Fallen Heroes: African Leaders Whose Assassinations Disarrayed the Continent and Benefitted Foreign Interests

No continent has experienced half the political assassinations, coup d' tats, internal and external wars, civil unrest, and economic upheaval s since the second half of the twentieth century that Africa suffered. Yet, hardly any serious pundit would say that the hands of foreign forces that are out to secure their "so-called interests" in the continent or that want to gain new ones, were not in most of these setbacks. That these external forces have roughly been succeeding with the help of Africans with the evil disposition or Africans ignorant of their game plan is true.

Opposed to this foreign exploitation and domination with the use of African puppet dictators are the Pan-Africanists, the civic-nationalists of Africa otherwise called the Union-Nationalist. They became prominent during the colonial era with their liberation movements to free Africa from colonial rule. How successful they were, is debatable. Today, neocolonialism dominates the continent. Puppets of foreign powers are in power in most of the African countries, and the pre-independence vision of an African Union has not been realized.

Some say the setback is because the propagators of the idea of a "New Africa" were killed early in the independence of most of the African countries. That Africa has experienced several other assassinations over the past six decades is true. However, the ones below have been the most reverberating, with far-reaching unintended consequences, especially as the legacies of these felled African heroes are expanding every day to become the base for the rebirth of Pan-Africanism, the ideal that is expected to be the cornerstone of the economic union and the political integration of Africa.