Once independence was won, the leaders of Africa's new states faced a series of Hobson's choices. Would they take the defense agreements the departing colonial powers offered them, or would they fend for themselves? What about the ‘help’ that other foreign powers presented? The US and the USSR both dangled lifelines, but they clearly had hooks at the end of them. Smaller states like Czechoslovakia and the Federal Republic of Germany offered forms of ‘protection’ too, though the Cold War's dangers were no less obvious there. In Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, and West Africa's Cold War, Marco Wyss tries to untangle the history of Europe's post-independence maneuvering in Africa, focusing on two of the biggest knots: Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire.

While politicians made promises about the wealth and freedom that independence would bring, the diplomats who hashed out the details faced a more immediate question: what kind of relationship should they cultivate with the departed European powers? Europeans were also making decisions about how much they wanted to involve themselves in African affairs. Framing this as a problem of comparative history, Wyss asks why Britain and France's postcolonial strategies in West Africa diverged, and why Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire adopted different stances towards their former colonizers. These two countries are seldom considered together, but Wyss makes a good case for why they should be: Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria have been foils in Africa's politics like France and Britain have been in Europe's. They were the largest economies in the region, and the ones where Europeans had the most to gain or lose in the years after independence. European firms had thick commercial connections in both countries, and the commodities that they produced — Nigerian oil, especially — raised the stakes of every parry over ‘security’. To Wyss the diplomatic side of the story is more important than the commercial one, but trade lurks in the background.

Wyss's study consists of four parts, each introduced by a helpful synthesis of the relevant political history. The first looks at Britain and France's post-independence defense and cooperation agreements with their respective former colonies, showing how these negotiations played out in close detail. Part Two describes the point where Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire's paths diverged from each other — while the Nigerian government distanced itself from Britain, Ivoirian President Felix Houphouët-Boigny's (r. 1960–1993) paranoia about subversion moved him more firmly into France's embrace. Part Three examines how both countries built up their armed forces, which Wyss analyzes through players less commonly studied in Africa's Cold War — Israel in Côte d'Ivoire and West Germany in Nigeria. Part Four turns outward, looking at the involvement of the United States in the region. While the US interpreted France as a rival, it approached Britain as a partner. This shaped American actions in West Africa, which American diplomats usually (though not always) understood through their relationships with Britain and France.

Wyss uses the trajectories of Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire to tell us something about the options available to politicians in colonialism's wake: the decision of what path to follow often came down to the political calculations of African executives. This point should be obvious, but it gets surprisingly little play in a historiography that has looked mostly at European sources. Wyss makes it here ably. West Africa's civilian elites were vulnerable to many forces, including ones within their own countries — rival political parties, upstart soldiers, and secessionist movements, among others. Some leaders, like Houphouët-Boigny, managed to translate their historical relationships with France into postcolonial protection (including from their own malcontent publics). Others, like Nigeria's Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa (r. 1957–1966), were pushed towards a different path, largely by pressure from opposition parties. Of course, as Wyss shows, in diplomacy it takes (at least) two to tango, and politicians like Balewa and Houphouët-Boigny were only part of the story. The British and French had their own interests, military and otherwise, which only sometimes dovetailed with those of their African counterparts. The value of Wyss’ book is to combine both European and African political aspirations in a single conceptual frame.

The partitions that divide historical study — national and imperial, European and African, among others — make this approach less common than it ought to be. Postcolonial Security draws heavily from archival sources, which Wyss treats thoroughly and critically. But they do not always serve his expressed goal to tell this story from Lagos and Abidjan as much as from London and Paris; the scale of the archival evidence tips heavily towards Western Europe. Furthermore, in places, Wyss oversells the differences between the colonial powers’ approaches. While it is true that France remained involved in its former colonies’ affairs to a much greater extent than Britain, the idea that Britain's policy towards its former colonies ‘was decolonized’ while France ‘remain[ed] a neocolonial actor in Africa”’(5) falls apart if we expand it beyond the book's narrow focus on high-level politics. If we consider the web of commercial interests, development projects, and political attachments (the Commonwealth, for one) that still knit the two countries together, Britain's relationship with Nigeria looks less ‘decolonized’. And even France's most loyal African actor still went off-script sometimes, as Wyss himself demonstrates. There is also a problem of temporal and geographic scope here. Wyss focuses on the years just after independence, which, at least for Nigeria, were quite different from the era of militarism that came next. Relations with Britain became both closer and more fraught in the long slog of military administration that followed Balewa's assassination, and the Cold War does little to help us understand Nigerian politics after that point. In the same vein, although Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire's size and wealth make them natural choices for this study, they were not the only states in West Africa choreographing their relations with Europe. Swap out Guinea for Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana for Nigeria, and a very different picture of what France and Britain were doing in West Africa would emerge.

Nonetheless, this book provides a direct and accessible answer yet to one of the most important questions in Africa's international history in the late twentieth century: why did Britain cut political ties to its former colonies after independence, while France knotted them even closer? As Wyss convincingly argues, this question cannot be answered without knowing what was going on in barracks, statehouses, and embassies in West Africa.