Text
E-book Soldier's Paradise : Militarism in Africa after Empire
group of men crowds around the news anchor’s desk looking ready for a fight. They wear full combat gear— camouflage, helmets, bulletproof vests. All of them are young and big, seemingly chosen for this task on the basis of size rather than se niority. Their drab uniforms contrast with the cheerful lighting of the tv station, which is better suited to weather reports than coup announcements. They pose like actors in an action movie, and they’ve cast themselves in the leading roles. These soldiers have taken over their govern-ment, and they’re not the first of their kind to do so.After the end of colonialism, dozens of African countries experienced military coups. Across the continent, societies that had just won their independence from Europe became military dictatorships. Once soldiers were in charge, politics shifted course. Promises of liberty were replaced by a vision of discipline, and military princi ples like rank, readiness, and obedi-ence supplanted the softer political values— equality, nondomination—that civilians had preached.1 Politics became a war of position between men in uniform, and in some countries that war raged for decades. Eventually most armies returned to the barracks, and for a while it seemed like Africa had left military rule in the twentieth century.It has not. From 2020 to the time of writing, soldiers have brought an end to civilian government in Guinea, Mali, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Gabon. The journalists and diplomats who didn’t see them coming have fumbled around for an explanation, usually landing on shortsighted theories involving Russian meddling or foreign mercenaries. But these coups didn’t come out of nowhere. The soldiers in the tv studios are building on a deep political tradition: for much of the late twentieth century, Africa’s most per-vasive ideology was militarism.2From the 1960s to the 1990s, African politics revolved around soldiers’ blood feuds and power grabs.3 The men who staged them were intoxicated by their own strength, brimming with ambition and nervous energy. “It has proved infectious, this seizure of government by armed men, and so effort-less,” wrote the South African sociologist Ruth First in 1970. “Get the keys of the armoury; turn out the barracks; take the radio station, the post office and the airport; arrest the person of the president, and you arrest the state.”4On the surface, their coups were about corruption, or bad behavior by poli-ticians, or low pay. But militarism was not always reactive, or reactionary. Nearly all militaries wanted to transform their countries, even though they didn’t always spell out exactly what they wanted them to become. Coups also came with ideas, and militarism—the ideology of rule by soldiers— aimed to make a new kind of society.
Tidak tersedia versi lain