CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN BLACK AFRICA

Abstract

THE LITERATURE on military interventions in African politics has become copious to the point of excess.' In striking contrast, the literature on military noninterventions is nugatory. Obviously there are difficulties in the path of anyone who would seek to explain non-events. As Welch puts it, 'far easier. . . to examine why civilian governments fall than how they are maintained';2 a coup, after all, is a distinct, sharp-focussed event, whereas civilian control is a set of relationships--a much less clearly-defined phenomenon. But this should not, and does not, mean that 'non-events' are somehow less deserving of study. On the contrary; like Sherlock Holmes's dog that failed to bark in the night when in the circumstances it should have barked, the non-occurrence of an event may be of very great significance. So attuned have we become to regarding the military coup as a normal, even predictable, move in the African political game that we seem to have lost sight of the fact that nearly half of Black Africa's states have not experienced coups in the two decades of the independence era. Upon occasion a certain awareness of the point does emerge, as when Enloe, for example, suggests that 'African armies which have not launched coups have received inadequate attention: Kenya, Liberia, Zambia, Tanzania'; or Cox, 'there is above all a need for a systematic examination of civilian control mechanisms in sub-Saharan Africa'; or Luckham, 'the biggest gap in our understanding of African political systems... [is] the function of military and police apparatuses under civilian and