RUTH FIRST I -1 The Barrel of a Gun Political Power in Africa and the Coup d'Etat Part V: The Soldiers Invade: Coup Casebooks First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press in 1970 Republished in 2012 by the Ruth First Papers Project www.ruthfirstpapers.org.uk Part V The Soldiers Invade: Coup Casebooks A Coup Inventory How should one differentiate between coups ? Coups in Africa, no less than elsewhere, do not fall into ideal types. Seeing that it is the first intervention in politics that tends to set up a coup trajectory, by breaking the previously accepted convention that government is for politicians and parties, it is useful to examine coups by the trigger at the start. But the typing of the coup d'etat has limited efficacy; they are often born in a muddle of motives, and they displace their own motives midway as they switch from one type to another and back again in the course of the action. The simplest and occasionally the initial stage of the coup d'etat cycle is the army strike, or the pay mutiny. Pay strikes are classic instances of class action by the poorest-paid in the army; armies, when they act as trade unions, have the power to hold the state, their paymaster, to ransom. In 1964 in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and the neighbouring East African states of Kenya and Uganda, the regulars of all the three armies were chafing at service conditions and the slow pace in Africanization of the officer corps. At the time that Tanganyika achieved independence, there were only three African commissioned officers in the army. (A further fifteen were on training courses.) A request for a crash training programme, a few weeks before the mutiny, produced a scheme by the British commander to have the army Africanized in ten years. But a State House circular shortly before the mutiny announced a slowing down of Africanization, in an attempt to accommodate non-Africans who had opted for Tanganyika nationality under the citizenship provisions of the independence constitution. 'The nation, ' the circular had read, 'must use the entire reservoir of skill and experience. It would be wrong 205 The Soldiers Invade: Coup Casebooks for us to distinguish between Tanganyikan citizens on any ground other than their character and ability. We cannot allow the growth of first and second class citizenship. Africanization is dead.' It was a sharp statement; and among the men preoccupied with promotion prospects, it had a sharp impact. Anonymous letters of grievance had been emanating from the army for some weeks, but they were considered no cause for alarm by the British command. When the mutiny broke, it was men of the First Battalion, Tanganyikan Rifles, who sounded a general alarm at Colito barracks, where they arrested all their officers. Later in the day the Second Battalion mutinied at Tabora, several hundred miles to the west, and there were incidents at a third barracks, in the south. The mutiny was treated as an industrial dispute. Negotiations were opened with the men -led by a sergeant - who were demanding more pay, quicker pro• motion, the removal of their British officers and complete Africanization. On the third day, the mutiny was considered settled. President Nyerere had broadcast an appeal for calm; and the Cabinet was resuming its functions. During the next two days, mutiny broke out in the Uganda army barracks at Jinja, and among Kenya forces at Lanet. Both mutinies were put down by British troops, still present in some force in Kenya. Then, when it was thought t.hat the mutiny in Tanganyika was all over, the army men there were seen to stiffen their terms. Evidence came to light of contact between them and a group of political dissidents, reported to have met with a former Opposition leader and several trade-unionists who had emerged as strong critics of the government. Tanganyika requested and received British troops. In Uganda and Kenya the pay strikes had been in no danger of escalating into anything else. In Tanganyika the pay strike was on the verge of becoming a coup that might have brought down the government. The mutineers were court-martialled; the Tanganyikan leadership called on the T ANU (government party) Youth League to build a new army; and the government improvised army representation on the national executive committee of the party, alongside similar steps aimed at politicizing the soldiers in support of its policy. 206 A Coup Inventory By contrast with the three East African countries, where pay and promotion grievances provoked a mutiny that fell short of a coup, and foreign intervention was invoked to discipline the soldiers, there was Congo-Kinshasa, site of Africa's first coup d'etat, which was ushered in by a pay strike. Independence was in fact not five days old when the army mutinied. The immediate cause was the obduracy of the Belgian army commander in refusing to permit any speed-up in African• ization; after the mutiny, discipline in the army shattered, with bands of armed soldiers becoming instruments for any politician or group that could use them. But the Congo's first army intervention in government shortly afterwards was not locally improvised; nor, for that matter, was the second in 1965. (Little in the crises of the Congo since independence has been.) Mobutu's ascendancy was made possible, when different political groups were advancing their claims through antagon• istic forces of armed men, by two decisive acts of outside inter• vention. The first was when, four days before he acted against the Lumumba government, five million francs were handed over to him by the United Nations, so that he could pay the army. 1 Then Mobutu was helped to create around himself a small but intensely loyal force of paratroopers, through the agency of the Moroccan General Kettani - who had served for many years in the French army - and who headed the United Nations military group charged with assisting in the reorganization of the Congolese army.2 It was this force that made Mobutu the arbiter of all subsequent political crises in the Congo. Auxiliary power structures were the security and police apparatus, and the College of Commissioners run under Belgian and American aegis.3 (Incidentally, in the first year of independence, the army's pay increased by 450 per cent.) The army stayed in the back• ground during the political developments of the next five years, and then climbed firmly into power in October 1965 - during the disputes for control between Tshombe and Kasavubu - to install Mobutu as President and Minister of Defence, with Brigadier Leonard Mulamba, the army commander, as Prime Minister, and to announce that the army would rule for five years so as to get the country off on a new start. 207 The Sold£ers Invade: Coup Casebooks The first of the West African coups took place in Togo in 1963, in the third year of independence, and was also triggered off by a pay strike. The immediate cause was the demobilization of veterans in a major French defence re-orientation. When President Sylvanus Olympia refused to take 626 Togolese, who had been serving in metropolitan regiments, into the Togo army, then 250 strong, a group of these ex-servicemen, led by a former master-sergeant, Emmanual Bodjolle, surrounded his house and shot him. The army installed a civilian government, .I presided over by Olympia's political rival, Nicholas Grunitzky. I Bodjolle made himself colonel, commander and chief-of-staff, while a former sergeant in the French army, Etienne Eyadema (who, it is widely believed, fired the shots that killed Olympio) 4 became a major in an army expanded to 1,200 men. Two years later Eyadema ousted Bodjolle, to make himself colonel and commander, and subsequently to become Togo's head of state. The pay strike was the trigger for the army coup, but it was not the only source of crisis in Togo. Olympia had built the Comite de !'Unite Togolaise (CUT), as French Africa's first nationalist party. And this he used to score the overwhelming electoral victory which put him at the head of the country's first independence government, in opposition to the party of Nicholas Grunitzky, who had been held in power previously with French support and the backing of Northern chiefs. Just before the army coup, CUT's youth movement split away from it to form the Mouvement de Jeunesse Togolaise, on the grounds that Olympia's policies were entrenching 'les vieux' among the politicians; were abandoning the party's radical youth and militancy; and were displacing French interests by tying Togo to other foreign interests, particularly American and West German. The replacement of Olympia by Grunitzky, with French-army-oriented and Northern soldiers as his support, won that initial round for France. The North-South conflict was also significantly coincident with the uneven distribution of benefits and government positions. The coup installed a Northern president, who ruled for a predominantly Northern army, with the civil servants - Southerners, 208 A Coup Inventory mainly Ewe - manning the ministries in truculent though un• expressed opposition to the real rulers of the land, the army commanders. In November 1966 there was an attempt to overturn the junta. It came not from a section of the army, but from within the administration, and it was led by Noel Kutuklui, Lome's leading lawyer and secretary-general of Olympia's former party, renamed Unite Togolaise. This was an attempt to seize power by civilian rather than military means. Some of the government's most senior administrators were involved.