ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Soldier’s Paradise, Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells the story of how Africa’s military dictators tried to transform their societies into martial utopias, and failed. Across the continent, independence was followed by a wave of military coups and revolutions. The soldiers who led them had a vision. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, officers governed like they fought battles—to them, politics was war by other means. Civilians were subjected to military-style discipline, which was indistinguishable from tyranny. Soldiers promised law and order, and they saw judges as allies in their mission to make society more like an army. But law was not the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Using legal records, archival documents, and memoirs, Daly shows how law both enabled militarism and worked against it. For Daly, the law is a place to see decolonization’s tensions and ironies—independence did not always mean liberty, and freedom had a militaristic streak. In a moment when militarism is again on the rise in Africa, Daly describes not just where it came from, but why it lasted so long.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Samuel Fury Childs Daly is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War.

REVIEWS

“Samuel Fury Childs Daly’s keen eye and steady hand pushes aside the conventional wisdom about military coups in Africa to show how military rule relied on courts to enforce the discipline that soldiers believed Nigeria needed. The rule of law and the rule of guns were not always an easy fit, but the space between them allowed for debate and dissent, most powerfully in the (literal) show trial of Fela Kuti.”

-- Luise White, author of Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Postwar

“Samuel Fury Childs Daly makes a significant, although in some ways counterintuitive, argument that places law and legalism at the heart of studies of military rule and postcolonial transitions in Africa. While Daly recognizes that military regimes are marked by indiscriminate arrests and violence, control over judiciaries, and the crude abuse legal process, he shows that law and legality are central to military self-fashioning, identity, and practice and therefore they are key to how these regimes are formed. This innovative and exciting work of legal history will speak to wide audiences.”

-- Rohit De, author of A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic

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