The JRB presents an excerpt from The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats by Blessing-Miles Tendi.

The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats
Blessing-Miles Tendi
UJ Press, 2025

Gender is the Stuff of Coups

Coup Redux

At this point, let us consider the recent resurgence of coups in Africa, because I want, briefly, to set a research agenda for investigating the politics of women and gender in these coups, a line of enquiry that has so far not received scholarly attention from political scientists. In 2019, Sudan underwent a successful military coup. In 2021, four successful coups transpired in Sudan, Mali, Guinea, and Chad, resulting in the instalment of military governments. In January 2022, Burkina Faso experienced a successful coup. Eight months later, Burkina Faso underwent another coup. In 2023, Niger and Gabon also experienced successful coups. A cursory review of these coups reveals that their contexts, causes, and impacts were strikingly gendered, yet political science scholars have not incorporated gender analysis in their writings about these coups. Let me demonstrate this point with a few examples. The 2019 Sudan coup occurred in the context of sustained protests, in which female activists were extraordinarily active, against Omar Bashir’s repressive and masculinized leadership. In Guinea, women’s groups and female politicians were involved in post-coup negotiations with military and civilian men, attempting to build an inclusive transitional government. Political scientists need to conduct painstaking research about the political agency, incentives, and impacts of women before, during, and after coups in Guinea and Sudan.

Melody Valdini has produced valuable work about why some male leaders enable women’s participation in politics, which might help us understand some of the gendered practices of coup-born governments in Guinea and Burkina Faso. Male leaders who actively facilitate women’s participation in politics are ‘often driven by the strategic value of having women in power, not the embrace of women’s power’, Valdini argues. This ‘strategic value’ is at its greatest when there are ‘events that break the status quo and drive down legitimacy’, like the revelation of colossal corruption in government or erosion of ‘the remaining elements of democracy such as reducing civil rights or blatantly biasing electoral outcomes’. According to Valdini, in these episodes of diminished legitimacy, ‘the stereotypical personality traits associated with women potentially become an asset’ to male leaders. However, Valdini points out that, while ‘the symbolism of women’s presence can be valuable to the state and political elites, it is critical to emphasize that its value is temporary’. Valdini recognizes that ‘the symbolic meaning of women varies across citizens, countries, and cultural spheres’ and identifies an innate affinity for democracy, honesty, and inclusiveness as stereotypical attributes often assigned to women, which are powerful enough to cause citizens to view womenʼs presence as a signal about the institutions in which they participate. Rather than guilty by association, this is feminization by association. In other words, a benefit that womenʼs descriptive representation potentially brings to men in power is the association with feminine stereotypical traits and behaviours; by including women in their governments or political parties, citizens assume that the associated institution will be more honest, inclusive, and democratic. Thus, for male elites to maintain power in this context, associating their party or government with women becomes a rational strategy.

In Burkina Faso, after the successful coup of January 2022 led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba, the coup-makers appointed a woman called Olivia Rouamba as foreign affairs minister. Captain Ibrahim Traoré overthrew Damiba in a counter-coup eight months later and retained Rouamba as his foreign affairs minister, ‘despite her being close to the ousted putschist leader’ Damiba, who fled to Togo, where he was granted political asylum, after the counter-coup. Traoré’s retention of Rouamba as foreign affairs minister led news outlet Africa Intelligence to christen Rouamba ‘the junta’s favourite foreign minister’. The post of Foreign Affairs Minister is important in Burkina Faso because the country ‘is highly dependent on foreign subsidies and quickly found itself at loggerheads with Western donors [and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)] reluctant to work with a government that came to power in a putsch’. According to Africa Intelligence, Traoré retained Rouamba as foreign affairs minister because Rouamba is: a ‘pragmatic technocrat’; ‘enjoys a certain popularity on the international stage’; had ‘a certain flexibility [and success] in negotiations’ with ECOWAS; and ‘managed to charm international organisations’ like the World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) into lifting their suspension of cooperation after the coup. Rouamba was a rising career diplomat before the January 2022 coup, so her accomplishments, as foreign affairs minister, with ECOWAS and international donors should not surprise us. Then again, both the January and September 2022 juntas’ decision to appoint Rouamba as the foreign affairs minister might also have been motivated by strategic benefit that ‘feminization by association’ brings. Valdini includes aggressiveness, stubbornness, arrogance, outspokenness, and an egotistical character, as some of the main traits associated with men in politics. Having come to power in coups roundly denounced by ECOWAS and international donors, and given Burkina Faso’s external aid dependence, did Damiba and Traoré calculate that their illegitimate coup-born governments would be better received internationally if the foreign affairs minister did not project male attributes such as intransigence or uncooperativeness? Women in politics are associated with traits such as ‘pacifying/peace-making’, tolerance, and sincerity, Valdini tell us. Might these stereotypical traits about women be a reason in addition to Rouamba’s self-evident ability as a diplomat that Damiba and Traoré chose to appoint Rouamba as foreign affairs minister? Was the appointment of a woman as foreign affairs minister a gesture to ECOWAS and international donors that Burkina Faso sought to maintain cooperation with them and that it was sincere about a programme for return to constitutional order? Following Gabon’s 2023 coup, General Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, the coup’s leader, appointed a female soldier called General Brigitte Onganoa as the junta’s deputy minister of defence. We need definitive answers for why the Burkina Faso and Gabon coup-born governments made unusual appointments of women to influential posts such as Foreign Affairs and Defence respectively.

After the 2021 coup in Guinea, which brought Colonel Mamady Doumbouya to power, a female lieutenant colonel called Aminata Diallo emerged as the coup-makers’ official spokesperson. A year later, Doumbouya appointed Diallo as spokesperson for the governing National Rallying Committee for Development (CNRD). Militaries—combat roles especially—tend to be male dominated, so it is uncommon, in the history of coups in Africa, for female soldiers to play an integral role in coup-making. It is equally uncommon for female soldiers to be appointed as the official spokespersons for coupmakers. Before the coup, Diallo was an administrator in the military. Diallo’s mother, Colonel Fatoumata Binta Diallo, was the first black female military helicopter pilot in Guinea, so her family lineage is one of military distinction. The fact that Diallo became the spokesperson for Guinea’s 2021 coup-makers might mean she was party to the coup-plotting. But it could also be the case that Doumbouya was pursuing ‘feminization by association’ when he made Diallo a key face of the coup. We need to research the roles of female soldiers in coups. Also, female soldiers have rarely been appointed as military governors of provinces or cities following coups. Yet Doumbouya appointed a female brigadier general, M’Mahawa Sylla, as Governor of Conakry—the capital and largest city of Guinea. Doumbouya’s 2021 ‘transitional charter’, which provided a framework for return to civilian rule, stipulated that at least 30 per cent of the members of the coup-born government’s legislative body, the National Transitional Council (NTC), should be women. Besides, after the coup, Doumbouya appointed a man called Morissanda Kouyate as his foreign affairs minister. A year before Doumbouya’s coup, Kouyate won the United Nation’s (UN) Nelson Mandela Prize for his work in the service of humanity. Specifically, Kouyate was recognized by the UN for his work as a long-time leading activist campaigning for gender equality and against female genital mutilation in Africa. Kouyate explained why he accepted the foreign affairs minister appointment:

[Doumbouya] said to me ʻyou must come and work with your country in this postʼ. I went into the government with my fight against genital mutilation. To give an example, I used to battle with foreign ministers of countries, pleading with them to lobby their governments to pass and implement laws against sexual violence. I used to go door-to-door to presidents, to prime ministers, to get their attention. Now, they are my colleagues. So, itʼs easier. I donʼt miss any occasion to talk about genital mutilation … People are rallying around. They know that I came into the government through the door of my fight against female genital mutilation. They know that I speak from my heart. It also benefits my country. When I speak on behalf of my country, people listen to the message I am carrying because a Mandela Prize winner will probably not tell empty stories. They believe he wonʼt dare do it.

Was Doumbouya, who infamously declared after the 2021 coup, ‘nous n’avons plus besoin de violer la Guinée, on a juste besoin de lui faire l’amour, tout simplement’ (‘we don’t need to rape Guinea anymore, we just need to make love to her, simply that’), an authentic gender-equality champion opposed to female genital mutilation? Or was Doumbouya engaging in a form of ‘feminization by association’, by linking his government to women’s and girls’ issues? To what degree was Doumbouya ‘genderwashing’ (through the appointment of Kouyate as foreign affairs minister), which is ‘the way that feminist and liberal concerns for equality and women’s rights are coopted’ for other agendas such as imperialist ambitions, bogus corporate social responsibility by exploitative multinational companies, and coup-born governments’ bids to attract a modicum of legitimacy and commendation? We need to generate conclusive answers to these questions. We also need to know about the attitudes and behaviours of other Guinean male coup leaders—and serving male and female soldiers generally—towards Doumbouya’s seeming promotion of female soldiers and gender equality. These gender questions are an essential and fascinating research agenda that would improve our understanding of the political outlooks of recent coup-makers and how coup-born governments grapple with the steep challenge of attracting legitimacy. Valdini presents only ‘two possible contexts in which the stereotypical traits associated with women increase in value—hybrid regimes and post corruption scandal elections’, but, as Valdini continues, ‘future research could examine other circumstances in which being associated with people who are assumed to be honest, inclusive, and just naturally democratic could come in handy’. The foregoing discussion about coup-makers’ political inclusion of women and women’s agendas in the Guinean and Burkinabe coup contexts suggests coup situations are potentially fertile ground for testing Valdini’s ideas on male political elites’ inclusion calculations.

The January 2022 successful military coup in Burkina Faso had as one of its motivations that civilian president (2015–22) Roch Kaboré failed to provide the military with adequate expert training and resources for its counterterrorism operations in the north of the country. The coup-makers also accused Kaboré of failing to unite the Burkinabe in a time of national security crisis. Damiba published a book called Armées ouest-africaines service de presse et terrorisme: Réponses incertaines? a year before the coup that brought him to power. Damiba’s book illuminates the inadequacies of counterterrorism efforts in West Africa and it offers some direction on how regional militaries can break the cycle of terrorism and ensure stability. I do not dispute the significance of combat-related grievances in Burkina Faso’s January 2022 coup. What I want to alert us to is the role that gendered ideas about ‘protectors’ probably played in the coup. Enloe observes that ‘one needs to keep a sharp feminist eye on ideas about “protectors”. Are the most effective protectors thought to be those trained to wield weaponry? If so, then again this interpretation is likely to make soldiers … seem to be the most dependable protectors’. The military’s removal of Kaboré from power was a clear indication it did not believe he was an effective ‘protector’ of the welfare of combat soldiers and Burkina Faso more broadly, in the context of a security crisis. Conversely, Damiba, a proven wielder of arms and author of a book about counterterrorism, was imagined by revolting soldiers as better placed to ‘protect’ the welfare of combat soldiers and Burkina Faso. Imagining combat soldiers as model ‘protectors’ during a security crisis privileges militaristic masculinities over non-militaristic masculinities reflected by elected civilian authorities such as Burkina Faso’s Kaboré, an ex-banker. Furthermore, given that combat soldiers are almost always male, ‘women are cast as the protected’, denying them agency or input on how human insecurity can be practically improved.

Chad’s 2021 coup also showed signs of gendered ideas about ‘protectors’ at work. Chad’s president Idriss Déby, a French-trained Air Force pilot who first came to power as head of a rebel group that violently ousted president Hissène Habré in 1990, died suddenly in 2021. Déby was killed in action during a battle between the national army and a rebel group in northern Chad. Constitutionally, in the event of the president’s demise, the head of Chad’s national assembly (who was Haroun Kabadi when Déby died) should assume a caretaker role and organize national elections. However, Chad’s military illegally installed Déby’s son Mahamat Déby, commander of the presidential guard, as successor in what was described as a dynastic coup. Chad’s dynastic coup guaranteed the continuity of Déby’s three-decades-old militaristic regime. Internationally, the dynastic coup was a signal to the Déby regime’s main external allies, such as France, that relations would remain unchanged, particularly in the realm of Chad’s collaboration with Western states in maintaining security and stability in the Sahel region. French Foreign Affairs Minister (2017–22) Jean-Yves Le Drian attempted to justify the 2021 coup in Chad by calling it ‘exceptional circumstances’, adding that, ‘logically, it should be Mr Kabadi [who succeeds the slain Déby] … but he refused because of the exceptional security reasons that were needed to ensure the stability of this country’. A public statement by Kabadi on Déby’s succession read: ‘considering this mixed military, security and political context in the country and the sub-region, the President of the National Assembly, did in all lucidity give his accord for the putting in place of a Transitional Military Council with a view towards a political transition in peace and security.’ France and some domestic Chadian actors’ (the military especially) preference that Mahamat Déby succeed his father constituted the privileging of a militaristic masculinity over a non-militaristic one. To avert possible domestic instability and the loss of Chad as a steadfast actor in regional security operations, it was imagined that an effectual ‘protector’ was required for the role of Chadian leader. The ‘protector’, inevitably, was a soldier, Mahamat Déby, who had trained at France’s Lycée-Militaire in Aix-en-Provence and had combat experience against Islamist militants in northern Chad, Nigeria, and Mali. On the other hand, Kabadi, who had a background in agronomy before he joined politics, was plagued by poor health, making him ‘weak’ (feminized) and hence ‘unsuitable’ for the role of ‘dependable protector’. And because, as stated before, gendered ideas about ‘protectors’ habitually typecast women as ‘the protected’, Chadian women were automatically excluded from the country’s presidential succession politics following Déby’s 2021 demise. In this construction, only manly men who reflect a militaristic masculinity, not women who personify femininity or womanliness, could succeed the slain ‘protector’ Déby, himself a model of militaristic masculinity even in the evening of life, as evidenced by his death on the battlefield.

In view of the fact that coups and coup-born governments are gendered, the responses of external actors to the resurgence of coups in Africa need to be attuned to the gendered politics and outcomes of coups. Presently, external actors that attempt to reverse coups do not incorporate gender in their approaches. Antonia Witt has contributed a weighty granular study of the AU’s and SADC’s attempts to undo Madagascar’s 2009 military coup. If Witt’s study is read from a gender perspective, it is apparent that the AU’s and SADC’s approaches rarely pay attention to the gendered character of coups and coup-born governments. They do not seek to overturn the gendered power structures generated or solidified by coups. Going forward, the coup prevention strategies of the AU and regional organizations, and other bodies beyond Africa, might want to place stronger emphasis on increasing women’s representation in institutions such as parliament, since, as Schroeder and Powell argue, the pronounced presence of women in parliament lends legitimacy to civilian government, thereby diminishing the prospect of coup occurrence. Economic downturn is often an outcome of coups for the reasons that unconstitutional changes of government cause instability and because Western and African external actors often impose damaging economic sanctions and suspend much-needed donor aid to countries that undergo successful coups. Post-coup downward economic spirals affect women and men in dissimilar ways. Post-coup economic decline tends to deepen women’s economic marginalization because, compared to men, women are traditionally marginalized from economic benefits, employment, and access to capital. How can external actors attempt to reverse coups through suspension of donor aid and the application of economic sanctions, without doing harm to already economically marginalized women? Where coups are violent and involve the sexual abuse of women, as happened in the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) 1997 coup in Sierra Leone, women’s experiences of sexual violence need to be recognized and addressed by external actors that intervene to reverse coups. Seeing as coup-making is ‘riddled with the workings of manliness’, how can military masculinities be effectively deconstructed and transformed to lessen the bearing of manliness in coup-making and to prevent all forms of violence against civilians during coups? How can external actors enhance women’s inclusion in post-coup transition processes, in ways that are not instrumentalized by coup leaders or that play into the inclusion calculations of male gatekeepers? These are important gender questions that ought to be integral to researching the prevention and reversal of coups and the practical work of external interveners attempting to undo coups.

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• Blessing-Miles Tendi is Associate Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford where his research has focused on civil-military relations, intelligence, gender and politics, and the existence and uses of ‘evil’ in politics. He is the author of Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media (2010).

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Publisher information

The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues the 2017 coup that ousted long time Zimbabwean president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and the generality of coups, cannot be accurately and rigorously understood without examining the crucial role of gender and women’s politics in military seizures of power.

Tendi’s book shows that gender and women’s politics pervade military coup causes, dynamics, justifications, and international responses to coups. Contrary to influential representations of Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup and other recent coups as markedly different from past coups, Tendi draws on long gendered histories of military coups in Africa to argue that there are significant continuities in coup characteristics across time. Additionally, Tendi’s highly original study of Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup identifies the motives, dynamics, and trigger of the coup. Despite the existence of an international anti-coup norm and democracy promotion in Africa by Western states, Zimbabwean coup-makers’ direct intervention in politics was largely not publicly condemned or penalized by Western and African diplomats. Tendi uses original interviews with diplomats and politicians involved in external responses to the coup, to address this important puzzle.