Le soldat africain et le politique: Essais sur le militarisme et l'Etat pretorien au Sud du Saharaby Michel L. MartinReview by: Claude E. Welch, Jr.Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 28, No. 2(1994), pp. 334-335Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485745 .

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334 CJAS / RCEA 28:2 1994

through resettlement schemes and the deployment of agricultural "experts." Mandala shows how this struggle was played out in the context of indirect rule, which made some chiefs tyrants and others "tribunes" of the people, and also how the nkhondo-ya-mitumbira (war of the ridges) "generated the agenda and language for nationalist resistance" in the valley until 1964 (275).

Mandala makes excellent use of oral sources. He might have better utilized docu- mentary evidence, however, as it relates to inheritance disputes (no court records are cited), since these disputes constitute an important subplot to the unfolding story of changing gender relations. Mandala's examination of the relationships between peasants, planters and the state before 1923 requires clarification, but this is really a quibble. The analysis of struggle between state and peasant in the realm of distribution is solid.

Mandala, therefore, succeeds in most of his objectives. He demonstrates the histor- ical importance of the environment to peasant history and effectively narrates the struggles of Lower Tchiri peasants to control their own destinies. By focusing on the labour process, he indicates "how physical processes engage with the social conditions of peasant production" (277), thus providing a window on peasant struggle, explaining its "moral" character.

Close analysis of production relations yields insight into tensions between genders and generations. While Mandala takes a few pot shots at "feminist scholars" without citing specific authors (149, 153), he also shows that we cannot afford to "ghettoise" gender and generational conflict. He shows that "one does not need to go beyond peasant studies in order to ask meaningful questions about gender, generational, and other forms of rural differentiation" and that questions of gender and age are "implicit in the study of peasant formation" (272). This is a salutary step toward a truly "gen- dered" history.

Work and Control, then, is useful reading for historians of Southern Africa, but it is also an important book for scholars of peasant studies and gender issues.

Joey Power Ryerson Polytechnical Institute

Michel L. Martin. Le soldat africain et le politique: Essais sur le militarisme et 1'Etat pretorien au Sud du Sahara. Toulouse: Presses de l'Institut d'etudes politiques de Toulouse, 1990. 228 pp.

Michel Martin, who is well known for his wide-ranging sociological analyses of the French and African militaries, has collected six essays, all but one of which were pub- lished from 1975 to 1988. Although Le soldat africain et le politique contains no surprising conclusions, it does demonstrate a searching, synthesizing mind at work.

Scholars of coups d'etat in Africa fall into two camps. One stresses the political context, maintaining that military intervention results primarily from weaknesses of legitimacy and civilian leadership. The other emphasizes the military institutional context, contending that seizures of power are largely due to factors internal to the armed forces.

Although Martin places himself in the latter category, he does remain sensitive to sociopolitical settings. Thus, African armed forces are marked by, "l'exteriorite,

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335 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

c'est-a-dire leur d6connection par rapport au contexte socio-politique parent" (18). Despite their small size and isolation, they are marked not by cohesion, but rather, "par une nette tendance a la fragmentation" (25), as well as by generational cleavages.

In the earliest of the essays published in the book ("Le coup d'6tat comme action de revendication corporative," 1975), Martin argues that ethnic and cultural factors have been overemphasized in explaining how African armed forces behave. He concludes

that, "le coup d'6tat . . . est surtout destin6 a repondre 'a une situation qui porte

atteinte, ou pergue comme telle, au status de l'organisation militaire" (71). In the latest essay, he then reverts to a phased explanation, asserting that an initial "moder- ate" phase is followed by a more radical period, which is in turn succeeded by a "Ther- midorean" reaction.

Le soldat et le politique casts little light on the recent collapse of military or milita- rized regimes. In the chapter entitled "Nature et legitimit6 du pouvoir martial," (1982) Martin asserts: "la situation politique du pouvoir martial dans sa version africaine est donc relativement solide. Toute possibilit6 d'alternance ... ne d6pend en fin de compte que de la seule volont6 des pr6toriens" (152). Neither does the book delve deeply into the inner workings of individual African military regimes. Martin's analysis instead remains at the macro level - an antithesis to Decalo's personalist interpretation of mil-

itary political behaviour south of the Sahara. For those who missed his essays in their earlier published forms, Le soldat africain

et le politique may well be of interest. Martin ranks, after all, among the leading French-language authors on civil-military relations. Although time has cast doubts on some of his interpretations, they nevertheless still merit attention.

Claude E. Welch Jr. University of Buffalo

Ali A. Mazrui. Cultural Forces in World Politics. London, Nairobi and Portsmouth: James Currey, Heinemann Kenya and Heinemann 1990. 62

PP.

Perhaps the type of wide spatio-temporal sweep and globalist vision employed by Ali A. Mazrui in this book is necessary to deal with the growing intricacies of contempo- rary North-South relations. Mazrui has done a fine job; he takes us through the "deep structures" of the various relations - cultural, political, technological and religious -

providing insights into their origins, present formations, functions and how things could be different.

According to Mazrui, the two primary international divisions after the Second World War have been ideological (between East and West, communism and capital- ism), and technological (between North and South). Mazrui shows great foresight in viewing perestroika not as simple reformism, but as the beginning of the end of an era. Thus, he is able to project: "The ideological divide between East and West may turn out to be much more transient than the technological gap between North and South"

(I). Mazrui suggests that the cultural closeness between East and West is behind this

transience. The South will have to learn - perhaps painfully, since rapprochement between East and West may actually widen the economic and technological dispari- ties between North and South by inducing capital flight exclusively from West to East

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