The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (review)

In December 1963 Britain's last two East African colonies, Zanzibar and Kenya, attained independence. In the following month there was a bloody revolution in Zanzibar and serious army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya. January 1964 was a month of events murky, traumatic, and for the future formative.

Timothy Parsons's work provides incomparably the best account to appear of the events in the three mainland territories. It is a meticulously careful study using a very wide variety of sources, British and East African. His conclusions dispose of a number of still widely held but erroneous beliefs, for example, that the hands of foreign agents were at work. He also analyses carefully the role of important actors such as Kambona who found himself involved in activities in which he played a leading part in initiating but whose development he could not control; and he gives credit where credit is due, but denied in Tanzania, to the best of the British officers, notably the late Lieutenant-Colonel R. S. N. Mans. Parsons also throws instructive light on the actual barrack-room mutiny leaders.

In early chapters, after some general reflections on military mutinies, Parsons attributes the mutinies to three main causes. First was the failure of the British officers to realize the effect of the political changes of the previous five years on their African soldiers. Despite warning signs, most seemed to believe the national battalions of the King's African Rifles would simply carry on in the British pattern as nonpolitical professional soldiers in their new nations and requiring British officers for some time to come—a belief shared and encouraged in Whitehall. No preparation for change was given to askaris. Second was the failure of the new political elites in all three territories to pay attention to the physical and psychological needs of their soldiers, either through general disinterest as was the case with Tanganyika's Nyerere, or because the Uganda and Kenya political leaderships were both in the hands of men from ethnicities considered by the British to have been "non-martial" while the soldiers came from other, and in the case of Uganda, remote ethnicities. Third was the very real grievances of the askaris, the slow pace of Africanisation, the lack of respect shown by the new political leaders to soldiers of considerable service and experience, the soldiers' sense of privileged status, and above all the issue of pay which had fallen behind comparable civilian rates in the civilian processes of africanisation.

Parsons then proceeds to provide a blow by blow account of the mutinies in each of the three territories, and the requests made for British help in restoring order—he correctly discounts Nyerere's later claim of British coercion, but also correctly notes that making the request was psychologically very much more difficult for Nyerere than for Kenyatta or Obote.

The final chapters set out the main formative results for the three new nations. Kenyatta followed the British model of a well-trained, well-equipped professional nonpolitical army recruited from traditional sources and accepting British aid but held in check should it be over-ambitious by a police gendarmerie recruited largely from his own ethnicity. Nyerere believed the British model would lead to praetorianism and recast his new Tanzania People's Defence Force as a less well trained military adjunct to his political establishment, accepting aid from several nations. Despite several murky incidents involving personalities, and in Kenya's case an Air Force mutiny, these two patterns secured their countries' freedom from military coups. Obote, whose task was admittedly more difficult, failed totally to address the issue of civil-military integration, initially hoping that the whole issue would go away, but in so doing leaving the army in limbo, only offering concessions rather than imposing discipline. The inevitable result was the rise of Idi Amin, bringing violence, terror, and conflict to...