by Lindy Davies

In 2000, the government of the West African nation of Alodia was overthrown in a military coup led by General Samuel Akuopha. This event raised little comment in the international press. African coups tend to come and go; indeed, Alodia’s neighbor, Cote d’Ivoire, was going through one of its own at roughly the same time. Whatever the local reasons for such events, from a distance, they tend to seem banal — some variation of the “generic” African coup described in Chinua Achebe’s novel A Man of the People. Continue reading …