Africa's Armies: From Honor to Infamy\-\-A History from 1791 to the Present (review)

A reader would normally expect a book entitled Africa's Armies to examine systematically a few of the principal dimensions of the titled subject—history, organization, personnel, role, economics, relations to other social institutions, effectiveness, and leadership—and to arrive at conclusions of a comparative sort. Indeed, most of the scholarly literature on this topic—a topic that has been examined at great length over the years—does just that.

Robert Edgerton's book, however, hardly touches on these aspects of Africa's armies. Indeed, the book is hardly about armies at all. It is instead, especially in the final half, mostly a discursive narrative in no particular order (country by country) about Africa's problems of governance. Of course, armies are deeply involved in politics in Africa, and Edgerton does not ignore these links. But he also writes about bureaucracies, corruption, patron-client relationships, tribalism, elections, tyranny, cultural conflict, cruelty, and economic growth, again in no systematic way.

This book, in short, is not a serious piece of scholarship that sets out to examine Africa's armies in any scholarly way that would be acceptable in the social sciences. In the historical sections Edgerton does a reasonable job of presenting information and observations about African anti-colonial forces (although he provides nearly as much coverage of the colonial forces). He draws heavily on his own earlier work on the Asante Empire, the Mau Mau, the Zulu War, and the women warriors of Dahomey. But this book tends to be a rambling, sensationalist, gossip-filled series of descriptions more about ceremonies, rituals, costumes, and quirks. We learn that Africans often fought valiantly and sometimes ruthlessly, but we find nothing new here. Tales of honor, courage, and military skill have been commonplace in the literature. Edgerton drifts from case to case with no apparent scholarly plan. We learn nothing here about African resistance to colonial rule that we have not already been told more reliably and more completely elsewhere.

As for contemporary African armies, the book's structure moves from country to country, offering a few comments about postcolonial history and describing the political failures and the armed forces' responsibility for and complicity in them. More reliable analyses are available elsewhere of individual countries. For generalizations and comparative discussions, I would likewise turn elsewhere—for example, to the works of Samuel Decalo, T. M. Ali and Robert Matthews, Will Reno, Herbert Howe, and Leo Kuper.

Edgerton includes a section on the politics of Tanzania, a country in which the military has had little involvement in national affairs. But instead of exploring just why the military has been marginalized in Tanzania, we get a hackneyed overview of Tanzanian history since independence and absolutely nothing about how Tanzanians avoided the excessive use of armed power there.

Much of this book is written in a journalistic prose that is factually suspect and sloppy. For example, we are told (on p. 143) that Farah Aideed had become a "household name" in the United States. When you consider that fewer than one-third of Americans know the name of the U.S. Secretary of State, one can hardly regard Farah Aideed as ever having been of "household" stature. We are also told that the first president of Togo was either Sylvanius (p. 174) or Sylvanio (p. 175) Olympio. His actual given name was Sylvanus. I mention these gaffes not to nitpick but to question how careful the writing is. Edgerton is impressed by university degrees and mentions them as if they should be a control on cruelty, foolishness, or avarice.

The concluding chapter is not a summing-up about Africa's armies and their current and future place in the scheme of things, but a disquisition on a variety of topics—witchcraft, corruption, tribalism, education, and communalism, inter alia. The generalities are thick and pedestrian. Finally, in the last two pages, Edgerton arrives at the optimistic conclusion...