Last week, as the summer drew to a close, President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon found himself under house arrest, locked in his luxurious palace in the capital, Libreville. His cousin, General Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, announced that he and his soldiers had taken over the oil rich country on Africa’s Atlantic coast and would be ushering in a transition period. A month earlier, something similar had happened in Niger, when Colonel-Major Amadou Abdramane and his soldiers arrested Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, and, blaming his regime for “poor economic and social governance,” declared an end to it. 

While the coup in Niger received plenty of attention—the Biden administration put out strongly worded statements condemning it and calling for the release of Bazoum—few in the West noticed that Sierra Leone narrowly avoided a coup of its own in August. Or what happened after the continent’s other attempted coup, in Sudan, which set off another round of bloodshed in April, prompting the U.S. and other countries to evacuate their embassies. It would be tempting to call it a hot coup summer, were it not all part of a far longer season of discontent on the African continent, one that kicked off in late 2020. Since then, there have been coups in Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Gabon, Guinea, and Chad, as well as failed coups in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau.