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

Soldier’s Paradise, Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells us, is a book about vanity (ix). Its author is too modest. Soldier’s Paradise is a book about many things, “militarism in Africa after empire,” its subtitle, being only one of them. The book is, most prosaically, about the “long contest between the military and the judiciary over who made Nigeria’s rules” (202). Yet at its core, this is a transgressive book that looks beyond an obsession with law and order—one shared by judges and generals—to the fetishization of discipline that characterized military rule, to the hypermasculinity performed by Nigeria’s soldiers and some of their erstwhile opponents, and to the politics of spectacle that was militarism’s façade. Gender pervades the book’s analysis and its sensibility. It is hard to mistake the fact that this is a book about masculinity and domination, and there is much more to Soldier’s Paradise than a straight accounting of the contest between generals and judges.

Still, if its author is modest, the book’s claims are not. Militarism, Daly tells us, was the “most pervasive” ideology of late twentieth-century Africa (3). If so, it emerged from a curious set of ideologues. Among its central figures number not only superior officers, but high court judges, and its champions included liberals like Nnamdi Azikiwe (at least in 1974). As Daly describes, as early as 1966, eminent jurists like Sir Egbert Udo Udoma established a legal scaffolding around military rule that allowed for the performance of law in the absence of (a constitutional) order. By dubbing military coups ‘revolutions’—rather than mere usurpations, or indeed simple crimes—Udoma and like-minded colleagues argued that in seizing power, coup leaders had rendered previous constitutional regimes null and void. They were, therefore, for all intents and purposes, free to do as they wished as they lay the legal foundations of new regimes. Daly demonstrates that this argument, laid out in Uganda v. Commissioner of Prisons ex parte Matovu, was a “portable” one, cited across Anglophone Africa. It brought justices and generals together in a marriage of convenience that proved durable.

This intersection of militarism and liberalism—as anchored in the legal profession—may be the most striking part of Daly’s analysis. It is the foundation of his argument that a history of militarism can only, if counterintuitively, be a legal history as well. That said, one wonders if the judges and generals were not more cynical than the historian allows. Given free rein to produce the revolution on which their legal status depended, Nigeria’s military rulers seem to have done little more than rummage in the detritus of customary law, in search of a new legal order that would further enshrine their power. Were these men ideologues or opportunists? Here, two further elements of Daly’s analysis merit mention. First, for most of the book, as is so often the case, Nigeria stands in for Africa, or at least Anglophone Africa. Second, but relatedly, allowing Nigeria to represent Africa, and portraying its officers as ideologues overshadows some meaningful differences in what militarism meant and how soldiers governed across the continent. The narrative arc of Daly’s story reaches its conclusion with Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s last military ruler (to date), the man whose kleptocratic and avaricious reign ended with his death in 1998. In Daly’s telling, that event marked militarism’s denouement. This is a persuasive way to frame the story, but it is also a very Nigerian way to frame it. It helps us to better understand the decades that followed Abacha, years when figures once name-checked by Fela Ransome Kuti—men like Olusegun Obasanjo “with his big fat stomach” and the younger brother of Shehu Musa Yar’Adua “with his neck like ostrich”—were elected to the presidency. It does less to help us understand the enduring—and recurring—allure of military government in other West African countries. Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings, who straddles the cover, or Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara were closer to true ideologues than were any of Nigeria’s strongmen. They are the military leaders a new generation sees as its antecedents, but Sankara’s ideology was not militarism; rather, it was a form of populism. If it was revolutionary, as Sankara believed, he did not need a judge to tell him so, or to draw conclusions from that fact.

Daly writes incisively on the generals’ antagonists and their victims, seeing them as both icons of dissidence and, in Fela’s case, objects of popular resentment. He is at pains to underscore that he is not fetishizing military regimes, that he is not succumbing to what he dubs their glamour—“in the archaic sense [of] allure … heavily dosed with deception” (25). Paradise for soldiers could often be hell—or at least purgatory—for everyone else, as he shows us. Here he points toward a fine line in writing about contemporary Africa. Countless others have walked it, teetering between what looks (at best) to be a world-weary cynicism and a reflexive gatekeeping that speaks honestly only in select company and hushed tones. Daly is nimble enough to take that path, balancing between marsh and muck. One hopes others will follow it.