cover image AFRICA'S ARMIES: From Honor to Infamy: A History from 1791 to the Present

AFRICA'S ARMIES: From Honor to Infamy: A History from 1791 to the Present

Robert B. Edgerton, . . Westview, $30 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-8133-3947-4

This is a deeply disturbing book, precisely because of its author's broad knowledge of, and deep sympathy for, sub-Saharan Africa. Edgerton (The Fall of the Asante Empire) romanticizes both the pre-colonial experience and the pre-independence insurgencies to a degree, but makes the point that African armies have fought in most cases with honor, sparing noncombatants even under the stresses of revolution. He is correspondingly at a loss to explain the behavior he describes in his next three chapters. What began in a context of corrupt and inefficient governance as a pattern of military coups and assassinations (totaling over 100 since decolonization), has increasingly degenerated into virtually random mass slaughters, for which Edgerton provides a compendium, from Liberia to the Sudan and back to Sierra Leone. By the time he finishes, the atrocities blur into each other and one account of torture or cannibalism seems just inexplicably horrific as the next. The common thread, however, is that these events have virtually nothing to do with armies or warfare. The perpetrators are not soldiers, whatever they may call themselves—and often, indeed, no longer even bother with such trappings as uniforms and chains of command. The most extensive and the one Edgerton describes in greatest detail, the mutual Hutu-Tutsi genocides of the 1990s, involved populations butchering each other; armed forces were vestigial. Edgerton is better at describing the phenomenon than explaining it. While sharply and legitimately critical of European failures to build infrastructures that sustain modern states, he eschews vulgar West-bashing. At the same time he is reluctant to accept the arguments of those African intellectuals who interpret African culture as structurally maladaptive. In the end he issues a generalized call for African armies to redevelop a professional ethic and rediscover their historic social roles. (Nov.)