Part of review forum on “Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire”

“But the bitter truth is that one person’s paradise is always someone else’s prison.” This is the last sentence of Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire by Samuel Fury Childs Daly. The statement caps off an impressive exploration of the history of militarism in postcolonial Nigeria. More specifically, Daly interrogates the intersections between militarism and the law, two distinct approaches to achieving social order in postcolonial Africa.

The closing statement also encapsulates a key predicament of postcolonial Africa. The heroes who sought to deliver Africans from colonial repression ended up being the worst kind of oppressors. In the case of Nigeria, the first military coup happened a mere five years after independence. At the same time, African militaries were unlikely liberators. “Soldiers, with their pith helmets and defense pacts with Europeans, seemed like the dregs of imperialism” (5). Thus, it was a quick turnaround for the soldiers already saddled with this reputation to lose the stain of having sustained colonial repression and become liberators par excellence. The book’s goal is not to explain this seemingly inexplicable paradox, but to understand what the ideology of militarism looked like in practice.

What Daly spends a lot of time doing (and indeed one of my quibbles with this work) is disabusing his readers of the notion that military rule in Africa was sustained by foreign capitals or that some foreign powers pulled strings from a distance. Many Africanists who have observed military dictatorships that lasted long will no doubt agree on the role of foreign connections in normalizing or legitimizing their rule (unless militarism, according to Daly, has a duration). Moreover, this is salient given that Africans, coming out of colonial rule, were eager to see real improvements in their everyday life, as Daly himself observes. The norm, therefore, should have been that military regimes would have lasted short periods, being forced out after it became clear that they, like colonialism’s successor governments, were incapable of delivering. In the era of Structural Adjustment Programs, military regimes’ ubiquitous use of discipline—“their ideological touchstone”—as the basis of their rule is especially appealing to those interested in “fiscal discipline.” The Africans who have, therefore, critiqued a foreign role based on such shared rhetoric, military rulers’ travels to foreign capitals, security pacts between them and foreign powers, and so on, should be given some credence.

In Daly’s argument, at the core of militarism was a kind of cynicism. One takeaway from the study is that the implementers of militarism knew that the paradise they promised was a sham. They promised one thing to the poor and another (in secret) to the rich (8). They approached politics as they did war; “they run countries like they fight wars” (2), to be won by any means. No wonder, then, that the military regimes that Daly studies were contemptuous of the procedural processes of courts. To bring in an example outside of this book, in contemporary East Africa, in a moment of honesty, a military official reminded the public that “we have the law and we have other means.” This comment goes to show that the notion of the law under militarism is at best a suspect claim. Daly demonstrates the ways in which militarism is very much about theatrical performance. Throughout the book, he shows how accountability and impartiality as bureaucratic and legal virtues were “performed,” even when practices were anything but.

One strength of the book, I thought, was Daly’s excellent discussion of post-empire’s judicial mercenary system, where one judge from one former colony was employed by politicians to legitimize a constitutional coup or a military a coup in another. Daly masterfully shows how the seemingly odd and paradoxical language that many military regimes deployed to describe themselves came about. For example, the notion of military rulers, like General Idi Amin and others being “revolutionary” in fact had roots in a legal interpretation that allowed them to establish political and legal legitimacy. That was a genius deployment of the law that has lasted to this day. Yet, the vast majority of Africans experienced militarism’s law in the form of “war” on various social ills, according to soldiers, such as the war on indiscipline and the war on filth—the infamous programs that put enormous power in the hands of individual soldiers. I would hope to think that the soldiers and the senior officers who waged these campaigns (which included brutal physical assaults on victims) were not thinking about the law in the traditional sense, but indeed a war to achieve their version of “discipline.” Daly points out histories of military muscle-flexing on the continent that extend back to the late nineteenth-century wars of conquest. When imperial armies threatened African resistors with the claim that “Whatever happens, we have the maxim gun and they don’t,” it was fighters facing other fighters (even if one side was outmatched). Daly rightly notes that ordinary citizens who lived in areas affected by one or another of militarism’s war “experienced military rule as a long, brutal occupation” (93). But in my view, postcolonial rule by the gun deserves more castigation than Daly provides.