In October 1970, after the civil war had ended, General Yakubu Gowon reiterated his earlier pledge that military rule would be terminated on 1 October 1976, but two years before that date he postponed the return to civilian rule indefinitely on the grounds that Nigerians had not yet demonstrated ‘moderation and self-control in pursuing sectional ends’.1 In July 1975, nine years after his own elevation to Head of the Federal Military Government (F.M.G.), Gowon was removed by a coup d'état led by Brigadier Murtala Mohammed, who cited mismanagement as the immediate reason. However, after the coup, ‘well-placed spokesmen for the new administration…reaffirmed that the goals of the coup were to restore the good image of the military and to create conditions which will make reactive military intervention unnecessary in the future’.2

The creation in November 1979 of a Transitional Government of National Unity under the leadership of Wodei Goukouni was greeted by most observers with a sigh of relief and a measure of guarded optimism. The composition of the new régime in Chad, and especially the enhanced rôle of the defeated Sara south within it, may possibly stabilise a situation still exceedingly volatile and inherently unstable. Yet, as West Africa cautioned, ‘twenty years of government by a group unrepresentative of the country, pretending to fill the vacuum at the centre of power and doing so with conspicuous ineffectiveness, cannot be easily erased’.1 Even given the sincerity and goodwill of all 11 groups in the new power hierarchy – which is far from assured, because every conceivable opportunistic faction has been included – the attempt to bring unity and stability to a land that has never experienced either may easily founder against the harsh realities of sharp internal divisions.

The primary purpose of this article is to survey the political history of the Union Defence Force (U.D.F.) and the South African Defence Force (S.A.D.F.) – the former term applying to the Union and the latter to the Republic of South Africa – from 1914 until 1979, in such a manner that other scholars can undertake comparative research on African armies in general and those in Southern Africa in particular. Although the focus is on one geographical area, namely, South-West Africa or Namibia, for a 65-year time span, this need not constrain other analysts in their choice of location or duration. A secondary purpose is to include the additional element of international organisations, specifically, the League of Nations and the United Nations, because hopefully this will enrich the comparative utility of the research design. The principal organising device of the enquiry is that of the differing rôles of the military unit, an approach which has been utilised in the literature concerning armed forces in non-western areas.1

In the three decades that have elapsed since the end of World War II, the overseas empires created by the European powers have almost all come to an end, and a wide range of new states, large and small, has taken their place. Now, when many of these nations are approaching the 25th anniversaries of their independence, it is a fitting moment to ask how well they are doing, not in any spirit of paternalistic chauvinism, but rather in order to see how far the hopes and expectations of the last years of dependence have been fulfilled in the first years of freedom, and whether a modern polity, modelled essentially on the nations of Europe, can be created and sustained by peoples of very different traditions, working within arbitrarily imposed boundaries that were not of their own choosing.

The continuing prominence of coups d'état in the political life of the Third World has sustained interest in the question of whether, and in what circumstances, the armed forces are capable of making a positive contribution to modernisation. During the 1960s, a number of scholars began to take a favourable view of the military's modernising potential based on ideal-typical conceptions of armed-force organisations which, in Henry Bienen's felicitous phrase, were ‘unencumbered by empirical detail’.1 A second dimension of support for the positive image was perceived in the attitudes and class background of the officer corps.2 Critics of this viewpoint questioned the accuracy of these characterisations given the impact that transfer to a different socio-economic and political context has on institutional performance. Case-studies of Third-World militaries found that many lacked a single corporate identity, suffering from factionalism along cleavages of age, ethnicity, and regionalism; organisational cohesion was undermined by a proliferation of patron-client relationships.3 The motives for staging coups also were questioned, the military being perceived as particularly well-equipped to defend and pursue its corporate interests.1

Since independence from colonial rule, there have been considerable changes in the legal systems of new African nations, reflecting – at least in part – the need to re-establish the position of indigenous customary law in relation to received European law. For many modern Africans, customary law has equivocal significance: all too often, this represents a traditional order, now out of keeping with contemporary social conditions and economic demands, and in addition is imbued with political connotations.

An authentic national liberation exists only to the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation. It is not possible to take one's distance with respect to colonialism without at the same time taking it with respect to the idea that the colonized holds of himself through the filter of colonialist culture.1

Disappointed with the development performance of most Third-World countries during the past two decades, many scholars and public officials have looked for a more effective strategy. They are concerned not merely with the extent of growth, but where it has occurred, with evidence that relatively little of the benefits of increased productivity has ‘trickled down’ to the poorer half of the populations of these lands. Capital-intensive methods have raised expectations in both the urban and the rural areas without generating adequate employment opportunities or distributing the benefits of growth equitably. As a consequence, the many poor remain as desperately disadvantaged as they ever were, making a re-evaluation of development priorities, within as well as outside of Africa, of the utmost importance at this juncture.