African History · Unit 12
Contemporary Africa
A continental institution still finding its footing, a democratic intervention that worked, and a coup wave that is rejecting the very idea of outside intervention
This closing unit examines Africa's most recent political history through three lenses: the African Union's evolution from the OAU's toothless 'dictators' club' into an institution with real, if still limited, tools for continental governance; the 2016-2017 Gambian crisis, in which regional intervention successfully forced a 22-year dictator to accept an election he lost; and the 2020-2023 wave of Sahel coups, whose leaders have explicitly rejected the same kind of regional and Western intervention that resolved Gambia's crisis, a rejection this curriculum's earlier material on Guinea's 1958 'no' vote suggests has its own long, complicated history.
Learning Objectives
- •Students will be able to explain the institutional differences between the Organisation of African Unity and its successor, the African Union, and evaluate why the OAU's non-interference principle limited its effectiveness.
- •Students will analyze the 2016-2017 Gambian constitutional crisis as a case study in successful regional intervention, identifying the specific diplomatic and military tools ECOWAS used to resolve it without armed conflict.
- •Students will compare the Gambian case to the 2020-2023 Sahel coup wave, evaluating why Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger's military governments explicitly rejected the kind of regional intervention that resolved Gambia's crisis.
- •Students will synthesize this curriculum's full twelve-unit arc into a coherent final assessment of the relationship between colonial-era decisions and contemporary African political challenges, while avoiding a deterministic reading that treats current events as simply predetermined by that history.