myth, largely fostered by the departing colonial powers, that Africans preferred strong
authoritarian rule to democracy. This was never the case but the myth suited the interests
of Europeans, who needed to justify providing support for autocratic regimes that would
safeguard their strategic and financial investments on the continent” (665). So was the
experience of “arrested decolonization” (Biodun Jeyifo 2006: 3).
Yet by the time one regime is overthrown by another, people, to their disappointment,
discover how little things have changed and how worse situations have become. This has
been the case from Greece to Chile. The falsity of the patriotism mantra is perhaps best
illustrated with the Spanish experience between 1814 and 1981 when more than fifty
pronunciamentos occurred. The recurrence of military intervention would eventually
consolidate the audacity of the class when it did not only enforce mistrust between it and
the civilian population, but also popularized the idea that it was far more patriotic and
owed the nation a duty to intervene in the politics. But it was no doubt an attempt to
defend the interest of the military class only in the society (Paul Preston 1990: 131). All
the same, it is instructive to note that the exclusive claim to the love for the nation is
reminiscent of the various colonial strategies through which the system perpetuated itself
in control for scores of years. Or to go farther than that, knowing that
compartmentalization of African history is an intentional imperialist strategy to play
down the enormity of the deficits resulting from African relation with the West (Jacques
Depelchin 2005: 15), the military strategy by which Nigeria and Ghana were held in
thrall for decades owed so much to the alibi of the civilization of the coercive movement
of Africans across the Atlantic.
No matter the paradigm of performance used, the military interventions in these countries
and the revolutions they purported failed to deliver. Thus if it was their argument that the
politicians were leading the nations on the path of indignity, there was actually a sense in
which their intervention expedited the arrival of both nations at the portal of such
indignity. The various regimes perpetrated all manner of atrocities against the nations so
much so that the myth of the nation as a collective entity was quaked. It offered, instead,
for the people other drifts of the semantics as they began to consider possibilities of