How Europe Politically Underdeveloped Africa
In a renewed period of coups across the African continent, Ruth First’s analysis in The Barrel of a Gun remains as timely as ever.
“It has proved infectious, this seizure of government by armed men, and so effortless,” Ruth First writes in the opening pages of The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’État (1970), reissued by Verso this year. “Get the keys of the armoury; turn out the barracks; take the radio station, the post office and the airport; arrest the person of the president, and you arrest the state.”
Though published over half a century ago, First’s observations about the phenomenon of coups in postcolonial Africa could equally apply to the present. Since 2020, eleven successful coups have occurred in African countries, including Guinea-Bissau (2025), Guinea (2021), Mali (2020 and 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), Niger (2023), Chad (2021), and Sudan (2021). These seven countries, which exclude coups in Gabon (2023) and Madagascar (2025), stretch contiguously from West Africa to Sudan, leading observers to invoke the idea of a Sahelian “coup belt” and a “coup wave” overtaking African politics.
Such generalized assessments carry risks, given the manifold reasons behind these military takeovers. Mali’s political instability goes back to 2012, when another coup took place as a result of a mutiny by Malian soldiers dissatisfied with counterinsurgency operations against the Tuareg rebellion in the north of the country. Niger similarly has a long history of coups and coup attempts, with roots in anti-French and anti-Western sentiment combined with the encroachment of Russian interests and the presence of lucrative uranium resources. Yet despite these local circumstances, connections can be drawn throughout the region. Weapons sales and the anti-jihadist military training promoted by the United States and France as part of the global War on Terror have become a primary factor in the recent destabilization of the Sahel.
This history of the present can be set against a deeper backdrop. From 1950 to 2023, an estimated 220 coups were attempted in Africa, with 109 being successful—the most on any continent, and nearly half of the 492 attempts estimated worldwide during this period. Among Africa’s fifty-four countries, forty-five have experienced at least one attempt, with thirty-seven having successful military takeovers. Put differently, approximately two-thirds of Africa’s states have endured rapid and disruptive political change through a military coup.
The Barrel of a Gun did not predict this pattern, but it did identify its essential symptoms. For this reason, it remains an important diagnosis of postcolonial Africa’s political condition. As a white South African, Ruth First is at first glance an unusual interpreter and messenger for this issue. Yet her examination of coups and militaries as political entities drew upon her interests in revolution, armed resistance, and political power more generally as a lifelong member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the anti-apartheid struggle.
Born in 1925, First grew up in Johannesburg as the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. She was raised in a political household that deeply informed her beliefs from an early age, with her political activism formally starting while she was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand. First was involved in establishing the multiracial Federation of Progressive Students, and she met fellow activists like Nelson Mandela and her future husband, Joe Slovo, while at Wits. They married in 1949, a year after the ultra-conservative, Afrikaner-based National Party came to power with its platform of apartheid.
The 1950s were a heady period of both political mobilization and setbacks for First and other activists of her generation. The Communist Party of South Africa, founded in 1921, was banned in 1950, with its members reforming the organization underground as the renamed South African Communist Party. The SACP aligned itself with the African National Congress (ANC), which proved to be the most effective party in terms of membership enrollment and developing alliances against the apartheid regime. The ANC’s Defiance Campaign in 1952 proved to be a decisive moment, demonstrating the potential of coordinated, nationwide mass action through strikes, boycotts, and other forms of civil disobedience.
This momentum against apartheid culminated in the 1955 Congress of the People, held in Soweto, with its adoption of the Freedom Charter, which demanded a nonracial democracy for South Africa. The apartheid government responded swiftly by arresting 156 activists for plotting to overthrow the state. First and Slovo were among those detained, along with figures like Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Moses Kotane, Helen Joseph, Ahmed Kathrada, and Alex La Guma. The infamous Treason Trial that followed lasted until 1961, with all of those accused eventually acquitted.
In 1960, however, the Sharpeville Massacre took place—a pivotal event that shattered expectations and fundamentally reshaped the outlook and strategy of SACP and ANC members alike. A newer organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), founded in 1959, had organized a pass protest at a police station in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, involving an estimated 5,000 people. After a morning of escalating tension, police opened fire, killing at least ninety-one people and injuring hundreds more. The apartheid regime declared a state of emergency and announced a ban on the PAC and the ANC.
These events spurred the ANC’s turn to armed struggle. Mandela, Slovo, and First played key roles in the development of this new strategy through the 1961 founding of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), a name which translates to “Spear of the Nation” in isiXhosa and isiZulu. As the military wing of the ANC, the establishment of MK marked a generational shift away from the civil disobedience approach of the older Luthuli. It also aligned the anti-apartheid struggle with liberation movements in other parts of Africa, Asia, and the rest of the world.
Yet this new tactical approach also put First and other activists at greater risk. In 1962 and 1963, Mandela and other MK operatives were arrested for their militant activities. The Rivonia Trial that followed led to Mandela’s sentence of life imprisonment along with seven others in 1964. First and Slovo had been involved in the purchase of Liliesleaf, the MK safehouse where Mandela had resided and his comrades were apprehended.
During the nearly two decades since her graduation from Wits, First had become a political journalist, writing for such venues as the Guardian (Johannesburg) and later New Age, a leftist newspaper that succeeded the Guardian after its banning and supported the ANC. She was eventually detained in August 1963 for her writing, in addition to her activism, and incarcerated under a ninety-day detention law. First ultimately spent over a hundred days in prison, an experience retold in her memoir, 117 Days (1965). Drawing upon her skills as a journalist, she reported on the conditions she endured, both physical and psychological, to convey the inhumanity of the apartheid regime to a global audience.
First was released in December 1963 and left South Africa in March 1964, never to return. When she arrived in London with her daughters Robyn and Gillian to join Slovo (their oldest daughter, Shawn, would arrive later), she was greeted as a celebrity. Yet exile proved to be a complex experience, at once personally liberating and rife with uncertainty. Political work competed with domestic responsibilities. However, First’s intellectual life blossomed. Exile became a period of academic ferment, turning her experience as a journalist into a commitment to longer works of scholarship and political theory. The project that became The Barrel of a Gun would preoccupy her for the remainder of the decade.
Against the backdrop of the decolonization that was unfolding across Africa, First’s personal papers indicate that she was initially concerned with postcolonial African governments and the new bureaucrats that were taking power. This budding interest soon turned to a focus on coups, whose disturbing frequency undermined the optimism of postcolonial independence. The Barrel of a Gun consequently became several things at once: an academic analysis of power dynamics in postcolonial Africa, a political history of Africa during the 1960s, and a document of First’s life and political views at the time. Indeed, while South Africa is notably absent from The Barrel of a Gun, it does form a subtext. As an SACP member, First’s attention and opinions on political violence, militarism, and revolution were informed by debates that had preoccupied South African activists during the preceding decade. The Barrel of a Gun provided a wider African context for her to examine these themes.
Through general historical background and more detailed accounts of case studies in Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana, The Barrel of a Gun presents an immersive narrative and sustained analysis of the connections between militaries, leaders, and economies. As First explains in her introduction, the book is concerned with positioning “a general theory of power for newly independent states” that would determine why they were “so vulnerable to army interventions in politics.” Put differently, First was not narrowly focused on the role of militaries per se in the postcolony. Rather, she viewed military takeovers as emblematic of systemic problems of governance in Africa.
Based on this stated intention, The Barrel of a Gun is both wide-ranging and intimate in scope. First’s tone is critical, at times cynical, and the narrative is frequently fast-moving, attuned to what she called “the sense of pulsating life in the streets” and that “rumbustious spirit” that reflected “something of the way people see, and say things about, their condition.” By the same stroke, First was quick to criticize the role of elites. “Army men have by now unmade and remade governments in one out of every four of the continent’s independent states,” she remarked. Foreshadowing French- and American-backed military training the present, First further quipped, “Sandhurst and St Cyr, the journalists were saying, had succeeded the London School of Economics and École Normale William Ponty in Dakar as the training-ground of Africa’s leaders.” She additionally commented on how “African development has been held to ransom by the emergence of a new, privileged, African class”: “Few of them read Frantz Fanon, yet they are living out his description of them: ‘Spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s governments, they organize the loot of whatever national resources exist.’”
Despite this caustic characterization, First’s conclusions did not attribute the problem of coups to a small handful of elites. Given their widespread occurrence, she viewed the matter as a reflection of structural issues: African governments were weak and vulnerable to military takeovers because colonialism made them so. The highly centralized, antidemocratic nature of state power introduced by colonial rule persisted into the postcolonial period, leaving limited options for political change whether through elections, an independent judiciary, or popular pressure.
In the same way that Walter Rodney famously showed how Europe underdeveloped Africa in an economic sense, The Barrel of a Gun presented the case for how Europe politically underdeveloped Africa. The hierarchical nature of African states left few institutions and mechanisms for popular participation, making coups an appealing option to short-circuit the political process.
First’s criticism ultimately reflected her concerns about the limits of political revolution in Africa and the ambiguous role of militaries in such events, arguably revealing some of her unfinished thoughts about MK and its revolutionary potential. Indeed, her follow up to The Barrel of a Gun was Libya: The Elusive Revolution (1975), which dissected the effects and contradictions of the 1969 coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power. The book provides a more focused case study of a military takeover under the auspices of revolution, where political and economic realities fell short of rhetorical ideals: Despite the country’s petroleum wealth, the Gaddafi government had failed to implement social and economic improvement for ordinary Libyans as promised.
Nonetheless, First never abandoned her own political ideals. She went on to experience the possibilities of African revolution firsthand when she relocated to Mozambique, which had gained independence from Portugal in 1975. Under the leadership of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), she was able to live in a country governed by a Marxist-Leninist party that neighbored her home of South Africa, albeit for only a few short years. On August 17, 1982, First was assassinated by a bomb mailed to her office at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. She was fifty-seven years old. The bomb was sent by the apartheid regime’s Special Branch, the same police unit that had interrogated her in 1963.
Apartheid would not end until 1994, though First is still widely remembered today as a political martyr in South Africa, for her activism as well as her writing. Indeed, she was unusually wide-ranging in her choice of topics, which also included books on colonial Namibia, Mozambiquan workers, and the South African feminist and socialist Olive Schreiner. The Barrel of a Gun, a vital part of this library, reflects her restless intellectual and political spirit.
The book also speaks to the present. As noted earlier, many African governments remain fragile and prone to military takeovers. Building representative institutions, mechanisms for popular participation, and vibrant civil societies of press freedom and social welfare are still needed.
“Power lies in the hands of those who control the means of violence,” First remarked decades ago, articulating the underlying logic and continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods. “It lies in the barrel of a gun, fired or silent.” This observation is still, unfortunately, all too true.
Christopher J. Lee is an independent scholar who has written or edited fourteen books on decolonization, globalization, and the South African left. He wrote the foreword to the new edition of The Barrel of a Gun.