The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa, by Célestin Monga, translated by Linda L. Fleck and Célestin Monga

 

2. How Africa Fits into Democratic Theory

 

Celui qui parle ne sait pas. Celui qui sait ne parle pas.

*

He who speaks doesn’t know. He who knows doesn’t speak.

—Mosse proverb

 

In one of his most recent works, Paul Krugman (1995) relates the intriguing paradox of the evolution of the knowledge of European cartographers who charted Africa between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. He observes that in theory one would expect knowledge to develop in a linear fashion and maps to become ever more precise as more research was carried out. However, this was not the case.

As Krugman explains, the maps roughly sketched by the first explorers, despite some inaccuracies with respect to distances, the shape of the coastline, and characteristics of the inhabitants, contained a wealth of useful information on the interior of the continent. As time went by and sources of information grew more reliable, the coastline was studied carefully, along with its cities and populations. As early as the eighteenth century, the mapping of the coastline had by and large taken its definitive form. At the same time, however, the interior—most of the continent—became less well known. Fantastic legends concerning the inhabitants’ characteristics gradually disappeared, but nothing more was learned about the real locations of towns and rivers. Over time, European cartographers actually became more ignorant of the continent than they were at the time of the first explorers.

What occurred over three centuries to cause such a regression? Krugman’s hypothesis, which strikes me as a good one, is that the improvement in mapmaking techniques raised standards with respect to the reliability of data. Secondhand information and intuitive judgments once taken at face value no longer measured up to the academic standards of those working in the discipline. Only data gathered in accordance with the research methodology and theoretical models of the day were considered valid. Although the plotting of the map of Africa benefited in the end from the initial skepticism of researchers—those who relied on data meeting the rigorous standards of present-day cartography—there was a time in which the improvement in scientific methods resulted in a loss of knowledge.

The analogy between the development of mapmaking and the evolution of research on Africa in the social sciences is striking. There was a time when the travel journals of a Ibn Battuta, a Ibn Khaldun, or even a René Caillé provided the West with information on the organization and operation of African societies that was considered generally accurate, if paternalistic and somewhat crude. Then ethnologists landed on the continent equipped with their theories and armed with their subjectivism and arrogance. Whether in good or bad faith, they claimed they were there to make the field of African studies “clear” and “rational” through the application of models that had more to do with the logic of their own mentalities than with the identity and structure of the places they claimed to analyze “scientifically.” From Jahn and Hegel to Lévy-Bruhl and Voltaire, the obsessive desire to apply rigid theories to recalcitrant terrain, without always verifying their validity through empirical research, resulted in a literature of dubious worth (Amondji 1993).

The present state of research in Africanist political science confirms that scientific knowledge in this field remains utterly confused. Despite the number of publications and the high methodological standards, the results are rather thin. Despite the repeated use of econometrics and complex models borrowed from game theory (which completely altered research methodology and revolutionized the knowledge of Western political scientists), one has the impression that Africanist political science is still stammering, still sterile, and in general it has yet to be taken seriously within the social sciences. As Sklar bluntly puts it:

The vast majority of political scientists still classify research on Africa questions as a peripheral “area study” which is not essential to the discipline’s scientific progress.... In competitive appointment processes, Africanist scholarship does not enjoy a comparative advantage based on disciplinary contributions of its practitioners. If the question is, “Why do we want an Africanist particularly?” no decisive reason, based on scientific or theoretical necessity, can be adduced. In fact, I cannot think of a widely recognized problem or theory, of concern to political scientists generally, that requires African area expertise to either explore scientifically or explain to students (1993:84).

It is clear that ignorance does not prevent researchers from being arrogant: if nothing has been found in Africa, they conclude, it is because the continent has nothing original to offer political thought. How can one seriously believe that the cradle of civilization, at present an immense territory where all races and cultures coexist, where every type of social organization on the planet is found, has nothing specific to offer political science? How can one believe that the current social transformations are reducible to the level of slight social tremors brought on by the economic crisis? How can one continue to affirm that the existing literature has properly interpreted the complex phenomena that have occurred throughout Africa when the theories and models developed over the past decades were incapable of not only predicting but even explaining the current social changes? It is high time that social scientists abandoned their arrogant attitude toward Africa, for to date very little of their research has helped us decipher its complexity.

That is why it is necessary to take a long, hard look at the basic assumptions that have governed thought in the social sciences up to now. In this chapter, I shall first examine democratic theory as it is used today, then compare and contrast this with African realities so as to measure its effectiveness and underscore its limitations. The first section deals with the polarization of the debate on democracy in Africa and demonstrates how the analytic paradigms that are usually employed to define and measure democratic progress do not properly evaluate what is happening in the African political arena. Epistemological, hermeneutic, and semantic questions, which the very idea of democracy has always raised, have caused Africanist political scientists to adopt divergent viewpoints, reducing their work to a web of contrasting and often incoherent ideas. I analyze the reasons for this confusion and try to shed light on the different ways in which the subject is approached, the conflicting objectives of researchers, the subterranean strategies used by political actors to exploit the nebulousness of the current situation, and especially the two main philosophical anchors that govern or justify the reasoning and arguments of scholars: ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.

The second section of this chapter underscores the need for a new approach to the definition of democracy so that it is not a projection of the values of those performing the analysis but a representation of the values of those experiencing it. This requires above all the adoption of a different conceptual framework for measuring democratic progress, such as the democratization index I have earlier proposed (Monga 1993, 1995b). Unlike other methods available in literature on the subject, it has the advantage of being more “legitimate” and flexible, and it provides for the possibility of both geographic and temporal improvement.

I conclude by calling upon Africanist political scientists both to rid themselves of the straitjacket of models ill adapted to the environment they seek to grasp and to espouse a multiple, imaginative perspective on African politics. Only then will scholars be able to see how old the quest for freedom in Africa truly is and the degree to which democratization is taking hold; only then will they be able to measure the vast riches the continent has to offer the social sciences. I also suggest a simple model of democratization in Africa, emphasizing the importance of the elaboration phase of the rules of the political game.

 

The Polarization of the Democratic Debate on Africa

One of the paradoxes of current democratic theory is the growing gap between theoretical advances and the practical application of models derived from them. Though questions and disputes about democracy go back to its origins, an examination of the present state of knowledge in the field allows one to better conceptualize its objective and understand the source of disagreement among the different schools of thought. However, applying research results to societies engaged in what Huntington (1991) has termed the Third Wave of democratization results in contradictions that lead one to adopt a skeptical attitude toward the utility of political science.

To begin, it is necessary to put things into their proper perspective and to demonstrate that, despite the debates on the definition of democracy and the conditions for its sustainability, not only do current theories rely on the same paradigm, but the blind application of this paradigm, which is incapable of grasping the dynamics and the meaning of political transformations in Africa, creates confusion.

Theoretical Advances of Democratic Theory

Let us return for a moment to the European cartographers, who, as time went by, knew less and less about their subject. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, they had so refined their research methodology that they grew more and more ignorant of the continent’s geography, because information no longer met their stringent criteria. Their intellectual itinerary is comparable to that of present-day political scientists, who have adopted such high standards for their paradigms of analysis that they are unable to use them to define the current state of African politics. To understand why confusion reigns in the study of African politics, let us begin with a brief discussion of the evolution of democratic theory and the principal issues being debated today.

It is surprising that the extensive literature produced by political scientists tells us little about the origin of democracy. Despite research indicating that the ethical quest at the heart of this idea is practically consubstantial with humanity—compare Snowden (1970) and Bernal (1987) to cite two mainstream publications—political scientists insist that democracy originated somewhere in ancient Greece. However, the definition of the word democracy and the implications of the Greek concept of the term call this opinion into question. The very principle of the rule (kratos) of the people (demos) opens up an infinite number of questions that are generally ignored but nevertheless explain the heart of the debate among various schools of thought. As Held has pointed out with respect to the notion of rule alone:

Definitional problems emerge with each element of the phrase: “rule”?—“rule by”?—“the people”? To begin with “the people”: who are to be considered “the people”? What kind of participation is envisaged for them? What conditions are assumed to be conducive to participation? Can the disincentives and incentives, or costs and benefits, of participation be equal?

The idea of “rule” evokes a plethora of issues: how broadly or narrowly is the scope of rule to be construed? Or, what is the appropriate field of democratic activity? If “rule” is to cover “the political” what is meant by this? Does it cover (a) law and order? (b) relations between states? (c) the economy? (d) the domestic or private sphere?

Does “rule by” entail the obligation to obey? Must the rules of “the people” be obeyed? What is the place of obligation and dissent? What mechanisms are created for those who are avowedly and actively “non-participants”? Under what circumstances, if any, are democracies entitled to resort to coercion against some of their own people or against those outside the sphere of legitimate rule (1987:2–3)?

The definition of the people, the other component of the word democracy, raises at least as many questions, and each carries with it important implications (Held 1987:iii). Far from being a purely philosophical discussion, an interrogation of the idea of democracy must include philosophical, theoretical, and practical dimensions. I shall argue in this chapter that it is because Africanist political scientists have not dealt sufficiently with such fundamental questions that they have had such difficulty in coherently conceptualizing the ways in which Africans conceive of and experience democracy. This opens up a larger debate about the geographic and temporal validity of the models used in the social sciences. One of the advantages of the index of democratization I have proposed is that it is capable of integrating this intrinsically conflictive problematic and capturing not only the specificity but also the range of indigenous perceptions of the idea of democracy without altering its original and “universal” substance.

But above all else, it is useful to look at the evolution and current status of democratic theory. The necessity of distinguishing between different types of approaches to democracy (philosophical, theoretical, conceptual, and practical) is no doubt the source of the debates that have pitted political scientists against one another over the last three centuries. Held (1987) provides an overview of the principal issues disputed in political theory since Plato and an interesting schematic presentation of the intellectual landscape today.

On the one hand, there is the liberal model, derived from the classical Greek model, influenced by the ideas of Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Montesquieu and synthesized over the course of the twentieth century by Hayek (1960, 1976) and Nozick (1974). This model derives from what is referred to as legal democracy, whose principal justification is as follows: “The majority principle is an effective and desirable way of protecting individuals from arbitrary government and, therefore, of maintaining liberty. For political life, like economic life, to be a matter of individual freedom and initiative, majority rule, in order for it to function justly and wisely, must be circumscribed by the rule of law” (Held 1987:251). The key features of legal democracy are a constitutional state (modeled on features of the Anglo-American political tradition, including the clear separation of powers), the rule of law, minimal state intervention in civil society and private life, and a free-market society given the fullest possible scope. Its general conditions include effective political leadership guided by liberal principles, limitations on bureaucratic regulation, and, if possible, the eradication of the threat of collectivism of any kind.

On the other hand, there is the Marxist model, inspired notably by Rousseau’s skepticism regarding the representative structure and codification of the general will. Like all others, this model has evolved considerably throughout history. It is one of the principal sources of inspiration for what is called participatory democracy, which Macpherson (1977) and Pateman (1985) have theorized in recent years. Participatory democracy is defined in the following manner: “An equal right to self-development can only be achieved in a ‘participatory society,’ a society which fosters a sense of political efficacy, nurtures a concern for collective problems and contributes to the formation of a knowledgeable citizenry capable of taking a sustained interest in the governing process” (Held 1987:262). Its key features are the direct participation of citizens in the regulation of the main institutions of society, including the workplace and the local community; the reorganization of the party system so that political leaders are directly accountable to the membership; a flexible institutional system with political parties much more integrated into the parliamentary structure; the adoption of the principle of better distribution of resources; and an open information system to ensure informed decisions.

These two models evolved from a variety of theoretical approaches to democracy, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1

Held’s categories are, of course, subject to critique insofar as they rely on ideological distinctions that are not always as clear-cut as he suggests. That said, I shall maintain his basic definitions all the while broadening them to include extensive French research on the question. ₁ I want to distinguish between theorists who think that the idea of democracy should be limited to purely political concepts—that is, to the political rights of the individual and the right to choose those who decide the rules of government (roughly speaking, what Held calls legal democracy)—and those who consider that democracy should apply to all aspects of social life and that individual rights should include economic, social, and cultural dimensions (an extension of participatory democracy as defined by Held and others). We shall later see that, in the case of African countries, it is necessary to use such definitions so that inspired autocrats will not twist too easily the concept of liberal democracy.

Political science has yet to go beyond the dichotomy between these models. Of course, some authors have questioned their validity in today’s world, given the implacable logic of the market economy. Revitalizing Rousseau’s skepticism regarding all forms of representation, Dahl, for example, has underscored the developmental logic of capitalism, which tends to “produce inequalities in social and economic resources so great as to bring about severe violations of political equality and hence of the democratic process” (1985:60). ₂ Other writers have addressed similar concerns. For example, the democratic models Held (1987, 1994) and Gould (1988) have proposed insist on the necessity of extending the democratic agenda beyond government and into the business world and social life. But these ideas have remained theoretical—one can easily imagine how disastrous a practical application of such an approach would be, especially for highly industrialized nations that pride themselves on being the exclusive repositories of freedom, the owners of democratic truth.

In sum, it appears that centuries of heated debates among political scientists have produced works that, however technical and advanced theoretically, are not applicable to the study of African societies. Much remains to be said and done on this subject.

The question is how to use these various models to decipher the sociopolitical transformations that began to take shape in Africa in the early 1990s. The answer, of course, is not an easy one. The syndrome of inefficient overqualification with which Africanist cartographers were stricken comes into full force here: How is one to use the variants of the liberal or Marxist model to measure political development in Zambia, Djibouti, or Mauritania? How can one be sure that the political institutions adopted in Malawi after the fall of the former “president for life,” Hastings Kamuzu Banda, are evaluated in the same way as the British institutions on which they are based? Should one believe that the strategies of Congolese politicians can be analyzed through the prism of French political science simply because the system is a replica of France’s form of government? Should one think that imported institutional paradigms, which Badie (1992) has denounced, have a concrete impact on the African political landscape, that they really affect the nature and operation of African politics? Should one believe that the fragility of the transition to democracy, which appears to have taken place in Zambia, Madagascar, Niger, and Congo, is a reflection of the low level of political development in these countries and hence of the impossibility of establishing a true democracy in these countries?

No. The practical application of the theoretical advances in political science described earlier has failed by and large, especially when it concerns understanding the actual organization and operation of African politics today. The liberal and Marxist traditions, along with their numerous variants, have produced increasingly sophisticated methods of analysis, but the environment they seek to encompass and interpret remains resistant to their application. Nevertheless, unlike European cartographers of yore, political scientists today insist upon using them in Africa at all costs. As a result, they perceive there only troubling images, signals of a profound disorder. They are nonetheless wrong to interpret this “nebulousness” as proof of Africa’s political backwardness.

The Paradigm of African Political Backwardness

This rapid overview of contemporary thought on democracy is necessary, even if its complexity is somewhat daunting. First, it helps one understand why Africanist political scientists are guilty of the crime of which economists are generally accused—as soon as two of them get together, they disagree about everything down to the most elementary conceptual tools. Second, it enables one to pinpoint the technical origin of errors in analysis and judgment that political science “experts” have made with regard to Africa.

Nothing is more enigmatic and confused than current research in Africanist political science. It is enough to read some books and articles on the subject to measure not only their complexity but the poor quality of the findings. Analyses of the sustainability of the democratic process, which were begun in the early 1990s in most African nations, are even more confused—even if one manages to decipher them, the conclusions reached by the various authors are often contradictory. Some view the present state of affairs in a positive light and think that time will improve the performance of local political actors. Others are pessimistic and think that the political, economic, institutional, and cultural prerequisites for democracy do not exist in Africa and are not likely to exist there for at least another generation or so. The only thing upon which everyone appears to agree is the political backwardness of Africa, not in terms of its obvious marginalization in world affairs, but in terms of its present capacity to adopt democratic ways. But they are all wrong and I propose to show how and why.

No encyclopedia is vast enough to cover exhaustively the vast array of incoherent mishmash published recently by the “experts.” So let us begin with the university scholars who have studied the political unrest on the continent. So as not to tire the reader, I will confine myself to the main theses advanced by the most renowned scholars, whose work has been published in the most prestigious journals.

The Presumption of Incompetence

Dabezies is a professor at the Sorbonne, an influential man, a former diplomat and military officer; in short, he is the prototypical French Africanist, having spent considerable time as a power broker in both government and research. Stupefied by the fact that “democracy has suddenly reemerged as a sort of panacea,” he cannot help wondering, with barely veiled irony, whether it is a “passing fever, an ephemeral illusion or an ersatz remedy” (1992:22). In his view, failure is all the more predictable in that its causes may be traced to decolonialization, for independence was attained before the new local leaders had time to acquire the political training necessary to govern effectively. The constitutional mimetism that determined their choice of governmental models could only lead to the present impasse: “Democracy, let it be said, is a long and difficult path; it is hard to manipulate and brings no miraculous remedy to Africa’s ills—notably material ones; it is, moreover, a new idea on the continent, and neither the colonial period nor the era of independence movements saw such a ‘bubbling over,’ which some have described in lyrical if not demagogic terms” (1992:25). The absence of historical depth—in terms of a democratic tradition and an institutional framework for the ratification of democratic values—is also cited by eminent British and American scholars as one of the causes of Africa’s present difficulties. In a recent book, Apter, a professor at Yale, and Rosberg, Berkeley professor emeritus, write that the various European political and administrative traditions of the colonial era “left a legacy of institutional indigestion, insufficiently trained cadres, poorly entrenched but with great power, and a host of developmental problems that quickly overwhelmed nationalist political successors” (1994:17).

Writings by Africanist political scientists are filled with such justifications, whose pertinence is dubious at best. (Though there is a strong body of literature in comparative politics providing evidence of democratic systems designed without any structural prerequisite [Rustow 1970; Karl 1990; Diamond 1992]). Let us skip the paternalistic commentaries on the continent’s “structural incapacity” and move on to the soundness of the arguments behind this thesis. Must there be a certain tradition and a group of men “trained” in the conceptualization and management of freedom for the idea of democracy to succeed? History offers few examples of such prerequisites because the quest for freedom is so intimately linked to human life itself that democracy emerges almost ex nihilo. Neither the fathers of the American Revolution nor the French revolutionaries needed prior training in order to construct political systems protecting citizens from arbitrary government!

Indeed, the most intriguing aspect of this argument is the refusal to apply the same presumption of incompetence to politicians in countries in other parts of the world whose political history resembles that of Africa. Eastern Europe, for example, had little experience with democracy before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A study by Stubos concludes: “All Eastern European countries, with the noticeable exception of Czechoslovakia, had no prior tradition of democratic rule before the imposition of communism. In some cases, of course, some sort of limited or guided democratic practices were in place and formal parliamentary institutions were in existence. The fact remains, however, that democratic institutions and practices never acquired deep roots in these countries, neither did they make a dent in their political culture” (1993:31). The presumed absence of a “democratic culture” (I will later return to this notion) did not prevent Eastern bloc countries from implementing a democratic process that scholars regard with interest and optimism. Only Africa is consistently labeled as a place where certain conditions must first be met if its democratic ambitions are to be taken seriously. Moreover, no one would suggest for Eastern Europe, as Collier (1991) did for Africa, the creation of some “external agencies of restraint” to prevent leaders from making “structural” or “natural” political mistakes because of their countries’ alleged lack of democratic culture.

The Absence of a Critical Mass of Democrats

Many consider that the threat to the future of African democracies lies in a small number of citizens who “want” democracy. This low demand for political reform is described by Dabezies: “If [democracy] corresponds to a diffuse feeling of freedom, indeed, at a higher level, to a profound desire to liberate the masses, it as yet directly concerns but a minority, intellectuals and civil servants in particular, certain of whom have only recently begun to oppose the regimes they denounce” (1992:25). Widner is in full agreement: “Pressure for great political competitiveness came from elites who found that public offices they held suddenly stopped yielding the rents they used to supplement their income. Where these elites could organize general strikes, incumbent heads of state often tried to preempt their demonstrations by legalizing such opposition while maintaining control over critical electoral resources” (1994).

Starting from the same assumption, Bates (1994) tries to explain the shift in the position of the elites, advancing a convoluted theory based on the notion of human capital. Bates explains that the growth of certain types of local elites (especially old guard politicians, attorneys, church leaders, and community activists), whose skills are marketable only in their own countries, eventually created a tense political situation in which there was a surplus of this type of labor. The elites could survive and provide for their families only by fighting the regimes in power. They therefore initiated the present democratic process, which remains limited to a few social groups:

From whom does the reformist impulse emanate? One source is fixed and specific human capital, those people who have invested in skills that are but imperfectly transferable elsewhere. Among these are the old guard politicians and those who people the ranks of local, community-based hierarchies: lawyers, community activists, and church leaders. A lawyer in Ghana, for example, especially one at the peak of his career, is unlikely to find a comparable position in London. Although he might join an international agency, his career path is not international. Unlike finance capital or people with general, as opposed to community-specific, skills, professionals cannot readily defect abroad. Therefore, in the face of declining welfare, rather than exit, they may find it preferable to give voice (1994:21–22).

Médart (1994) is even more blunt when he states that democracy has difficulty taking shape in Africa “because there is no democracy without democrats.” The events that led to a softening of authoritarian regimes are reduced to a mere game between elites and stripped of any legitimacy. In short, the quest for democracy in Africa is superficial.

Such arguments are invalid. They demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of what has been happening in Africa over the past few decades. To affirm that the battle for democracy was engaged by African elites (Bates even claims that this is one of the “paradoxes” of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa!) is to ignore the silent struggle by men and women of all social classes from the beginning of the colonial era. Collective insubordination is the oldest watchword in African societies across the board. Accounts by historians (Mbokolo 1992; Roberts 1990) and more general works on arts and literature (Kom 1983; Ngandu Nkashama 1984; Mouralis 1984) bear witness to this.

If Widner’s thesis were correct—that is, if civil servants and local elites initiated the democratic process in Africa—then the political system would function beautifully, for this social group is the most homogeneous and has the fewest conflicts of interest. Bates’s thesis does not withstand scrutiny, either: it is both an insult and an error to assert that African elites suddenly demanded a better system of government simply because their financial resources had dried up over the years and their skills were not exportable. How can one claim that a Ghanaian lawyer could not find the same type of position in London that he had in Accra? Or that a Kenyan priest would not be accepted in a New York parish? Or that a Malian volunteer working in the private sector in Bamako could not perform the same service in Paris?

Médart’s maxim, “There is no democracy without democrats,” is elegant but inaccurate and utopian. Were it true, Italian democracy would not work, and neither would French and U.S. democracies. For democrats exist nowhere—there are only human beings who agree, willingly or by force, to bow to institutions that function in accordance with a set of rules deemed to have been established democratically by the majority of citizens (see again Rustow 1970; Karl 1990).

The Urban-Rural Dichotomy

There is a tendency among some authors, Anglo-Saxon scholars in particular, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of demands for democracy by questioning the prevalence of such demands in the population of the countryside. This idea is based on the urban-bias theory, first advanced by Lipton (1977) and developed notably by Bates (1981). The basic assumption is as follows: “The most important class conflict in the poor countries of the world today is not between labor and capital. Nor is it between foreign and national interests. It is between rural classes and urban classes. The rural sector contains most of the poverty and most of the low-cost sources of potential advance; but the urban sector contains most of the articulateness, organization and power. So the urban classes have been able to win most of the rounds of struggle with the countryside” (Lipton 1977:13).

The apparent dichotomy between urban and rural areas determined public policy and the political economy of sub-Saharan Africa during the 1980s. In the past few years, it appears to have taken over scholarship as well. Political scientists are all too ready to view the democratic process as an exclusively urban phenomenon. The rebellious cities, symbols of the arrogance of the state and the wasteful expenditure of public funds, are pitted against the silent and exploited rural areas, “victims” of the power of civil servants and urban elites. Occasionally the “opposition” between urban and rural areas is technically explained and the well-documented propensity to overvalue African currencies becomes the conceptual justification for the domination of the urban sector over the rural one—an overvalued currency hurts exports and lowers the price of imported goods. In other words, having long accepted uneven exchange rates, African governments have made an essentially political choice that favors the lifestyle of city dwellers, who are more likely to purchase imported luxury items, and reduces the purchasing power of rural inhabitants, who are the exporters of raw materials (Bates 1981). From there it is but a short step—which certain authors do not hesitate to take—to the conclusion that the eruption of demands for democracy in Africa’s large urban centers is simply a noisy display by a bunch of hungry city dwellers who suddenly find themselves deprived of their numerous privileges.

Although such analyses are at once superficial and caricatural, they are influential and dominate thought in the academic community (the urban-bias theory has recently been critiqued on economic grounds by Varshney [1993], whose work will not be discussed in detail here). However, the decline of agriculture’s contribution to the economy is a normal phenomenon. Studies have shown that industrialization generally occurs at the expense of agriculture inasmuch as agriculture must contribute an increasing share of its revenues to the industrial sector (Timmer 1988, 1992, 1993; Quisumbing and Taylor 1990). Of course, these studies do not answer all the questions raised by the urban-bias theory—notably, whether the democratic movement stems from a loss in purchasing power among city dwellers. But as Bratton and Van de Walle have pointed out, that does not mean a correlation necessarily exists between economic factors and social demands: “It is ultimately misleading to interpret political protest in strictly economic terms ... there is little or no correlation between the intensity of political unrest on the one hand and the severity of economic crisis or austerity measures on the other. Some countries with very deep economic problems, such as Tanzania, Guinea, or Guinea-Bissau, witnessed little or no unrest by 1990, yet riots and strikes shook relatively wealthy countries” (1992:41).

This observation sufficiently invalidates the urban-bias thesis; however, the theory’s success in academic circles warrants a few additional remarks. The implicit idea behind the theory of urban bias concerns the political inertia of the bulk of the African population, which is manipulated from time to time by perverted urban elites. Nothing could be farther from the truth. First, one must question the validity of the urban-rural dichotomy given that sub-Saharan Africa is more and more urban and less and less rural. At the very least, it is incongruous to speak of the urban domination of the rural “masses” in such countries as Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Congo, where the percentage of city dwellers is around 50 percent! What is more, it is erroneous to view social groups as political monoliths, even in the Sahel countries, where the rural population is quite large. Conflicts of interest and ideological differences in rural areas weaken the relevance of the urban-rural dichotomy and suggest that definitions and labels need to be refined (Harriss and Moore 1984; Widner 1993). In an Africa where cable stations like CNN are watched in every home, where Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan are as popular in the country as they are in big cities, it is archaic to believe that those who live in rural areas are sociologically different from city dwellers. Those who have studied the conditions that led to the democratic process in Africa know that rural movements launched some of the most pressing social demands. The fact that they are more often voiced in urban centers reflects the desire to add a new political dimension to a very old quest for freedom.

A look at the geography of political protest is enough to refute the rural passivity argument. In general, popular protest originated in rural areas, and for a very simple reason: the rural sector suffered more from the economic crisis than the urban sector and thus was the first to revolt. But given the barbarity of authoritarian regimes, this revolt was insidious and subtle and was expressed at the level of everyday actions (Mbembe 1988). Together with urban organizations and networks, rural inhabitants have, as it were, delegated to city dwellers their spirit of opposition. Contrary to popular belief, the eruption of violence and protest in large African cities at the end of the 1980s was above all a rebellion by proxy; the democratic process has actually been orchestrated by peasants, whose purchasing power has been steadily declining for the past ten years. City dwellers were called upon to play a piece composed elsewhere—in the closed circles of family meetings, in the secret network of rural cooperatives, in the informal gatherings of country merchants, and in the weekly church services held in every hick town on the continent. Leading figures in the democratic movement can confirm that the current struggle for social change originated in the rural sector. ₃ To find more “scientific” proof of rural involvement in politics, one has only to look at voter turnout in rural areas, which is generally higher than in cities, even when polling places are scarce. Country folk are not illiterate ignoramuses, as some writers like to think, and they are often more involved in the democratic process than city dwellers, who tend to give in more readily to nihilism and discouragement.

The urban-rural dichotomy is thus something of a cliché. Those who perpetuate it and base their analyses on it are engaging in the sociology of appearances. Reality is very different.

Disparate Ethnic Conglomerations and Fragmented States

The resurgence of regionalism and ethnic conflicts in the post–Cold War era has also fueled pessimism concerning the future of democracy in Africa. Horowitz, a specialist in ethnic questions who teaches at Duke University, considers the implementation of democracy to be much more difficult in what he terms “divided societies.” His basic argument runs as follows: “Democracy is about inclusion and exclusion, about access to power, about the privileges that go with inclusion and the penalties that accompany exclusion. In severely divided societies, ethnic identity provides clear lines to determine who will be included and who will be excluded. Since the lines appear unalterable, being in and being out may quickly come to look permanent” (1993:18).

Applying this analytic framework to Africa, Horowitz paints a less than cheery picture of the current political situation:

Togo and the Congo Republic both have northern regimes (based, respectively, on the Kabrai and the Mbochi) that came to power after military coups reversed the ethnic results of elections. Neither regime has had a special desire to accommodate a democratic process it identified with its southern (Ewe or Lari) opponents. Consequently, both took steps to disrupt the process.... Kenya, with its Kalendjin-dominated minority government, finally succumbed to Western pressure and conducted a multiparty election. But the incumbent president, Daniel arap Moi, was able to use a combination of intimidation, violence and ethnic divisions among the opposition to win both the presidency and a parliamentary majority on a plurality of votes, mainly from his own group and several other small ethnic groups. The result is a regime that continues to exclude the two largest groups, Kikuyu and Luo. Likewise, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, presiding over a government supported mainly by Beti and Bulu and opposed by all the rest, benefited from an opposition divided along ethnic lines and an election boycott by the major party.... In a dubiously conducted election in Ghana, the military ruler, Jerry Rawlings, won the presidency, supported by 93 percent of the vote in his own Ewe-dominated area, but polling less than one-third in Ashanti, thus reviving an earlier polarization (1993:21–22).

Horowitz’s analysis is weakened by some factual errors. He is wrong to assert that a given head of state is supported by a given ethnic group, to the exclusion of all others, yet this falsehood supports his entire argument. None of the leaders who, in his estimation, automatically won the votes of citizens in their native regions could govern with the exclusive support of their tribes. In fact, one of the most important patterns that emerged in recent African elections is the nonexistence of ethnic voting blocs, the end of monolithic regional support for a given candidate (compare T. Young 1993).

Let us not dwell on Horowitz’s abuse of official results of elections that were rigged by authoritarian regimes in order to maintain power and that have been contested and denounced by the international community (Geisler 1993). Let us focus instead on the substance of his discourse. First, there is the arbitrary nature of his ethnic classifications, whose limitations and inconsistencies Horowitz himself has evoked in earlier writings (1985), as have many other anthropologists and historians (Amselle and Mbokolo 1985). Is it necessary to remind those who carelessly use ethnic labels that these classifications, which often go back to the colonial era, served a specific hegemonic purpose? As C. Young has written, “‘Colonial science’ constructed a wooden and unusable model of ‘tribal man’ in Africa. There existed, for purposes of drawing administrative subdivisions within colonial territories, a normative map in the alien mind, into which discrete ethnic units could be distributed, with due regard for colonial security calculus. Thorough administrative inquest and competent bureaucratic sifting and winnowing of ethnographic data would permit successful tribal cartography” (1994:75).

That analysis confirms what Vail has written concerning the anatomy of the differential process through which peoples in Southern Africa fell into the ethnic trap:

The creation of ethnicity as an ideological statement of popular appeal in the context of profound social, economic and political change in southern Africa was the result of the differential conjunction of various historical forces and phenomena.... One may discern three ... variables in the creation and implanting of the ethnic message. First, as was the case in the creation of such ideologies elsewhere, for example in nineteenth century European nationalism, it was essential to have a group of intellectuals involved in formulating it—a group of culture brokers. Second, there was the widespread use of African intermediaries to administer the subordinate peoples, a system usually summed up in the phrase “indirect rule,” and this served to define the boundaries and texture of the new ideologies. Third, ordinary people had a real need for so-called “traditional values” at a time of rapid social change, thus opening the way for the wide acceptance of the new ideologies (1989:11).

One must keep such historical phenomena in mind if one wishes to steer clear of what Southall (1970) has termed “the tribal illusion” toward which Horowitz’s remarks clearly point. Of course, though it stems from an illusion, the reality of ethnicity today is such that it is impossible to ignore. That said, one must study its origin before according it the importance many Africanist political scientists have given it. It is particularly necessary to ask whether ethnicity is the cause of current political difficulties or whether they stem from a long period of authoritarianism. Otherwise stated, is ethnicity an exogenous and predetermined variable, as Horowitz implicitly suggests, or is it an endogenous variable, whose value is dependent upon other factors that have been ignored?

When Horowitz speaks of the “ethnic results” of elections, he attributes a certain degree of incertitude to a process that, according to the logic of his analysis, ought to have none. If Africans indeed always voted in line with their “ethnic convictions,” there would be no need to organize elections, because their results would be preordained—a simple ethnic head count would do. Governance along ethnic lines—which, according to Horowitz, means the inclusion of the ethnic “winners” of elections and the exclusion of all other groups (the “losers”)—ought to require an extraordinarily complex institutional mechanism to function. But nowhere does Horowitz speak of either the technostructure or the procedures through which the Kabrai and the Mbochi involve all the members of their ethnic communities—and them alone—in the governance of Togo or Congo!

A few items of information are enough to refute the ethnic argument in Cameroon. During the 1992 presidential election, for example, the principal leader of the opposition, who was ahead in all the polls according to analysts, came from a minority group—English speakers in the northwest. On the eve of the election, 200,000 people, including politicians, intellectuals, and other prominent figures from all regions of the country, went to hear him speak in Yaoundé, the capital of President Biya’s native Beti country. (So much for clear-cut ethnic divisions and Horowitz’s overly schematic analysis.) Similar events occurred in Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Malawi, and Zambia—in short, in all places where elections gave voters a chance to express if not their preferences, then at least their dissent.

Much can also be said about the way Kenya has been analyzed through the prism of ethnicity. As Chege has written, “the deluge of so-called scientific literature” (1994:284, n. 15) by experts in development has not yielded significant results. With regard to the impetus behind political reforms, it was not pressure from international monetary funds that caused Moi to call a multiparty election. ₄ Numerous studies have shown that financial institutions would have continued as before, for they have never required the accountability of African governments. In fact, one needs the soul of a chemist to attempt to assign, as certain political scientists have done, a precise quotient of responsibility to every group involved in triggering the democratic process. One thing is certain, however: Internal pressure exerted by various groups in civil society was a much more decisive factor in the current reforms than the timid actions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Barkan 1992, 1993; Chege 1993; Holmquist, Ford, and Weaver 1994; Tibbetts 1994).

Finally, Horowitz’s implication that the African opposition consists of tribal representatives who are bitter about their exclusion from power goes beyond mere negligence: It is the type of characterization that is unfair to sub-Saharan Africa. What political scientist would call Bill Clinton a representative of the Arkansas tribe simply because he massively carried his native state? What political scientist would view Jacques Chirac’s landslide victories in Corrèze over the years as an example of an ethnic vote in this region? Why is the notion of an electoral base, accepted throughout the world and considered by Western political science as something every serious politician needs, systematically interpreted as proof of backwardness when it comes to Africa?

Though it rests on shaky foundations, the ethnic factor remains a constant in the political situation in Africa. It dominates intellectual discourse because it provides a simple and apparently coherent theoretical model for the analysis of seemingly bizarre, or incomprehensible, phenomena. Political scientists find this both technical and functional analytical framework reassuring, for it allows them to justify the existence of authoritarianism. For instance, Williams notes: “In Africa, where democracy is ‘widely approved but everywhere in doubt,’ open public participation in politics has tended to be characterized by divisive struggles among ethnic groups over power and resources. Resulting conflicts have led to a general paralysis of productive political activity, a demobilization of participatory institutions, and the seemingly ineluctable turn toward authoritarian mechanisms of rule” (1992:97).

This passage is almost word for word what Sklar wrote a decade ago, (1986:115) presenting the conventional wisdom. Given that few intellectuals wish to promote the idea of authoritarianism, some desperately attempt to devise an “honorable” solution to the problem. They turn to a sort of consociationalism with blurred boundaries that might encompass both Nigerian-style federalism and the Senegalese version of “shared” power. ₅ Though there is literature on the limitations of Nigerian federalism (Suberu 1993), little exists, unfortunately, on the Senegalese pseudomodel, whose merits are always being sung by the “experts” in constitutional engineering. Albeit poorly understood and little studied, the Senegalese model of government has sufficiently demonstrated its unsuitability as a serious alternative for other African nations (Diop and Diouf 1990).

So we are back to square one; that is, the level of banality and modesty scholars afford themselves when studying the ethnic question in Africa. As I will later demonstrate, the results of their analyses would be more consistent if they agreed to abandon some of their prejudices about the continent.

The Clash of Civilizations and Cultural Inaptitude

Huntington, one of the most prolific and influential Western political scientists of our time, has advanced the hypothesis of a clash of civilizations, in his eyes the best explanatory paradigm of the world today: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (1993a:22).

Huntington defines a civilization as a “cultural entity” comprising villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, and religious groups that, despite their heterogeneity, constitute a coherent whole. (Let us skip for the moment the syntactic incompatibility of this definition.) Then, using this framework, he identifies the major civilizations in the modern world: “Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African Civilization” (1993a:25). Beyond the arbitrary classification of civilizations, what is most striking in this assertion is the use of the word possibly with respect to the existence of an African civilization. It is hard to know what it is supposed to mean here: does Huntington doubt that civilizations exist in Africa today, or does he question the ability of African civilization (in the singular, of course) to “clash” or “compete” with others? In any case, the author’s perception of Africa is suspect.

Affirming that Japan alone has been able to modernize without Westernizing, Huntington predicts a great confrontation and advises Western leaders to take preventive measures. Among other things, he counsels the West “to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components,” “to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states” (1993a:48–49).

I have presented Huntington’s thesis because it sheds light on the ideological atmosphere in which certain theories in Africanist political science have been elaborated. His basic premise is that the most authentic quest for freedom belongs to the West, that it holds the copyright now and forever on the expression of democratic principles and their “proper” implementation. Other peoples are completely incapable of conceptualizing democracy, so it is best to leave them to the course of their own histories, all the while protecting the West’s precious Greco-Roman heritage from the contamination of heretical civilizations. Huntington presents his thesis even more clearly in his response to critiques of his new theory (1993b).

Huntington’s ideas are at the heart of the rhetoric on the cultural inaptitude of Southern peoples (notably Africans) that prevents them from assimilating the democratic model. Their incapacity to incorporate philosophical and political ideals elaborated in the West points to their inability to contribute anything of value to the chorus of nations and to participate in the grand ball of civilizations. This original sin manifests itself politically in various ways: Africans cannot seem to make work the institutions they are always importing (Badie 1990, 1992); African societies and their leaders appear to have adopted an attitude of masochistic complacency toward authoritarianism and patrimonialism (Callaghy 1994); in short, Africa refuses to develop (Kabou 1991).

Although Badie denounces what he sees as the superficial character of democracy in African nations, as well as their importation of governmental models, he does not consider these nations capable of developing alternative models:

References to democracy, to the rule of law, are as fragile, vulnerable and illusory as the beginnings of an alternative model are difficult to find in the discourse and political practices of African and Asian societies, and this for several reasons. First one must take into account the importance of imported governmental models in the political debate, ... which further dries up the production of new models. Second one must take into account the element of duration.... The third reason for this absence of alternative models is probably the lack, in these developing societies, of well-structured social movements, the nonexistence, within civil society, of at once organized and mobilizing forums of protest.... The fourth factor is perhaps, paradoxically, the overvaluation of politics that characterizes these societies.... The debate tends to turn in circles, around the modus operandi of the official political scene; it is much less imaginative with regard to the evolution and transformation of society.... The alternative political function is essentially an oppositional function, with no hope of gaining immediate access to power and that, to borrow Georges Lavau’s formula with respect to the tribunitial function, lazily contents itself with the production of a negative discourse (1990).

All the clichés are here: a political imagination held hostage to Western models, a paucity of forums of protest worthy of the name, a dearth of politicians up to the task, a lazy oppositional discourse. In short, democrats in the Southern regions are not worthy of the West’s consideration. Are we far from Huntington’s thesis? Apparently so, but in reality, no. For we find in Badie the same skepticism toward the ability of African societies to produce a “respectable” (alternative) political discourse.

A number of North American Africanists also subscribe to this logic of disqualifying African democracies on ideological grounds. Thus, Callaghy seems desperate about the inability of African societies (not leaders!) and nations to abandon mediocrity and patrimonialism. This leads him to question the possibility of true political change: “The characteristics of the modal African state are not likely to be altered very much by the varying processes of political liberalization sweeping Africa in the early 1990s.... Under the formal political structure of African regimes, a unifying perceptual and operational cultural idiom has emerged which is deeply embedded in society as well as in the state—that of patrimonialism and patron-client relations” (1994:204,206).

Using the same type of argument, Lancaster is equally quick to paint a dark picture of Africa’s future:

The nature of political institutions in Africa suggests that democracies there are likely to function differently from democracies in the West [nice euphemism!]. These regimes are more open than their authoritarian predecessors, but their accountability to their publics remains weak. It will take time for an undertrained and underfinanced media to play the role it does in much of the West of putting issues on the national agenda, contributing to national debate, and investigating and criticizing government policy failures or corruption. The public may remain politically inert except at elections; even then, many Africans continue to base their votes on cues from village “big men” or ethnic brokers rather than on the government’s performance (1993:29).

All those who have carefully followed African politics in the past few years, especially the presidential elections in Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, and other countries, know that Lancaster’s contemptuous description of African voters is not realistic (neither is the presumption of rationalism and political activism she attributes to Western voters), a point to which I shall return later. In fact, this poorly argued Afro-pessimism is a version of Huntington’s thesis, which holds that there is no way to civilize these accursed peoples and that it is therefore best to keep them at a safe distance. This concern confirms what Rufin (1982) has written about the West’s hands-off attitude toward the chaos in Southern countries and its desire to prevent the invasion of the barbarians, as the Romans had earlier done.

Fortunately, many other scholars have pointed out the shortcomings of Huntington’s theory. I will confine myself here to several fundamental contradictions in his reasoning, which is enough to refute his hypothesis. Cultural pluralism, for example, is much more acute in the United States and Canada (which, in Huntington’s view, are part of the same homogeneous civilization) than it is in Italy (classified in a different civilization). The geographic zones Huntington hastily and arbitrarily draws are far from monolithic and the five criteria he uses to define a civilization (history, language, culture, tradition, and religion) do not allow one to differentiate in a compelling way between the peoples of the world—none have exclusive rights over their own history, tradition, or culture! One of the paradoxes of what is referred to as “Western cultural imperialism”—which I regard as nothing more than the temptation to subject and mold the other to one’s vision of the world—is that it has imposed a certain type of discourse, a certain language and tradition, in short, a single history. Since Columbus’s time, the West has endeavored to render civilization uniform, to make it “one” (Said 1993). Even when this attempt failed, there were consequences: The trajectory of numerous peoples was irrevocably altered, the confrontation reshaping the identities of both victims and aggressors (Todorov 1982, 1993). Thus, today it is at once futile and artificial to try to restore the authenticity of civilizations, to try to reestablish the imprints of each culture—as if we were dealing with chemical ingredients.

I could list endless examples of blunders in much of the “scientific” literature devoted to the study of Africa’s political transformations. But Huntington’s work, replete with errors of fact and judgment, strikes me as enough to discredit research on the topic. Granted, one could simply shrug one’s shoulders and conclude that because the social sciences are not among the exact sciences, these errors are par for the course. The problem is that errors made by influential scholars, who are also trendsetters, influence the decisions of politicians and policymakers. In a very concrete way, Africa is the victim of the prejudices and analytical errors of researchers who are accountable to no one. A remark Jacques Chirac made during a trip to Abidjan a few years back is proof of this: “Democracy,” he declared, “is a frill for Africa.” Now that he is France’s president, we will be able to measure the concrete of his vision.

All of this leads to the real question of how to explain the collective blindness of the political science community. How is it that Africa, which does not have a monopoly on complexity, remains so opaque to scholars, so very resistant to their methods of analysis that it makes the theoretical models that have issued from centuries of political thought appear ridiculous? Why do Africanists continue to confuse the subject and object of knowledge? Before suggesting new avenues of research, I shall attempt to respond to these questions.

 

Theoretical Framework for Analyzing Political Change

In order to advance a theory of democratization that does not fall victim to the aforementioned distortions, it is necessary to proceed in stages. I shall begin by analyzing the reasons for the present confusion in Africanist political science—the genesis, if you will, of misunderstandings. I shall then suggest another way of looking at and studying Africa’s new political marketplace.

The Genesis of Misunderstandings

Two types of reasons account for the blindness of some researchers. These reasons are tied either to the development of the social sciences and the attitude of those who wield concepts (I refer to these as external reasons) or to the nature of the new local political marketplace—that is, the new rules of the game and the behavior of the new political actors (I refer to these as internal reasons).

The external reasons can be summed up in a short phrase: the obstinate refusal of global brain trusts (the academy, international development agencies, the banking community) to take sub-Saharan Africa seriously. They are exhibited in two ways:

• Through the West’s lack of geopolitical and speculative interest in Africa, a result of the end of the Cold War, and
• Through scholarly contempt for Africa’s misuse of certain political concepts and methodologies

The internal reasons have a dual origin:

• On the one hand, the extraordinary agility with which African authoritarian regimes have manipulated techniques of renewal, which has allowed most of them to reinvent themselves and sometimes even to turn to their advantage the desire for change

• On the other hand, what must be called the political bricolage of opposition leaders, which is perceptible behind the structural weakness and atomistic tendency of their movements, most of which came to light in a socioeconomic environment conducive neither to risk taking in general nor to political risk taking in particular ₆

Let us examine one by one these four sources of confusion.

The World’s Indifference and Intellectual Safaris

It is easy enough to call into question Fukuyama’s (1992) ludicrous vision of the end of history. Nevertheless, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a radical shift in the way the international community—wrongly more than rightly—views and conceptualizes history. The marginalization of Africa is a part of this shift, which was stimulated by increased global competition for volatile, scarce, and expensive capital. ₇

The new world order that came into being after the disintegration of the Soviet Union does not include Africa within its world geography. Unable to discern the smallest sign of hope in Africa’s ongoing sociopolitical transformations, the international business community has focused its attention on three areas: the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific. The criteria this community uses to assess its potential interest in disparate parts of the world are limited to such indicators as internal rate of return and net present value, used to measure the immediate value of discounted financial flows expected from investments and the payback period. Given these “objective” criteria, it is neither surprising nor regrettable that easy-profit seekers have avoided the continent.

More troubling is that the indifference of “money makers” appears to have determined the general attitude toward Africa. Despite the success of numerous missions in Africa, the UN is trying to forget the trauma of Somalia and Angola and thus has paid less attention to issues of human rights and democracy. Western governments that used to proclaim their “duty to interfere” in countries where the standards of universal morality were blatantly transgressed have become reserved. The era of the great overseas operations for the protection of human rights appears to have come (temporarily?) to an end.

This new attitude has rubbed off on Western intellectuals. Among Africanist political scientists, it translates into a lack of rigor in their treatment of the continent. The sophistication of the aforementioned theoretical models in fact disguises a certain negligence. When it comes to Africa, one can afford to indulge in approximations, generalizations, even illiteracy. Africa’s overall image is so negative that only the most pessimistic types of discourse conform to the logic that governs understanding of the continent. Publications as “prestigious” as the Financial Times, Der Spiegel, or Time can publish cover stories and surveys built upon falsehoods and factual errors without stirring up a storm of protest, no doubt because “experts” on Africa know that rebuttals will not damage their professional reputations. ₈

The abdication of intellectuals serves the interest of certain players, namely, that of Western leaders who have personally involved themselves in “African affairs.” ₉ When former French president François Mitterrand was questioned about the efficacy of his support for democratization in Africa, he declared that the increase in the number of African countries having adopted a multiparty system was proof of his success (1993)—as if it were enough for any old Mobutu to proclaim himself a democrat to be recognized as such by France’s head of state. Although it is hard to tell whether this type of thinking stems from cynicism or contempt for Africans, it certainly reflects the current trend in the West of intellectual exoticism with regard to Africa. It is no longer necessary even to formulate intelligent answers to legitimate questions.

As a result, and despite the multiplication of sophisticated yet confused theories, the scholarly debate—when it exists—on political transformations in Africa lacks vigor and impartiality. True or false, supported by empirical evidence or not, most analyses are never put through the filter of common sense or rigorous conceptual schemes; one is generally satisfied with what appears “plausible,” “original,” or “convincing.” In recent years the continent has become the El Dorado of wild thought, the best place for daring intellectual safaris, the unregulated space in which to engage in theoretical incest, to violate the fundaments of logic, to transgress disciplinary prohibitions; in short, to give oneself over to all forms of intellectual debauchery—with impunity and in good conscience. Africa is the final frontier for those who like to tinker with ideas; it is the Luna Park for lovers of ideological orgies.

Archaic Instruments of Analysis

It is not at all surprising that Africa has often proved resistant to the assumptions of political scientists and does not fit into (Western) democratic theory. The analytic paradigms that social scientists persist in applying to these complex societies are obviously inapt. All discussions on the meaning and optimal form of democracy hinge upon the idea that “objective,” measurable conditions determine its sustainability. Held writes: “Democratic ideas and practices can only in the long run be protected if their hold on our political, social and economic life is deepened” (1987:4). Diamond (1990) reiterates this position when he affirms that in the long run only the emergence of a civic culture can help negotiate one of democracy’s intrinsic paradoxes, namely, the conflict between the necessary clash of ideas and the need for consensus.

Within each school of thought, these assumptions translate into a few concepts: the notions of political culture—which includes civic culture and participation—legitimacy, and accountability. Summing up the terms of a prominent debate between eminent U.S. political scientists, Lipset (1990) dismisses Juan Linz (who tends to favor parliamentary government) and Donald Horowitz (who more or less advocates presidentialist forms of government) on the grounds that the only thing that really matters is the political culture of a given people. In fact, most of the current democratic models primarily base their judgment of a political system’s democratic validity on this criterion. But the assumptions upon which the idea of political culture is founded are false; for in general—even when they are applied to the well-established democracies of the industrialized world—they stand on shaky ground, as numerous critics have demonstrated (Aron 1972; Callinicos 1991).

Take, for example, the notion of civic culture. Almond and Verba came up with this idea in the early 1960s, and it continues to serve as the centerpiece of current political theories on African societies. There is nothing wrong with the idea per se; the problem lies in the practical application of the supposed elements of civic culture and the criteria used to measure it. Let us begin with Almond and Verba’s definition of the term. Their point of departure is the notion of political culture, which they define as follows:

The term “political culture” refers to the specifically political orientations—attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system. We speak of a political culture just as we can speak of an economic culture or a religious culture. It is a set of orientations toward a special set of social objects and processes. But we also choose political culture, rather than some other special concept, because it enables us to utilize the conceptual frameworks and approaches of anthropology, sociology, and psychology (1963:12–13).

Their approach is honest and straightforward, and their willingness to include the research methodologies and perspectives of such disciplines as anthropology, sociology, and psychology speaks to their modesty and the subtlety of their model. They are right to propose a flexible, multidimensional analytic scheme, for the notion of civic culture, derived from that of political culture, must be wielded with great care because it belongs to a vast conceptual field and varies greatly from one society to the next. Thus, when Inglehart defines civic culture as “a coherent syndrome of personal life satisfaction, political satisfaction, interpersonal trust and support for the existing social order” (1988:1203), he points to the implied existence of such notions as a collective attitude, a scale of values, a feeling of well-being on the part of citizens toward citizenship, etc. Such a vast field of study inevitably opens onto various divergences, which make it virtually impossible to perform comparative analyses—unless one falls into the trap of ethnocentrism, which, unfortunately, most scholars who utilize this concept do.

In truth, the definitions social science dictionaries give the term attitude transform it into a Bermuda Triangle of sorts from which it is almost impossible to escape. Summarizing decades of multidisciplinary research on the question, Jary and Jary define it as a “learned and enduring tendency to perceive or act toward persons or situations in a particular way.... It is therefore useful to see attitudes as involving three elements: a) a cognitive component—beliefs and ideas; b) an affective component—values and emotions; c) a behavioral component—predisposition to act and actions” (1991:27–28).

Marshall addresses the complexity of the problem:

Many people do not have well-developed or even superficial opinions on topics that may interest the sociologist. Some would argue that the idea of attitudes is closely tied to the culture of Western industrial society, in which citizens are regularly invited to express their views on public issues, both directly and through the ballot box. What is certain is that attitude scales developed in Western societies do not function in the same way in other cultures. Even the standard simple job satisfaction question attracts a different pattern of response as soon as it is used beyond the confines of Western industrial societies (1994:21).

We can see how difficult it is to evaluate the attitudes of individuals in different parts of the world. Even more difficult is measuring collective attitudes and group behavior by way of individual responses to questions developed within a particular frame of reference. Yet the followers of Almond and Verba do not hesitate to use the civic culture argument everywhere and for everything, even to predict changes in the scale of values from one generation to the next. True, statistical sampling techniques are extremely sophisticated today, and the central limit theorem, with its predetermined margin of error, allows one to sidestep the problem of representativeness and to grasp the essence of a given population. The question nevertheless remains: How can one be sure that surveys conducted by U.S. researchers in the slums of Kinshasa truly reflect the thinking and political opinions of people in the Zairean bush? How can one be certain that the information collected from questionnaires hastily put together and distributed in a few neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam corresponds to the way Tanzanians conceive of and experience politics?

Political scientists who use Almond and Verba’s model often fail to take into account the caveats expressed by its authors. For example, in attempting to evaluate political culture in Zambia, Bratton and Liatto-Katundu asked people to fill out a questionnaire based on a few questions: “We address a simple and conventional set of questions which will be familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of an earlier generation of political culture studies.... What do people know about their political system? How do they feel about their government and their fellow citizens? Which political values do they hold dear? And, finally, how do they act politically?” (1994:1). Even if the results are not totally devoid of interest, there clearly is a Western bias in the survey questions. How can one hope to obtain reliable, usable information from Zambian citizens who are asked, only several months after the end of decades of dictatorship, to express their political orientations? How can one expect intelligent answers to such questions as “What is a local government council supposed to do?” How could one be surprised to find that populations long forced to live in a corrupt, inefficient single-party system do not distinguish between the federal government and local authorities? What would the responses be if the survey had taken place in Columbus, Ohio, or Moscow rather than Lusaka? Would researchers rely on the answers to measure the level of political culture in the United States or Russia? It is clear that these types of studies have theoretical, conceptual, and practical limits. ₁₀ The conclusions reached cannot be interpreted in the manner suggested by Almond and Verba’s original model.

Although the quantitative problems associated with measuring political knowledge cannot be underestimated (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1993), political scientists who employ such methods to evaluate the civic culture of individuals must also be aware that the collective consciousness of which Durkheim spoke (’the body of beliefs and sentiments common to the average of members of a society” [1968]) is equally difficult to grasp. Dahl, an advocate of the concepts of political culture and citizen competence, has come to recognize their severe limitations: “If democracy is to work, it would seem to require a certain level of political competence on the part of its citizens. In newly democratic or democratizing countries, where people are just beginning to learn the arts of self-government, the question of citizen competence possesses an obvious urgency. Yet even in countries where democratic institutions have existed for several generations or more, a growing body of evidence reveals grave limits to citizen competence” (1992:45, emphasis added).

The results of empirical research on the validity of these notions in long-established democracies are disappointing and attack the credibility of the democratic idea. Muller and Seligson (1994) recently developed a model designed to test the nature of and the causal relationship between civic culture and democracy. Their conclusions call into question Almond and Verba’s thesis (countries with a high level of civic culture have stable democratic systems) as well as the opposite point of view advanced by Barry (1978) and Schmitter and Karl (1991), which holds that civic culture is not the cause but rather the result of democracy. According to Muller and Seligson, causation is, at least, reciprocal. There is no such thing as a linear correlation between the level of democratic culture and the effectiveness of democracy. One is tempted to agree with this idea in light of the mysterious separation between practical political consciousness and discursive consciousness made by French voters. Analyzing voting patterns in a small French town, Déloye observes that

voters do not create their behavior, they recreate it at each election, drawing upon knowledge acquired from previous polls. In the voting booth, the voter generally discovers, within the “pool of ordinary knowledge” that constitutes his or her memory, a practical answer that gives meaning to what is happening. Most of the time, s/he instantly associates the present electoral situation with similar experiences s/he has had in the past (whence the difficulty of modifying, even marginally, this internalized behavior). This reflexive form of competence anchors voter behavior in the personal history of the voter.... The power of this voting habit, justified by practical voting consciousness, paradoxically explains why the voter has such difficulty formulating the meaning of and reasons for his actual behavior (1993:88).

To some extent, these comments are similar to Rohrschneider’s remarks concerning the consolidation of values within the German elite. Studying the manner in which democratic institutions in former West Germany modified the behavior of politicians in former East Germany (a process known as “value convergence”), he observes that the lack of democratic culture does not negatively affect the outcome of the political game, since the institutions progressively shape the political behavior: “I find that the socialist and parliamentary institutions in the East and the West, respectively, have substantially influenced elites’ conceptions of democracies in Germany, leading to a value divergence across the East-West boundary. Yet the findings also suggest that a partial value convergence in terms of liberal democratic rights among postwar elites has taken place. The results support an institutional learning theory, but they also suggest that support for liberal democratic values has been diffused in East Germany” (1994:927). In an epigraph to his article, Rohrschneider quotes a member of parliament from East Berlin, who serenely declared: “I think entirely in dialectical terms.” This loyalty to Marxism parallels voting habits in a small French town: both phenomena belong to the same type of determinism, which is institutional rather than cultural in the narrow and almost ethnological sense in which political scientists often understand it. Paradoxically, this leaves more hope for the idea of democracy than one may have initially expected.

Proposing an elaborate mathematical model devised to question the dogma of civic culture, Muller and Seligson shed light on some of the practical difficulties in measuring civic culture across the world. It invites one to reexamine Inglehart’s model, generally considered the cornerstone of theories based on the idea of civic culture, which consists of four variables: (1) a country’s level of economic development in 1950, as measured by its gross national product (GNP) per capita; (2) the percentage of the labor force employed in the tertiary sector, which is used to determine the size of the middle class; (3) a composite measure of civic culture over 1981–1986 that reflects the general public’s average level of life satisfaction, interpersonal trust, and lack of support for revolutionary change; and (4) a country’s years of continuous democracy from 1900 to 1986. Democracy is measured on the seven-point scale Gastil developed for Freedom House, which has published a yearly report since 1972 (see Gastil 1991).

An analysis of Inglehart’s model reveals the arbitrariness of its logic and the reason it cannot be transferred to the African context. Even if we put to one side the accuracy of the indicators used to measure the level of economic development (economists increasingly view GNP as a poor indicator of prosperity), the fact remains that the idea of a middle class takes on a very different dimension in sub-Saharan Africa, as do the problematic notions of level of life satisfaction, interpersonal trust, and support for revolutionary change. Whether one adopts Inglehart’s model or Muller and Seligson’s, the measurement of democracy poses an even greater problem: How can one employ a simplistic seven-point scale to interpret what is happening in Rwanda, Zaire, Congo, Madagascar, Senegal, Libya, or Sierra Leone? And how can one compare the situations in these countries to what is going on in the United States, Scandinavia, or the Islamic republics in the former Soviet Union? One cannot. Despite their high level of sophistication and the good faith of their authors, these models are decidedly inadequate to the task.

The results of recent research likewise invalidate the idea of civic culture. Verba et al. conducted an extensive survey in the United States that led them to conclude that citizens who are involved in traditional forms of political activism (participation) are in no way representative of the social groups to which they belong. This conclusion confirms the thesis earlier advanced by Bennett and Bennett (1986). Given that the question of representation lies at the very heart of democratic thought, such discoveries ought to serve as a wake-up call to researchers and policymakers: “Those in public life are more likely to be aware of, and to pay attention to, the needs and preferences of those who are active. Thus, it would seem to matter for the democratic principle of equality that studies of citizen participation in America concur in showing political activists to be unrepresentative in their demographic characteristics of the public at large” (Verba et al. 1993:303).

Of course, one may question whether observations of this sort apply to Africa—once again, much research remains to be done. But it is already clear that the theory whereby one surveys a group of activists involved in various forms of political participation in Dakar, Lusaka, or Nairobi and deems the results to be representative of the political hopes and needs of the Senegalese, Zambians, or Kenyans warrants discussion. Adopting the opposite approach—that is, seeking to discover why some citizens do not participate in political life—Brady et al. (1995) developed an original model with surprising results. For example, they found that certain resources such as time and money count at least as much as civic competence; and that some citizens are inclined to express their political views conventionally, whereas others tend to use different avenues of expression, which as yet have been studied little, if at all. One must keep this crucial finding in mind if one truly wishes to explore and understand the new African political marketplace. Unfortunately, few Africanist scholars have done so.

The other criterion of analysis found occasionally in Africanist political theory (generally in the works of rationalists) is that of legitimacy. In theory, the idea of legitimacy is less contentious than the concept of civic culture advanced by culturalists, for it appears to encompass less controversial notions. However, if one takes a closer look, as Weatherford has done, one cannot fail to see that its various dimensions are no guarantee of a smooth, controlled analysis. How, for example, is one to verify whether a given political system actually meets the following criteria:

Accountability (Are rulers accountable to the governed via a process that allows wide, effective participation?); Efficiency (Is the government set up to accomplish society’s ends without undue waste of time and resources?); Procedural fairness (Is the system structured to ensure that issues are resolved in a regular, predictable way and that access to decisional arenas is open and equal?); Distributive fairness (Are the advantages and costs allocated by the system distributed equally or else deviations from prima facie equality explicitly justified on grounds that define “fair shares” in terms of some long-run, overarching equality principle?) (1992:150)

These questions are, of course, troubling but so very important if one is to provide the word legitimacy with real content. They might be asked by an Algerian in Algiers or by an Angolan in Luanda, but also by an American in Washington, a Frenchman in Paris, or a Japanese in Tokyo! The sad truth is that one would likely receive a variety of discordant responses to these questions regardless of the country in which they were posed. And what one perceives at the level of the political and institutional system (the macro-level) is but a single aspect of legitimacy. One must also study the meaning of legitimacy at the level of individual beliefs and hopes (the micro-level), which means investigating such notions as interest and involvement in politics (’the psychological feeling that political participation is worth the opportunity cost of trading off time and commitment from other occupations,” as Weatherford puts it); faith in collective action, that is, in the trustworthiness of other people; and a certain degree of optimism with respect to one’s country and to the power of voters. All of these not only warrant analysis but would unquestionably open up important debates in any country.

We have come to the end of our theoretical excursus. Having begun with the idea that a liberal democratic model exists to which African countries, despite the political reforms of the early 1990s, have not managed to conform, we have arrived at the idea that the evaluative criteria of said model are too arbitrary to be taken seriously and that no country in the world could pass the democratic test anyway—assuming it were possible to design such a test. Many years ago this observation led Dahl to describe democracy as a goal after which polyarchic Western governments strive but never reach (1971). It is a shame that Africanist political scientists have not taken to heart the modesty implied in this lesson. As for African heads of state, they do not hesitate to exploit these contradictions in order to “legitimate” their authoritarian regimes and revamp their approach to politics.

The Art of Political Aggiornamento: A Revamped Discourse

The opacity of the new African political landscape cannot be attributed to the egocentrism and ignorance of Africanist political scientists alone. The remarkable creativity of African leaders has also contributed significantly to the present confusion. Because of the rapidity with which they have brought their discourse and repressive techniques up to date, African dictators have managed at once to create uncertainty about their abilities and will and to sell the international community on the ludicrous idea that the future of Africa depends on them and them alone. As a result, thought is by and large confined within the boundaries they have erected and only their point of view is included on the agenda of university scholars, political brain trusts, and international banking institutions.

Through an incredible reversal of fortune, all of Africa’s dictators—from Senegal’s Abdou Diouf and Djibouti’s Hassan Gouled to Morocco’s Hassan II and Zaire’s Mobutu—who were losing strength in the early 1990s succeeded not only in maintaining power but occasionally in strengthening their control over their countries and in changing the issues of debate, this at a time when the dictators of the former Eastern bloc were toppling like bowling pins. If one is interested in advancing thought on democracy in Africa, it is necessary to examine this near miracle (the techniques of political survival used by African dictators) in order to understand why it occurred.

Initially shocked and stunned by the 1990–1991 popular uprisings, African leaders quickly regained their composure and began to decipher the vocabulary of the new era. ₁₁ They came to understand that the imprisonment of their opponents was costly and difficult to manage: The democratic myth appeared to have ignited a firestorm of political activism, and the number of people wishing to become involved in government increased exponentially. Whereas the opposition had previously been confined to a handful of leaders not only known and “on file” but mostly in exile, it now extended to countless masses. These illegitimate governments had to address the problem of controlling an ever increasing number of adversaries. Already overcrowded, prisons could no longer hold them all.

Since direct violence was no longer effective, heads of state quickly classified it as an obsolete tool, an outmoded weapon—at least against certain types of leaders. ₁₂ It was therefore necessary to devise new techniques to rally people to their cause, to rewire the circuits of official propaganda, and to modernize practices of exclusion. That is why African leaders have developed a discourse centered on democracy. In the name of pluralism, they do their best to fight words that strike them as unorthodox. Their retorts warrant attention.

The discourse of African heads of state centers on four themes: (1) the political immaturity of the population; (2) the lack of financial means to organize efficiently the democratic process; (3) the denunciation of outside interference and violations of their national sovereignty; and (4) the demand for cultural relativism, which gives them license, on “moral” grounds, to design their own democracy. In their eyes, democratization is a mere cosmetic; thus, they busy themselves with the elaboration of a “new” ideology to explain their refusal to adopt the principle of alternation of power. Cameroon is a striking example of this strategy. The primary goals of official discourse are to make a mockery of popular demands, to engage in sophistry, and to create deliberate confusion. Let us take a look at some of these new techniques and at the new crib sheet for authoritarians. Concentrated on Cameroon, the discussion that follows also sheds light on what is happening in Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and other countries.

Cultural relativism against democracy: It all begins with the repeated use of cultural relativism clichés. The celebration of the myth of uniqueness is likewise one of the government’s new themes. In a speech given in Yaoundé in 1991, Paul Biya proclaimed, “Cameroon is Cameroon!” so as to justify his refusal of the National Conference—a popular meeting during which all the politically active groups in the country redesign the rules of the political game and elaborate a new electoral agenda. In so doing, he was following in the footsteps of some of his minions, such as Emah Basile, the deputy and mayor of Yaoundé, who rejected the idea of a multiparty system by declaring to the National Assembly in 1990: “We don’t want imported models!” Beyond the puerile quality of such a slogan, especially in a country where those in power refer and defer daily to French constitutional law, it is necessary to call attention to the resurgence of a certain form of national pride. It is a rather laughable nationalism, however, because its essential function is to rationalize the maintenance of a repressive system by giving it a “philosophical,” “legal” foundation and an “intellectual” framework.

By refusing to import political models developed in Benin, Nigeria, or Congo (for example, the Supreme National Conference), the authorities not only were expressing contempt for “little countries” but were simultaneously affirming, “We’ll democratize at our own pace.” Understood in this idea is the following: “We refuse to use outside ideas because they do not belong to the reality of our culture or our history.” The reasoning is specious, as it is in all sophisms. First of all, the cultural precepts that are referred to are rarely identifiable. Lévi-Strauss and Eribon criticized this type of monoculturalism, which forgets that “toutes les cultures résultent de brassages, d’emprunts, de mélanges, qui n’ont cessé de se produire, bien que sur des rythmes différents, depuis l’origine des temps [all cultures are a result of brewing, of borrowing, of mixing; a process that has not ceased, though always with differing rhythms, since the beginning of time]” (1990:212). ₁₃ Multicultural by virtue of its formation, Cameroonian society has, of course, produced its own synthesis that citizens may conceivably wish to retain today. But to disgrace and discredit a political system from the Sahel while glorifying a hybrid form of presidential government is completely incoherent.

The cult of Cameroon’s uniqueness likewise appears in the comparisons leaders often make between their own country’s performance and that of other countries where the economic and political situation is deemed to be worse. State-run television regularly devotes programs to the “catastrophes” that occurred in Congo or Zaire, insinuating that the disaster was brought on by the organization of national conferences in these states. It is comforting for leaders to invoke such notions as “intellectual sovereignty”; they can slyly refer to the “Westernization of the political order,” which Badie and others have denounced, and to distort the debate on democratization.

Burkina Faso’s president Blaise Compaoré dips into the same well of cultural relativism, declaring: “I do not believe that there exists a set of immutable principles for the political organization of a state. Each state must prove extremely imaginative and inspired if it is to find the mechanisms capable of combining political forces that do not always share the same options. Every society inevitably has a specific form of political organization. Just as every people evolves in function of its own cultural experiences” (1995:55).

The president of Equatorial Guinea, T. Obiang Nguéma, justifies his adherence to cultural relativism via the rhetoric of political illiteracy:

Like all African nations, Equatorial Guinea is in the process of democratizing. This is why we have adopted a governmental policy that we have baptized trial democracy. For we cannot be considered as totally democratic. It is a new process. To speak of democracy, one needs a well-informed, well-educated people able to face the problems that emerge with democracy. The country must also have sufficient financial resources if democracy is to develop normally.... Africans see democracy as a way to make money, to obtain important positions, to live like kings, forgetting that their responsibility is to craft the nation. A great majority are not yet aware of the true meaning of democracy. Ignorance and poverty are, of course, factors that slow its development” (1994:102).

The “do-nothing” strategy: In the 1960s and 1970s, when African opposition leaders living in exile in the West denounced human rights violations in their countries and called for the establishment of a multiparty system and for free and fair elections, governments invariably replied by way of solemn communiqués. Anxious to preserve the respectability they had won by lobbying the most influential international media, autocrats vehemently rebutted all accusations. The demands of opponents were reduced to “posturing on the part of men hungry for power” or “attacks on national security” (compare Eyinga 1978), and insults were a large part of official replies. The ideologues of the single party always justified their responses on the grounds that because the people were not yet ready for pluralism, the maintenance of national unity, “patiently won” at the price of a long civil war, required sacrifices in the realm of human rights. For decades, the discourse of authoritarians centered on this theme.

Since the mid-1980s, African governments have evolved considerably. Amid the panoply of arms used against opponents, invectives remain a favorite weapon, but the content and timing of governmental reactions are now more original, more in keeping with the spirit of the times. Subscribing to the axiom that “there exists no historical law that provides that a people shall revolt at a certain threshold of despotism, famine or abuse” (Vargas Llosa 1993:2), African authorities presently opt for a do-nothing strategy. At first view, this does not look like a strategy at all, since it does indeed consist in doing nothing for as long as possible. In the face of their failure to improve the economy, of growing demands of all kinds, of scandals uncovered by the press, and of criticisms from the international community, governments often counter with silence. It is as if African heads of state think that by adopting a contemptuous attitude, they can wear down their opponents, keep them outside the arena of debate. Doing nothing has become a consummate political virtue. And sometimes it works! Sheer exhaustion has caused some members of the opposition to team up with those in power, for they feel their effort to change the course of history ended in failure (for example, in Morocco, Tunisia, Zaire, Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon); it has driven others to radicalize their discourse and thereby fall into the trap of blindness or populism; it has led still others to abandon politics (for example, in Zaire and Kenya)—which is the chief objective of governments seeking to reduce, in any way possible, the ranks of the opposition.

Disqualification and defamation as a weapon: A new function ascribed to official discourse is the use of discredit and defamation as a strong weapon against recalcitrant members of the opposition. To each of the opposition’s demands, the government responds with censorship (silence) or systematic vilification (words). This was the case in May 1990, when Cameroon’s chief opposition leader, John Fru Ndi, led a march in Bamenda for the establishment of the Social Democratic Front party (SDF). The authorities prohibited the protest march and deployed a large number of troops in the northwest region of the country. Thousands of protesters showed up, defying the Cameroonian army, which opened fire and killed six people. Unable to control the outpouring of emotion generated by the affair, the government launched a disinformation campaign centered on discrediting those who had organized the march. Over several days, journalists on Cameroon’s only state-run television station explained that the deceased had been “trampled to death” by other protesters. ₁₄ Poorly disguised archival footage was used to back up this claim. The protesters were presented as “wild gangs” from Nigeria who had sung the Nigerian national anthem during the march. John Fru Ndi was accused by the state press of being a common swindler who had been responsible for the bankruptcy of the Cameroon Bank, from which he had purportedly borrowed CFA 400 million that he never paid back. ₁₅

The same tactic was used between July and September 1992, before the presidential election slated for October 11. The regime got the Paris-based African press to run articles singing the praises of Paul Biya’s government and demolishing his opponents. Biya’s “success” was celebrated, his economic and political results deemed enviable. The other candidates were all impostors. John Fru Ndi, the opposition front-runner, was portrayed as the former cook (!) of Prime Minister Simon Achidi Achu. Yondo Black, who played an important role in establishing a multiparty system, was accused of being a crooked lawyer. The intellectuals in the front lines of the battle for freedom of speech were presented as “tribalists,” and “illiterate” ones to boot. Yet again, discredit and defamation served to belittle those guilty of the crime of imagining that things could be run differently. Only the glossy paper and dazzling photos of Jeune Afrique and Africa International outshined the Cameroon Tribune.

Similarly, Zaire’s dictator Mobutu uses insinuation to discredit his adversaries. Never at a loss for ludicrous ideas, he has declared that the “politics of food” is the only way to explain the behavior of those opposed to his regime: “Know that they come see me, eat at my table. Sometimes planes land in Gbado at two o’clock in the morning, and you wouldn’t believe who wants to have a chat. And I’m there, I receive them, and the planes take off again at 5 a.m., and no one’s any the wiser. Listen, I’m not going to say anything more” (1994:20). He also engages in sophistry: “It’s quite simple: in the minds of some of my fellow countrymen, the transition means nothing more than the departure of President Mobutu, his eviction, outside the context of any popular vote, and their installation—without elections. I said no! The people are sovereign, they have their say in this. All the more so since they’re the ones who elected me, and many times over” (1994:16). And when asked his opinion on the reasons for popular protest in Zaire, he responds without a chuckle: “Oooh!... It’s because of my personality, you see. I’m not always pleasant to behold, my head has an unpleasant shape, my name too no doubt. I make people feel uncomfortable, there you have it” (1994:21). Not a word is uttered about his catastrophic performance as Zaire’s leader for the past thirty years. To pacify the international community and maintain power, he need only discredit his opponents.

Resorting to the paradigm of ethnicity: To “explain” the difficulties of democratization in Africa, official discourse constantly resorts to the ethnic or tribal argument. Nearly two decades ago, Kotto Essome observed: “Because it explains everything, the ‘tribal’ excuse defies all explanation. Universally invoked as the fateful, ancestral cause of Africa’s ‘ethnic’ divisions, it excels in diverting attention from their genesis in colonialism and from the ravages on the fringes of a market economy that catalyzes and reinforces their institutionalization”(1985:33). Although the “tribal” is lacking in scientific substance, the ideological mystification of “tribalism” has allowed African governments to deflect public opinion from the only question that really matters: their abysmal thirty-year record of rule. By reducing even the most corporatist opposition demands, criticisms, and social tensions to “manipulative” efforts on the part of one or more ethnic groups to the detriment of others, African heads of state often succeed in eliminating debate on the economic failure and social bankruptcy of their countries. They systematically sidestep the issues raised by the opposition by bringing them back to the question of slicing up the mythical “national cake” among the different tribes.

Thus, when Cameroonian attorney Yondo Black was arrested in February 1990 because he sought to create a political party, the government accused him of having tried to use his title of traditional tribal chieftain to organize the takeover of the government by the Duala. Next the government elicited a “show of support on the part of traditional Littoral tribal chieftains for President Biya.” Wearing exotic tribal garb and ornaments of royalty, some went on television stating that the Duala community had not mandated Yondo Black to defend its interests. Although that had obviously never been the intention of this former president of the bar association, the government had achieved its objective: it had created a diversion so that attention would not be focused on the real question raised by Yondo Black—respect for political pluralism written into the constitution—and had lent credence to the idea that he was motivated not by nationalism but by tribalism.

The ethnic argument has nourished the practices and discourse of authoritarianism in the past few years. Thus, it is easy to see why the official ideologues became flustered when, after thirty-three years of exile in France, the writer Mongo Beti decided to return home in February 1991 (see Kom 1991a). Born in Mbalmayo, a true son of the south province (Biya’s native region), Mongo Beti has steadfastly opposed the regime. In his case, it was impossible to trot out the old “tribe-with-hegemonic-ambitions” argument; something else was required. Taken aback, out of catchy ideas, the government first organized a campaign on national television devised to show that Beti was, of all things, French! His identity papers were presented on television along with copies of visa request forms he had filled out in Paris in order to make the trip home. Subsequently, J. Owona, general secretary of the presidency and second in command, published a vitriolic article in a “private” newspaper published by the presidency in which he besmirched the writer’s family and accused Beti of having been co-opted by other tribes (Owona 1991).

The cult of fatalism: The efficacy of modes of political communication that use paralogisms and distortion depends on their capacity to maintain the illusion of power. To imprint these new “truths” into collective memory, the regime attempts to exploit the factor of time. It seeks to impress these theses on the general psychological environment—in a Braudelian sense. ₁₆ It endeavors to restructure the episteme by creating the conditions for fatalism on a massive scale. Its goal is to discourage the greatest number of citizens, to take away their interest in politics—in brief, to reduce political participation to the lowest possible level.

Through police brutality and various types of subterfuge, political opinion remains focused on considerations that do not invite debate. Such measures as censorship, the prohibition of privately run media, the imprisonment of recalcitrant journalists, the silencing of dissenting voices, the exponential increase in official propaganda, and the reinforcement of police and administrative powers have not so much recreated the climate of terror found in these nations during the 1960s and 1970s as they have created a collective weariness and discouragement.

More sophisticated, if hardly original, techniques are used to reach the same goal: sap the foundation of citizens’ hope and faith in the possibility of a different world. Thus, the enlistment of intellectuals in the apparatus of repression is not designed to breathe new life into the existing system but rather to convince dreamers and utopians that “every man has a price” (compare Mbock 1985), that it is better to put up with a corrupt (and sated) leader than to risk the alternation of power, which would come down to a political takeover by young, hungry wolves—even more inclined to rob the public coffers than those in place. ₁₇

Whenever the government wishes to justify the imprisonment of a writer, the torture that takes place at police headquarters, the rigging of the register of voters, the stuffing of ballot boxes, or the nonpayment of salaries, it finds at its disposal a pleiad of “professors-with-a-long-list-of-diplomas” (that’s the way they are usually introduced on public media) ready to explain such decisions. Cameroonians watched on television an “eminent” professor of public law criticizing the National Conference on the grounds that “it is not provided for by the dictionary” and that “a Belgian would not understand it.” They were not surprised when he was later appointed minister of culture. They likewise witnessed the promotion of a “great philosopher,” who had long called for the “dictatorship of renewal” (official ideology), to a high-ranking position within the administration of the University of Yaoundé. They have seen “world-renowned intellectuals” make meager attempts at theorizing tribalism and then assume the directorship of big-budget public agencies.

The same strategy of “conversion” has been used successfully against numerous political “opponents”: those who work for the government and whose only role is to create diversions; those who created parties in the hope of receiving state financing; and those who tired of waiting for the alternation of power and thus resigned themselves to joining ranks with the “presidential majority” in exchange for a seat on a board. Such maneuvers, which involve the combined interests of urban elites, coteries, mysterious lobbies, and various pressure groups, are not related to a given policy or political idea, but that does not prevent the government from presenting them as proof of the existence of a dialogue among the nation’s different political families. It also shores up the idea in the collective unconscious that alternation of power serves no purpose, that it might even be dangerous insofar as it would upset the delicate balance (’dialogue,” in official parlance) of political forces.

Without question, these new political techniques (the cosmetics of authoritarianism) have helped cloud the perception of Western and African political scientists. They underscore the need to refine analysis of African sociopolitical transformations. As the Beninese philosopher Houtondji has pointed out, “The major problem in the sphere of political analysis is to know not so much how a regime defines itself as what objective function this self-proclaimed definition has in the political game which the regime is playing” (1983:93).

Official African discourse stems above all from the idea, endorsed by numerous intellectuals, of the negatively marked specificity of the African political arena, for the political philosophy behind most theories of modernization supplies cultural relativism with a theoretical framework of which African heads of state take advantage (Coleman and Halisi 1983). When Huntington affirms that “the most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government, but their degree of government” (1968:1), he elegantly justifies the suspicion of the universality of forms of political organization and, in so doing, de facto concedes the validity of any form of relativism that claims to be able to govern “better”—that is, according to measurement criteria that may be defined only locally. Huntington’s initial criticism is no doubt well founded, but it leads one to a slippery slope that African dictators have not hesitated to start down, reinforcing their barbarisms with all sorts of philosophical justifications.

The Political “Bricolage” of the Opposition

In the face of the creative maneuvering by African heads of state, the opposition cuts a sorry figure—but this does not reflect the dynamism and seriousness of rural and urban populations, who do not hesitate to make sacrifices so as to manifest their desire for freedom. Wole Soyinka has often spoken of an Africa betrayed from within. This observation, which was subsequently developed by Ayittey (1992), certainly applies to the political arena, where the inconsistency and capriciousness of actors in certain countries is such that long hoped for change appears unlikely. There are several problems regarding opposition leaders. First, very few of them were prepared to fulfill their roles. Although the Côte d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo and Gabon’s Paul Mba Abessole have a great deal of experience fighting political battles, the same cannot be said of the vast majority of current opposition leaders, often former big shots in the regime who transform into its most bitter rivals. ₁₈ Cameroon’s Jean-Jacques Ekindi is an interesting case in point. A former political baron of the single party who organized in March–April 1990 a national march against the establishment of a multiparty system, a staunch critic of the coordination of opposition parties in 1991—two months after the first opposition party was legalized—he resigned from the ruling party in May 1991 and became the general secretary of said coordination in August. Similar examples can be cited for Gabon, Togo, Congo, the Central African Republic, etc.

Quite often, then, the career paths of opposition leaders are inconsistent, which raises the question of these leaders’ true motivations, their loyalty to the causes to which they have committed themselves (if loyalty can be said to exist in politics), and their leeway to maneuver vis-à-vis the regimes they claim to oppose. But given that politics is not an art of the straight line, as Winston Churchill’s tortuous ideological trajectory amply demonstrates, the seriousness of African politicians must not be judged on their successive party affiliations alone. This brings us back to our initial reservation concerning this category of African opposition leaders: It is their flexibility of spirit that makes their behavior so unpredictable—and always “justifiably” so. ₁₉

Almost everywhere opposition parties seem paralyzed. Ruling heads of state have custom-built adversaries; that is, the latter are often ready to celebrate the virtues of the old order, often incapable of transforming collective despair into an avenue for change. Despite the institution of a multiparty administrative system, public discourse remains one-dimensional insofar as the new leaders have not suggested alternative political programs. The numerous recognized opposition parties revolve around a few individuals, exhibit a rigid, centralized structure, and function in the same way and with the same ideas as the old single party. This organizational deficiency leads one to think that Africa’s multiparty system is but a conglomeration of multiple “single” parties.

I believe these are the principal reasons for the current confusion in Africanist political science. Next I shall attempt to propose an alternative vision of the political arena.

Outline of a Theory of Democratization in Africa

Having addressed the genesis of the misunderstandings that cast doubt on the relevance of Africanist political theories, I will now move on to an analysis of the space of politics. I will explain the new rules of the political game, interpret the current transformations and changes in attitude, and examine Africa’s contribution to democratic theory. Adopting Braud’s definition of the political arena as the “site of (peaceful?) competition for the right to monopolize coercion, to lay down the law and to guarantee its effectiveness in society as a whole” (1992:6), I shall analyze in more theoretical terms what is at stake in the current political battles and how the rules of the game and the behavior of the actors have changed.

The Reconfiguration of the Political Arena and the Capacity to Disguise

Many who have studied the African political game have spoken of the hunger for power that drives political actors but have not investigated their true motivations (Bayart 1989). These writers forget that power is never an objective in and of itself; rather, it helps one attain other goals, which are by and large clearly expressed. By analyzing competition for power in sub-Saharan Africa, one can better grasp the multiple dimensions of the present democratization process.

In the period immediately following independence, power in Africa was conceived as a sort of privilege, indeed a monopoly, held by a group of individuals and occasionally divvied up among members of a clique, along the lines of Krueger’s (1974) rent-seeking principle. At the time, this “substantialist” conception of power, to use Braud’s terminology (1992:10), was the most widespread in Africa. Numerous writers have referred to its most perverse forms as “neopatrimonialism” (Callaghy 1994; Médart 1994).

This paradigm is no longer operative today. Even the most extreme forms of African patrimonialism have undergone revision. Far from being a system of mere privilege trafficking and influence peddling, patrimonialism is attuned to the social exigencies of the times and seeks to craft a type of power that is less direct and primitive, more equilibrated, and, in a certain sense, interactive. The naked power that characterized the first three decades of African independence has given way to a much more subtle form of political action that I shall term power in disguise. It consists in the ability to appear to be something one is not (as witnessed in the techniques for the renewal of the symbolic order) and sometimes does not even require the threat of violence to succeed. A minimal level of obedience to government authority is guaranteed not only by the conviction of citizens that the state has methods of public and private retaliation but also by their very disenchantment, a result of the capability of authoritarianism to disguise itself. ₂₀ In societies with a highly developed sense of spirituality, the craftily manipulated politics of confusion allows leaders to capitalize on the psychology of fear, to play with people’s emotions, and to exploit the entire range of emotions.

The specificity of African power also lies in the very nature of the institutional arena in which political competition is played out. The usual dichotomy between rigid political systems characteristic of dictatorships (where competition is restricted because access to power is blocked) and flexible systems (where the various actors divide among themselves, in a more or less inegalitarian manner, positions of power on the local and national levels) cannot account for the subtleties of the African model. Both systems are combined in a semirigid model in which access to the political game is blocked less by way of restrictive constitutional provisions than through the practical, everyday implementation of laws and rules. Cases like that of Cameroon, where the constitution of May 20, 1972, stipulates that “the President of the Republic defines and implements national policy,” or Côte d’Ivoire, where a code of election law was adopted in 1995 for the specific purpose of keeping the candidate the administration feared most out of the race (French 1995a, 1995b; New York Times 1995), are exceptions, not the rule. In general, the textual framework of competition has been modernized to the point that access to the political arena is blocked not through institutional constraints but through abuses of the new legal liberties. Thus, when Zaire’s president Mobutu Sese Seko officially legalized 322 “opposition parties,” he knew very well that the effect on the political outcome would be the same as legalizing none; the excessive number of parties allowed him to trivialize the function of opposition to his government and opened up various possibilities for political manipulation—the heads of most of the parties were loyal to him, and these precious allies were numerous enough to defeat any proposal by the parties to take action against him. Most African dictators quickly understood and mastered this classic technique of barring access to the political arena via excessive politicization.

The evolution of the balance of power in the African political marketplace can be illustrated as a function of the number of parties, as shown in the Figure 2.2, showing the atomization dynamics of the political marketplace. This figure highlights the predatory strategy of African governments. In countries where the ruling (and former single) party reluctantly endorses the idea of political competition, it is possible to multiply deliberately the number of opposition parties to weaken the opposition as a whole. Authoritarian governments are powerful when the political game is dominated by a single party, as was the case in most of the continent in the 1960s and 1970s, or in countries where there is no political party at all (Nigeria and Uganda in the early 1990s). However, there is always an upper and a lower limit to any political power in Africa, whether it comes from the government or its opponents. These structural limits, which are represented by the two asymptotes in Figure 2.2, have been very important in the democratization process: Even under brutal dictatorships by single-party regimes, the government’s room to maneuver was constrained by various forms of passive resistance and informal techniques of collective indocility—illustrated by the higher asymptote. Facing new forms of strong, popular opposition in the early 1990s, African governments were obliged to open up the political market and tolerate some competition. Immediately following such a concession, their political power dissipated, as did their ability to repress opposition (represented by the downward sloping curve). Even at the peak of a democratic explosion, there is a limit to the weakness of authoritarian regimes: Some military leaders in the army can be neither removed immediately nor circumvented. They represent, therefore, the lower limit of the decreasing political weight of authoritarian regimes (the lower asymptote).

Figure 2.2

The opposition parties’ room to maneuver tends to increase exponentially immediately after the legalization of the first two opposition parties (the upward sloping curve). Thus, the optimal moment for radical political change lies somewhere between three and four parties, when the gap between the two main political actors is the greatest—the point at which the power of the authoritarian government has weakened drastically, and the strength of opposition leaders has reached its highest level. If major constitutional changes do not occur at this time, it is very likely that the country will move to another phase of political history; this is the second stage of the democratization process, typically characterized by major setbacks in political reforms. Beyond four or five parties in the political market, the authoritarian regimes are able to regain a monopoly: They support the establishment of an infinite number of new “opposition parties” that are totally under their control and that are used to challenge or ridicule their strongest competitors. Discord is almost inevitable among so many opposition leaders, some of whom invariably end up claiming “ethnic” or “regional” legitimacy, which enables them to join a coalition government in the repressive system they pretended to oppose. Such strange moves have devastating psychological effects inside and outside the country, for they send negative signals to the other players who are involved in or who are watching the game: Those in popular resistance movements are discouraged by what they see as their leaders’ lack of commitment or even betrayal (especially by those who later make deals with the government they opposed), while international opinion is quick to conclude that opposition leaders lack clear vision, strategy, and consistency. Such was the case when opposition leaders became ministers in the government they had opposed after the 1992 presidential elections in Cameroon and Kenya, the 1993 presidential race in Senegal, and the 1995 legislative and presidential elections in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, respectively.

Thus, by flooding the political market with as many political parties as possible, the government is eventually able to trivialize (or even marginalize) its opponents. Of course, it is usually well known that most of the newcomers are in fact political allies of the sitting government, but it does not matter, since their official status as opponents entitles them to official respectability, public funding, campaign time in the public media, etc. The actions of these newcomers finally erode the political appeal of the other opposition leaders, who are quickly labeled “radical,” “irresponsible,” or “violent” people. This is one of the main paradoxes of multiparty politics in Africa: the higher the number of opposition parties, the weaker the opposition is as a whole, and the stronger the authoritarian regime becomes. It all boils down to monolithic pluralism, for the political weight of the two main political actors may grow or diminish, but it returns to the starting point. A political baron of Cameroon’s former single party used a nice metaphor to describe the current situation of atomization of the political market and ideological unanimity. Some political actors are sopranos, he said, others, baritones, but they’re all singing the same song (Ntsama 1993).

The Cohabitation of Two Worlds

The original character of political struggles in sub-Saharan Africa is also attributable to the multidimensional nature of the political arena and the weak differentiation between the organic and the functional. The political arena is multidimensional insofar as two distinct levels of political activity exist: one visible, the other invisible (Monga 1995a).

• Researchers tend to focus on the visible level of the political arena, made up of three main types of actors: institutions provided for by the constitution (the executive and legislative branches, the judiciary, the highest governmental agencies, the military); political organizations (parties and affiliated associations); and various organizations of civil society. I call this the technostructure of government.

• Few people even suspect the existence of the invisible level, which is likewise divided into three primary categories: international pressure groups (European politicians who receive financial backing on the sly from Africa, Western diplomats working in or on Africa); transnational financial networks (including international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank, as well as businessmen, large corporations, and banks with commercial interests in sub-Saharan Africa); and sects, religious groups, and other private transnational organizations. I call this the superstructure of the political marketplace. Figure 2.3 illustrates the two levels as a longitudinal section of the African political marketplace.
   

Figure 2.3

The democratization process was intended to reaffirm the principle of an effective balance of power via the division of responsibilities among the different branches and agencies of government. But even in countries that adopted new constitutions allowing such balance to occur, the exercise of power is still stuck between the known and the unknown level. This has resulted in the blurring of the institutional boundaries that the revision and clarification of the rules of politics sought to introduce. Thus, alongside the legislative, departmental, and judicial branches of government are informal networks of power, which are extremely active and powerful, and through which most important political and economic decisions are made. That is why the hopes public policymakers placed in democratization have not materialized—the decisions reached in the informal political circuit tend to cancel out official government programs. The elaboration of economic policy comes up against the conflicting agendas of the various actors. Researchers who do not grasp the structural subtleties of the sociopolitical environment simply conclude that Africa is resistant to economic reforms and that the adjustments that need to be made if these moribund economies are to be saved cannot take place within the context of democratization.

In countries where the process of public policy development is mysterious, where the semantics of politics needs to be redefined, it is imperative to investigate the goals of political actors and the rules of political life in order is to understand the dynamics of the current situation. To begin, let us examine the uses and perceptions of power in Africa.

Uses, Efficacy, and Perceptions of Power

The disenchantment and utter confusion resulting from the “failures” of Africa’s first democratic governments intrigued and unsettled most analysts, who were eager to see confirmed their culturalist theories on the structural incapacity of African peoples to negotiate democracy. Hence, the civil war that broke out in Congo in 1993 and 1994, the fiery or Ubuesque conflicts pitting the prime minister against the presidents of the republic in Mali (1993), Niger (1995), and Madagascar (1995), the merciless battle between Benin’s head of state and his main political rival, the president of the National Assembly (1992–1995)—all of these events, which are typical (or so it was thought) of authoritarian regimes alone, have cast considerable doubt on the possibility of democratic consolidation in Africa. It is necessary to examine the political environment and imagination of these regimes in order to understand such events and to get past the indignant attitude of researchers toward these democratic “setbacks.”

To grasp the meaning of what is at stake, one must begin by classifying political actors according to their motivations. Certain leaders of political organizations, having found nothing better to do in society, seek power out of spite. This partially explains why, for example, there are more established parties in Benin than there are seats in the National Assembly. Others become involved in politics out of revenge, having lost the important positions they once held in the political system. Despite democratization, the African political class is the same as it has always been. Still others enter politics not to change things but to defend the interests they represent—interests that generally concern the few, cross ethnic lines, and exhibit no particular ideological bent. Around 98 percent of Africa’s political actors fall into these three categories. In their view, the alternation of power is more intimately linked to the alternation of men than to the alternation of approaches to government. According to the law of large numbers, a fundamental rule of probability theory, these leaders are much more likely to gain access to power than others. It is not surprising, then, that their actions obey a separate logic, their interests lie in the maintenance of the status quo rather than in change, and their agendas reflect the concerns of a minority of social groups instead of the hopes and dreams of the majority of the population.

We will have to wait until the fourth category of politicians, at present a tiny, fragile group, grows large enough to effect deep changes in the way politics operates in Africa. The forefather of this group is no doubt the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, the leader of an opposition party (the Rassemblement National Démocratique [RND]) founded during the Léopold Sédar Senghor years, who has become so disillusioned about his ability to influence events that he has chosen to withdraw his party from elections. The RND’s involvement is limited to championing a few issues.

Signs of the emergence of this new race of politicians attuned to the needs of the population are perceptible here and there, but for the time being, democratization continues to make do with the politicians at hand. Their mediocrity in no way affects or reflects the people’s desire for freedom or the quest for democracy on the continent. If the depth of democratic feeling were judged solely on the basis of a nation’s leaders, then neither Japan nor Italy nor Canada nor even the United States would pass the test. Why do political scientists tend to demand of Africa that which they do not expect from other regions of the world?

Another problem arises from what I shall term Braud’s paradox, whereby a government has much more difficulty effecting change when it takes power in a preexisting environment of legitimacy:

If socio-economic structures are by and large seen as satisfactory, if common values have been strongly internalized by the different segments of the population, if, finally, the political regime appears properly adapted to the expectations of social groups, governments and those seeking to replace them have little latitude to act. As for advocates of radical change, they have no chance of running institutions.... The alternation of power is as frequent and smooth here as the parties or opponents are similar to one another, sharing in fact more or less common social conceptions. On the other hand, as soon as this condition is lacking (or appears to be lacking), democratic alternation of power becomes a major political problem (1992:19).

This paradox takes a different form in black Africa, where the ingredients for desired change are in no way lacking—the painful failures of the past forty years have prepared even the most timid spirits for a revolution in the institutional framework and the exercise of power. But two problems exist that weaken the capacity of new leaders to bring this to fruition: the proximity of the ideological positions of politicians, old and new, as the categories proposed earlier suggest, and the money factor, so very important in these lean times. In countries in dire economic straits, some of which are forced to depend on outside aid to pay the salaries of civil servants and to cover the government’s operating expenses, there is little room to maneuver in the area of public policy. Once in office, the leaders who have been duly elected (or whose legitimacy is uncontested by their opponents) find themselves held hostage to economic realities. A case in point is Niger’s president Mahamane Ousmane. The centerpiece of his 1992 campaign was a virulent attack on the IMF’s and the World Bank’s programs of structural adjustment. No sooner had he won the election against the former single-party candidate than he had to convince the international financial community of his seriousness. In the end, Ousmane had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill of structural adjustment, for which the voters never forgave him. Only months after assuming office, his government lost a vote of confidence in the National Assembly and a chaotic coalition government with a hostile prime minister ensued.

Contrary to Braud’s prediction, it is not so much the population’s acceptance of existing values and socioeconomic structures that weakens the ability of new governments to enact change. If his paradox remains apposite—that is, if the new leaders’ freedom of action is inversely proportional to their legitimacy—it is because they almost always inherit a disastrous economy but almost never try either to explain the reason for the rigorousness and brutality of their economic policies or to conceive alternative programs of development. Caught between a demagogic, superficial critique of the IMF’s programs of adjustment and an incapacity to envision new horizons and possibilities, they find themselves trapped in a legitimacy without content. Albeit democratically elected, these new statesmen are scorned by the international banking community and are eventually dropped by the very people who brought them to power. This is the syndrome of powerlessness to which the governments of Niger, Mali, Congo, the Central African Republic, Zambia, Madagascar, and São Tomé and Principe have fallen victim.

Pakistan’s prime minister Benazir Bhutto said recently, in an effort to explain the disaffection toward newly elected governments, that the problem is that people believe democracy lowers inflation and reduces unemployment. Her statement mirrors what Benin’s president Nicéphore Soglo said following the 1995 legislative elections:

After a good campaign, many candidates among the members [of my] government were surprised to see parties show up at the last minute in villages, bringing either something to drink or an envelope, along with ballots in their name. This is why they did so well in certain areas. Many were surprised by this. But I explained that after seventeen years of economic decline—let us not forget that purchasing power fell 2% a year during the 1980s—it wasn’t surprising to see people leap at the chance to take that money (1995:60).

Such explanations are facile and do not withstand scrutiny. In reality, the problem is less a matter of the civic incompetence of the people than of the political incompetence of the leaders who claim to represent them. These are two very different notions that one should not use interchangeably.

On the other end of the spectrum, authoritarian regimes that have managed to stay in power through a subtle trade-off between brute force and disguised power—governments of such nations as Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Togo, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania—receive subsidies from and the blessing of the global banking community. Alas, they too have had little if any success in implementing public policy (Mosley 1991; World Bank 1994). This leads me to advance a model of political efficacy (see Figure 2.4) that runs counter to Braud’s observations and that measures a government’s ability to enact political and economic reforms (necessary to increase citizen involvement in the res publica) in terms of its level of legitimacy.

Figure 2.4

Thus, the use of political power depends less on who the leaders are and what they know than on whether the people see them as legitimate. Hence the necessity of reexploring this mundane concept, which few Africanist scholars bother to do.

New Strategies of Mythologic Legitimation

Aware of the intensity of popular resistance (active and passive) to their regimes, African governments endeavor to develop ideological mechanisms of socialization and regulation that are in fact techniques of legitimation. To this end, they have attempted to devise political mythologies. The first problem they confront is finding a frame of reference that cuts across class and ethnic lines, necessary for the elaboration of a system of representation centered on values acceptable to the entire population. But in countries where historical traumas (slavery, colonization, failures of the independent state) have left deep scars, ideological antagonisms have escalated. The insidious undermining process begun by the colonists and pursued by the local consuls and proconsuls working for the colonial powers profoundly altered the perspectives adopted by different indigenous social groups. Having experienced the same history, the same dramas, the same “culture,” and the same destiny, populations became convinced of the existence of an intimate, age-old identity of dubious origins. This terrible assumption gave rise to a considerable amount of suspicion—indeed hatred—and entire ethnic groups unknowingly became hostage to cruel, cynical warlords. The political incompetence of leaders (not the so-called civic competence of populations), tolerated elsewhere, has sometimes led to savage violence, as witnessed by the events in Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Angola, and Mozambique. Care must be taken lest the same scenario repeat itself in other countries (compare Chapter 7).

The multiplicity of collective memories necessarily implies different interpretations of the tragic and different social constructions, which is why certain heads of states do their best to incorporate these diverse perceptions of reality into hegemonic strategies (cultural or ideological) for the construction of socializing structures intended to serve their goals. Myths play an important role in this process. For decades, the most popular myth in African politics was that of solidarity, celebrated by politicians via slogans of a nationalist flavor or in favor of national unity. Regional integration was the leitmotiv of public discourse, even though the slogans actually served the politics of exclusion (Kamto 1987). Things have changed: The myth of protection has replaced the old standby and has comfortably installed itself in political discourse. Those entering the race for power now affirm that their goal is to protect people not only from the totalitarianism of the sitting government but also (and especially) from the supposed aggression of “rival” groups (ethnic, socioprofessional, etc.). The goal of national unity has given way to strategies designed to fragment society: The objective of politicians is no longer to appeal to the population as a whole but to shore up enough ideological or geographical support to make their views heard in the national political marketplace. The political action of many new players is confined to carving out an “ethnic” or “regional” base that allows them to bring something to the table when negotiations begin among respective “representative” groups. Given that everyone must claim to represent some group or other, the rhetoric of politicians often centers on the theme of protecting this group, whose overall size matters less than the size of its mouth. ₂₁ The myth of protection serves the purposes of a rather primitive political mercantilism.

For a while, the myth of competence occupied the scene. At the time of the first popular uprisings (1989–1992), the new politicians were expected to be competent “technocrats,” expert in the fine points of management and well versed in the arcana of international finance. The reasoning behind this expectation was clear and simple: The failures of the first three decades of independence clearly pointed to Africa’s urgent need for nonpartisan cadres able to get the continent back on track—the “politics of politicking” came later. The dire economic situation of African countries dictated that the major political players (dictators and their principal political rivals) take a back seat to former officers of the World Bank, the IMF, or some other international banking institution charged with putting the house in order. This is how the myth of competence came to be born. Alassane Ouattara, a former IMF executive, became prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire; former World Bank administrators André Milongo and Nicéphore Soglo were named to the same office in Congo and Benin, respectively; and coming from major international institutions, Zoumana Sacko became prime minister of Mali and Ahmadou Cheifou, prime minister of Niger. Heads of state feverishly sifted through the list of expatriates until they found one unknown (and politically insipid) enough to be named prime minister.

Was this a matter of naïveté? Whether or not, the myth soon faded away. With few exceptions, the mediocrity of the technocrats—combined with the ferocity of the opposition leaders and the fact that the people, impatient for change, were not fooled—was enough to invalidate any subsequent candidacy from abroad. In western Africa, these politicians are referred to as “vacationers,” expatriates who take a vacation from their jobs in the West to assume the temporary position of prime minister or even to run for president in the tropics.

Finally, the myth of legitimation, which aims at reaching “an effective consensus on institutions so as to reinforce the obedient attitudes that facilitate their functioning” (Braud 1992:37), has slowly begun to emerge but has yet to come to the fore in most African countries. Although the institutional sanctification that generally solidifies democracy is far from sight, most political and community leaders in Africa now prefer right to might. For example, the Islamic fundamentalists who have taken up arms against the Algerian authorities invoke the nullification of the 1991 elections as the primary reason for their anger; the armed factions involved in the bloody battles in Congo in 1992–1993 also demanded respect for the law. In the 1995 fight between the supporters of the prime minister and the proponents of the president of the republic in Niger and Madagascar, both sides called for respect of the constitution. Albeit superficial upon occasion, these references to the law are a positive sign, for in the past combatants never bothered to recognize the constitution or to come up with any legal pretext for their acts of violence. “Moral” discourse alone, accompanied by vengeful slogans, had been enough to justify their actions. The increasingly frequent appeal to the law suggests the return of an ethical exigency that must not be overlooked.

How long will the current political myths last? It is difficult to say. The conditions for the endurance of myths—the mobilization of leaders around their diffusion so that they might be accepted by the population—do not appear to have been met. This is all the more true in that a large fraction of politicians are content to respond superficially to the people’s demand for physical safety and self-esteem, of which Africans have been deprived for four centuries. The anxiety associated with, on the one hand, the outside domination of the colonial era and, on the other, the denial of civil rights prevalent in the postcolonial era is still very much present (Diop 1979). Most politicians answer this anxiety with frivolous symbols. The semiological codes upon which they rely to transmit their worldview and leadership qualities do not meet the criteria of endurance as defined by anthropologists: They do not draw upon local moral values, collective memory, or even the various resources of African languages. Thus, during presidential campaigns, people were shocked to see some sitting heads of state adopt as symbols of their goals animals they had hastily selected on the advice of European advertising agencies little familiar with the subtleties of the local imagination. On 1992 Cameroonian presidential campaign posters, a photo of President Paul Biya was superimposed onto the image of a growling lion, with the caption: “Man-Lion.” Zaire’s Mobutu has long compared himself to a leopard and always wears a fake leopard-skin hat. In both cases, reactions were mixed—people were not sure whether these attempts were designed to scare them or attract their votes. During the 1992 campaign, Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi chose the rooster as a symbol, which elicited sarcastic remarks as to his strength and courage. Côte d’Ivoire’s Henri Konan Bédié adopted the elephant after doing violence to the constitution and the election code in order to disqualify his principal rivals. His adversaries were quick to point out that his methods were indeed elephantine. ₂₂

Elements of a Theory of Democratization

This nonexhaustive inventory of the particularisms of African political life suggests that researchers should show a little more modesty in their judgments. The metamorphosis of the collective consciousness these past few years is such that one is obliged to return to Held’s basic question: “Is democracy an essentially Western project or is it something of wider, universal significance?” (1994:4). Responding to such a question reopens the old philosophical debate on universalism versus cultural relativism, on narrow rationalism versus unlimited culturalism. Elsewhere, I have attempted to put forth an argument and analytic framework reconciling these two approaches (Monga 1995b). At the moment, I wish to conclude by emphasizing the main lessons and theoretical exigencies that Africa brings to and imposes upon political science and by suggesting a simple conceptual model of democratization that incorporates these principles.

Africanist political scientists have too often attempted to use reductive analytic paradigms to study political problems in Africa. In their models, they frequently confuse causes and effects, parameters that matter and those that reflect isolated epiphenomena, and what economists term endogenous and exogenous variables. My analysis calls attention to a few essential points that will serve as the basis of my model:

• First, the democratization process in Africa is dissimilar to that which has been observed elsewhere. In Africa, it is a matter of a difficult and ongoing confrontation between unequal forces (those of repression and those of freedom), between, on the one hand, opposition leaders who are often politically incompetent and almost always discounted by the international community and, on the other, heavily armed authoritarian regimes that have outside support and the blessing of international political and financial organizations. This latter, apparently insignificant detail is in fact important; we must remember that the West, the former Soviet Union, and the entire world community actively contributed to the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and to the fall of military dictatorships in Latin America. ₂₃

• The central, if often subterranean, role civil society plays in the current transformations does not so much affirm itself as it must be inferred. Given the weakness of opposition parties (a reflection of leaders’ severely limited freedom of action), the breadth of the social movements that have arisen in sub-Saharan Africa these past years can be adequately explained only by internal dynamics whose scope must be measured, mechanisms understood, and operational codes deciphered. If the action of civil society is responsible for the groundswell of social movements on the continent today, then an analysis of democratization must be centered on it.

• The typology of the causes of the so-called failure of the democratic process in Africa generally consists in an inventory of the manifestations and effects of this failure (rather than the causes of existing problems) or in a study of routine institutional problems, which are found to some extent in all democracies, including those in the industrialized world. Paradigms that rely on the notion of political culture and suggestions by Pambou Tchivounda (1982) and Michalon (1994, 1995) for ethnic federalism need to be reevaluated and submitted to a simple test: are they valid in all regions of the world? The answer is fairly clear: in general they are not. For instance, if measured through civic competence, the level of political culture in the United States would be almost the same as it is in Mozambique; and ethnic tensions are certainly a major political issue in Canada, as they are in Malawi or Burkina Faso! ₂₄ In my judgment, these paradigms do not help one conceptualize logically the democratic phenomenon, which has other determinants upon which one needs to focus. One of the most important is that the major political players reach a consensus, not on the division of power among competing elites, but on the rules of political competition.

• The linear and teleological approach to democratic consolidation is by and large erroneous. The idea that it is possible to pinpoint the precise moment when this consolidation occurs—that it is a function of the number of free elections organized in a country or any other fixed quantitative criterion, which can only be arbitrarily established—is ludicrous. Nothing is static, nothing gained once and for all. Democracy as a quest for greater public welfare is an ongoing process, a daily battle between opposing forces—the forces of change coming from civil society, on the one hand, and authoritarian regimes, on the other, who likewise attempt to grab hold of fragments of civil society.

• In the short term, democratization is realizable in a given political marketplace only if the majority of existing political forces in a country feel it is in their interest to participate in developing the rules of the political game. In the long term, democratization is sustainable only on certain conditions: the implementation of the agreed-upon rules; the maintenance of a formal political system—in the mechanical sense of the term, implying human and financial means; and the existence of informal rules (1) that either enable the rules to be continually brought up to date as the interests of the principal players evolve or allow for the emergence of networks of social communication to facilitate the circulation of information among major political players and (2) that provide for the nonviolent, unobtrusive adjustment of political behavior, which gradually transforms normative democracy into (the illusion of) a long democratic tradition. ₂₅ Finally, the democratic spirit becomes engraved in the collective imagination as over the years citizens enlarge the space of what the great British jurist J. F. Moulton termed “the domain of obedience to the unenforceable” (1925). Human actions continue to fall into the three categories Moulton defined: on the one end, those prescribed by law, which all are expected to obey; on the other, those that depend solely on the will of the individual; and in between, those that arise more or less voluntarily and that are neither imposed by law nor born of pure individual will. It is to this third category of actions, where human behavior results from a blend of individual consciousness and respect for the law, and which is “nearly as strong as positive law,” that Moulton refers. Here “obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself.” There is, I submit, a strong, positive correlation between the existence of this third domain of human actions and the sustainability of democracy and democratic deepening.

• A country’s level of political development, if such a thing may be said to exist, must be measured above all on the basis of the degree to which the different political players have reached a consensus on the rules of the game. More than any other variable, this consensus determines (1) the validity of the concept of democracy as it is conceived in a given nation, (2) the manner in which it is implemented, and (3) whether it will be successfully maintained. It therefore plays an important role in the consolidation of democracy, the quality of which will later depend upon the strength of Moulton’s third domain of human action.

• When forces for change manage to decipher the different forms of behavior within civil society and channel them into greater participation in political life—which may be “invisible” to traditional political scientists—they will succeed in imposing a broad consensus on the rules of the political game, which will subsequently translate into a true liberalization of politics. If, however, the forces of repression (at the present time, authoritarian regimes still in power) have enough financial and human means to limit the intrusion of civic organizations into political life, it is unlikely that a consensus will be reached on the political agenda and on the rules of competition. The democratic process, in that instance, would have little chance of consolidation.
   

These assumptions and observations may be graphically illustrated in Figure 2.5. The reasoning behind this simplified model of democratization partially corroborates Przeworski’s point of view:

Figure 2.5

Democracies last when they evoke self-interested spontaneous compliance from all the major political forces.... To evoke such compliance, democracy must simultaneously offer to all such forces a fair chance to compete within the institutional framework and to generate substantive outcomes; it must be fair and effective. Yet under some historical conditions, these requirements cannot be simultaneously fulfilled by any system of democratic institutions. Foremost among such conditions are periods of profound economic transformation (1991:x).

My analysis of the African body politic leads me to temper Przeworski’s idealism—in my view, democracy is never “fair.” As soon as people start competing for power, the concept of fairness must be wielded with great caution, even when the various stakeholders agree upon the results of negotiations.

 

Conclusion

It is high time political scientists and, more generally, Africanists in the social sciences reevaluated the theoretical frameworks through which they analyze political phenomena in Africa and adopted a more imaginative approach to the subject. To return to Sklar’s remark cited at the outset of this chapter, I would say that Africanist political science lacks legitimacy at the moment and thus offers little of value to the social sciences. Political scientists must free themselves of the models to which they are presently chained and follow the advice of de Certeau (1984), who advocates a close reading of the way in which people invent their daily lives.

The bloating of the social imagination, brilliantly analyzed by Ka Mana (1991) and exhibited by the eruption of actors with strange political habits on the political scene, must not stop one from seeing the forest for the trees. Beyond the outrageous behavior and missteps of politicians, which are in no way confined to Africa (compare Castoriadis 1987), the continent is doing its best to get by, to survive neglect—that is, to struggle against historical determinism. It sometimes gropes and staggers along, zigzags more than it advances in a straight line, but its desire to be free of the scorn of outsiders and of its own self-doubts is, in my view, obvious. That is why I am attempting to understand the intimate determinants of the population’s political behavior and to decipher the hidden rationality that appears to govern daily life.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: Hermet (1983) and Badie (1988) belong to the first school of thought; Touraine (1992) and Lefort (1981, 1986) to the second. Back.

Note 2: The suspicion with regard to elected representatives and hence to the active exercise of citizenship goes back to Rousseau’s The Social Contract, written in 1762: “Soveriegnty cannot be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated ... [for] the people’s deputies are not, and could not be, its representatives; they are merely its agents; and they cannot decide anything finally. Any law which the people has not ratified in person is void; it is not law at all. The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing” (p. 141). Back.

Note 3: Interviews with the following opposition leaders: Laurent Gbaggo, Côte d’Ivoire (April 1990, April 1993); John Fru Ndi, Cameroon (May, October 1992); Paul Mba Abessole, Gabon (February 1992), Mountage Tall, Mali (June 1991); Aristide Sokambi, Central African Republic (June 1991). Back.

Note 4: According to the most serious economic journals, the global financial community was in fact staunchly opposed to political transformations in Africa, for it considered that the uncertainty of such developments would be bad for business. Compare Geisler (1993:631). Back.

Note 5: The notion of consociationalism warrants a few comments. Lijphart (1977) coined the word from Johannes Althusius’s concept of conociatio in his Politica Methodice Digesta (1603) to suggest a new way of conceptualizing democracy in what he calls plural societies. Lijphart presents the models as follows:

In a consociational democracy, the centrifugal tendencies inherent in a plural society are counteracted by the cooperative attitudes and behavior of the leaders of the different segments of the population. Elite cooperation is the primary distinguishing feature of consociational democracy....
[It] can be defined in terms of four characteristics. The first and the most important element is government by a grand coalition of the political leaders of all significant segments of the plural society.... The other three basic elements ... are (1) the mutual veto or “concurrent majority” rule, which serves as an additional protection of vital minority interests, (2) proportionality as the principal standard of political representation, civil service appointments, and allocation of public funds, and (3) a high degree of autonomy for each segment to run its own internal affairs” (1977:1,25).

First, the idea of a plural society sounds like a pleonasm. At this time of globalization and triumphant multiculturalism (whether illusory or real), I cannot think of any country that is not a plural society. Second, I doubt the effectiveness of those political coalitions that are designed to share the “national pie” equitably among various segments of society, for this is exactly what most African leaders have attempted to do since independence—we now see the results of such strategies. As far as proportionality of representation is concerned, besides its utopian aspect (how do we define a segment?), one must recall that African leaders’ attempts to implement such a concept led to the adoption of public policies based on the strange idea of “balanced regionalism,” that is, the classification of people using teleological ethnic labels conceived for the very purpose of the operation. In countries such as Cameroon or Rwanda, the main outcome was the legalization of injustice and arbitrary policies. Finally, the vague formulation of Lijphart’s fourth principle (a high degree of autonomy for each segment of the national population) reveals the practical difficulties of its implementation: Even if “successful,” this would lead to a Nigerian-style centrifugal federalism; the worst case would be endless claims of micronationalism by various political entrepreneurs, as witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. Back.

Note 6: My definition of political risk goes beyond the classical analysis of country risk used by investors. It includes the social risk taken by each member of the community to express his ideas publicly against the prevailing institutional practices, and current social and cultural habits. I believe there is a direct correlation between political risk and the democratic project’s chances of success. Back.

Note 7: At the conference on “Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile,” organized by the African Studies Program of Northwestern University in November 1994, I listened to Dennis Brutus’s stirring reflections on disenchantment. The famous South African poet was wondering whether so many lives had been sacrificed over the years simply to conquer voting rights in order to insert the country into the world market economy—at the price of devaluing human beings and destroying the environment. One should not dismiss his remorse on the grounds that it reflects the disillusionment of a nostalgic Marxist. According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward (1994), the U.S. president asks himself the same questions, since his room to maneuver in the economic policy is severely limited by the attitude of a small group of bond traders on Wall Street. James Carville, one of President Bill Clinton’s election advisers, confirms the limits of political power in the world’s greatest democracy: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope. But now I want to be in the bond market: you can intimidate anybody” (quoted by Woodall 1995:3). A rather sad assessment of the financial markets was made by French president Jacques Chirac, who once described speculators as the “AIDS of the world economy” (Woodall 1995:3). Back.

Note 8: At a conference sponsored by the African Studies Association (Orlando, Florida, November 1995), Howard French, the New York Times’ correspondent in West Africa, explained that the editors of major U.S. newspapers view Africa as a training ground for young foreign correspondents because it is the only place in the world where a mistake made by a journalist has no negative consequences (it affects neither the newspaper’s reputation nor diplomacy and finance). Back.

Note 9: The expression is taken from Péan (1983), who studied the no-man’s-land of patrimonialism that characterizes Franco-African relations. On the same subject, see also Glaser and Smith (1992), Médart (1994), and Martin (1995). Back.

Note 10: The research methodology used to carry out the survey was sound, respecting most scientific standards. The problem lay in its applicability and effectiveness. The 100-item questionnaire was, for example, translated into four Zambian languages (Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Kaonde), but it is well known that only a tiny minority of Africans can read the language they speak fluently. What is more, the way certain notions that are foreign to the collective imagination are understood can significantly alter responses. In the section of their study entitled “Conventions and Caveats,” Bratton and Liatto-Katundu note, for example, that

respondents appear to have misunderstood some items because they were vague or difficult (the ten-point numerical scale used for questions on political trust proved too difficult for a few respondents who were old and illiterate, engendering a few meaningless responses); ... sometimes, they tried intentionally to mislead the interviewer (for example some people didn’t want to reveal that they had a radio in the house for fear that it would be stolen.... We also failed to capture situations in which a household owned a radio, but it was broken or had no batteries) (1994: Appendix, and n. 11 and 12).

 Back.

Note 11: For a listing of important events, see Bratton and Van de Walle (1992:32). Back.

Note 12: My purpose here is not to suggest that physical violence against political opponents is no longer practiced in Africa. The recent attempts by the military to assassinate opposition leaders in Togo and Cameroon and the murders of Nigerian political opponent Ken Saro-Wiwa and Burundi’s elected president demonstrate the continued use of this radical tactic. Back.

Note 13: Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivorian opposition leader, criticized such approaches by saying: “We do not want an Ivorian type of democracy. We want democracy, period.” Interview. Back.

Note 14: Following this affair, CRTV lost most of its credibility, and the journalists who participated in the government’s disinformation campaign were held up to public scorn, most notably Z. Ngiman, who had read the government’s communiqué on the air. Under public pressure, he was forced to elucidate the affair. He cosigned an open letter to the minister of information denouncing governmental pressure and later published a book on the incident in which he explained how the government had forced television journalists to malign John Fru Ndi’s SDF. See Ngiman 1993. Back.

Note 15: See Ekani (1990:2) The defamation campaign did not have the desired effect on the public. Moreover, in a suit filed by the SDF, a courageous judge in Bamenda recently ruled that the government pay FCFA 10 million in damages weekly to the chairman of the SDF. Back.

Note 16: Deciphering the manner in which things are inscribed within time, Fernand Braudel isolated three elements of duration and demonstrated how on the surface events express conjunctural fluctuations, which are dependent, in turn, upon slow structural shifts. Back.

Note 17: Many executives in Yaoundé, as well as many peasants in the back country, use the following reasoning: “It’s better if Biya stays in power because he’s already gobbled up so much that he might actually get down to work. If we replace him with a younger man, we’ll have to wait until he, too, has done his share of gobbling up.” The rationale has held true in other African countries. Back.

Note 18: It is likewise necessary to distinguish here between leaders with pre-1990 experience fighting political battles inside their countries and exiled leaders who engaged in them from the outside alone. Back.

Note 19: In this regard, the career path and discourse of A. F. Kodock, secretary general of the Cameroonian UPC “opposition” party, are instructive. After criticizing and ardently fighting the Biya regime for several months, he was appointed to the cabinet, which increased tensions within his political family. Asked by the press to explain the dramatic shift in his position, Kodock mentioned divisions within his party and blundered that he was ready “to hang on even to a serpent in order not to drown.” Beyond the Freudian slip of comparing the head of state, his new boss, to a serpent, his comment reveals the tremendous and, unfortunately, typical cynicism of “new” African politicians. Back.

Note 20: State violence now takes various forms in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to the traditional policing agencies (the military and state and local police), the government uses private militias, Praetorian Guards of sorts who answer only to the head of state. Generally better trained and better armed, the “soldiers” of these paramilitary organizations are recruited along ethnic lines and have an antagonistic relationship with the national armed forces which, in theory, are already at the service of the government. This “private” dimension of state violence, which existed in various Latin American countries during the 1970s, is a relatively recent phenomenon in Africa. Back.

Note 21: For this new type of politician, it is no longer a matter of trying to represent the largest number of voters but of appearing to be the intrepid defender of a given social group—majority rule losing its raison d’être. The only thing that counts is speaking in the name of a particular constituency and presenting oneself as both its advocate and agent. In essence, one must loudly and clearly proclaim that one is speaking for a disenfranchised, long-suffering, excluded group. Back.

Note 22: Occasionally, African autocrats’ attempts at mythological legitimation are so awkward that they backfire. See, for example, Toulabor (1981). Back.

Note 23: An instructive example of this political double standard is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lech Walesa in 1983. This highly significant political and symbolic gesture, orchestrated by a group of Western democrats and humanists, increased world recognition of this union leader and apprentice electrician who had founded the Solidarity Movement in 1979. The free world was also sending a clear message to Poland’s General Wojciech Jaruzelski and his Soviet sponsors. Aside from a few intellectuals such as Nigerian Wole Soyinka, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, freedom fighters in Africa (politicians like Walesa) have never benefited from such direct support. Well before the establishment of the Solidarity Movement, people were fighting for change in Africa; they were openly silenced, forced to exile, prison, or death. And all the while Western democrats remained silent. As Walesa was being awarded with the Nobel Prize, Laurent Gbagbo, leader of the clandestine Ivorian opposition, who had taken temporary refuge in France, was “under surveillance” by the French socialist government, which described Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the Ivoirian Jaruzelski, in panegyric terms (’the sage of Africa,” “the founder of the modern Côte d’Ivoire,” etc.) that might have come from the mouths of communist autocrats. Western governments have praised all of Africa’s dictators, from Morocco’s Hassan II, to Mali’s Moussa Traoré, to Somalia’s Mohamed Siad Barre. Back.

Note 24: The boisterous remarks—reinforcing tribalism—that Quebec’s separatist leader, Jacques Parizeau, made on the evening of the October 30, 1995, referendum on independence amply demonstrated to any remaining doubters the limits of the myth of national unity achieved through multiculturalism. Similarly, the reaction of U.S. citizens along racial lines to the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial underscored deep ethnic division in the United States. This has yet to incite any “expert” to call into question the effectiveness of U.S. democracy or even to suggest that Lijphart’s theories on plural societies be applied to the United States. Back.

Note 25: The idea that the experience of democracy is an illusion may seem cynical. I concur with Dahl and others that democracy is necessarily a utopian horizon as soon as it is given more than a purely “political” content (the right to vote). Admittedly, some people live their utopias better than others. Back.

 

The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa