The African Superpowers (a TL)

1990s (Part 3)

The 1990s, despite the vast number of fights and problems in Russia, Iraq and the Balkans, was a time of incredible prosperity, and the development of technology that would change the face of the world and how it talked to each other. The internet, first truly envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992, spread like wild fire in the 1990s. Cellular phones also began becoming far more common, and by the end of 1990s Africa has 270 million users of cellular phones - half as many land lines, but by 2010 the number of cellphones would be considerably bigger than the number of land lines.

In 1996, Africa Aerospace and a number of the world's smaller aviation makers made history, when the Aerolive Aurora flew for the first time from Jan Smuts International Airport in Johannesburg, showing the world that supersonic airliners were not just a flight of fancy or limited to the Anglo-French Concorde. The Aurora was a plane carrying near 300 passengers, with fuel economy per seat being nearly three times that of the afterburning Concorde. The Aurora was very popular among the nations which built it - South Africa, East Africa, Brazil, Canada, Australia and Japan - but initially struggled for orders in other places. But Aurora took advantage of many design innovations and technology, including an onboard computer system that allowed the passengers access to a vast number of movies, music and television shows while on the plane. As the costs of flying supersonic were expected to be larger than on conventional airliners, the plan was to make the airplane quite comfortable to fly in. The Aurora's main issues were dealing with the heating of surfaces when flying at supersonic speeds, which was dealt with by using the fuel as a heat sink, which when combined with ultra-high-temperature alloys used in the engines, allowed for leaner combustion, which helped the airplane's fuel consumption and range. The Aurora entered revenue service for Royal South African Airways, Japan Air Lines, Air Canada and TAM Airlines in June 2000, with the first full flight being by RSAA, with its first flight, Springbok Flight 2000, leaving Johannesburg's Jan Smuts International Airport for Singapore's Changi Airport on June 7, 2000.

While the global air travel market was opening up for the Africans, the ground transport market also beckoned. African railways were mostly government-owned enterprises, and despite substantial freight movements they were known for inefficiency, with South African Railways in particular being infamous for this. Economics were forcing changes, but everyone involved looked to the railways in the United States and Europe as what they wanted to be - the European High-Speed Trains were models of efficiency, whereas the American railroads, despite being lacking in the job of moving passengers, were the kings at moving freight - more than one African railfan went just to see the trains at places like Cajon Pass and Stevens Pass and talked about it, watching two-mile long trains of double-stack containers coil their way up the mountains of the American West. One of these was Eric Menson, a veteran engineer for East African Railways Company, who spent a month on the Southern Pacific Lines for six weeks in 1985, and came back talking about how good of an idea it could be for East Africa. Menson formed his own company, Central Railways of Africa, and began assembling money for building an American-style freight railway in Africa. Menson found the ability to find funding from American railways themselves, and his Central Railways began building a line from Kampala to Nairobi in February 1988. This line began operating in 1991, using a number of huge DDA40X diesel locomotives, sold to the African line after being retired from the American railroad. The gigantic DDA40X engines proved to be legendary, being that there were nearly twice as tall as the engines used by the state-owned railways, and the trains, in the same form as the American lines, were able to move frieght in incredible amounts, and by the end of 1990s, the Central Railways line from Kampala to Nairobi had been extended to Kampala in Uganda and was being built to Dar es Salaam, with the goal of ultimately extending the line all the way to Mbali in Rhodesia and to Lilongwe. The 40 DDA40Xs sold to the line from the Americans were added to with twenty new-builds from GM Africa, which began entering service in 1996.

Politically, the leaders of the early 1990s had little trouble being re-elected. Abraham Bazaka was re-elected in 1990, though he announced he would not seek re-election in 1995. Likewise, Ian Smith was re-elected in 1991, but he resigned his position in September 1994, retiring at age 71. Steven Biko and the African National Congress was re-elected in April 1993, but he lost some of his majority, and in April 1998, the ANC lost command back to the South African Party, now led by Afrikaner Mathinus van Schalkwyk, who took over from Helen Suzman in 1994. As with Biko, van Schalkwyk was unable to gain a majority in government, and he turned to the National Party, led by Pieter Metjiens, to form a government. Metjiens at first was helpful to the government, but within a year of the election, relationships between van Schlkwyk and Metjiens were going south, with both Biko and Kwabena shouting at him, hoping for failure.

Africa was shaken on September 20, 1997, when terrorist truck bombs ripped though the American embassies in Addis Adaba and Nairobi. The American Embassy in Nairobi was across the street from a major synagogue, which made things worse as the bomb went off on Saturday morning, in the process catching hundreds of people outside the synagogue. More than 300 people were killed in Nairobi, with thousands of injured. The East African government was visibly furious, and after the admission by Al-Qaeda that they were the ones responsible, most of the Africans had no objections to the United States' missile strikes in Afghanistan in August 1998. Another attack on an American embassy in Salisbury was shut down on August 25, 1998, when members of the Rhodesian Federal Police raided a house in Bindura, northeast of Salisbury, in the process discovering over 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate in bags and a nearly-complete car bomb in the trunk of a stolen Buick Century, and another 70 pounds of TNT in the back of a Ford Bantam that had been stolen in southern Congo, along with a number of AK-47s, grenades and handguns. Considering the size of the crimes, the Congolese let the auto theft charge the perpetrators were guilty of go, figuring the Rhodesians would treat them harshly - which was a good assumption. The ring leaders, Ibrahim Eidarous and Mahmoud Hisham al-Hennawi, were sentenced to life in prison for the crimes in Rhodesia. It was never proven that they were the ones responsible for the attacks in Nairobi and Addis Adaba, but the East Africans and Ethiopians decided against trying to force the issue. The loss of Eidarous, a documents specialist, was a blow to al-Qaeda in any case.
 
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