Part of review forum on “Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire.”
When Sam Daly first reached out, inviting me to participate in an Author Meets Critic panel at the African Studies Association, I immediately said yes, even though I had promised myself that I would start saying no more often so that I could prioritize my own book writing. I enthusiastically said yes for two key reasons: (1) I am a fan of Sam’s work and have great respect for him as a scholar; and (2) I wanted to know what he had to say about militarism in Africa, a topic that is near and dear to my own research interests. Soldier’s Paradise did not disappoint. I found it to be smart, well researched, and highly enjoyable to read, not necessarily because of the subject matter—though I did like that too—but because of his clear prose and witty asides. I laughed out loud when he described the naming conventions of military decrees in this manner: “(Military jurists used parentheticals extravagantly.)” (176). It is obvious that Sam takes the craft of writing seriously, and he tells a good story. In what follows, I discuss some of the book’s other strong points. I also offer a few critical observations that warrant further discussion.
One of the book’s major strengths is that it takes militarism seriously. Indeed, Sam argues that militarism was the “most pervasive ideology” in late twentieth-century Africa, and I agree. “From the 1960s to the 1990s,” he writes, “African politics revolved around soldiers’ blood feuds and power grabs” (1). And yet, despite the centrality of military rule within Africa’s postcolonial politics, most historians have not seemed particularly interested in understanding why it has been such an attractive ruling strategy. This work has been primarily left to social scientists—the political theorists, sociologists, and policy wonks who use quantitative data to make sense of military governance. Sam, in comparison, uses rich archival data to unpack the complex relationship between military governments and the broader judicial system. More specifically, he explains how and why military rulers need laws, courts, and judges to implement their revolution. While the bulk of his analysis focuses on Nigeria, his work has cross-cultural resonance, particularly among states that were once part of the British empire.
Part of taking militarism seriously is recognizing that the entire “system” is far more complicated than observers may have previously assumed. As Sam argues, military rule, much like colonial rule, did not work through violence alone. Instead, it occasionally relied upon “subtler means.” While soldiers certainly used force to get things done, they also used “enticement, conditioning, and the manipulation of feeling” (86). This is a key point, one that I have also made in my own work. During Idi Amin’s dictatorship, the Ugandan military state relied upon gendered ideologies, discourses, and practices to maintain power, not simply violence. Gender was not divorced from militarism, but part and parcel of it. It was a crucial organizing factor of the military state, influencing how Amin and his henchmen understood and utilized power; gender also mediated how men and women experienced military rule, oftentimes in profoundly different ways. While acknowledging that militarism produces ideas about gender, Sam suggests that “military historians never meaningfully took it up” (214, n. 86). As a historian who has written extensively about gender and militarism, I take issue with this claim. It is true that many military historians have not taken gender seriously, but it is unfair to suggest that we have never taken it up in a meaningful way.
Calling out another scholar for failing to cite one’s own work is certainly narcissistic, but it highlights my larger critique of this otherwise outstanding book: gender is curiously absent from Sam’s analysis even though men and masculinity (as well as sex and sexuality) are all over this book. While there is a brief discussion of Nigerian women’s relationship to the military/state in the introduction, there is no comparable discussion of men, save for the reminder that although soldiers are not always men, in Nigeria, “militaries were overwhelmingly male in their composition, culture, and self-regard” (26). But what does this actually mean in terms of how masculinity shaped the nature of militarism in this particular place and time? Conversely, how did militarism shape masculinities? These are the types of questions that I would have liked to see examined. The fact that the index has no entry for “men” or “masculinity” suggests that these were not analytical categories that were central to the book. Given that there is a substantial body of feminist literature on gender and militarism, it is a shame that very little of it was utilized in this work.
In spite of these minor critiques, I want to congratulate Sam on publishing such a timely and important book and thank him for teaching me new things about militarism and the logics of martial politics. This is certainly a text that I will return to time and again.
