In the spirit of “every coup deserves a blog post”, here are some basics about the coup in Niger.

Caveats to start: I know a lot about coups, but I do not know a lot about Niger. What follows are from some readings I’ve been looking at, the most valuable being Rahmane Idrissa’s Historical Dictionary of Niger.

There are three threads that provide context for the Niger coup of July 26.

1. Western – and French in particular – exploitation of the country which, for various French/Western reasons, is deepening and making people more miserable.

2. Niger’s history of coups – and the recent regional coups in Burkina Faso and Mali.

3. The roiling and seemingly unending conflict between “jihadi” groups like the Islamic State in the Sahel, etc., and the “French-led” regional counterinsurgency against these groups. (The scare quotes will be explained below).

Let us begin.

1. French exploitation

In the series on the Scramble for Africa, we covered France’s scramble for West Africa in episode 15. After overthrowing the West African states, France re-organized the territories for exploitation. The colonial currency regime (called the CFA Franc, which persists today in many of these countries) is a part of this system. The key references for this are Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and the more recent Africa’s Last Colonial Currency by Pigaud and Samba Sylla. Imposing famines, huge colonial massacres, and the continual drain of resources were the order of the day.

The murderous mission of Voulet-Chanoine

Probably here we should mention the famous expedition of Voulet-Chanoine. These two French officers left from Senegal in November 1898 to try to conquer and unify West Africa under French colonial control. They had a number of troops and hundreds of enslaved porters. The stuff the Europeans needed to scramble for Africa was carried around for them by enslaved porters in chains – in a project all justified at the time in the name of abolishing slavery.

Anyway, back to Voulet-Chanoine. When they reached the Niger outpost, they committed a series of massacres, including one where the French made a big show of murdering children (Sansanne-Haoussa) and another where they murdered thousands of people at Birni-N’Konni. After a number of these massacres, Voulet-Chanoine’s fellow Frenchman Jean-Francois Klobb (a Lt. Colonel who gave Voulet, a captain, a direct order relieving him of command) caught the column and told the French troops to stop, so Voulet killed him too. That night, Voulet tore the galloons off his uniform and told his troops: “I am no longer a Frenchman, I am a Black chief. With you, I will found an empire.” A couple of days later the troops mutinied and killed both Voulet and Chanoine. The expedition continued on and killed more Africans and some of the French leaders went on to have successful military careers.

The French, like the other Europeans in Africa, also exerted control through periodic, murderous “punitive expeditions”.

Hunger and famine in colonial Niger

Shortly after the French consolidated their position in what would become Niger, there was a famine – in 1902-3. And another in 1913. And another in 1920. And another in 1930. Perhaps you will say there were famines before colonialism, and there were. But France imposed qualitatively more hunger and famines than existed before. Walter Rodney cites a Brazilian study by Josue de Castro, which Rodney says “convincingly indicates that the African diet was previously more varied, being based on a more diversified agriculture than was possible under colonialism.” To ensure Africans worked for them, France would prevent them from gathering foods or having gardens and force them to pay taxes in francs. France’s plunder of Africa also included conscripting 164,000 African troops to fight for them in World War I — which caused, among other things, a race panic in Germany – a story for another day.

Uranium was discovered just before Independence in 1959 and its exploitation was organized by a French company. In its generosity, France allowed Niger 5%, then eventually 12%, of the royalties from the exploitation of this resource, which provides some 1/3 of France’s uranium and is 63% owned by French capital (and 37% by Niger).

IMF and World Bank austerity

Between French capital’s control of the country’s resources and infrastructure, neocolonized Niger continued to experience famine and food shortages in 1972-3. The IMF pressured the country to privatize 54 state companies in 1984; the credit union was privatized in 1985. At the end of 1989, the new government followed a World-Bank encouraged policy of drastic cuts to education funding, called Project Education III. Student protests followed with police killing several student protesters in 1990. In 1992, in desperate financial straits, the government got $50M in aid by recognizing Taiwan, which meant China broke diplomatic relations. In 1995, the government signed a structural adjustment package with the IMF, was overthrown in a coup in 1996, and the post-coup government also signed a structural adjustment package. In 1997, the World Bank demanded more public sector cuts, leading to more public sector strikes. In 1998, the IMF congratulated the government for its compliance with austerity, as public sector strikes shut the whole civil service down. In 2000, the prime minister asked deputies to forgo their entire salaries: “The coffers of the state are absolutely empty”, he said. The combination of drought and austerity policy led to a severe food shortage in 2004-5: The IMF took the occasion to force the government to raise taxes on milk, sugar, and corn flour. The government backed off of some of the taxes after a month long strike. Another food crisis followed in 2010-2011.

France needs Africa to subsidize it

Colonialists always present their pillage as a gift to the colonized, but the reality is that the rich countries are generously funded by the poor, and France’s CFA Franc zone is a fountain of free resources for France. Having decided that France is going to join the US in its confrontation with Russia and China, it needs to squeeze the global south – and especially Africa – for the resources to do so. It’s a dangerous plan.

2. A history of coups in Niger

In the years leading up to Niger’s independence, the socialist leader who appeared positioned to take the country into the future was Djibo Bakary of the Mouvement Socialiste Africain, whose party came to be known as Sawaba. He was elected to lead the government in 1957, but he was overthrown and exiled by France in 1958, two years before independence happened. The next elections were rigged and the Sawaba party was disallowed. A Sawaba uprising happened in 1964 and was crushed – hundreds of Sawaba were imprisoned as political prisoners and in one incident, twenty one were suffocated to death at Maradi’s prison.

Besides being a socialist and pan-Africanist, Bakary’s crime was opposing de Gaulle’s idea for a Franco-African community. With Bakary out of the way, the post-Independence government joined the Franco-African community and signed an agreement allowing French troops to occupy Niger (a situation that persisted until the 1974 coup).

Reviewing the Historical Dictionary of Niger, I counted six coups: 1958, 1974, 1996, 1999, 2010, and now 2023. Several of these coups were by military officers who promised to hold elections quickly – and then did so! Other military governments stayed in power for a decade or more.

But the dynamics of a coup are never entirely local, as a perusal of William Blum’s book Killing Hope will show. Alternating between military and civilian governments, intervening in electoral processes where possible and resorting to military coup as needed, was the preferred method for keeping pro-US / pro-Western governments in power all over Africa for many decades after independence.

In recent decades, however, the US strategy has changed, to prefer dysfunctional civilian governments with low-level insurgencies that are then fought, but never defeated, by Western-led counterinsurgency efforts. This way, African militaries are always engaging in counterinsurgency under broad Western command against African populations. African resources still flow to the global north, with illicit flows taking a good share of the total. In endless war situations, land-grabs and resource-grabs are easier to hide (see, e.g. the US in Syria).

Which leads to our next section:

3. The French and US militaries in the region

The governments of West Africa have been under French military control since independence. The US initially exerted its own interests through France, but in recent decades has exerted influence more directly, through AFRICOM, especially since the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. The Niger government signed agreements allowing the US to operate lethal drones in Niger, and declared its support early on for the rebels that would overthrow Gaddafi. There are a large number of Islamist insurgent groups operating in the countries of the region: both Al Qaeda-branded and Islamic State-branded groups murder civilians, attack police stations and military outposts, and kidnap people. The attacks can be severe. Luca Raineri, writing in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, summarized a series of attacks in west Niger in 2019 alone:

in May, twenty-eight Nigerien soldiers were killed in an armed ambush by ISGS; in July, ISGS stormed a Nigerien military position near Inatès, killing eighteen soldiers; in October, five Nigerien gendarmes were also killed in an ambush by ISGS near Abarey; in November, ISGS attacked the Malian military base of Indelimane, just across the Nigerien border, killing fifty-three Malian soldiers; in December, ISGS mounted a large-scale attack against the military base of Inatès, which claimed the lives of seventy Nigerien militaries; and in January 2020, a new ISGS assault on a Nigerien military post in Chinegodar killed at least eighty-nine soldiers.

This is a little bit more than a state can be asked to simply “live with” or “manage”, when the prescription for dealing with this violence is another decade of Western-led operations that seem to lead nowhere. After the destruction of the Libyan state, the so-called “jihadi” insurgencies have targeted states of the region and the US/France have been completely ineffective. The African militaries that have been subordinated in these counter-terrorism efforts have good reason to be impatient: their Western advisers are advising them to death.

Niger’s neighbours, Burkina Faso, and Mali, have both recently seen their civilian governments overthrown by the military. In all three coups, the militaries have complained about the handling of the fight against the “jihadist” insurgencies.

This is where Russia and China enter the story. Since the collapse of the USSR and until recently, African states had no alternative but Western military cooperation, even to try to resolve military problems like the Islamic State that were created by the West in the first place. But having watched Russia help Syria actually sweep the Islamic State out of Syria, the post-coup West African states might be wondering if they could pull off something similar.

Likewise, before the Belt and Road Initiative, African states had no alternative but to go to the IMF and World Bank and impose austerity, even though it trapped their people in debt and misery. Now there may be better deals to be found. Or at least, that thing capitalists supposedly love – a fair competition. Take a look at the visual capitalist from EIGHT years ago:

So, there are big stakes, and a wider conflict over the future of Africa, at work in this coup.

This post is inspired by The East is a Podcast’s latest episodes on Libya, featuring Matteo Capasso, discussing the rise and fall of Gaddafi’s revolution from 1969-2011. Sina’s episodes coincided with my own research, with my Civilizations co-host Dave Power, into Italy’s initial invasion of Libya in 1911-12. We did our own episode about that invasion, which culminated in Italy committing genocide in Libya after WWI – and we’ll be returning to the long war there and the genocide in our show.

But what I wanted to do in this post is use the occasion of Sina’s episode to talk about a book that profoundly changed the way I viewed Gaddafi and Libya. That book is the 2012 Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, by Maximilien Forte. When there is a US war and propaganda campaign against a targeted country, I instinctively look for books from different perspectives, including if possible the strongest possible case for the other side. I don’t need anti-war books to be fair and balanced: we’re subjected to non-stop pro-war, biased propaganda. I don’t mind reading biased anti-war propaganda. I can do the balancing myself.

I had read a couple of other books about Libya or touching on it. I’d read a bit about the Chadian civil war in pro-US sources like Burr & Collins’s 1999 Africa’s Thirty Years War: Chad-Libya-the Sudan, 1963-1993. I knew about Gaddafi’s Green Book and his Isratine proposal. So, like any consumer of Western media, I got the impression of a snazzy-dressing, mentally unstable, adventurist dictator. Not so different than impressions of Saddam Hussein provided in South Park: The Movie, or of Kim Jong-Un that you would get from Kim Jong-Un’s Little Book of Calm.

Most of the anti-war material I read didn’t really dislodge this view.

But Forte’s book did.

Whenever any US-based regime change is successful, it is cheap and easy to make the argument that the ousted leader was a strategic failure. I have personally heard such arguments about:

• the Afghan communists, overthrown in 1992;

• Aristide in Haiti, overthrown in 1991 and again in 2004;

• Chavez in Venezuela when he was overthrown for a couple of days in 2002;

• Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1990 and 2003;

• Assad in Syria from 2011 on;

• Hizbullah in Lebanon (for supporting Assad);

• Milosevic in Yugoslavia;

• Lula and Dilma in Brazil;

• Zelaya in Honduras.

These are just the ones I have personally heard in my own life. I know that such arguments have been constructed about every single leader that’s been regime-changed at least since the early phase of the Scramble for Africa in the 1830s when France grabbed Algeria, and probably before.

Now, the fact that they’re formulaic and repeated in every single case doesn’t necessarily make them false. Nor does it make ousted leaders angels or martyrs. It does, however, impose an extremely heavy burden of proof, so much so that it might behoove readers to reverse the default assumption. Maybe if the regime-changers were lying the last 100 times, they’re lying this time.

For Aristide, the argument went that he shouldn’t have accepted the US intervention to put him back into power in 1995; he should have conducted more repression against those who were trying to overthrow him from 2001 on; he should have conducted less repression against same; he should have been more/less conciliatory; he shouldn’t have asked for the indemnity money France stole from Haiti…

And what about Gaddafi? He shouldn’t have antagonized the imperialists with his bombastic style; he shouldn’t have antagonized them by supporting Palestinian armed organizations, the IRA, the ANC; he should have avoided intervening in the Chad war and the fight with that France-backed government; he shouldn’t have made a deal to try to normalize relations with the imperialists, since they overthrew him anyway…

The implication in all these cases is that there was some set of perfect strategic choices that could have kept the nationalist regime in power and kept the revolution moving forward. Maybe there was. But is this a fruitful use of energy, criticizing the failings of third world leaders facing impossible odds? Our efforts might be more profitably deployed in activities other than criticizing the strategic errors of such leaders.

(That’s not to say there aren’t a few good principles that Third World leaders have learned from hard experience. The Patnaiks distilled a few economic ones at the end of their book, Capital and Imperialism: impose capital controls, survive the CIA coup attempt, impose import controls, stimulate the domestic market, raise agircultural productivity, redistribute land, provide rights to employment, food, healthcare, education, pension/disability for 10% of GDP, don’t apologize for economic nationalism. I might eventually do a post just on these points, but not right now).

Anyway, there are several general retorts to the “X was bad and deserved to be overthrown by the imperialists”.

1. Is the country better of now than it was under X? (Almost always the answer is disastrously no – Libya is an extreme case, though Iraq, Haiti, and Afghanistan are right up there).

2. If X was so bad, why did the imperialists overthrow him at all?

The answers to #2 can be found in Maximilien Forte’s book. Here are a few:

• Under Gaddafi’s regime Libya’s life expectancy grew from 51 years to 74. Literacy grew to 95% for men and 78% for women, and per capita income increased to $16,300. It was the only continental African nation to rank “high” in the Human Development Index.

• Gaddafi supported the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Mandela told Gaddafi: “your readiness to provide us with the facilities of forming an army of liberation indicated your commitment to the fight for peace and human rights in the world.”

• Under Gaddafi, Libya was a major financial backer of the African Union and an advocate for independent, AU institutions including sovereignty over resources, an African Monetary Fund to replace the IMF, and independence from the International Criminal Court which, until it added a couple of Russians to its indictment list, has only ever prosecuted Africans.

Contrast this with the photo of those gathered to overthrow Gaddafi in 2011, above. Notice anything?

• Libya under Gaddafi invested around $150 billion in infrastructure and agriculture projects in Africa.

• A minor point: Gaddafi treated African leaders and diplomats with dignity (as China does) in contrast with the West which continues to engage in calculated humiliation and indignities of the same leaders.

• Gaddafi was a fierce adversary of the US African Command (AFRICOM). After his overthrow in 2011, the US announced deployment to four more African countries: Central African Republic, Uganda, South Sudan, and the DR Congo, and 14 joint military exercises in 2012.

Forte suggests that Gaddafi’s “turn toward Africa” was “arguably a turn away from the Arab world’“. While Gaddafi had worked in many Arab unity initiatives, he gave up around 1999. It was Gaddafi’s Africa policy that got him overthrown.

As always, there’s more. Forte’s book is devastatingly argued, has rich footnotes, and a 30-page reference list. I wasn’t able to emerge from my reading of it with the same stereotyped idea of Gaddafi as an erratic and silly person. Indeed, I don’t even think that the US players that overthrew him saw him that way. That’s a myth for mass consumption, an expression of hatred.

(Another aside, I realized watching pro-war propaganda that while we think of hate speech in terms of screaming, clawing, and gnashing teeth, a lot of hate is expressed through mockery and ridicule. Certainly the caricatures of Gaddafi are hateful.)

When she heard Gaddafi was murdered, Hillary Clinton was being interviewed when the note came in on her phone. Her spontaneous reaction was to say: “We came, we saw, he died.” And to burst into what appears to be a truly satisfied laugh, a rare unscripted moment of celebration for a politician renowned for extraordinary self-control.

There’s nothing to celebrate.