The dark side of democracy popular sovereignty, decolonisation and dictatorship (original) (raw)
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The State, Nationhood, Ethno-politics and Democracy in Modern Africa: A Philosophical Reflection
Following Ferdinand Tönnies' distinction between community and society which could be translated also into the distinction between nation and state, it would be difficult if not impossible for modern African countries to practise democracy as understood in Western countries. If at all there is democracy in Africa it must be peculiar and unique. This is predicated on the fact that most African nations consider the state as something "alien" and contrary to their societal values. The main thrust of this paper therefore, is to demonstrate that the modern African state is the product of colonization and imperialism with capitalism as one of its direct consequences. Nationhood, ethno-politics and tribalism are what actually characterize African public space. Consequently, it foreshadows the basic tenets of Western-like democracy which is the respect for the universal human right. Democracy as conceived by Western countries cannot thrive outside the ambit of the state and this is anthetical to Africa's societal values and politics.
The premise of this chapter is that the historical uniqueness and socio-political specificity of settler colonialism demand different set of constitutional enquiries and remedies to the ones posed and rehashed when dealing with colonialism, authoritarianism and/or low-intensity democracy. The failure to appreciate, or rather a tendency to elide, this specificity has resulted in mimetic constitutional theories and praxes that at best fail to provide solutions to the bequeathals of settler colonialism or at worst entrench their realisation. With a focus on South Africa, the main objective of this chapter is to put forward Mogobe Ramose’s constitutional philo-praxis for dislodging what I term neo-apartheid constitutionalism. I locate Ramose’s proposal in the decolonising constitutional tradition of African nationalists to demonstrate a long lineage of concerns with and serious attempts to posit constitutional visions and political jurisprudences that preempt neo-colonial constitutionalism. The philosophy of African humanness is at the heart of this post-conquest constitutional vision. Since African humanness decrees a never-ending quest towards cosmic harmony, wholeness, and national being-becoming it is proper to refer to this quest as a quest for post-conquest constitutionness in contrast to the linear and rigid order of post-colonial constitutionalism. I begin the chapter with a discussion of the paradox of post- colonial constitution-making namely, the concurrent de-constitutionalising and constitutionalising paradox. I will demonstrate that the failure to face this paradox head on in South Africa has resulted in five interrelated crises of constitution and consequentially a neo-apartheid constitutionalism. The Pan-African Congress of Azania’s constitutional vision was a direct preemption of such a neo-settler colonial constitutionalism. More specifically, this vision was a direct confrontation with, what from a constitutional perspective, I regard as the three main legacies of settler colonialism, namely: (i) the colonial state form and conversely the subjugation of indigenous sovereignties; (ii) the entrenchment of a world of apartness and the deliberate failure to resolve the National Question; and (iii) the continuing subordination of African life-ways and their epistemologies and jurisprudences. I argue that responses to these bequeathals constitute the three main pillars of decolonising constitutional vision and praxis.
Theory and Event, 2010
For some time now I have been pondering the closely knit relationship between democracy and colonialism. Notwithstanding the widespread conception among democracy theorists that there is a contradiction between the two, in this paper I contend that colonialism has served as a crucial component in the historical processes through which modern democracies were created and sustained. Focusing on the production of “the people”—namely, those who are acknowledged as citizens and consequently have been granted the right to participate in political decisions—I maintain that colonialism has been deployed by democracy as a force that unifies, limits, and stabilizes the people within the metropole by employing violent forms of exclusion. And yet, unlike other forms of exclusion which have been deemed accidents or aberrations and regarded as symptoms of democracy’s evolutionary development, political scientists have often assumed that colonialism is totally alien to democracy and indeed antithetical to the two basic democratic principles: sovereignty of the people and equality.
Back to Basics: Decolonizing Democracy in Africa
(...) This essay seeks to revisit some of the fundamental issues regarding democracy and democracy promotion in Africa. A distinction is made between people’s political and material expectations—a capacity to influence government to improve their material conditions—on the one hand, and the Western-led and -defined ideal of the procedural liberal democracy agenda on the other. Rather than giving an empirical account of the state of democracy in Africa by focusing on failed or failing states frameworks, corruption, rent-seeking and neo-patrimonialism or institutional incapacity, this text focuses on the problematics of democratization in Africa that might arise from the externally imported nature of its agenda. The essay does this by proposing a decolonial approach to our understanding of what democracy should look like in Africa. The contention is that the idea of democracy in Africa, like many other elements of state- and nation-building on the continent (in education and the judiciary to name but a few), has to a large extent failed to be truly decolonized, in spite of the formal end of colonialism in the 1960s. Building on interviews from fieldwork in several sub-Saharan African countries in the last five years, the text aims at treating some of the insights from post-colonial, decolonial and African political theorists, including Claude Ake, in our Western thinking about democracy in Africa.
Crisis of Citizenship and Nationhood in Africa: Reflections on Hegemony and the State
Review of history and political science, 2017
One major challenge which post-colonial Africa faces, today, is crisis of citizenship and nationhood, which this paper attempts to explain by arguing that Africa is made up of countries where none is a nation that is made up of one people. Therefore, in post-colonial Africa, the remarkable and fundamental differences in character, attitudes, habits, feelings and ways of life of the different peoples that make up a country, create a situation where the differences make the peoples to be antagonistic and bitterly hostile to each other, especially in their struggle for power and control of resources. This paper therefore interrogates the idea of hegemony and the state, how their nature and character accentuate the crisis of citizenship and nationhood and how the dynamics of colonialism and colonial rule continue to "terrorize" post-colonial Africa, because hegemony and the state that ought to unite the peoples and build a nation are bedeviled with internal crisis. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the constitution of each African country should make provision for each nation to have the opportunity for self determination.
Domains of politics and modes of rule: political structures of the neocolonial state in Africa
Daraja Press, 2023
If we want to start thinking about the emancipation of Africans from the neocolonial yoke, we must first start by understanding the political problems concerning the state in Africa. It is the character of the politics which the state deploys that directly impact the majority of the population which constitute the conditions of existence of neocolonialism. In other words, if we wish to understand the character of the state in Africa it is less who it represents that is of importance – that is largely obvious in any case – but more the manner in which it rules over different sections of its people that is of primary concern.