ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the military and society in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya with a view to evaluating the usefulness and pointing out the limitations of the idea of praetorianism and specifically to making comparisons of the roles of the military in East Africa. Nationwide political structures are too weak to enforce the will of ruling national elites, whether these elites are traditional lineage groups, party elite, civilian bureaucracies, or the military. Huntington suggests that at one phase of a society’s development, instability and coups are to be explained in terms of changes in the nature of the military. Variations in the politics of the three countries are apparently related to differences in the military as well as in the institutionalization of the political systems. The conflict between British officer streams was most pronounced in Uganda, which experienced the most rapid military growth in tropical Africa outside of Nigeria.
