Considering the appeal of militarism as a form of politics

Using observational and archival research, Samuel Fury Childs Daly explores what happens when soldiers take over the government — and why so many found security in the option.

By Sarah Steimer

On a trip to Nigeria in college, 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,” Daly recalls. “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 what appealed about militarism as a way to organize society. 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. In this latest book, Daly focuses on militarism as a political ideology and what happens when soldiers take over the government.

“I started this project wanting to understand what the appeal of militarism was: what was attractive about it as a political system, and also how its charisma worked,” Daly says. “I wanted to understand how soldiers made a case for why they should run society and what about that case was appealing to civilians.”

One of his core questions came back to those uniforms: What was it about the cultural side of militaries that people find attractive, and how does that translate into politics? He also looked at the way military organization and law interact or intersect. Whereas many people see martial law as a space of anti-law that works much differently from the civilian legal system, soldiers see martial law very differently. 

“It's a system of law like any other,” Daly says, “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.”

To answer his book’s core questions, Daly embarked on a project that he describes as being on the cusp of history, anthropology, and the study of law. It's both observational and archival. The archival piece, however, is particularly tricky when dealing with military dictatorships, because they aren’t very forthcoming about their activities. There’s concern that records might incriminate them someday, but these regimes did everything in a hurry, so they weren't concerned about posterity or precision. There are, however, court cases and some administrative records, as well as memoirs, that Daly was able to mine.

“This is a pretty piecemeal way to do research,” he says. This project, even though it's about a period that isn't very long ago, is based on very scattered materials, and 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 sort of utopia.

Of course, not everyone shared that vision, and Daly found people pushing back on it in the courts in particular, where they tried to bend the military's plans to their own personal interests or to make their own lives better. 

Most of the chapters in Soldier's Paradise are about individual people who got caught up in military law, and Daly uses their stories to understand militarism as a system of thought. For example, one chapter is about 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. 

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 says. “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.”

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. The animating force of African politics for a long time after independence was not freedom, but discipline, Daly explains, and many saw the military's disciplinary vision for society as very appealing.

“There's a larger matter here that is not historically specific to this time and place,” he says. “This history shows that how people define freedom is very contingent on their own circumstances. 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. A lot of people crave structure and security, and military officers understand that intuitively. 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.”

Daly says this era of African history is uncomfortable to talk about because it challenges a lot of the moral certainties that people have about what happened after independence. And considering that many people would rather forget about this era, he notes it could make his book rather controversial.