Africa and the New World Order: Voices and Ways of Liberation in Armah's Osiris Rising (Ayi Kwei Armah) (Critical Essay)

Since the late 1980s, a new world order has been established with the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the official end of Apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the insolent supremacy of Western capitalism and cultural values and the recent demonstration of Anglo-American imperialism in Afghanistan and in Iraq, just to mention a few. This modification of the international social, economic, and political arena has impacted poor and developing countries, especially those of Africa as J. Wiseman pinpoints that saying: "the end of the Cold War in the 1980s transformed the external environment in which African political systems operated. (1) Examples of these transformations are legion. The Russian politics of Perestroika and Glasnot implemented in the 1980s under President M. Gorbatchev caused the Soviet Union stopped any military and financial cooperation with pro-communists, Afro-Marxist countries such as Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Angola, and Mozambique. At the same Western European countries, such as France redefined their African agenda, as they saw that communism and Marxism were contained. One shall remember the historical speech of former French president, at La Baule, France, in 1990, warning African leaders that financial aids to their governments would continue to flow unless they practiced political liberalism.