Author’s response to a review forum on “Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire”

The epigraph of Soldier’s Paradise is from a 1979 essay by Jenny Holzer. “When you dominate somebody you’re doing him a favor,” it goes. “You’re helping him while helping yourself. Even when you get mean he likes it. Sometimes he’s angry and fights back but you can handle it. He always remembers what he needs. You always get what you want.” A polemic about sadomasochism might seem like an odd place to start a book about military dictatorship, but Holzer’s famous essay captured something important about politics: Just as there are people who find pleasure in bondage, there is jouissance in repression. Discipline and subjugation are political values—toxic ones, maybe, but like many toxins they’re pleasurable in small doses. This fact rubs liberal-minded people the wrong way, but we ignore it at our peril. Authoritarianism’s pleasures include the spectacle of watching others suffer, the excitement of causing pain, or the cold thrill of feeling it yourself. Pain, as sadists and masochists know in their different ways, makes you feel alive. This zero-at-the-bone aliveness is the gift that tyranny offers.

Alicia Decker, Gregory Mann, and Ben Twagira have written thoughtful responses to my book, and I’m grateful to them for saying something real about its claims rather than dodging them (or blandly endorsing them). When I started writing Soldier’s Paradise I felt that scholars of Africa were caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock was a pious approach to the history of African independence that only wanted to talk about freedom. It stopped the track sometime in the 1960s, before the point when democratically elected governments gave way to dictatorships. It couldn’t explain why so many African countries were taken over by their armies, and it couldn’t account for tyranny as anything other than the residue of colonialism or an effect of the Cold War. The hard place was a fixation on violence and decline that dressed up old colonial ideas about barbarism as objective social science—a postcolonial gothic, as I call it in the book. Independent Africa was not a “deathworld,” as Achille Mbembe, perhaps the continent’s most celebrated interpreter, described it. The metaphors that were used to describe African politics—a phallus, a belly, a puppet show, a black hole—obscured more than they revealed.

Soldier’s Paradise was an attempt to get out of that dead end by showing that even seemingly cynical dictatorships had structure, form, and vision—but that vision wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “Were these men ideologues or opportunists?” Mann asks, noting that I downplay how self-interested dictators like Babangida and Obasanjo could be. Why couldn’t they be both? The fact that they loved power (and did everything they could to hold onto it) doesn’t mean that they were un-ideological. One could also turn his question inside out: is any ideology divorced from the self-interests of those who put it down on paper? Probably not. Mann also points to a problem of perspective, which I cop to; I allow Nigeria to stand in for Africa often. It’s easy to assume that whatever lies over the horizon is more-or-less the same as what you can see from where you’re standing. It isn’t, of course, but in my defense, Nigeria’s scale—nearly one out of every five Africans is Nigerian—makes it an especially high point to look out from.

Militarism was an ideology of law and order, but this isn’t why I wrote Soldier’s Paradise as a legal history. Law is more about grey areas than red lines, and lawyers dwell in ambivalence; what matters is that your argument carries the day, not necessarily that you agree with it. Historians of law can be similarly mercenary in how we think about the past, and it’s rare to read a legal history that is crystal clear about right and wrong. In a historiography of independence that can only see rebels and bootlickers, this is a useful corrective.

But my reluctance to moralize has led some readers to believe that Soldier’s Paradise is an apologia for military rule. “Post-colonial rule by the gun deserves more castigation than Daly provides,” Ben Twagira writes, noting that I could have given more space to the military’s critics—especially the ones who saw them as colonial apologists. This is a view that my sources do not support. For all their ills, soldiers had minds of their own, and to see them as the stooges of the British obscures what made them popular. Although they could be Anglophile in their tastes, they took orders from no one except each other. Twagira’s smart response points to a pitfall of many liberal critiques of oppression: We celebrate the people who fought back, and we want there to have been a lot of those people. The hard truth is that sometimes there weren’t. If we always center those who resisted, we lose sight of those who saw nothing to resist—and thereby miss the whole point of why an oppressive system lasts. As for castigation, all I can say is that I don’t share the beliefs of the men I write about. Describing their ideology is not the same thing as endorsing it, and I have no interest in weighing their souls.

Each of us has a domain of experience that we think we understand intuitively. Sometimes it’s where we’re from, or a community we count ourselves part of, or a way of life that we know from living it. The settings of this book—the barracks, the courtroom, Nigeria itself—are all far from my own life, and whatever insight I have about them has been eked out through study, not instinct. But maleness … that’s something I thought I knew by feel.

The word “queer” appears nowhere in this book, but it wouldn’t be absurd to call Soldier’s Paradise a queer history of militarism. I resisted the term because I dislike the interpretive move of “queering” one thing or another, usually to signal that there’s something non-normative about it while vaguely connecting it to sexuality. If a book isn’t about sex, especially of a minoritarian kind, then it isn’t queer. This book isn’t about sex. What it is about is masculinity, and how male soldiers and officers brought the vanities of their gender with them into politics. Queer history is good at showing how desire roils underneath ideology, and how seemingly wholesome political convictions conceal libidinal urges. It shows us how affect shapes who we want to follow into battle and who we don’t. Buttoned-up military historians could learn something from all this.

And yet, Alicia Decker contends that I ignore gender: “Gender is curiously absent from Sam’s analysis,” she writes, “even though men and masculinity (as well as sex and sexuality) are all over this book.” This is puzzling; Decker’s critique implies that men and masculinity are somehow outside of gender, or irrelevant to it. They are not.

Soldier’s Paradise is about how men planned the world around them, and how their self-consciously masculine values shaped what they did in public. “Masculinity” is absent from the index for the same reason that “Africa” and “army” aren’t there—it’s on every page in one form or another. As for women, they appear in this story as both boosters and critics of militarism. They do not appear as soldiers, and it is important to acknowledge this fact. The primary actors of military history are almost always men, and until recently most military historians took that for granted. Decker doesn’t, but I stand by my contention that many do (I cite her work on p. 232, n. 49). Military history needs gender, but I make this point not through a Rosie-the-Riveter strategy of widening the lens to see women. Rather, I make it by starting from the premise that militarism is an ideology by and for men. For this reason and others, it is not a good ideology.

Running through the forum is a suspicion about my stance towards these men. Why cut them so much slack? Doesn’t quibbling about their philosophies distract from the fact that they ruled by force? Why talk about these soldiers and not those soldiers? By way of an answer, I’ll say that my sights were trained on something larger than any of them. Like all historians, I have a subject of study (what I passively observe), and an object of critique (what I want to change). These are not the same thing. In Soldier’s Paradise, my subject of study was Nigeria and its legal system in the era of military dictatorship. My object of critique was something else: the fetishistic attachment to rules that many people feel, myself included. I wanted to understand the conditions that lead us to accept tyranny, and maybe even to want it: anxiety, fear, the tendency to equate order with beauty. Knowing how these things work is the first step towards breaking them.

I used Nigeria’s history to do all this, but I could have used my own country’s. Maybe I should have. I have some regret about airing other people’s dirty laundry in the name of making a point that applies just as well—maybe better—to the place where I live. My next book is about the United States, and as I write it, I’m learning what’s gained and lost when your subject and object are the same thing. This much is clear: The path between muck and marsh, as Mann puts it, is treacherous no matter where or who you are.