For a while some people, including me, allowed ourselves to believe that military rule was a relic of the twentieth century. The militaries that governed some of the world’s largest countries – Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria – were more retiring in the twenty-first century than they had been in the twentieth, and their drab uniforms and televised coup announcements mostly disappeared after the millennium. Until recently, that is. In Africa in the last few years, a series of military coups has given lie to the idea that army rule is a thing of the past. Men in uniform are back in statehouses across the continent, and military coups in Mali, Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Sudan have shaken up Africa’s internal order. Military dictatorship, long thought to be dead or at least deep in hibernation, has come back to life. Historians are notoriously bad at predicting the future, but West Africa might be a bellwether. Whatever global order is emerging, old-school military dictatorship will be part of it.
Africa’s new military regimes have suppressed protest, stifled the media, and put many people in jail. The violent extremist movements the regimes in the Sahel are combating are real, but they also invent enemies – internal and external – to justify their takeovers. Officers fight with one another, too, which makes for unstable political systems. Their international commitments are unpredictable, and the recent coups have precipitated a shift away from old allies (France, the United States) towards new ones (the Russian Federation).
All of this has happened before. My new open-access book Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire argues that geopolitics and personal power are not enough to explain why the armed forces have returned to African politics. There is a deep martial pattern in West African history, and the coups of the last few years are a return to one of independent Africa’s most important political traditions: militarism. Militarism has been forgotten compared to the other, more hopeful ideas that animated African politics after independence, like Pan-Africanism. But it was at least as important as those visions, if not more so.
The military regimes of the past were innovative (though that is not an endorsement of them). They made a new political philosophy of discipline, new institutions, and new rules for how people should think and behave. They promised to make Africa into an orderly and rule-bound paradise. None of this come to pass, but their promises remained popular. In Nigeria and elsewhere, people liked militarism’s disciplinary spirit; whipping the public into shape, sometimes literally, had a certain appeal to those who felt that the world had become too unruly. Independence did not always mean freedom, and soldiers’ rigid ideas shaped independent African politics much more than many historians would like to admit.
Over the last few years, I have had the unpleasant feeling that the history I was writing was becoming current events. Just like in the past, Africa’s contemporary military regimes are building an ideological foundation that will keep them in power for a long time. Long submerged by more hopeful ideological currents, militarism is now rising back to the surface of African politics. My book describes where it came from, and why it lasted so long.
Beginning in the 1960s, army officers who took power tried to remake their societies along military lines. In these ‘revolutions,’ as coup plotters called their takeovers, a new ideology emerged. Militarism was a coherent and relatively consistent vision for society, even though not all military regimes were the same. It had its own political values (obedience, discipline), morals (honour, bravery, respect for rank), and an economic logic (order, which they promised would bring wealth). It had a distinct aesthetic, and a libidinal politics. The military’s internal principles became the rules of politics at large. Officers came to believe that military training could transform their countries from the ground up. Some came to believe, ironically, that only strict discipline would bring true freedom.
Militarism was a freestanding ideology, not just American liberalism, Soviet socialism, or European neocolonialism dressed up in a uniform. It was not just an epiphenomenon of the Cold War, however tempting it is to explain it that way. Powerful outsiders pulled some of the strings in African politics, but not all of them, and African officers took pride in the fact that they followed no one’s orders but their own.
African independence was more of a grey area than the black-and-white stories we have about it suggest. Decolonisation, the book concludes, ‘is an empty vessel, and you can put all kinds of things into it. The rejection of European imperialism took a dizzying array of forms, and decolonisation promised many different futures, not all of which could be reconciled with one another. Africa’s literal decolonisers – the people who made colonies into something else – can’t be neatly divvyed up into rebels and bootlickers. Not all acts of decolonisation were acts of liberation. There were decolonisations of the left and the right. Some united peoples cleaved apart by colonialism. Others split them up further. Some rejected “tribe” and tried to make nations that weren’t defined by ethnicity. A few took ethnonationalist turns, with bloody ends. Many decolonisers wore uniforms.’
Today’s military regimes do not seem to have the same long-term visions of their predecessors, but the longer they stay in power, the more likely they are to start making plans. Despite all their promises to return to the barracks, they are not going anytime soon. If we are trying to anticipate what the continent’s military regimes might do next, it makes sense to look to the past. In the late twentieth century, military regimes promised to create a ‘soldier’s paradise’ in Africa. They failed, but their vision was consequential even in failure. This vision has already reshaped regional politics, and it might have a knock-on effect for the larger global order. Not everyone dreams of freedom, and for those with a disciplinary frame of mind, militarism has an appeal that no other ideology does. Africa’s twentieth century history shows us what happens when they take the reins.
The views and opinions expressed in the CGO blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the programme and its partners.
