ABSTRACT

If military history was until fairly recently viewed in some Western academic circles as the bastard child of the profession, its African subset was even more of an outcast. Writing on the eve of the new millennium, a military historian of precolonial Africa, John Thornton, observed that while many of the post–Vietnam War generation of Western historians shied away from the study of war because of “its suspect association with militarism,” the African military historian had an even steeper hill to climb. African historians recounting the Continent’s past, he wrote, did not include the military, “whose part in the colonial era is too darkly shadowed by their history as imperialist collaborators” (Thornton, 1999, 3). Four years later, John Lamphear, another military historian of precolonial Africa, wrote that African scholars had discouraged the study of Africa’s military history because it could be used to evoke the image of “a dark continent of incessant conflict waged by savage warriors,” precisely the sort of image that had been used to justify the Scramble by European powers to impose colonial rule on Africa 150 years earlier (Lamphear, 2003, 169). There were, of course, African military historians who swam against this tide of denial, but theirs were isolated voices (Ogot, 1972; Uzoigwe, 1975, 1977). More recently, Timothy Stapleton, author of the monumental three-volume Military History of Africa, laid some of the blame for the slow progress of African military history on the African military itself. African soldiers do not show a great deal of interest in military history, he wrote, in part because African military staff schools and academies are small and underdeveloped, but also because of “the secretive, politicized, and internal-security-oriented nature of African military culture” (Stapleton, 2013, v. 1: xi).