Mr. Kah,

I thank you for being more forthcoming particularly on your
impressive segue from a universal claim to a specific and incomplete
analysis of African Armies.  I want you to clarify this please:
"...in the army  in Arica particularly,deliberately exist a
methodology of education designed to turn soldiers into subservient
tools, whose allegiance is not to our constitutions  and the rule of
law, but essentially to defend the neo-colonial exploitative  class
whose intrest and that of the people quite regularly conflicts."

I believe if this pegagogy of subservience is "deliberate" in African
Armies then I would have been aware of it.  I know for a fact that
the Gambian Army was trained by the British Army during Jawara's
Government.  The Officer Corps were trained in the finest military
institutions in this planet- Sandhurst, St. Cyr, Fort Benning
Georgia, Royal Defence College in London, Staff Colleges in Nigeria,
Pakistan, and the USA. I know upon my commission as an officer I
swore an oath of allegiance to the Gambian constitution and to my
Commander in Chief, then Jawara, against all enemies foreign and
domestic.  This is almost similar to the oath of allegiance for the
US Armed Forces which I also served and worked at the Strategy and
Plans Division at the Pentagon.  So my friend what are you talking
about?
It is true that you don't see in the US the pattern of soldiers
dappling into politics as in most African Armies.  The main reason is
the long history of democratic praxis and a complex web of
institutional arrangements that guarantees the subordination of the
military to civil authority in the US. Unfortunately this is not the
case in most young, fragile and vulnerable countries in Africa.
Civil-military relations is a complex issue that the finest minds in
the US are still struggling to understand well.  I believe it is
beyond the scope of this forum for us to engage in that argument.
Finally, I would warn you to be careful of putting Ex-Capt. Sankara
on a pedestal.  Afterall he was a romantic revolutionary and not an
exemplary model warrior.    His charisma loomed larger than any other
attribute he has as a warrior or a politician.  No wonder he was the
darling of the anti-establishment media.



=====
Ebou Jallow
Georgetown University
Washington, DC

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