On a recent flight to Dakar, a cabin crew member of an African airline enthusiastically greeted a Burkinabe passport holder ahead of me – “Welcome and greetings to Captain Traoré! We love him”. The passenger smiled and quietly took their seat without the mutual fanfare. This excitement for a younger leader is understandable in a continent with struggling economies and a young population (average age: 19), especially when the country has endured a colonial power such as France, and the new leader seems unafraid in his rhetoric to face the enemy head-on. France still maintains its monetary empire, built around the CFA franc, which in a book co-authored by Senegalese economist, Ndongo Samba Sylla is called “Africa’s Last Colonial Currency” in African countries. France is recognised for its decades-long political interference in the region. Fighting neocolonial powers out of control of African states’ political economy is indeed a fight of our time, just like generations before struggled to decolonize Africa. The Cult of a Military Man Today’s glorification and glamorization of military leaders in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Guinea – all countries with military regimes in their infancy – on our social media feeds, along with the fabricated achievements should worry anyone concerned with our struggle for liberation as a continent. Far too many African people have firsthand or indirect experience of living under militarised rule and know the enormous cost of militarism on generations, from colonial to post-colonial. It is an old script that has rarely ended in freedom. Yet, today, there is an increasing tilt towards supporting military regimes and the made-up messianic men at the top. As a Ugandan who has only known the rule of President Yoweri Museveni, who took power in a coup in 1986 and, 39 years later, maintains a firm grip on the nation with his family like a monarch, I tend to exercise a measured pessimism of military takeovers. Across the continent, the grim irony of ‘liberators’ morphing into despots is a recurring tragedy. From military coup leaders to elected officials who dismantle constitutions to illegally extend their terms to outright election robbers, the pattern persists. Prof. Amina Mama, a Nigerian-British feminist intellectual, has observed that “African ‘liberated’ states have never liberated women. It’s been an edifice of male complicity engaged in pacification forever—colonial, post-colonial, neoliberal, theocratic.” It is from this vantage point that my hesitance and low expectations of yet another military regime are rooted. I take the work of African feminists on decolonisation, demilitarisation, and peace seriously. Military rule remains a barrier to freedom and dignity, even when later clothed in a civilian facade of elections. “The long-term effects of militarization and military rule persist even after civilian governments are established,” says Prof. Mama, “Politics tend to be violent, as competing interest groups organize gangs of thugs to secure elections; protests against dispossession are met with military force, which in turn leads to the militarization of people’s struggles for justice.” When ‘Liberators’ Become Rulers for Life Freedom is a fight to change both material conditions, as much as a fight to live free from violence and the fear of violence. Military rule will never guarantee that. To conflate or equate military rule with a people-led uprising is a great disservice to the fight. Our post-colonial histories are littered with military male power complicity in exploiting people’s legitimate grievances and hopes, only to deliver new forms of oppression, serving our land, resources, lives and futures at the altar of the very imperialists they claim to fight. Pegging our hopes of liberation solely on militarism and being hooked to a military industrial complex we have no ownership of, will quickly drown us in debt as we are forced to chase one arms dealer after another. That’s not freedom. Ugandan researcher and cultural critic Kalundi Serumaga once wrote about the symbiotic relationship between Uganda and Rwanda leaders that “Illegitimate power cannot rule legitimately, and remains permanently insecure, in crisis and in need of self-validation.” The junta rule of Colonel d’Armée Assimi Goïta has crafted a “new social contract based on a strongman narrative, portraying himself as Mali’s defender”. On April 29, he led the dissolution of all political parties, making it more difficult to create new ones in the future, requiring a deposit of 100,000,000 FCFA. While similar tactics are seen across the Sahel countries, Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, who seized power at 34 in 2022, has garnered a mass, cult-like following online, with even Black celebrities chiming in. Much of the online content about Burkina Faso is about the leader, frequently filled with falsehoods, half-truths, and exaggerations that tap into a hunger for a ‘saviour.’ As one African feminist friend wryly noted about our hunger for big men politics, “people are so desperate for heroes that they will even take Satan himself if he says two correct words.” The internet has been a vital tool for young Africans to build community and learn about each other’s experiences, bypassing decades of Western media dominance and racist lenses. Africans can create their own narratives, debunk historic bias and offer counter-narratives. However, when the masses access information engineered by Big Tech through their algorithms, which prioritise popular engagement over fact, profit over proof, it is easy to capitalise on people’s sentiments and amass devotees overnight. In addition to foreign-corporate-controlled and influenced platforms, limited digital literacy makes it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Today, AI and deepfakes allow government communication, or its simulacrum, to be taken at face value, circulating unchallenged. This kind of cult following always arises in moments of heightened foreign interventionist actions, for instance, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The internet’s mass reach and ability to drown out alternative or dissenting voices make the manipulation of reality far easier today. Critics are quickly labeled, attacked and dismissed as ‘foreign agents’ both by the governments and the very people whose freedom is at stake. This environment is fertile for dangerously oversimplified, binary discourse that deliberately obscures
