<i>Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War</i> by Marco Wyss

The study of post-independence defense links between new West African governments and former metropoles is a challenging task. The main problem lies in the source base. Even recent studies that attempt an ambitious enquiry in African archives, such as Riina Turtio's analysis of the creation of armies as social history (in State-Building and National Militaries in Postcolonial West Africa: Decolonizing the Means of Coercion), have ended up with relatively few local sources. Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire are among the most important new nation-states in the region, but access to Ivorian diplomatic correspondence is complicated at best, and the difficulties of finding top-level Nigerian governmental files from the 1960s have been discussed at length by Samuel Daly in his A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War. As a result, historians still have to rely on European archives discussing postcolonial contexts, forcing them to build arguments that nevertheless demonstrate an understanding of the priorities of African elites.Marco Wyss is conscious of this immense problem (p. 20), and he delivers a convincing response. After introducing the multitude of colonial and other non-African actors, he highlights the diverging paths to decolonization chosen by Britain and France (p. 5). Wyss then discusses the roles of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Czechoslovakia, and Israel and the interactions the United States had with the two main European colonial powers (pp. 10, 12–14). Wyss maintains that defense relations were not “one-way traffic.” He emphasizes the need to understand the goals of Nigerian elites in the potentially more democratic pre-1966 political setting, as well as the goals of authoritarian Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny and his entourage in the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d'Ivoire—Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. One basic difference was that Nigerian political rhetoric emphasized neutralism, whereas the Ivorian government insisted on a pro-Western orientation (pp. 15–19).Wyss's detailed, nuanced discussion starts with the agreements forged between the colonizers and the new African ruling elites in the final years of the colonial presence and the early years after independence. The British regarded some elements of Nigerian infrastructure, such as the Kano airport and Nigerian port installations, as essential for Britain's role as a regional and Cold War power (pp. 32–37). Nigerian leaders initially favored (p. 41) a larger defense agreement with Britain but became more reluctant after 1958 and especially after the 1959 elections, which enhanced their bargaining power. British officials denounced the Nigerians’ hesitancy as a “ruse” (pp. 42–45). Thanks to Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who overcame the opposition leader, Obafemi Awolowo and other radical voices, the British managed to set up the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Agreement in 1960 (pp. 51–61). In Côte d'Ivoire, negotiation of a similar agreement was poisoned by the deep frustration Houphouët-Boigny expressed toward what he saw as abandonment by the French, who had conceded the path toward independence to the leaders of other former French colonies (p. 65). Amid concerns in Paris about Soviet and Chinese intervention in West Africa (p. 67), the lingering anger of the Ivorian leader and his preference for regional leadership over other African party leaders through the Entente (p. 69) caused near-panic on the part of the French (pp. 79–80, 83–85) and led to an agreement that gave strong advantages to Houphouët-Boigny at the expense of the French government (p. 87). In the Nigerian case, pressure from the Nigerian Youth movement (p. 96), from political opposition (p. 99), and from regime politicians who set their hopes on diversification and better contacts with Moscow spurred the British to tolerate quiet abrogation of the defense agreement (pp. 108–109, 115). In Côte d'Ivoire, Houphouët-Boigny's personal situation, including his rivalry with and fear of neighboring Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah (pp. 120, 123–124), and his crackdown within his own regime (via purges of his rivals in 1963 that were tolerated by the French; pp. 129–130, 134–142), cemented the security relationship with the former colonial power.Wyss traces the further deterioration of the British role to Nigeria's fear of Ghana's military power (pp. 160, 163, 166) and a Nigerian search for additional partners, including Canadian (pp. 165, 168, 174) and West German (pp. 154, 168, 171, 176, 181–182, 186) support. The British were thus gradually pushed out of their position as Nigeria's protectors (p. 184). In the Ivorian case, the French were confronted with a sustained Israeli presence (pp. 206–217)—although the Israelis, according to Wyss, had no intention of supplanting the French presence—which made the latter intervene with the Houphouët-Boigny regime and reinforce their engagement (pp. 205, 212). In a final long section, Wyss analyzes the relationship between British and U.S. strategies for Nigeria. The Nigerian government hoped to gain more diversified support by including Washington (p. 241) but was ultimately disappointed (pp. 254–255). Houphouët-Boigny's government sought U.S. support, including through the Ivornian ambassador, Henri-Konan Bédié, in the initial period after Ivorian independence, when tensions arose with the French (pp. 264–270, 272–274). Ultimately, however, the Ivorian government modified its position. In light of the frequent coups d’état in West Africa in the 1960s, Houphouët-Boigny insisted that a substantial contingent of French troops remain close to Abidjan for the protection of his regime (pp. 285–290). His quest for closer cooperation with Washington was mainly a lever to push the French into more enthusiastic engagement (pp. 283–285).Wyss's lucid, systematic analysis will long be the best available study of two essential cases of defense cooperation in West Africa. He makes the best of a complicated, lopsided source base. One obvious criticism is that, despite Wyss's awareness of the limits of French and British sources and his skill in extracting Nigerian and Ivorian positions from these sources, the book could have profited from a more nuanced deconstruction of the different views, goals, and currents within Balewa's Nigeria and Houphouët-Boigny's Côte d'Ivoire. Even so, Postcolonial Security is a landmark work that eschews sensationalist views that would find French neocolonial schemes everywhere. The book demonstrates the complexities of Britain's gradual retreat from West Africa and offers a sophisticated appraisal of what defense cooperation meant, both as an outcome of decolonization and as an element of early domestic policies in independent Africa.

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