ABSTRACT
Africa continues to have a mix of military and civilian regimes. Some countries are ruled by military men who have been in power for a relatively long period, such as Mobutu in Zaire and Nimeiri in Sudan. But these two countries, and others in Africa, have seen the development of party or movement organizations underneath executives led by individuals who came from the armed forces and whose continuance in power depends largely on military support. In other African countries, the rulers have been civilians in power since independence who continue to rely on single parties to carry out legitimating and representative functions. This is the case in Zambia, Guinea, Tanzania, the Ivory Coast, and Cameroun. In Senegal and Kenya, a transfer of power from a founding father to a civilian successor has already occurred. Elsewhere, military personnel have replaced one another or have aborted experiments to return to civilian rule, although the leader produced by new elections may have been a military man, as in Upper Volta. To make the picture yet more complex, there are cases in which the transition to civilian rule seems to have taken hold, as in Nigeria and (perhaps more tenuously) in Ghana. And there has been a recent coup that ended a long-standing civilian-led government in Liberia and that might have ended one in Gambia if not for Senegalese intervention, which led to the restoration of the civilian ruler.
