Situation Report: Africa 2008 to 2009: Retrospective look at the past year and forecast for the new year, Paul-Simon Handy

As the year 2009 starts and the spectre of the global financial crisis is yet to reveal its full and likely devastating potential, it is time to reflect on the past year’s security related developments in Africa and draw some lessons for 2009. In many ways, 2008 will be remembered as a year of contrasts. On the one hand, it will go down in history as the year of the biggest financial crisis since the great depression of 1929 with fears of pending unemployment and a global recession of incalculable consequences making the rounds. On the other hand, historians and analysts will look back at 2008 as the year Barack Obama was elected the first African-American President of the United States of America. The immense and, in some cases, unrealistic hopes raised across the world by this development are representative of widespread perceptions of a world in chaos. In Africa, violence around Kenyan and Zimbabwean elections were later challenged by other peaceful – even though not always free and fair – experiments in Angola, Swaziland, Rwanda, Guinea-Bissau, Zambia and Ghana.