Dvakrát komunistické Československo a Afrika
Two Works about Communist Czechoslovakia and Sub-Saharan Africa

Summary/Abstract: Zídek, Petr. Československo a francouzská Afrika 1948–1968. Prague: Libri, 2006, 248 pp. Zídek, Petr, and Karel Sieber. Československo a subsaharská Afrika v letech 1948– 1989. Prague: Ústav mezinárodních vztahů, 2007, 322 pp. The authors of these two works, argues the reviewer, merit recognition for having set out into an almost entirely neglected fi eld of research – namely, the relations between the Czechoslovak Communist regime and the countries of the Third World. With thorough archive research they endeavour to provide a comprehensive description of developments in one of its areas, Sub-Saharan Africa. In the process they contribute to our knowledge of political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence history, while leaving economic and culture relations more or less aside. When the two publications are compared, however, the volume that Zídek wrote independently comes out better. For one thing, Zídek has taken advantage of a considerably wider range of sources (including records from French archives, contemporaneous periodicals, and his own interviews with people once involved in the events); for another, he has endeavoured to capture the whole context, the prerequisites, and mechanisms of Czechoslovak foreign policy towards the countries of francophone Africa. The reviewer considers the work relatively well informed and conceptually well considered. By contrast, however, he argues that the other work under review lacks any theoretical conception and does not even attempt interpretation; the result, he concludes, is a rather superfi cially structured, boring, descriptive summary.

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