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Soldiers As Traditionalizers: Military Rule and the Re-Africanization of Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Ali A. Mazrui
Ali A. Mazrui
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

On the basis of evidence mainly from West Africa, many scholars in the 1960's made predictions about likely trends in Africa as a whole on such issues as one-party states. On the basis of data from Eastern Africa, can we now risk predictions about likely performance of military regimes in Africa as a whole?

There is evidence from Eastern Africa that African soldiers may be agents of retradi-tionalization. The bulk of the army in most countries is recruited from some of the most rural and least acculturated sectors of society. Contemporary African soldiers may be traditionalists in charge of modern armies with modern technology. What happens when a modern organization is manned mainly by rural recruits?

It may be that both modernization and retraditionalization are taking place under military leadership in Africa. The cultural revivalist role of sub-westernized or non-westernized African soldiers is beginning to manifest itself in places like Uganda under Idi Amin and Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko. The political decline of westernized intellectuals and the rise of soldiers may herald a partial re-Africanization of Africa, but with some painful costs.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , January 1976 , pp. 246 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1976

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References

1 Influential works of that period include Coleman, James S., ”Nationalism in Tropical Africa,” American Political Science Review, xlvii (June 1954Google Scholar); Coleman, , Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1958Google Scholar); Apter, David E., The Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955Google Scholar); Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1960Google Scholar); and Kilson, Martin, ”Authoritarian and Single-Party Tendencies in African Politics,” World Politics, xv (January 1963), 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar–94.

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3 Lefever, , Spear and Sceptre: Army, Police, and Politics in Tropical Africa (Washington: The Brookings Institution 1970), 21Google Scholar. For a prophetically more cautious approach, see Janowitz, Morris, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations: An Essay in Comparative Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964Google Scholar). For further comparative purposes, see Lerner, Daniel and Robinson, Richard D., ”Swords and Ploughshares: The Turkish Army as a Modernizing Force,” World Politics, xii (October 1960), 19–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Halpern, Manfred, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1963), esp. 251Google Scholar–80,

4 See Welch, Claude E. Jr. and Smith, Arthur K., Military Role and Rule: Perspectives on Civil-Military Relations (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press 1974), 256Google Scholar. Welch has pointed out elsewhere that the ”modern” organizational characteristics of the armed forces could readily break down after the army has captured power. In short, ”coup leaders face the same difficulties over which their civilian predecessors stumbled —without necessarily benefiting from greater advantages.” Welch, , ed., Soldier and State in Africa: A Comparative Analysis of Military Intervention and Political Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1970), 59Google Scholar.

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17 David Martin refers to the irritation of the younger exiles over the Acholi war dance and song in the preparation for the invasion of Uganda. Martin seems to suggest that it was the younger, modernized or westernized soldiers in exile who were particularly unhappy about such a ceremony. In fact, in addition to the reservations of the more modernized or westernized of the exiles, there were also reservations on the part of those who belonged to other ethnic communities. For Martin's allusion to this episode, consult General Amin (fn. n), 189–90.

18 Saberwal (fn. 8), 17, 29.

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23 Some of the works by Samir Amin, Johan Galtung, Walter Rodney, and Colin Leys belong to this new genre of developmental literature. Perhaps the most sustained and most recent application of this radical perspective to an African country is Leys, Colin, Underdevelopment in Kenya (London: Heinemann Educational Publishers, and Berkeley: University of California Press 1975Google Scholar).

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25 See Mazrui, ”The Resurrection of the Warrior Tradition in African Political Culture: From Shaka the Zulu to Amin the Kakwa,” paper presented on the panel on Terrorism and Politics in Africa, Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association of the U.S.A., Syracuse, N.Y., October 31-November 3, 1973. A revised version has since appeared in Journal of Modern African Studies, xiii, No. 2 (1975), 67–84Google Scholar. See also Mazrui, ”Ethnic Stratification and the Military-Agrarian Complex: The Uganda Case,” paper presented at the East African Universities Social Science Conference of Eastern Africa, University of Dar es Salaam, December 1973. A revised version has since appeared in Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel P., eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1975Google Scholar). See also Mazrui, , Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Making of a Military Ethnocracy (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications 1975), 30–52Google Scholar.