The African struggle continues: The awakening of North Africa (original) (raw)

2012, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines

2011 will be remembered as a momentous year in North Africa when the sclerotic dictatorships of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya collapsed. Until then, the region seemed implacably immune to the democratic wave that began sweeping across the continent at the turn of the 1990s. Bookended by democratic transitions in Benin in 1989 and Nigeria in 1999, the 1990s witnessed tumultuous political changes across the continent characterized by tantalizing successes and tortuous setbacks. In 1991, for example, there was the victory of the opposition in Zambia and the implosion of the state in Somalia, and, most memorably, in 1994 the continent celebrated the triumph of South Africa and mourned the tragedy of Rwanda. The twists and turns in the struggles for political transformation that came to be dubbed the "second independence" engulfed North Africa as well. But the violent suppression of the 1992 elections in Algeria and the country's descent into civil war paralyzed the prospects of democratic transition in the region and fed into the narrative of North African exceptionalism. These developments reinforced the calcified division of Africa into two, Sub-Saharan Africa and Arab Africa, one supposedly pre-modern and the other anti-modern, the former capable of democratization and the latter irredeemably mired in autocracy. In reality, there were different trajectories within and across regions that defied the cartographic certainties of this tattered Eurocentric and Orientalist discourse. In this article, I seek to remap the historical geography of the North African revolutions by placing them in their rightful African context of struggles for the "second independence". After examining the general conditions and characteristics of what the Western media has dubbed the "Arab Awakening" and others call the "African Awakening" (Manji and Ekine 2011), the article will briefly outline the trajectory of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. At appropriate junctures, their continental and international dimensions and implications will also be examined. The similarities between the democracy movements and processes in North Africa and the rest of the continent are unmistakable in their causal dynamics, social composition, and political visions. Equally evident are the complex connections and demonstration effects from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to other countries within and outside the continent. The reverberations of struggles among Africa countries go back to the nationalist struggles