On a college trip to Nigeria, Assoc. Prof. Samuel Fury Childs Daly was struck by just how many people wore uniforms. There were different colors and every pattern of camouflage imaginable; some were conventional military uniforms, while others were bright blue or hot pink for different militias or youth groups. But everyone seemed to be wearing one.
“I got a lesson in the power of uniforms one day when somebody tried to confiscate the shirt that I was wearing,” recalled Daly, now an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. “It was a fast-fashion button down with epaulets that this policeman decided was too close to a military uniform. That got me thinking about militarism as a more general force in this society.”
In his new book, Soldier's Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire, Daly explores militarism’s appeal as a political ideology and what happens when soldiers take over the government. A historian of 20th-century Africa, his previous book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War, looked at African politics as they connect to warfare and to militaries.
“A lot of people crave structure and security, and military officers understand that intuitively,” said Daly. “Military regimes offer people a firm hand that, in times of crisis or uncertainty, is actually very reassuring. There's always the risk that firm hand might crush you, but that is a risk that a lot of people are willing to accept.”
Martial law
To answer his book’s core questions, Daly embarked on a project he describes as being on the cusp of history, anthropology and the study of law—one that was both observational and archival. The archival piece, however, is particularly tricky when dealing with military dictatorships who, notoriously, aren’t very forthcoming about their activities. Records might be incriminating someday. Regimes also form in a hurry, often without concern for posterity or precision. However, Daly was able to mine court cases, some administrative records, as well as memoirs.
“This is a pretty piecemeal way to do research,” he said. This project, even though it's about a period that isn't very long ago, is based on very scattered materials. My task was to find a story to tell in these records that really are not very complete.”
What Daly learned, and what he describes in Soldier's Paradise, is that military officers believed that they could govern better than civilians and that they could transform their societies from the ground up. They believed they could make civilians think and act like they did, leading to a kind of utopia.
Of course, not everyone shared that vision. Daly also found evidence of people pushing back, often in the courts, or trying to bend the military's plans to their own personal interests. Throughout the book, Daly uses their stories to understand militarism as a system of thought.
Several chapters in Soldier's Paradise focus on individuals who got caught up in military law. “It's a system of law like any other,” Daly said, “with its own internal tensions and rules. I wanted to learn about how martial law worked when you applied it not just to soldiers, but to everybody.”
For example, one chapter highlights Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who had some very complicated entanglements with the law during several military dictatorships. Another chapter is about psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon and how military regimes used his ideas to license their vision for society.
After gaining independence, many people felt they were sold a bill of goods; they were disappointed with corrupt politicians or how their quality of life improved slower than the nationalists had promised.
However, the stories also show that not everyone was against militarism or dictatorship.
“The cold truth is that for a lot of people, there were advantages to this ideology,” Daly said. “There were things that they liked about it, and there were ways that they sought to improve their lot in life by hitching their personal fortunes to the fortunes of the military.”
According to Daly, the animating force of African politics for a long time after independence was not freedom, but discipline.
“This history shows that how people define freedom is very contingent on their own circumstances,” he said. “To people in this era, freedom meant not the liberal freedom to do what you wanted, but freedom from the tyranny of your own instincts. Military regimes told people that if everyone behaved like a soldier, everyone would eventually become self-disciplined enough that their freedom would mean something.”
Daly says this era of African history is uncomfortable to talk about because it challenges many of the moral certainties that people hold about the period after independence. And considering that many people would rather forget about this era, he notes it could make his book rather controversial.
—Adapted from an article first published by UChicago’s Department of History.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
