The use of arbitrary arrest to silence opposition often required new legislation authorizing preventive detention. Courts could not always be relied on to cooperate with political prosecution; the culture of the law retained its hold on many judges (often still expatriate) long after other components of the state had been placed under party command. The reservoir of arbitrary colonial legislation that remained in force provided other resources for intimidation. Colonies of political exiles soon began to swell, especially in the former imperial capitals and some neighboring countries.
Finally, the communications media needed to be brought to heel. Radio and—as it was introduced—television had always been government monopolies; thus these media were easily transformed into regime mouthpieces. The press, however, was a different story; especially in West Africa, newspapers and pamphlets were a vital and vibrant source of debate in late colonial times, perhaps alongside a semiofficial government press. The semiofficial government press was transformed into a yet more docile vehicle, and as needed regime papers were launched. For the rest, through legal restrictions, financial pressures, arrests of editors, and outright suppression the independent press in most countries was brought to heel.16
THE BRIEF FOR SINGLE-PARTY RULE
Thus, through these and yet other mechanisms single-party rule soon became the near-universal pattern of government.17 A number of justifications were adduced for the single party, predicated on the reality of its claim to mass mobilization or more minimally on a genuine broad adhesion. These are found in the declarations of leading figures, most importantly those of Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré, and in the writings of academic advocates already cited. The most thoughtful brief for the single party is found in the 1965 Tanzanian report of a widely representative presidential commission to study the feasibility and shape of a democratic single-party state, described in chapter 1.
Thus a genuine mass single party, ran the argument, could bring a truer democracy than the divisive, often ethnic politics of multiple parties. In single-party democracy, membership was open to all; indeed it was often obligatory. Theoretically, decisions were made by the party on the basis of open discussion; thus fractious and adversarial multiparty democracy was replaced by consensual internal party debate. The party could thus claim to generate universal consent and in this way be said to embody a Rousseauvian general will. Candidates could compete within the party for nomination to parliamentary seats and party office; indeed, such competition became widespread and could be found in Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Ivory Coast, Congo-Kinshasa, among other countries.
A second cluster of arguments revolved around the urgency of national unity. The single party, through its supreme commitment to the nation, could rise above ethnicity. By barring institutional arenas in which ethnic conflict might occur by eliminating party competition, the party inhibited the harmful politicization of ethnicity and fostered the flowering of a nationalism transcending communal attachments. In short, the single party offered a formula for sidetracking ethnicity through what closely resembled the nation-building project labeled by Nelson Kasfir as “departicipation:” that is, closing down the channels for ethnic mobilization.18
A third array of justifications invoked the developmental necessity of a unified regime. There was not a moment to lose nor to waste in sterile debate. Underlying these themes was a curious law of regime energy conservation. The implicit thesis held that developing states possessed a limited quantum of policy energy; any that was consumed in contentious politics or adversarial discussion thus decreased the amount available to the state to act. A single party thus promoted judicious state energy conservation.
Fourth, a single party helped insulate the state from international intervention. Opposition parties readily became instruments of foreign interests. Senegal president Léopold Senghor wrote in 1961 that opposition is “tempted to serve foreign powers. . . . You know it, parties are teleguided from the outside. . . . Our duty is to prevent subversion.”19 Such views were widely held at the time.
Fifth, the single party had an important pedagogical function. In its mobilizational activity, the party provided a primer for the political education of the rural citizenry. Its popular meetings were forums for diffusing an agenda promoting radical change and for arousing the political consciousness of the lower reaches of civil society. Such pedagogy was also carried out by the party ancillary organizations within their respective spheres of activity.
Finally, competing political parties were held to be superfluous in Africa because of the purported absence of established social classes. Multiple parties were necessary where social class and hence conflict existed as a means of structuring and reflecting such fundamental differences. However—an argument particularly dear to Julius Nyerere—African society was in its essence communal. Its unity at the level of political movements was thus organic and natural.
Even by the early 1960s, these theses were losing their credibility, belied by the political realities visible to all. Symptoms of the infirmity of the single-party formula were widespread. Those associated with moderately successful regimes in terms of developmental achievement, such as in Tunisia, Ivory Coast, and Kenya, maintained some of their prestige. Others in which the consent dimension still overshadowed the repressive temptations, such as Tanzania, also retained their élan for another decade. But more often the credibility of the system was wearing thin.
Partly this reflected the de facto fusion of party and state. In the amalgamation, the state was the ascendant partner; as chapter 3 argues, the quiet assimilation of the norms, routines, and practices of the colonial state meant that its authoritarian face was destined to reappear. Parties as distinctive institutions tended to shrivel in postindependence Africa; states had a quotidian role and presence, and parties at the end of the day were above all electoral instruments, elections having been emptied of much of their content save for a plebiscitary function. Party ideology likewise devolved into vacuous slogans. One of my former doctoral students, Soriba Sylla, recounted to me his earlier experiences as an agent of the Ministry of Information in Guinea, sent on tours of villages to give ideological lectures. The villagers dutifully assembled at the summons of the local administrator; they listened politely, although he well understood that they did not believe a word he was saying. He also realized that they knew that he did not believe in the ideological message either.20
MILITARY INTERVENTION
By the mid-1960s, the military coup had emerged as the primary vehicle for regime displacement, and it remained so until the wave of democratization in 1990. This pattern—obvious in retrospect—was not foreseen in 1960. At that time, armies inherited from the colonial state were small, a mere ten thousand soldiers for giant Nigeria, and, as noted, with the exception of the Algerian army and the armed liberation movements that later succeeded to power, they had no ties to the nationalist movements. African officers trained in the military academies of Sandhurst and St. Cyr were exposed to very different intellectual views than those that most African university students were confronted with in overseas study, which tended be of radical leftist variety. Thus armies were widely viewed with distrust; Nkrumah was not alone in developing an elite presidential guard outside the military command structure, whose loyalty was assured by the diverse special privileges bestowed on its members.
The first military coup in Africa occurred in Egypt in 1952, when a junta of nationalist officers led by Gamel Abdel Nasser seized power, initially with Muhammad Naguib as front man. Although this military coup did not directly resonate elsewhere in Africa as a model—decolonization on the rest of the continent was still in its early stages—there were several aspects of the coup and the regime that emerged that were harbingers of the military takeover patterns that became institutionalized throughout Africa more than a decade later. First and foremost was the absence of any popular resistance; once a handful of top officers faithful to the old regime were neutralized, the new “Free Officers” junta quic
kly consolidated control.
The extant regime under King Farouk was utterly discredited by its venality, the greed of the landlord class that underpinned it, its failure to block the emergence of Israel as an independent Jewish state, and its inability to secure the withdrawal of the eighty-thousand British troops occupying the Suez Canal Zone (in violation of the 1936 accord providing for their presence, which capped the number at ten thousand). Farouk himself was a caricature of a modern ruler; as Martin Meredith writes, he had the largest landholding in Egypt, four palaces, two yachts, thirteen private aircraft, two hundred cars, a “gargantuan appetite and endless procession of mistresses.”21 Equally tarnished was the liberal Wafd party, in power since 1922, and dominated by the landlord class.
Though the initial number of officers involved in the conspiracy was small—no more than one hundred—the ability to strike a sudden blow at the heart of the system, to seize the capital, and to convince the public that the old regime was gone sufficed to consolidate power. Farouk was arrested at his summer retreat, compelled to abdicate and depart into exile, thus decapitating the institutions of the ancien régime. The Free Officers articulated a resonating message of radical reform and nationalist assertion that promised a new departure. Proposals to reform land policies for the peasantry, to confront the British garrison in the Suez Canal Zone, and to aggressively pursue funding for the Aswan high dam were wildly popular. So also was the nationalization of the Suez Canal in the wake of the abrupt American withdrawal of its offer of finance for the Aswan project in 1956. When the British and French, in alliance with Israel, sought to reoccupy the Suez Canal in late 1956, the global wave of protest, and intense American pressure compelled a humiliating abandonment of this ill-considered revival of nineteenth-century imperialism. Far more than a mere military autocrat, Nasser now stood at a zenith of global prestige, ennobled as an icon of anti-imperial struggle. Equally important for the future role of the military in Africa were crucial features not recognized at the time: the ready feasibility of the coup mechanism; the possibility of rapid consolidation of a new regime; the availability of a standard narrative of legitimation in cleansing corruption and introducing radical reform.
Thus some key dimensions of the future military coup dynamic were clearly sketched.22 A sudden strike by a military segment controlling enough force to decapitate the summit of authority could succeed swiftly, especially if the head of state was abroad or distant from the capital and unable to immediately summon loyal forces. Once the key sites of power were captured—the presidency, the parliament building, a handful of core ministries—resistance by incumbents was difficult unless large portions of the security forces rallied to their defense. Quick seizure of the communications nodal points—the radio and television stations, the capital airport—likewise almost always assured success. Unless the conspiracy was betrayed to the incumbents, the plotters failed to seize the key nodal points of power, or external intervention in support of the extant regime occurred, there was little possibility of existing regimes striking back. As in the Egyptian case, the public disaffection that was widespread by the mid-1960s made popular resistance to a junta unlikely, and once the coup seemed a fait accompli the bureaucracy would follow orders. Indeed, almost always the immediate public response was celebration; in this mood of welcome, promises of sweeping away corruption, policy reform and (usually) eventual return to civilian rule and national elections were a passport to entry legitimacy.
Military intervention elsewhere appeared swiftly after independence, although at first each instance was attributable to unique circumstances, and except in Sudan coup organizers at once turned power over to others. Thus there was not yet a perception of an emerging pattern. The distinctiveness of each coup in light of what was to follow merits brief examination.
The next military takeover occurred in 1958 in Sudan, two years after independence. Northern Sudan was fragmented along religious and ideological lines; the two largest parties, the Umma (descendants of the nineteenthcentury Mahdiyya) and the Democratic Union Party (later People’s Democratic Party, linked to the Khatmiyya sect and Mirghani family), competed with an active Sudanese Communist Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood (later the National Islamic Front), and radical socialist currents. The south was sidelined in the decolonization arrangements; the British conceded a hasty power transfer to outmaneuver Egyptian claims to restoration of its nineteenth-century sovereignty. The unity of the Nile valley slogan from Cairo had some support from the Khatmiyya but not other northern factions and was strongly opposed in the south. By 1958, paralyzed by the political impasse and faced with the first stirrings of southern insurrection, the Khartoum parties willingly ceded power to the military.23 This army takeover was little noticed in the excitement of impending independence elsewhere.
Five other brief military interventions took place before the tidal wave beginning in 1965 permanently transformed the environment. In all cases, power was at once turned over to civilians, a clear sign that army rule was not yet in the scripts of African political practice. In these instances, there is little sign of premeditation; the interventions were a product of immediate circumstance.
In September 1960, Colonel Joseph Mobutu temporarily seized power in Congo-Kinshasa, at a moment of total confusion and political impasse; President Joseph Kasavubu had announced the revocation of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who in turn proclaimed the ouster of Kasavubu. Mobutu “neutralized” both and immediately turned authority over to a College of Commissioners composed of university students that he had designated. The army, badly disorganized by the July mutiny, was in no condition to take power, nor would such a move have been welcomed or even permitted by the major external forces then playing a crucial role, the UN and United States in particular.24
In Togo, a band of French army veterans, disgruntled by the refusal of President Sylvanus Olympio to incorporate them into a Togolese security force, invaded the presidential compound and assassinated Olympio in January 1963. This murder apparently had little advance preparation, nor was there a plan for what happened next. The assassins turned power over to a civilian national coalition dominated by the parties hostile to Olympio, contenting themselves with incorporation into army ranks and spectacular promotions, perhaps with discreet French guidance.25 The street was silent rather than festive as it was after most later coups. Though Olympio had imposed an autocratic single-party system, with the north largely marginalized, the regime still had significant support in the capital; a still weak military could hardly have consolidated power.
In August 1963, by contrast, the military was propelled into action by an urban popular revolt in Brazzaville, led by unionists and students. The independence elections were closely contested, and Fulbert Youlou won the presidency by a narrow margin. The politicization of regionalism also produced a high level of ethnic tension, especially in the capital. Street rumor held that Youlou, a defrocked abbot, slept on a golden bed and wore imported Christian Dior soutanes. When Youlou sought to impose a single party, popular demonstrations became a mob march on the presidential palace, immortalized as the trois glorieuses days of a revolutionary uprising. A desperate Youlou appeal for French intervention fell on deaf ears, and he was forced to flee; the military intervened to restore order, but rather than taking power it merely brokered the accession to office of Alphonse Massamba Débat, who led a government initially viewed as staffed by “technicians.”26
Benin was also an early candidate for temporary military intervention in 1963, because of the impasse and paralysis multiparty politics created in a setting where political competition by 1958 had congealed into a three-player ethno-regional game. None of the trio of independence political leaders (Hubert Maga, Magan Apithy, and Justin Ahomadegbe) were able to form any stable coalition; a venture by Maga in imposing single-party rule by the electoral formula of allocating all seats to the leading party led to crisis in October 1963, which the military intervened to calm. However, it began a
t once to negotiate its exit and organized new elections in 1964.
Finally, in Gabon in February 1964 a military faction aligned with opposition party leader Jean-Hilaire Aubame briefly overthrew President Léon Mba. Aubame and his party, the Union démocratique et sociale gabonaise (UDSG), had initially joined Mba in a coalition regime, but two successive new constitutions concentrated power in the presidency and marginalized the UDSG. Aubame drew much of his support from the Woleu Ntem subgroup of the large Fang ensemble in the northwest of the country rather than from the capital Libreville. This proved a weakness when the French army immediately intervened to reverse the coup in the face of little popular resistance. Mba’s heir and successor, Albert-Bernard Bongo (later Omar Bongo Ondimba), completed the consolidation of a single-party rule, setting a record for longevity in office; he held power without serious challenge (and with strong French sponsorship) from Mba’s death in 1967 until his own death in June 2009.
Thus before 1965, though in many countries discontents with single-party autocracy were building, military intervention was an isolated and sporadic response to palpable public disaffection. The African political scene altered dramatically from 1965 to 1966, when in the space of a few months nine successful army coups took place in Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Kinshasa, Ghana, and Nigeria. Enhancing the shock effect of these coups was the high visibility and broader political importance of several of the countries. In different ways, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria and Kwame Nkrumah epitomized the heroic dimension of African liberation; Ben Bella secured his image as a result of his part in the bitter eight-year independence war in the former, and Nkrumah earned his through his towering persona as anti-colonial tribune. Congo-Kinshasa and Nigeria were two of the largest and most important African states. In none of these instances did the military then withdraw in favor of a preferred civilian leader or hold immediate elections to resolve an impasse; from that point until the 1990 democratization wave the army coup became the institutionalized mechanism—indeed, almost the sole means—for incumbent displacement and regime change. This bedrock political axiom became embedded in expectations across the continent.
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