Nairobi/Johannesburg  - The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which triggered the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, also prompted a major shake-up of the African political landscape.

Many autocratic African leaders and regimes that had been backed by either the Soviet Union or the Americans as part of a proxy Cold War on the continent found the rug pulled out from under their feet as tensions eased between the two superpowers.

As Soviet funding to its allies dried up, and the winds of change reached Africa, one-party or no-party regimes from Benin to Kenya, Zambia and Malawi were suddenly besieged by street protests and forced to open up, at least ostensibly, to multiparty politics.

The end of the Cold War also meant that Western governments could no longer rationalize propping up dictatorial regimes on the basis that these countries could help block the advance of Communism on the continent.

In Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa's most notorious dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko, had ruled since 1965 with the US backing him as a buttress against Soviet influence.

The US happily pumped in aid as Mobutu pillaged his country's mineral wealth, amassing a personal fortune estimated at over 5 billion dollars.

US support for Mobutu dated to 1960, in the days following Congo's independence from Belgium, when Patrice Lumumba, an independence hero and the first elected prime minister of the new state, accepted Soviet military aid to quell a provincial uprising.

Lumumba was murdered in a CIA-backed coup in 1961. Within four years, former army general Mobutu had taken his place and set about banning party politics.

Feted in Washington, where he was considered a personal friend by then US President George Bush, Mobutu's stranglehold on power came crashing down with the Soviet Union.

The US simply did not need him to hold back the tide of Communism anymore, a fact Mobutu himself was bitterly aware of.

"I am the latest victim of the Cold War, no longer needed by the US," he told Time Magazine as the US joined Belgium and France in pressuring him to allow a transition to democracy.

By 1997, Mobutu had been deposed by Laurent-Desire Kabila.

In apartheid South Africa, the fall of the Iron Curtain nixed the spectre of a Communist "total onslaught" in Africa, which the National Party had long been warning would result if the leftist African National Congress (ANC) came to power.

By that point the "red menace" had come to supersede the "swart gevaar" (black threat) in National Party thinking.

But as Martin Meredith, author of The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, points out, after the collapse of Communism in Europe, "the fear that the ANC could be used as a Trojan horse for advancing Soviet interests fell away."

By then, the regime was also in talks with jailed anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela on his vision for South Africa and finding in the "terrorist-in-chief" an accommodating future leader, more intent on reconciliation than nationalization.

Meanwhile, in Angola, the implosion of the Soviet Union brought a real chance at peace after 15 years of a civil war bankrolled by Cold War powers.

The Soviets and Cubans had taken the side of Angola's Marxist MPLA against right-wing US-and-South-Africa-backed Unita rebels in a battle for ideological supremacy in Africa.

The Soviet Union supplied billions of dollars of military equipment to Angola, while Cuba and South Africa contributed tens of thousands of troops to the war effort.

By 1991, however, the US and Russia had declared the Cold War in Africa over. South Africa and Cuba had also withdrawn.

But Unita leader Jonas Savimbi refused to recognize the MPLA's victory in elections and the war continued for another decade, killing nearly 500,000 people before it ended in 2002.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for Eastern Europe to get democracy, Africa's democratization process is far from over.

The Economist magazine reported last year that, out of 54 African countries, only 32 have governments elected in multiparty polls. (dpa)