Lumpenmilitariat 2025 Apr 30
Marx and Engles in the 1940s coined the term Lumpenproletariat when discussing the unthinking lower class of society who are easily exploited by counter-revolutionary forces. It includes criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes.

But then there is the term Lumpenmilitariat. Polish journalist and chronicler of Africa Ryszard Kapuściński in his essay collection The Shadow Of the Sun introduced the word to me, attributing it to Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui, and explaining it thusly (in 1998):

Here is one of Africa’s problems: its intelligentsia lives for the most part outside its borders, in the United States, in London, Paris, Rome. Remaining in their native countries are, at the bottom, masses of illiterate, downtrodden, utterly exploited peasants; at the top, the corrupt bureaucracy or arrogant, coarse soldiers (the lumpenmilitariat, as the Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui calls them).

Being me, I needed to know more. And so, linked here is where I believe Mazrui first introduced the term, in an academic political science paper written while a professor at Uganda's Makerere University and published in March 1973, about two years into Idi Amin's military dictatorship of the country. Amin's politics famously drifted while in power, and Makrui's paper is an examination into why, seemingly framed in an attempt to reckon what he was witnessing in Uganda with the theory of Marxism.

And so, the word in question, defined by Makrui's own self:

The lumpen proletariat is a mass of disorganized workers and ghetto dwellers in the developed world; but the lumpen militariat is that class of semi-organized, rugged, and semi-literate soldiery which has begun to claim a share of power and influence in what would otherwise have become a heavily privileged meritocracy of the educated.

Mazrui later left Makerere University and Uganda entirely after feeling that he lost political standing by declining an offer by Amin himself. Quoted in 1986 in the New York Times:

I was, in a sense, running away from Idi Amin. For a while, I was in good standing in Uganda. But I declined his invitation to be his Kissinger, a special adviser. I might have done some good. Or, possibly, I wouldn't have been alive to talk to you here today.

He spent much of the remaining portion of his career in the USA, a professor at several prominent universities here, and even produced a TV documentary.