intractable civil wars and refugees became the faces of Africa. But, in the last decades of the century, South Africa achieved the miracle of majority rule under Nelson Mandela, while in Uganda Yoweri Museveni fought the first post-independence liberation war and became the symbol of a new political generation of leadership in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda - intellectuals who had been through the fire of liberation struggles and set out to build societies which could transcend both the heavy hand of outsiders, and the scourge of ethnic politics. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which a million Tutsis were killed by their erstwhile friends and neighbours from the majority Hutu population, acted as a terrible warning of what ethnic politics had in store if Africa's new leaders were to fail.