By Donal Cruise O'Brien, John Dunn, Richard Rathbone
The West African states have reached adulthood. This new volume--appearing a decade after the profitable West African States: Failure and Promise--provides updated experiences of 9 states, together with Chad, Burkina Faso and Cameroon, which have been ignored within the prior quantity, and introduces modern theories of West African politics. The publication displays adjustments at the flooring and in addition in educational debate, significantly the outstanding retreat of dependency concept and Marxian research and the increase of free-market theorizing by means of either governments and students. the amount additionally comprises vital observations at the political significance of spiritual fundamentalism within the zone, and the expansion of subnational sorts of political task. The writers are famous students within the box, and contain participants to the influential magazine Politique Africaine. this may be an invaluable textbook for everybody attracted to African politics, however it can be a provocative contribution to the controversy at the nature of the kingdom and political tactics in Africa.
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The first president of Burkina Faso was also in this isolated position in his relation to the army. His authority, resting on his renowned heroic stand during the first war with Mali in 1974, was eroded by his direct calls to the rank and file to denounce counter-revolutionary officers. In spite of its transformation into a 'popular army', the Burkinabe armed forces retained a remarkable esprit de corps. The army had other areas of dissatisfaction, in particular Sankara's project to equip the Ministere de l'Administration Territoriale et de la Securite with an autonomous intervention force (FIM ATS); to be placed furthermore under the command of a non-military figure, loyal to Sankara and responsible for a number of political assassinations.
Further, this awakening rests on a hidden Muslim mistrust of the CNR, a mistrust aroused by direct attacks against Islam the day after 4 August 1983 and then sustained by more or less veiled criticisms in the media, the destruction of a number of mosques in the context of urban reconstruction, or certain provisions of the new family code. The development of the associative movement (Association des Etudiants Musulmans du Burkina - Association of Muslim Students of Burkina), mutual aid structures (like those in Bobo-Dioulasso that undertake the ceremonial organisation of funerals for the more destitute), or collective activities of a festive character (excursions, animation) or a cultural one (seminars of reflection) or the attempts at unification of the Communaute Musulmane37 and the rise of a reformist movement somewhat influenced by Wahhabism, all articulate popular attitudes that reflect the search for a sociability which does not blossom in the organisational forms of a solidarity imposed from 'above'.
Then in rapid succession came the CNU extraordinary congress in Yaounde on 14 September; the early presidential election of January 1984; the trial, death sentence, and pardon of Ahidjo and two of his collaborators implicated in the plot of February-March; and on to the dramatic events of 6 and 7 April when an uprising of the presidential guard had to be put down 31 Jean-Francois Bayart violently; the model succession had indeed turned into a nightmare. In order to come to grips with these developments, observers were not short on explanations: Biya had lacked the necessary 'reconnaissance' regarding his predecessor; he had been indecisive and poorly advised by his entourage; he had, out of a spirit of revenge, driven the north to revolt.