Speaker Series: Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Beginning in the 1960s, many African governments were taken over by their armies. “The Soldier’s Creed” describes how law and militarism intersected in postcolonial Africa. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, military officers believed they could remake their countries in the image of an army. Soldiers tried to condition civilians to think like they did—and when that failed they tried to beat the bad habits out of them by force. Military-style discipline became a political philosophy, and some soldiers came to believe that making Africa into a vast open-air barracks was what would make it truly “free.” In Nigeria and elsewhere, soldiers saw judges as partners in their attempts to “discipline” their countries, but law wasn’t the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Civilians could turn law back on them, they discovered, and only some judges shared their world-making aspirations. Using an original collection of legal records, documents, and memoirs, Samuel Fury Childs Daly shows how law facilitated militarism and, at times, worked against it.

Samuel Fury Childs Daly is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago’s Department of History. Professor Daly writes about law, warfare, and the politics of military regimes. Most of his work describes the history of Africa since independence. He asks how soldiers and judges think: how do military dictatorships use law, and how do judiciaries check their powers – or enable them? He also studies what warfare does to legal systems. Armed conflict degrades normative orders, and sometimes it creates new ones. How do people make order and resolve disputes in wartime? His first book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connects the Nigerian Civil War to the fraud and violent crime that wracked Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, it traces how technologies, survival practices, and moral codes that emerged during the fighting lasted long after the war was over. The line between martial violence and violent crime can blur on the battlefield, and once that line is gone it is hard to redraw it.

He is currently conducting research for two projects – a global history of military desertion, and a book about military imposters and role-players. His work has been published in venues including Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in History from Columbia University, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He previously taught at Duke University.