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Christopher Clapham, ed., African Guerrillas. Oxford, U.K.: James Currey; Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. 208. $17.95, paperback; $39.95, hardcover.
Anthony Clayton, Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa Since 1950. London: UCL Press, 1999. Pp. 235. $24.95, paperback; $79.00, hardcover.
African Guerrillas and Frontiersmen both grapple with creating analytical order out of violent conflicts that continue to bedevil parts of Africa. Christopher Clapham, editor of African Guerrillas, provides a comparative framework for understanding the types, causes, and outcomes of African insurgencies. The other chapters, based on field work, cover insurgencies in postcolonial Africa, and more specifically in West and East-Central Africa. Some armed groups achieved military victory: the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) in Eritrea (David Pool); the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia (John Young); the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda (Pascal Ngoga); The Rwanda People's Front (Gerard Prunier); and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo/ Zaire in Congo-Zaire (Cyrus Reed). Other "guerrillas" were unable to obtain military victories-in Somalia (Daniel Compagnon); in Liberia (Stephen Ellis); in northern Uganda (Heike Behrend); and in Sierra Leone (Ibrahim Abdulla and Patrick Muana).
Frontiersmen is more comprehensive in its coverage. It incorporates not only sub-Saharan Africa but also the Maghreb, begins with wars from 1950 rather than just those in the postcolonial period, and includes interstate conflicts alongside intrastate wars. Both books are unusual for their interest in the warriors. Substantively, the two volumes contain interesting similarities and differences that themselves often suggest ways forward in understanding contemporary African wars.
Both works struggle with what is distinctive about African wars. Despite its title, African Guerrillas prefers the term "insurgencies" to "guerrillas" because many African wars depart from conventional understandings about guerrilla war. For example, Prunier emphasizes how the RPF insurgency depended initially on trained Tutsi military personnel in the Ugandan army who had grown up in Uganda, had often never set foot in Rwanda, and lacked local civilian support even among Rwandan Tutsi until after the 1994 genocide.
Clayton finds European concepts of organized war, military strategy, and conventional versus low intensity war unhelpful. Twentieth-century African wars, he says, have generally been fought by ill-disciplined militias with no respect for rules governing the conduct of war, have used terror...