Mercenaries in the Congo and Biafra, 1960-1970: Africa's weapon of choke?

Often maligned by academics and international organisations alike, mercenaries are perceived as being a contributory factor to the worsening of conflict and as a threat to democracy. This chapter demonstrates that this reputation is not wholly deserved, and that in certain cases mercenaries have made a valuable contribution to creating stability in highly unstable contexts. Also, this chapter questions certain interpretations relating to the role and identity of mercenaries. Far from being cold-blooded avaricious killers, we show that there is a range of different reasons why someone becomes a mercenary and argue that the aforementioned categorisation has been used as a political tool.