This work was submitted in September 2008 as a Masters in Politics/Goldsmiths University. It was written under the supervision of Branwen Gruffydd Jones, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Eyal Weizman and has received distinction. An illustrated pdf version is attached.

Introduction
4th of May 2005. Surrounded by the buildings of international organizations, a small group of demonstrators is gathered on the United Nations Plaza in Geneva. Their chants and drums are audible from afar as I walk towards them camera in hand. An on-looking old man asks me: “are you a journalist?” “No, a friend of the demonstrators” I reply. As I grow closer, Togolese flags are waved, the writings on cloth banners become legible: “UN remember Rwanda”, “Bob Akitani is our president”. To beats of news boxes turned into drums the crowd sings: “Thief, Chirac the thief”. Suddenly silence. Charles Tsévi - a member of main Togolese opposition party UFC (Union des Forces du Changement) who had asked me to film - begins his speech:
“Mr. the General Director of the United Nations,
Following the events which have marked the sociopolitical life of Togo since the 5th February 2005, we, Togolese nationals living in Switzerland, wish to recall a number of points. Since 40 years, the Togolese have lived under an oppressive regime which has systematically plundered the nation’s resources. Due to foreign support to the regime, the efforts of the people to change it always failed.
On the 5th of February 2005, the death of the man who symbolized this dictatorial regime was perceived as an event that opened the way for a state both democratic and respectful of human rights. This hope was short lived. Transgressing the rule of law, a small group of soldiers gave the power to Fare Gassingbé, son of the late president. Under pressure from the Togolese people and the international community, the regime nonetheless backed down and organized elections. The material and political conditions not being fulfilled, two days before the elections, the Interior Minister demanded that these be postponed, qualifying the electoral process as suicidal. He was immediately sacked. Despite the numerous irregularities which occurred during the elections of the 24th of April - multiple votes, votes of foreigners, stolen ballots - France and the CDAO approved the results. The protests of thousands of Togolese were repressed by the military. The death toll is of several hundred people, and thousands have fled the country.”

Charles Tsévi’s discourse provides the reader with a good summary of the political crisis Togo had just gone through. It also points to the context that sparked my interest in this country and would lead to my field trip in Togo in August 2005 with Manuela Honegger, my colleague on this project. As of the death of the General-President Eyadéma Gnassingbé, we followed sympathetically with our Togolese friends the unfolding events. While they spent their nights online discussing and attempting to organize Eyadéma’s succession with the diaspora, we were often left puzzled by the little information on Togo we could access, as well as its quality. What was the nature of the Eyadéma regime? Why did it resort to such violence? Who was resisting it and how? What, in summary, was happening to the political configuration delimited by but not restricted to the Togolese territory? The Swiss, French and American media gave suspiciously familiar answers to these questions: (1) Eyadéma was a dictator who used the state to forward his private interests, those of his clan and those his own Northern ethnic group - the Kabre; he used (2) a numerous and violent army to tame the population and repress (3) the irruptions of a Southern, young, male, youth; all of this with (4) the support of France. Irrational violence, anti-democraticity, personal rule involving clientelism and corruption, ethnic conflict were the dominant themes that reappeared once again. They themselves were mere reactivations of the meta-theme of bestiality which has characterised much of the discourse on Africa for centuries. Implicitly defined as natural characteristics of African politics and society, such explanations left little place for historical transformation, and were incapable of even asking how did the regime’s practices emerge and by what processes were they shaped?
The themes developed in news reports further echoed the dominant academic discourse on Africa which revolves around the issues of “neopatrimonialism” - the continuation of “traditional” clientelistic relations within the “modern” state, of “state failure” - the state’s incapacity to fulfil the functions associated with the modern state, and of “development” - the evolution from “traditional” to competitive capitalist economies. This dominant discourse posits a single path for the evolution of societies - liberal democracies and integration into the world economy - which Africa would be incapable of following. As such this discourse approaches the understanding of African societies by defining them negatively against a Eurocentric model, and, as Achilles Mbembe has repeatedly noted, we have come to know more about what Africa isn’t then what it is.
Finally, focusing on the supposedly endogenous characteristics of the Togolese regime, the dominant explanations - both mediatic and academic -left little place for its inscription in a complex field of transnational economic, political, and social relations. This is maybe another level on which my description of the demonstration organized by the Togolese in exile in Geneva is an appropriate starting point: it indicates the difficulty of assigning clearly identifiable spatial and, as we will see, temporal limits to “Togolese politics” - the struggle to define the modalities of life in common within the territorial boundaries of the Togolese state. If foreign relations are generally recognized to be central to domestic politics - to the point that this very distinction becomes dubious - this is, according to Jean-François Bayart, particularly the case for African states. For while African societies were inscribed in relations of economic and political domination with Europe as of the 15th century, local political actors nonetheless used these unequal relations to forward their own political struggles - what Bayart refers to as “strategies of extraversion”. As such, answering my queries concerning the nature of the Togolese regime - understood as the government plus the nongovernmental actors that allow it to maintain its domination - and the formation of its practices will demand an understanding of actors and process which, if they do converge in their interaction with Togolese politics, are not restricted to the Togolese territory. It will involve following projects, actions and chains of causalities which are multiple, fragmented, and polydirectional, with no clear beginning or end.

An engagement with History, an attention to the activities of state and non-state actors within and without the borders of the Togolese state, a refusal of naturalization, will thus characterize the following enquiry. In the first chapter, following Jean-François Bayart’s insights, I will focus on the changing modes of accumulation of the Togolese regime and their importance for political struggle. Here, after giving a historical introduction, I will trace the transformations that occurred during the 1990s and the role the struggle for resources played in the 2005 political crisis. In the second chapter, I will enquire into the transformations and functioning of the regime’s practices of power, asking how it maintained control over the Togolese population. Here my focus will be on the emergence of the military apparatus, and the particular techniques deployed to prevent uprisings and revolutions. Finally in the third chapter, since, on the one hand, resistance transforms the practices of power and, on the other hand, following Michel Foucault I consider that the task of the critic is both to diagnose the limits imposed on life and the possibilities of transgressing those limits, I will enquire into the modalities of resistance towards the regime enacted by the Togolese population. Here I will ask how the mass demonstration organized by the women of the market was mobilized and how and why violence was used by the youth in the riots which followed the rigged elections. In these chapters I will rely on different sources, ranging from interviews gathered during our travel in August 2005, to the writings of social scientists, NGO reports, and obscure internet articles. My exploration will take the form of “stories” - the description and narration of case studies using the tools of social science and theory, bringing together multiple perspectives, people, places, times. My hope is that despite their restricted scope they will allow me to produce a representation of Togolese politics that escapes the naturalizing tropes I criticized in this introduction and to shed some light on the historical processes and complex relations among multiple actors operating at various scales that shaped the 2005 Togolese crisis.

Chapter 1: Networks of Accumulation

Struggles for power and resources in pre-colonial Togo
In October 1884, Hugo Zoller arrived on the coast of “Togoland” in a hammock carried by four “negroes” remarking that, in Africa, “the black man has the same role as a horse, a mule, a donkey or a camel in other countries”. The reporter for the Kölnische Zeitung and member of a pro-colonization lobby, was to report on the new German Protectorate, which was still fragile to say the least: it was defined by a treaty with one king but which remained unrecognized by the other kings and chiefs on the coast, delimited by four flags but with no one to defend them. As such, despite his racist perspective, Zoller’s account of his travel is a precious testimony of pre-colonial Togo, its configuration of power, its economy, its people.
Part of the Slave Coast, the location of actual Togo had been an important center for slave trade since over a century. But when Zoller arrived, the sale of slaves had been practically abolished since 1863. The trade of human beings had been replaced by that of palm oil and fruits - which were used in Europe for the production of soap and wax - but even more importantly by the new opportunities entailed by the creation of the British Colony of the of Gold Coast. For the African and European entrepreneurs who wished to escape the heavy taxes imposed by the British colony simply slipped further along the coast, into the strip of land that lay between the British and French empires. Here they founded Lomé - today the capital of Togo - and established their factories in other small cities that soon prospered. The entrepreneurs were not moving into a void, but into a space controlled by kingdoms and their local chiefs who competed amongst each other for authority. The arrival of foreign entrepreneurs was seen as an indissociably economic and political opportunity: the chiefs erected new taxation posts, sent letters to European firms demanding that taxes be paid to them rather then their competitor. Nonetheless, both taxes and laws were much more relaxed then in the colonial empires, and this was the main attraction for these entrepreneurs.
The local chiefs also competed among each other for the support of foreign powers. Around 1880 the chiefs of Porto Seguro (today Agbodrafo), Little-Popo and Agoué tried to sign a protectorate with the French, while the Lawsons of Aného had paid allegiance to the British. Since the British had also pressured the chiefs to cease hosting entrepreneurs involved in contraband and to expel the German firms, the German entrepreneurs and yet an other small chief - King Mlapa of Togoville - sought after the German Empire for protection.

The story of the palm oil commerce and taxation and the beginning of the German colonization of the Togolese coast provide a telling example of forms of economy and politics that had become structural: inscribed in unequal economic and political relations to the world, Togolese polities nonetheless exploited these relations as means to fight local struggles, indissociably for economic resources and power. As such local struggles were greatly affected by shifts in the balance between great powers and the global economy, and were constantly adapting their strategies in order to capture in their own interest these foreign relations. With the traffic of slaves coming to end, one strategy to derive new forms of accumulation was to have less strong taxes and laws than neighbouring empires. Today, Togo remains inscribed in unequal foreign economic and political relations, and Togolese political actors continue to develop new strategies to capture them to their own advantage. In order to understand what role the struggle for economic resources played in the 2005 political crisis, I will briefly trace the shifts in modes of accumulation that followed Eyadéma’s accession to power in 1967. I will then follow the multiple projects and actors that determined the emergence of one among many new forms of accumulation that emerged in the 1990s - that related to the second-hand car trade within the Free Zone. I will finally inquire into the political struggle for the captation of this resource that occurred during the 2005 political crisis.

The shifting resources of the postcolonial state
When Etienne Gnassingbé (as he was called before naming himself Eyadéma Gnassingbé in 1974) achieved power after his coup in 1967, he immediately suspended the constitution, ruling the country from 67 to 79 by decree and ordinances. In order to govern the population, the General resorted to practices of violence which I will detail in the next chapter. But in 1974, with the first oil crisis, the price of phosphate was multiplied by five and became the country’s main resource. Simultaneously the petrodollars that flooded Western banks were lent easily and at low interests rates to Third World states, and Togo leaped into the fray. Finally, a third resource was the state’s interventions in the economy through the creation of industries and through organisms that granted it the monopoly on imports or the sales of cereals. A few years of abundance followed, allowing the regime not only to maintain itself through techniques of violence but through the redistribution of resources - the number of civil servants, for instance, jumped from 30 000 in 1977 to 49 000 in 1980. But the euphoria would prove short-lived: as of 1979, following the second oil crisis, all three resources were threatened. The price of phosphates toppled, the Dollar soared and the interest rates of loans were drastically augmented and Togo - as many other Third World countries - was unable to pay. In exchange for further loans, Togo was subjected to Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) by the international financial institutions, but the neoliberal policies imposed through these programs demanded the state to reduce its public expenditure and to disengage from the economy. By the beginning of the 1980s the resources of the state were thus seriously reduced, without the neoliberal policies having produced the hoped for rise in growth rates or in foreign investment. Although the docile application of neoliberal policies and the country’s strategic role during the Cold War - which I will discuss further on - allowed it to maintain access to international aid, even this last resource would be cut by more then half following the political crisis at the beginning of the 1990s. What new resources could be derived by the regime in such a context? A systematic study of this question has not been produced, but it seems the regime developed a number of strategies. It curtailed the application of neoliberal policies in order to maintain as much influence on the economy as it could - for instance by keeping the majority of shares of “privatized” state enterprises. It derived new revenues from the application of neoliberal policies through practices of “corruption” - for instance in the process of privatizing state enterprises. Finally, the regime inscribed itself in fluctuating forms of parallel and illicit trade - from diamonds to weapons, cocoa and drugs. The case of the Free Zone will provide an example of the creation of new resources through the detournement of neoliberal policies. As in the pre-colonial period, this new resource would be an important stake in the reconfiguration of power that followed Eyadéma’s death.

The Free Zone
In the Overseas Private Investment Corporation’s (OPIC) 1989 yearly report, one can read that “OPIC pursued a number of initiatives to facilitate US private investment into regions and sectors where the potential for significant development impact was great but in which US investors had traditionally found difficult to operate.” Among these initiatives figured the project to establish Export Processing Zone (EPZs) - Free Zones in which products are transformed before being re-exported - in sub-Saharan Africa. These aimed to circumvent the “difficulties” American investors had found in their operations by developing extremely liberal conditions: no taxes on imports and exports, reduced or non-existent taxes on profits, reduced labour rights - in short legal incentives that have become central to enterprises competing in the global economy. While EPZs had already proven their effectivity in Southeast Asia and Mauritius for instance, the projects in Senegal and Zaire had failed - according to the OPIC because of excessive involvement from these states. As such The OPIC commissioned the Service Group to conduct a research in 12 countries for potential new zones, emphasizing the need for a private management. On the 1st of August 1989 Togo and Cameroon were informed by the OPIC that they had “won”. Togo had a number of assets: its recently adopted liberal investment code and interest in developing a Free Zone project, the country’s cheap labour, its important port, not to mention its strong security apparatus which was a necessary condition for the OPIC. Sure of the success of the future zones, Torge Gerlach of the Service Group argued that “Free Zones are a means of integrating Third World countries into the global market. The success of the zones will contribute to reinforce the arguments of those promoting a complete liberalization of the economy.” For the Togolese regime this was clearly seen as a golden opportunity - since the project was backed by a US organization it was sure US capital would follow. Togo immediately adopted the Free Zone project in its national law, and, from then on, the project was present in practically every presidential discourse: Eyadéma argued that over 100.000 new jobs would soon be created.
Sadly, the millennial tone both of advocates of neoliberalism and of the Togolese regime did not manage to conjure the wished for success. Almost immediately after the inauguration of the Free Zone the country was shaken by the “wind of the east” as it is often referred to - the wind of democratization which blew through Africa following François Mitterrand’s infamous 1990 “Discours de la Baule”. Following political unrest and mass strikes, the country was brought close to stand-still, and so was the Free Zone. Although as of 1994 - after the restoration of Eyadéma’s authoritarian power - the zone attracted new enterprises, it still did not fulfil the expectations. Today just over 60 enterprises operate within it, but their exports are mainly directed towards West Africa - far from the inscription of the country into the global market, and none are from the USA. These enterprises have developed close to 10.000 jobs, but they are precarious and on the whole less well paid then formal work outside of the free zones. Some workers prefer to quit their jobs since the working conditions affect their health and salaries are not sufficient to feed their families. But if the Free Zone has clearly failed in its expectations, it has nonetheless proved an important new site of accumulation for the regime. For while the OPIC’s project stipulated the zone should be managed privately, it was finally operated by the SAZOF (Société d'administration de la Zone franche) under the authority of the Ministry of Commerce and directed since a number of years by Kpatacha Gnassingbé, one of Eyadéma’s sons. The second-hand car trade held by Lebanese entrepreneurs provides an example of the strategies of accumulation derived from the zone.

Lebanese second-hand car traders and the regime
The majority of the Free Zones are situated near the Lomé port which is often referred to as the economic artery of the country. And in effect, life pulses in and out it at a dizzying speed. Not only is it the central infrastructure for the enterprises located in the Free Zone, but it also drains an important traffic to and from the landlocked countries which has sharply risen since the political turmoil in Cote d’Ivoire. Close to 50% of cotton from Burkina Faso and Niger is now exported through the port, and conversely it is here that they receive much of their imports, among others second-hand cars. This market has been expanding: the flux of cars rose from 28.000 1999 to 77.000 in 2003. It is mainly held by Lebanese traders whose diasporic network spanning the globe is a central infrastructure in connecting the Middle East, Europe and Africa. In one of the car parks located in Free zone No 1, we met Ali Esedin, who told us of his trajectory and trade:
“I was in Cote d’Ivoire from 1977 to 1989. When I got married I wanted to go back to Lebanon, but it didn’t work out. I heard that in Togo the market was good, so I came here. I think its good here. I’ve been selling cars since 5 years, I have 5 employees and 45 cars - it depends, some times you can find 100 cars here. Most of them come from Germany. Some times I take accidented cars, but I prefer if their mechanic is good. It depends on one’s capital. You need a lot of capital to buy new cars, I have a small capital.”
Ali guided us through his park. Some of the cars were being repaired before being sold. Others were filed with Tvs and fridges which would soon sold on the market. Other illicit goods - such as drugs - are also said to be related to the car trade. Incapable of attracting large-scale foreign enterprises, the Free Zone was nonetheless an attractive environment for smaller entrepreneurs whose activities in turn provided a new important resource for the regime. Ex-prime minister Agbéyomé Kodjo confessed after being sacked in 2002 that 70 millions FCFA a month were derived from the taxation of the second-hand car trade and distributed among the Eyadéma clan. Having become an important resource for the regime, it is not astonishing that the free zone and the second-hand car trade were at the center of the struggle for the redistribution of power and resources that followed Eyadéma’s death.

Post-Eyadéma struggle for power and ressources
It is difficult to untangle the complex negotiations for power and resources that followed Eyadéma’s death, but based on a number of news articles and previous, confirmed experiences, I can give the following account. Faure and Kpatcha Gassingbé were the two most prominent among Eyadéma’s sons. Already before 2005, Faure had taken the direction of the Ministry of Mines, Equipment and Telecommunication, and Kpatcha that of the SAZOF and was involved in the direction of the Port of Lomé. Immediately following Eyadéma’s death, intense deliberations among the Eyadéma clan and the army finally lead to Faure being given the presidency but with the close assistance of Kpatcha. But Kpatcha’s stepping aside from the presidency could not go without certain paybacks. Even before the elections, the interim president Abbas Bonfoh (Faure had been temporarily forced to step down) granted a Lebanese entrepreneur named Bassam El-Najjar - who had close ties to Kpatcha - the monopoly over the import of second-hand cars, and allowed him to impose a new tax on every vehicle - 30.000 FCFA (roughly 30 Euros) for normal vehicles and 60.000 for trucks. The taxes were collected by the SAZOF, and Kpatcha Gnassingbé is alleged to have received his fair share. But the distribution of resources and power was still unstable. Kpatcha would soon after play a central role in the post-election repression - of which he is recognized as the main organizer. Following the rigged elections he would be appointed Minister of Defence. Feeling threatened by the assent of his brother - particularly following rumours of a planned coup, Faure took repeated steps to distance his brother from economic and political resources. In June 2006 a report on drug trafficking which mentioned the involvement of Kpatacha but not that of Faure was mysteriously leaked to the press. In October 2007 the new Director of Taxation who was close to Faure, demanded of Bassam-El Najjar 13,7 millions Euros in taxes, in return for the taxes he had collected on second-hand cars. Bassam fled, and was replaced in his role of monopoly by Uniport, an enterprise with close links to Faure. In December 2007 Kpatacha was not re-established as Minister of Defense. In February 2008 he resumed his activity at the head of the SAZOF.

This is certainly not the last note of the Kpatcha-Faure Saga. But what it allows to observe is the continuing importance of economic resources derived from the taxation of foreign entrepreneurs to the struggle for domestic power - and vice versa. The struggle amongst the regime also demonstrates that far from being simply divided between Southerners and Northerners - the ethnic hatred thesis - Togolese politics is fractured by multiple antagonisms. While we did see that state institutions and resources were used as a private property redistributed to maintain authority - a practice that might be qualified as “neopatrimonialism” - I have shown that these practices are not “natural”, but were deeply shaped by changes in the global economy and the shifting projects of various economic actors. These changes formed a shifting frame of indissociably economic and political opportunity which political actors attempted to capture to their own advantage. Among other strategies used to such effect, maintaining Togo as a less judicially tight space with low taxes has proved long-lasting. To this effect, the EPZ project was reapropriated by the regime and allowed to reactivate a long tradition. While it initially aimed at integrating Togo into the global formal economy, it in fact contributed to the inscription of the country in a “recycled globalization” and networks of illicit trade - for differentials in jurisdictions are not only attractive for transnational companies of scale but for small scale entrepreneurs and illicit traffickers alike. As such, multiple actors and projects operating at various scales, with at times contradictory at others convergent intentions, perpetuating practices shaped by a long history or taking advantage of a temporary conjuncture, shaped the redistribution of wealth and power that followed Eyadéma’s death.

Chapter 2: Practices of Power

The months immediately following Eyadéma’s death were already marked by mounting violence, but it was after the rigged elections on the 24th of April 2005 and the riots of the opposition youth, that the military and militias unleashed a violence of a rarely seen brutality. French and Swiss television stations mostly showed images of barricades burning and of the military violently beating unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Lomé. But our interviews as well as the reports of NGOs revealed a systematic repression of all those suspected of belonging to the opposition or even to a neighbourhood or village in which members of the opposition lived. While the youths were usually armed of stones or machetes at the most, the regime had at its disposal a well-equipped military. The campaign of violence attained its climax in cities such as Aného and Atakpamé, far from the digital eyes of the media. In Aného the military shot from helicopters at demonstrators armed with machetes, and in Atakapamé whole neighbourhoods said to hide members of the opposition were burned down. During these dark days, between 500 and 800 people were killed, and 40.000 people fled. But is it sufficient to describe this brute violence? This might dangerously reproduce the discourse of bestiality I criticized in the introduction - a discourse both fascinated and terrified by the untamed violence of Africans. Some - as Okuwi Enwezor - have called to refrain from the production of representations of African violence tout court and focus instead on “the normal” - the banality of everyday lives. I nonetheless believe the task of critiquing forms of violent oppression remains an important one, particularly in a context where - as we will now see - violence is not a temporary outburst but a form of government, precisely inscribed in daily lives. My aim in this chapter will be to ask how was violence practiced by the Togolese regime, to what ends, and how was this practice formed? I will do so by tracing the very emergence of a Togolese army under German colonization, following the formation of the doctrine of Counterrevolutionary Warfare in the French colonial wars, and observing how the practices of violence inherited by the independent regime were transformed over time. Far from being the expression of the “bestiality” of African polities, we will see that the practices of violence of the Togolese regime were deeply shaped by the colonial encounter and had their own rationale.

From ethnographic accounts to colonial army
Hugo Zoller’s travel kept him close to the coast and it was only at the end of the 19th century that the first explorers would venture into the North of the country. The travellers were immediately struck by the difference in political organisation: while the Southern populations had long been in contact with European traders and had achieved a more central authority, the Northern populations were fragmented. Explorers and colonizers alike found it much more difficult to deal with these “barbarous tribes” who resisted their incursions and threatened them with attack. Charles Piot reports the first encounter of the Kabre with the German colonial administration: around 1898 a German horseback battalion appeared in the plain. Its mission was apparently simple reconnaissance - making contact with Kabre for the first time, and informing them that they were now under German rule. But as they set camp, one of the officers went looking for food and helped himself to sorghum in a field. The field owner shot the soldier through the heart with an arrow. Shortly after, three German battalions returned, and “pacified” the population by shooting at them and torching homesteads. They finally submitted to German rule, but they had made a lasting impression. From then on the populations of Northern Togo would be reputed for their warrior tradition and would be almost exclusively recruited for the colonial army under successive colonisers.

Under German administration the army reached 500 men, who, although they were used to defend the colony against the allies in 1914, mainly had the function of maintaining internal order. Under the French - who occupied most of Togoland as of 1914 - the army grew to 1500 men. This time 700 soldiers were sent to fight France’s colonial war in Indochina, and, a few months after the French defeat in 1954, in Algeria. In both these wars they intersected with the development of a military doctrine - Counterrevolutionary Warfare - which would prove to be an enduring contribution of the French army to the theory and practice of war. It is to this development that I now turn, for it sheds some light on the practices of violence of the Togolese regime.

The development of the doctrine of Counterrevolutionary War
Following the emergence of the doctrine of Counterrevolutionary War - the war unleashed in order to protect the state from its seizure through armed force - takes us though a complex circuit through different battle fields, as well as through the ambivalent relation between colonizer and colonized - oscillating between hatred and fascination, copy and rejection, and transforming both into something else. Already since their arrival in North Africa in 1830, many soldiers of the French “armée d’Afrique” were encouraged to go native: they wore Africanized uniforms and adopted the tactics of the Arabs. The encounter with the colonized forced the French military to revise the strategies adopted in conventional wars. General Bugeaud, recognized as soon as he was transferred to Algeria in 1840 that defending fixed points against the mobile raids of the Arabs was ineffective, and that mobility and intelligence were crucial assets. Although we can already see here some of the elements that would crystallize in Counterrevolutionary War, it was only with the repression of the independence wars of Indochina and Algeria that a fully-fledged theory would be formulated. One of its major proponents, Charles Lacheroy, was drafted to Indochina in 1951. After a year of fighting, he was left puzzled by the increasing difficulties of the French army, despite it being more numerous and better equipped then the Vietminh. In 1952, in the jacket of a captured combatant, he discovered a small book written in Vietnamese. “I had it translated immediately, Lacheroy told Gabriel Peires in 1989. It was Mao Tsé Tung little book on Revolutionary War. There must have been a few in France at the time but they were unknown to the army”. Lacheroy immediately understood from Mao that the strength of the Vietminh was to be found in its capacity to gather the support of the population, and set out to write his own mirror counterrevolutionary theory. If the enemy was no longer a clearly defined exterior aggressor but an interior enemy constituted of parallel hierarchies disseminated throughout the population, the role of the army would be to define, infiltrate and destroy these hierarchies. If the population was the object of an intense propaganda the aim of which was to delegitimize the colonial state and gather its support, the army should produce an adverse propaganda to demobilize the population. Torture and terror could be used both as means of gathering information and dissuasion. Counterrevolutionary Warfare thus involved a shift in techniques of war, but also in the definition of the enemy - from exterior to interior - and in temporality - from a temporary to a permanent practice with no definite end. Lacheroy’s numerous publications and conferences would find all the more echo among the French army that the defeat in Indochina was hard to swallow, and he was appointed advisor to the Ministry of Defense in Algeria. In 1958 the Battle of Algiers would prove the ideal testing ground for the new doctrine. A year later, Claude Delmas - another senior advisor in Algeria - wrote the fully-fledged theory “La guerre révolutionaire”. Despite the French defeat in Algeria, this new theory would be exported to the dictatorships of the world though the book it self, training provided by the French military, and finally by the demobilization of colonial soldiers and their integration in the armies of their newly independent states - such as Togo. Finally, France maintained close military ties with its ex-colonies, to which I now turn.

The military apparatus in postcolonial Togo
When Togo gained independence from France in 1960 led by Gilchrist Olympio, the 700 Togolese soldiers came back from service in Algeria. They demanded to be integrated into the national army but were refused. Olympio attempted to distance him self from France, and Togo was supposed to exit the CFA monetary zone on the 15 January 1963. The 13th he was assassinated by a group disaffected military - among others Eyadéma - allegedly with the support of France. Olympio’s pro-French political rival Nicolas Gruzinski was installed in power, but was overthrown by a second military coup in 1967. This time Eyadéma seized power.
Under Eyadéma the army grew sharply, particularly as of 1974 thanks to the revenues from phosphate: 2250 men in 1976, 5200 in 1981, 13.000 in 2005. In continuity with the practices of the successive colonial administrations, Eyadéma maintained a practically monoethnic army, with between 60 and 80% of its men from the North. He even insured himself of their fidelity by handpicking them in his region during the yearly traditional wresting match called the Evala. Not only was the army numerous but it was well equipped and trained, mainly thanks to French support. Immediately after Olympio’s assassination in 1963 Togo signed a defence and military assistance agreement binding it with France, as had most of France’s ex-colonies as of 1960. The agreement grants France the right to intervene in case of a foreign attack, but also allegedly in case of an interior threat. France further more provided training - with 28 to 30 military instructors present at all times - and equipment. In exchange, France could count on a strategic ally in the context of the Cold War and after. In our interview, the Political Scientist Comi M. Toulabor detailed Togo’s strategic role: “Eyadéma erected him self as a fortress against communism during the Cold War. He used this combat as a political resource to obtain the support of France and of Western powers.” The Togolese army is alleged to have participated in covert French interventions in Africa, such as the 1987 coup against Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara. France also used the Togolese infrastructure to deploy its own military - for instance in its 1977 attempted coup against Benin’s president Mathieu Kerkou. The country’s strategic role would outlive the Cold War since from 2002 to this day France has used the Lomé airport as base for its “Opération Licorne” in Cote d’Ivoire.
While the above allows to understand the development of the military into a central pillar of the regime and the special tie between the Togolese military and France, I have found no proof of the actual teaching in Togo of the doctrine of Counterrevolutionary War. Nonetheless, detailed interviews with ex-soldiers would almost certainly be conclusive, given the “intimate” relations between Togo and France and the dissemination of this doctrine by France to numerous anti-communist regimes in the context of the Cold War. But as Comi M. Toulabor noted, such a teaching was not even necessary since the Togolese troops had probably integrated these techniques during their service in Algeria. Finally, the practices of the Togolese military point to the integration - with a number of transformations - of the techniques of Counterrevolutionary Warfare.

Practices of violence of the Togolese regime
As we have seen, in its essence Counterrevolutionary Warfare involves the protection of the state from an interior enemy - real or imagined. As such its first stage is to define this interior enemy. Since he gained power, Eyadéma developed a discourse which constantly vilified any detractors - including the late Sylvanus Olympio - and associated the Southerners with all opposition. Conversely, as of 1974, Eyadéma developed the mythical discourse of “togolité”, arguing that the migration of the Northerners to Togo was “vertical” (divine) while that of the others was only a recent “horizontal” (terrestrial) migration, and that as such the real Togolese people were the Northerners. Through this discourse and discriminatory practices in public institutions, the regime politicized the regional and ethnic North - South divide, which, though it had a social reality before Eyadéma seized power, was not the main source of political polarization. These myths were disseminated through an intense use of propaganda through the media - news paper, radio, TV - which were completely controlled by the regime until the beginning of the 1990s. But the regime also had recourse to “animation” - the display of the myth of power in the forms of parades of singers and dancers.

Eyadéma drew his inspiration from various regimes: that of Mobutu - a close friend and mentor, but also North Korea - whose choreographers organized Togolese national parades in 1973 and 1977. Through these forms of popular celebration the regime achieved a much deeper effect on Togolese society then the simple use of mass media would have. For animation involved the constant participation of the entire population both publicly and privately in the cult of “Eyademaism”. Lack of devotion could be enough to be indexed as an opposition member by one of the regimes numerous informers, and subsequently be tortured, beaten, or to “disappear”.

The omni presence of networks of denunciation, rumours of exactions, as well as occasional outburst of public violence entailed the constant imagination of potential violence. As Eyal Weizman notes, this is precisely the space of terror - the gap in-between existing violence and potential violence, which imagination fills in. Comi M. Toulabor argued in our interview that terror had a dissuasive aim, preventing subversion by trapping the population in a state of permanent fear. This is precisely the effect the doctor Ludwig Külz reported to the German administration in 1905: “First of all the African must feel that the White man is stronger, or he will not obey. If he has once the experience of the stick he will not feel the need to start again; he only need know that the stick is there, ready to act.”

The definition of the interior enemy, propaganda, intelligence, denunciation, and the infliction of terror - all characteristics of Counterrevolutionary Warfare, remained important techniques of violence in the 2005 political crisis. They were further supplemented by new techniques - such the disruption of privately owned media and the use of militias - which emerged at the beginning of the 1990s but lye beyond the scope of this paper. I will not repeat here the detailed factual analysis of the repression that followed the 2005 elections - a work that NGOs such Amnesty International, the Togolese League of Human Rights have done remarkably. What the above inquiry provides is a better understanding of how the practices of violence of the Togolese regime were formed, and what rationale lay behind them. As in the previous chapter, we see at work multiple actors with their own projects and agency who intersected and changed the course of the development of the practices of violence of the regime. The work of explorers and ethnographers constructed an image of the Northern Kabre as “barbarous tribes”, thus contributing to their being exclusively recruited as soldiers. During their missions in French colonial wars, it is highly probable that these soldiers encountered the doctrine and practice of Counterevolutionary Warfare, which would influence the techniques of violence they deployed against their own population following independence. As such the violence of these practices does not make of them an example Africa’s radical alterity to the West, but rather of the ambivalent co-constitution of the colonizer and the colonized. Combined with the increase in number and capacity of the Togolese military due to its strategic role during and after the Cold War, this particular technique of violence would become a central pillar of the regime. Far from being an expression of bestiality, violence was applied with a particular rationale: terror was inflicted as a form of governmentality - defined by Michel Foucault as the way one conducts the conduct of men - in order to contain dissent.

Chapter 3: Networks of Resistance

What were the possibilities of resistance in such a context? This is first an ethical question - I wish to acknowledge the actors that refused and contributed to undermine this oppressive Togolese regime. It is furthermore central to my inquiry into Togolese politics and the nature of Togolese regime since, on the one hand, politics is precisely a struggle and as such it is necessary to understand the different forces at work in a given political field, and, on the other hand, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, the practices of the regime were transformed by resistance to it during the 1990s. Enquiring into this question one could analyse the play of party politics. But they have received sufficient attention both from the media and political scientists, and in a context where the electoral process is a masquerade, one might wonder to what extent party politics actually consist in a form of resistance. My interest will rather go to what Achilles Mbembe has called the “power of the street” - the rebellions and uprisings, strikes and demonstrations, enacted by the youths, the students, the jobless, the women – which haunted Togolese politics throughout the 90s. While this power is not completely absent from Western media, it is generally restricted to its most violent occurrences. These are left in their spectacularity without serious inquiry into the modalities of their mobilization and spread, thereby reproducing the imaginary of an “irrational African violence”. In the case of the 2005 Togolese political crisis, the only images which made the televised news were those of the violence that marked the days following the elections. The mass demonstrations that preceded the elections - such as the massive “women’s march” of the 27th of February 2005 - were occulted. This mobilization in particular was surprising given the repressive context that followed Eyadéma’s death. As such, in the first part of this chapter I would like to ask how was such a march mobilized? In order to answer this question I will enquire into what, in the functioning of the market, might have provided the basis for mobilization. In the last part of this chapter I will discuss the riots that followed the elections. Here I will focus less on how these riots worked since data is insufficient to address the question, but instead inquire into the ambivalent use of violence - which was both directed against the regime and foreigners.

The politics of the women of the market
The centrality of women to commerce in Togo can be traced to the period of prior to colonization, when they brought palm fruits and oil to the European factories on the coast, and in turn acquired the monopoly on the distribution of certain goods - mostly textiles. This would lead to their centrality in the textile market on a regional scale - which persists until this day. While a few women called “Nana Benz” still sell textiles in formal shops in Lomé’s central market, the majority of women work in the informal sector which has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. This is a general trend in Africa which, according to Abdoumaliq Simone, can largely be accounted for by the decline of the public sector employment imposed through SAPs. In Togo the informal sector currently absorbs between 75% and 80% of the active population - 45% for men and 84% for women. The informal sector in Lomé is mainly concentrated in the numerous markets - over a 100 if one counts those of small scale. The markets are woven into a complex web of supply that bind them to each other, to the rest of the Togolese territory, and to other cities in West Africa. As such, as Abdoumaliq Simone notes, the city has become a huge intersection of bodies in which the markets function as attractors, through with pulse streams of people moving in and out of the city, as well as between various quarters. But the markets are not only made of networks of bodies and things. They also involve an economy of the gaze. For if the informal sector in Africa is characterized by the fragmentation of all lucrative tasks into as many as possible and the incessant development of new combinations among people and things, it then demands of its various actors to both be attuned to the infinitesimal actions of others and to be seen in a particular way - in order for it to be registered that one is ready to embark on a particular kind of operation and collaboration. Georg Simmel already recognized the importance of the gaze in the interaction among people. For Simmel the eye was the “most direct and purest interaction that exists” for people cannot avoid taking through the eye without at the same time giving. As such the eye produces “the most complete reciprocity”. This mobile network of people, things and vision would prove central to political mobilization in 2005. For while the movement of people and things would provide an infrastructure made of people which would allow for the dissemination of information throughout the city, this daily economy of the gaze would create a loose bind - or a “passive networks” in Asef Bayat’s words - between the market workers that could be instantly mobilized.

It was not the first time the networks formed by the informal traders throughout the city and beyond had proven their capacity for disseminating information and mobilization. One notorious historical occasion has been dubbed “the revolt of the women”. In 1933, two male leaders of a committee organized to prevent the imposition of new taxes on market products had been arrested by the French colonial administration. The news spread through the market and within hours over 4000 demonstrators, mostly women marched towards the palace of the French governor, at which they threw stones. The prisoners were immediately released and the taxes abolished the following day. A few years later, during the struggle for independence, the women of the market supported financially the main nationalist leaders and disseminated the information for banned meetings by crying them in local languages as they publicized their merchandise and distributing forbidden tracts from their baskets. At the beginning of the 1990s, they also solidarized with the students and demonstrated massively despite the dire repression. The 2005 political crisis was no exception to the rule. Following Faure’s coup they organized a mass demonstration demanding the return to constitutional rule, and this despite a ban on demonstrations and the closure of the private radios and televisions which might have relayed the information. The organizing was led by the NGO GF2D (Groupe Femme Démocratie et Développement), whose offices were filled by a small group of women. This core group then disseminated the information to the women of the market by word of mouth. On the 27th of February they were over 40.000, mostly women but also men, to walk though the city clad in red - a colour which symbolizes danger. The mass demonstration evolved peacefully at first, but quickly confrontations between young men and the authorities degenerated. Though initially the repression was exclusively directed towards the young men, when the crowd was dispersed and chased into the opposition neighbourhood of Bé, women, men and children were severely beaten. As on other occasions during the 90s, the military - helped by the militias protecting the nearby Hotel Napoleon - forced demonstrators into the Bé Laguna. The following day five bodies were dragged out of the water. During the demonstration one of the main enterprises of the Free Zone - Amina, the Korean hair factory - mysteriously went ablaze. Although officially it was explained by a short circuit, others believed that it was set on fire by the demonstrators because the Free Zone was directed by Kpatcha Gnassingbé, but formulated as an accident in order to receive the insurance money.

The revolt of the youth
The repression that followed the march of the women was one among many acts of violence that marked the run up to the elections. As Charles Tsévi mentioned in his discourse on the UN Plaza (quoted at the beginning of this paper), three days before the elections, Interior Minister François Boko - a Northerner and former ally of Eyadéma - pleaded for a postponement, calling the current electoral process “suicidal”. The unfolding of the elections proved him right: many Southerners - particularly in neighbourhoods reputed to be pro-opposition - were denied their election cards, while foreigners were distributed pre-voted cards, militias caused havoc, the military fled with the urns, to name only a few “irregularities”. As expected, the score announced on the morning of the 26th of April - with the consent of France and the CDAO - gave the victory to Faure Gnassingbé. Having tried all the possible non-violent means without success but refusing resignation, the youth headed to the streets. With an arm still wounded by a bullet he received that day, a young man explained: “We the youth, were are already 25 years old, but we have no work. We want democracy. We must fight. On the 26th when the results were announced, we came out. We erected barricades, took out the pavement. At 11 am the city was black, because people were burning tires. Around 12 the red berets came out, shooting real bullets.”
And so it happened throughout the country, particularly in the South. Although the youth cannot be said to have been formally controlled and organized by the opposition parties, it is clear that the opposition did encourage “popular resistance”. The youth particularly targeted the symbols of power: governmental institutions, the police, the houses of members of the party in power. They also attacked foreigners in different neighbourhoods and several were killed. Some - Nigerians and Malians - had been caught with pre-voted cards for the party in power, but others - Lebanese, Indians, and French - were targeted without immediate reason, probably because it is thought that they support financially and in turn profit from the regime. As such, while the riots that followed the elections were mostly the legitimate rejection of an oppressive government and of all those that are linked to it, they were also marked by xenophobia. And if one can only sympathize with the revolt of those who have suffered too long and who refuse to live any longer in poverty and fear, in its rejection of one form of oppression the Togolese youth produced its own. But normative judgment is not the task I have set myself here. Here too one must try and understand how this practice of violence was formed. Although the data that would allow analyzing the actual propagation of this violence was not generated, one can reflect on the political and economic conditions that framed it.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the recourse to violence by the opponents of the Togolese regime can largely be attributed to the lack of possibilities of change by non-violent means. As such it has nothing to do with an “irruption” of “irrational violence” but is the product of the closure of the “political opportunity structure”, to use Charles Tilly’s concept. Although following the death of Eyadéma alliances were rapidly changing, the regime nonetheless kept the support of the key domestic political player - the army, as well as the most influential foreign actor - France. In such a context, after 38 years of a violent regime, violence appeared as the only way to conquer power. As for the targeting of foreigners, it is in fact a widely spread phenomena both in the West and in Africa. In many African states, the perceived threat by “foreigners” has progressively replaced antagonisms structured by ethnicity. Such a perception has mainly emerged since the beginning of the 90s in the context of political democratization and rarefaction of wealth - in which the questions of who can vote, who can be candidate, who can access schools, land, or obtain commercial licenses, have both been redefined and become urgent. While the riots occurred mainly because of a struggle for the control over political institutions, they also allowed to play out other micro-antagonisms, and some foreigners were probably targeted because they were perceived as competitors on the market. Without denying agency to the demonstrators, the violence used during the post-election riots and its targets are largely the product of transformations on the level of the economy, the functioning of political institutions, and of practices of violence I have traced in the preceding chapters of this paper. While the regime often legitimized its repressive practices by the risk of ethnic conflict, this is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe less spectacular then the images of young men burning tires, throwing stones, and robbing shops in the streets, this chapter has shown the daily interactions that make the mobilization of the “power of the street” possible. The increase in the informal sector - a by-product of the economic transformations I traced in the first chapter - contributed to possibilities of resistance to the regime. But in a context in which elections and peaceful demonstrations alike proved ineffective to bring about political change, the use of violence appeared as the last resort. The extremely asymmetrical distribution of the means of violence - which remained in the hands of the regime - did not allow for this strategy either to alter the configuration of power in Togo.

Conclusions

The last stop of our travel in Togo was the refugee camp of Lokossa in neighbouring Benin, where 25.000 refugees had fled. In a field temporarily provided by the state of Benin, a small multinational city had emerged, This city too had its conflicts: as we approached with the director of the camp he was quickly surrounded by a group of people demanding better food, shelter, protection. Although we were not able to enter the camp for security reasons, the glimpse we had showed faces still strained by fear, but also life: people were moving in and out, women were selling food at the exit of the camp, young men had started working as “semijan” (moto-taxis) - which had led to conflictual competition with the Beninese. We were told the refugees would probably stay there several years before being able to return to Togo. But the Togolese authorities, hoping to prove that they were truly aiming at a government of national unity, were eager to get them back - or at least appear to be doing so. A worker of the UNHCR explained that on the 12th of August 2005, a highly mediatized repatriation operation was organized by the regime. At the border between the two countries, Refugees were offered 35.000 CFA to embark on a bus that would take them home. The bus was quickly filled, but only 4 passengers were actually recognized by the UNHCR worker, who noticed that several were in fact Beninese.
Our visit to the camp left us thoughtful. It reminded us of the multiple strategies used by a scrupuless regime to remain in power - among others trickery. It also reminded us of the fate that is reserved today to the othered and the dispossessed - the days are far when, in the ideological context of the Cold War, Hungarian or Vietnamese refugees were sought after with trains, boats and plains before being dispatched among different states. Finally, it showed us that, contrary to what victimizing perspectives would like us to believe, the camp too is a force field. As such it provides a last example of the articulation of multiple people and projects, of the intersection of scales ranging from the local, the national, to the global, which come to define a given situation and which I have repeatedly tried to untangle in this paper.

In the first chapter I showed how the crisis of the Togolese economy that occurred at the end of the 1970s was related to changes in the global economy, and then followed the projects and activities of the US administration and Lebanese entrepreneurs. These allowed the regime to derive one among many new forms of accumulation, which would be an important stake in the post-Eyadéma struggle for resources and power.
In the second chapter I showed how the descriptions of ethnographers and colonizers had contributed to the exclusive recruitment of soldiers for the colonial armies among the Northern population of Togo, and how during, the French colonial wars these intersected with the theory and practice of Counterrevolutionary War. Re-imported to Togo at the same time as its militaries following independence, this practice of war which involves the infliction of terror would prove a lasting form of governmentality which continued to by exercised during the 2005 political crisis.
In the third chapter, I inquired into the networks of people, things and vision which constitute the market and how they served as a tool for political mobilization in the run up to the 2005 elections as at other times in Togolese History. I then showed that the use of violence by the youth following the elections was ambivalent - serving at once as a tool of liberation and oppression. I argued that the violence of the youth was deeply shaped by broader transformations of political institutions, the economy, and the practices of violence enacted by the regime.
In this conclusion I do not wish to limit these stories by pining them down to final point. Rather they must be left in their dispersion. My intention is not to argue contra dominant understandings of the political crisis for my own singular truth of the event. My hope is not to have simply rejected the dominant representations but to have complexified them.
-Surely Eyadéma and his clan used the state as a means of private accumulation and redistributed their wealth to buy support - a practice which might be referred to as “neopatrimonialism”, but these practices were heavily conditioned and transformed by Togo’s changing inscription in the global economy, rather then they were “natural” or “traditional”.
-Ethnicity played a role in the conflict, but ethnicity was politicized by the regime relatively recently rather than it was the result of ancient hatreds. Ethnicity was not the only source of conflict since the regime itself was shot through with antagonisms and the “Southern youth” did not simply attack Northerners but foreigners.
-France surely continues to play a dominant economic and political role in Togo, but emphasizing its complicity with the regime is not sufficient to account for the complexity of political and economic relations that have allowed the regime to perpetuate itself. Rather it is necessary to pay attention to multiple foreign actors - from powerful states such as the US to diasporic entrepreneurs, and many others which lie beyond the scope of this paper.
-The brute violence exercised both by the regime’s military and militias and by the opposition youth, possessed their own rationality and had been shaped historically - particularly by the colonial encounter - rather then they belonged to an African “beastlike” nature.
-Narrating my different case studies, I have tried to describe these entanglements in themselves, rather then defining the reality I was observing in negative terms - in its failure to duplicate a Eurocentric model.
-Untangling these different actors and processes we also see that the transformations affecting of modes of accumulation, practices of violence and resistance, do not move in a single direction, but have their own polydirectional logic and agency. Actors and processes that may seem unimportant may in fact have wide and unintended repercussions. As such, the field of relations is inherently ambivalent, since no actor or process contributes to a single outcome, but is rather entangled in other actors and processes that may reapropriate them and shift them in different directions. Such an analysis, as Achilles Mbembe rightfully notes, shows that African social formations are not converging towards a single point, trend or cycle, but harbor a variety of interlocked and paradoxical trajectories. This perspective demonstrates the fallacy of evolutionist theories of the state, society and the economy on which the theories of state failure, neopatrimonialism and development are founded.

The analysis I have produced here has thus involved tactical manovers in relation to representations which are tainted with racism and which, repeated time and time again, have finally prevented us from seeing anything at all. Seeing again the suffering but also the life of the Togolese population at the mercy of an oppressive regime is maybe a first contribution of an analysis that escapes the dominant tropes. This may contribute to greater concern for and solidarity with the Togolese. Rejecting the naturalized bestiality of Africans and thus their exclusion from a common humanity is also a necessary precondition in this direction. Such a solidarity should not simply be expressed in emotional empathy, but through the active critic of the complicity of Western states and the aggravating mechanisms of the global economy. But a second contribution of the above analysis is precisely to have demonstrated that the 2005 Togolese political crisis was not only shaped by states and international financial institutions, but by a complex field of relations that includes non-state actors operating on a transnational scale. As such it tactical on another level: it is from within this force field that any effective strategy of change will have to operate.

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