Africa

9 Africa roger southall It remains fashionable to refer to the contemporary impetus for democracy in Africa as the ‘second wave of independence’ or as a major aspect of ‘African renaissance’. Such terms embody two major meanings: the disastrous failure of democratization efforts following political independence in the 1960s; and the umbilical relationship between social and economic development and democratization, if the latter is ever to take root in an Africa that is mired in poverty. The view that Africa is ‘trying again’ points not only to how a paradigm of democratization has assumed primacy in analysis of the continent’s condition since the early 1990s, but how that paradigm has become inextricably entangled with political and intellectual activism. Indeed, the urgency of democratization debates flows both from the desperate condition of the mass of Africa’s people and from the fact that, while on the one hand ‘democratization’ has in essence replaced Marxism as both explanatory device and panacea, it has on the other been appropriated as goal and tool by Western policy agendas. Democratization in Africa: the first wave Early approaches to democratization in Africa were largely subsumed under the closely interrelated perspectives of modernization and nationalism. The study of democratization arrived in the 1950s and 1960s as an accompaniment of decolonization, and in its most systematic and coherent form drew heavily on American political science. The study Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 138 AREAS of politics in Africa was discouraged during the colonial era. African peoples were regarded as backward, if not barbaric, and hence unsuited to the pursuit of ‘politics’ – conceived in terms of a civilized liberal ideal. Moreover ‘politics’ was presumed to entail the prior existence of ‘the state’, which at most, was taken to exist only in potential terms under colonial tutelage. When, belatedly political science did arrive, in response to the decolonizing formation of ‘new states’, it did so largely with all the baggage of American liberal commitment, with its diverse mix of idealism, universalism and (paradoxically) blinkered ethnocentrism (Omoruyi 1983). Africa’s ‘new states’ were assumed to be in the throes of a process of political modernization, whose end-state had an uncanny resemblance to political life in the industrialized West. In part, modernization theory was a response to the failures of orthodox economics, which was criticized as failing to comprehend the complex interactions between social change and economic development. Modernization was viewed as taking place via the diffusion of ‘modern values’, through education and technology transfer, amongst the new African elites who were at the head of the struggle against colonialism. A central preoccupation of political scientists consisted of the difficulties of ‘political institutional transfer’, which ran up against the embeddedness of traditional authority, especially as represented by the chiefs, who symbolized local particularities and the communal values of tribal life. Indeed, modernization was viewed by political scientists and nationalists alike as above all Africa’s transition away from an inhibiting tribalism towards a modern nationhood which, buoyed up by rapid economic development, would represent sovereign if not actual equality with the former imperial powers. If the process of ‘nation-building’ or ‘national integration’ was the primary responsibility of Africa’s modernizing elites, the principal instrument was the political party, whose function was not only to ‘articulate’ and ‘aggregate’ public opinion but to engage in the promethean task of ‘political mobilization’, of forging links between tribe and nation. It was in the study of parties that the supposed ‘valuefreedom’ of Western political science most easily cohabited with political idealism. Their formation and development Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 139 represented not only the most explicit embodiment of political modernization but also the condensation of heroic nationalist struggles for the achievement of the classic liberal goals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The very classification of parties symbolized the implacable advance of progress. For whereas cadre or elite parties were customarily formed as defensive reactions by traditional elites to the threats posed by modernization, mass nationalist parties were the creations of the forward-looking elites, who had appropriated the language of liberalism imported by colonialism, exposed colonial tutelage as self-serving, and honed the demand for African self-determination, sovereignty and racial equality. Significantly, however, whereas Western liberal-democratic thought was founded principally upon rational individualism as found in the political theories of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), African nationalism, emphasizing the putative solidarity of rapidly-forming, self-conscious, African national collectivities, had much greater affinity to the romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Consequently ‘African democracy’ soon came to resemble more the ‘people’s democracies’ of the communist world than Western liberaldemocracies. This was to have grave consequences in later decades, when the hollowness of Africa’s first attempt at democracy was to be laid bare by appalling widespread violations of human rights by regimes claiming to possess popular legitimacy. The fairly rapid political atrophy of the first wave of nationalist democracy in Africa, as first one-party regimes and then military rule took hold in an increasing number of states, was greeted in two ways. First, authoritarian trends were often conceived as a not irrational response by the modernizing elites to ‘the dramatic danger of disorder and perhaps even of regression’ (Zolberg 1966: 6). Thus Africa appeared to have too little, not too much, authority, although the most astute observers recognized that the conditions for authoritarian rule to bring about modernization were not yet present, and that the costs could be very great. The alternative therefore lay in the pursuit of a more limited version of democracy, one that would deal with societal stresses and strains by the sort of machine politics that characterized Western countries before they became fully Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 140 AREAS industrialized and modernized. Developing institutions like the civil service and military that could contain the urban masses would also help, for rising expectations were reckoned to constitute a serious threat to the political stability upon which industrialization and modernization (and hence democratization) ultimately depended (Huntington 1968). However, in contrast to such conservative responses, the second major response to the rising tide of authoritarianism was a reaction against modernization theory and an embrace of radical or Marxist political economy. Part of the problem for modernization theory was that its intellectual armoury was closely aligned with American foreign policy, preoccupied as it was with containing communism. There was, as Leys (1996: 11) claims, a silence about the social side of development that was cloaked by the doctrine of ‘value-freedom’. The capitalist character of the development that modernization anticipated was not openly acknowledged. Yet by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the outlines of an emerging African crisis were already manifest in the form of economic stagnation, political instability, authoritarian rule, militarism and not least, the rapid and highly visible formation of African privileged classes whose typically kleptocratic behaviour challenged their characterization as a ‘modernizing elite’. Not surprisingly, African scholars were increasingly drawn to the theories of the (metropolitan) ‘new left’ (which was simultaneously engaged in a critique of mainstream political science) and more particularly to a tradition of ‘expository radicalism’ in African studies – building on early works by such writers as W. E. B. Dubois and George Padmore, who argued how European colonialism had destroyed African civilizations and social and economic formations. Rodney (1972), for instance, drew not only upon ‘expository radicalism’ but also Frantz Fanon’s (1970) thesis that colonialism underdeveloped the personality of the colonized. He owed even more to Andre Gunder Frank and theorists of Latin American dependency, whose analyses and insights were now systematically applied to Africa. They built upon Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), where Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, argued that the fruits of African political independence had been denied by continuing economic dependence on the former Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 141 colonial powers. Dependency writers stressed not only the external orientation of African economies, which constrained the prospects for internal growth, but also how such ‘underdevelopment’ underlay the political power of the emergent African bourgeoisies – the principal beneficiaries of ‘neocolonialism’. Even where, as in Nyerere’s Tanzania, there were attempts to ‘de-link’ from metropolitan capitalism by pursuit of socialist strategies, state control of the economy translated into the development of a ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ whose interests contradicted those of workers and peasants, who were accordingly exhorted to engage in class struggle (Shivji 1976). Elsewhere, the lack of an indigenous entrepreneurial class with access to investment capital still required that development be directed by the state, as in Kenya for example. While dependency theory and Marxism contributed much to the understanding of the patterns of African development and ‘periphery capitalism’, they posed as many questions as they solved, not least because of their inability to delineate realistic alternative paths to development. Although there was an implied socialist alternative, it was difficult to demonstrate the existence in Africa of the indigenous social and economic forces that would carry such a revolution through. Instead, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, African countries were more typically dominated by ruling classes whose material interests were determined primarily by preferential access to the state. By the mid-1980s the population of sub-Saharan Africa was, on average, considerably poorer than it had been a decade earlier. Twenty-five of the world’s severely indebted low-income countries were in Africa, the continent was unable to feed itself, and AIDs was spreading rapidly, possibly affecting up to a third of the population in middle Africa. The bane of African national development was, then, not the emergence of a dominant class as such, but its parasitic character, supported by a ‘swollen state’. This swollen (or ‘overdeveloped’) state was also, by its nature, inherently authoritarian. On the one hand, colonial experience and post-colonial contestations had left African countries bereft of institutions (effective political oppositions, a free media, functioning constitutions) capable of countering abuse of power and ensuring administrative accountability. On the other, the centrality of the state to Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 142 AREAS resource allocation had encouraged a concentration of political power that typically saw personalized regimes ruling by a mix of coercion and clientelism – the granting of rewards and favours to particular supporters irrespective of the laws and regulations concerning public conduct. Democratization in Africa: the second wave The early 1990s witnessed a dramatic return of multi-party democracy to Africa. Whereas ‘in 1989 29 African countries were governed under some kind of single-party constitution, and one-party rule seemed entrenched as the modal form of governance’, by 1994 ‘not a single de jure one-party rule remained’ (Bratton and de Walle 1997: 8). This was widely perceived as the local manifestation of Huntington’s (1991) third wave of democracy globally. Many authors have stressed the increasing importance of political conditionality attached to foreign assistance and the emergence of Western demands for ‘good governance’ in contributing (with more or less effect) towards this democratic momentum. Yet although the surge of popular power in eastern Europe probably did much to undermine the legitimacy of oneparty and authoritarian African regimes, there is a consensus of radical and mainstream opinion that internal forces in the form of the rise of pro-democracy movements, not external pressures, were most fundamental. Study of ‘watershed elections’ demonstrates how protest movements incorporated key segments of African populations (students, trade unionists, professionals, intellectuals, some business interests, the media, women, the urban poor, small farmers and the churches) and how their demands for democracy were resisted by the ruling group, their business associates and often, their external allies (on France see, for example, Renou 2002). In apartheid South Africa especially, the combination of mass protest, declining regime legitimacy, and economic failure was widely seen as creating divisions between so-called ‘hard-liner’ and ‘soft-liner’ elites, propelling them towards multi-partyism and democratic transition. Yet political transformation in Africa at this time was both widespread and extremely uneven. A residual group Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 143 of states were largely untouched by the process, either because multi-partyism was well-established (Botswana) or because demands for reform were too weak (Zimbabwe and Swaziland). In a third group of states armed rebellions engineered the overthrow of repressive regimes with the hope of representative government to come (Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia). And in a fourth group, state collapse saw central institutions disintegrate under the weight of looting, communal violence and civil war (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zaire/ Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo-Brazzaville) or fall victim to the predations of rival warlords (Chad, Somalia). Despite this unevenness, democratization was rapidly to become the central preoccupation of academic observers and engaged activists during the 1990s, spanning the ideological divide between mainstream liberal and radical/ Marxist analyses, because for both it offered significant hope of a better future for Africa. Yet there were, inevitably, important differences of interpretation and emphasis with regard to, in particular: first, elections, electoral systems and constitutionalism; and second, the relationship between democratization and development. Elections, electoral systems and constitutionalism Very considerable attention has been devoted to the study of elections, and not least in the period 1950–65 when electoral procedures were used to determine, or at least to legitimate, ‘the form, rate and direction of the decolonization process’ (Cohen 1983: 73). Later, as Cohen (1983) notes, the tendency for military regimes to create ruling parties and then to stage façade elections (Zaire, Togo, Benin, Sudan) testifies to rulers’ recognition of the legitimation function of elections. And the re-establishment of constitutions providing for elections in post-military Ghana (1969 and 1979), Nigeria (1979), Uganda (1980), Upper Volta (1978–80) and the Central African Republic (1980–81), as well as multipartyisms’s re-introduction in Senegal (1976) indicated the continuing faith of some elites in the utility of elections. But the unevenness of Africa’s electoral experience created a valuable distinction between categories of elections (competitive, semi-competitive and non-competitive) (Chazan 1979). Even so, overall, the shift to one-partyism and militarism led to a declining academic emphasis upon electoralism; Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 144 AREAS most scholars transferred their attentions to the state, class, imperialism and underdevelopment. Africa’s second wave of democracy re-ignited enthusiasm for the study of individual elections (see for example Daniel, Southall and Szeftel 1999). Cohen (1983) illustrated how, during Africa’s first wave, analysts’ theoretical concerns dealt principally with voter choice (overwhelmingly, the extent to which choice was based upon ethnicity), voter turnout (notably whether regime restrictions on political competition increased voter dissatisfaction or political alienation), and political participation (the role of elections in legitimating regimes and/or entrenching their domestic political control). These issues still retained some prominence, but in the 1990s analysts became more concerned to locate elections in the context of contemporary ‘transition theory’ – in turn heavily influenced by O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead (1986). Apart from seeking to understand the causes of transitions and the variable rates of progress, major emphasis was also now placed upon the conditions for making successful transitions sustainable. Akin to the ‘new institutionalism’ interest in similar issues elsewhere, this resulted in renewed interest in both electoral systems and constitutionalism. Africa’s electoral systems were in large measure inherited from the colonial powers. Traditionally, Francophone countries have elected their rulers by systems of proportional representation (PR), Anglophone countries by plurality systems. Whereas for Francophone countries this usually involved parallel elections for parliaments and presidents, most Anglophone countries started with borrowed Westminsterstyle parliamentary systems before subsequently (in moves that reflected a growing centralization of power and a weakening of legislative checks upon executives) introducing separate presidential elections. This historical divide remains largely intact. Even so, significant debate has taken place concerning the qualities of different electoral systems, for two reasons. The first is that scholars, democratic activists and international agencies are seriously interested in how to prevent the abuse of elections by politicians, by means such as electoral monitoring (see Daniel and Southall 1999). A second spur has been the specific electoral requirements of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 145 On South Africa, a seminal contribution concerning an appropriate electoral system to best overcome the legacy of apartheid in an ideologically and ethnically divided society was Horowitz (1991), which argued for the adoption of an Alternative Vote (AV) system. A plurality system would lead to overrepresentation of a winning party, and national list PR would disconnect individual representatives from voters and effectively exclude ethnic groups not represented in a putative majority coalition (Horowitz 1991: 200). In contrast, AV would produce majority rather than coalition governments, by encouraging vote pooling and ethnic accommodation – parties would be forced to attract the second or third (party) preferences of voters. ‘AV does not stand in the way of majoritarianism, but makes majorities responsive to the interests of others as well. This is an important conciliatory feature – and one that builds legitimacy – in a divided society’ (Horowitz 1991: 202). In the event, South Africa opted for national list PR on the grounds of simplicity, inclusivity and the fact that no votes would be ‘wasted’. (The adoption of PR as a way of easing the transition to democracy in Namibia in 1989 was also influential here.) This was of major significance, in that it represented a move away from Westminster-style, ‘winner–takes–all’ majoritarianism in favour of an electoral system that provides for the inclusion of minorities, which in South Africa’s case are based primarily on ethnicity and race. Furthermore, it fuelled important comparative work by Reynolds (1999), who, after studying elections under plurality and PR systems in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and in Namibia and South Africa respectively came out strongly for PR as more likely to foster power-sharing and inter-ethnic accommodation. In contrast, plurality systems were more likely to foster majoritarianism and ethnic polarization. The drawbacks of the plurality system were to be demonstrated in Lesotho’s elections of 1993 and 1998, which led to the exclusion of opposition parties from the parliament despite their gaining a sizeable share of the vote. Lesotho moved to adopt a mixed member proportional system in consequence. And South Africa is now considering the merits of the reintroduction of constituency elections for at least a number of its MPs, so as to establish a firmer connection between voters and their representatives. Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 146 AREAS As much as the debate about electoral systems has transcended academe to become an increasingly significant issue in contemporary African politics, there is widespread recognition of the need to locate any electoral system in a wider historical and institutional context. For instance, both theoretical and empirical work has concluded that the combination of a PR electoral system with a parliamentary, rather than a presidential, form of government is most likely to enhance the prospects for democracy in Africa (Southall 1999). Meanwhile Darnolf (1997) ascribes the presence of a democratic culture in Botswana and its absence in Zimbabwe to the sharply contrasting nature of their decolonization experiences – Botswana’s peaceful negotiations with the departing colonial authority providing a basis for acceptance of diversity and opposition, versus Zimbabwe’s bloody liberation struggle, which fostered political intolerance and distrust of opposition. Such an appreciation of the historical legacies characterizes the revived interest in constitutions, central to the shaping and study of Africa’s multiple transitions. These transitions have varied considerably, but one of the most influential models was the national conference, pioneered in Benin in 1990 and later adopted in Cameroon, Togo, and Niger, where reluctant rulers were forced to concede the re-drawing of constitutions and the formulation of new rules for multi-party elections (Joseph 1991). Although equivalent processes have been variously waylaid or avoided by authoritarian leaders elsewhere, the idea that rulers should forge a contract with the ruled and craft a new beginning has become widespread. Indeed, because prominent African political scientists and other intellectuals have been intimately engaged in democratization struggles they have had to confront the democratic potential offered by different institutional arrangements and consider if there is a sound basis for rendering constitutions viable. For many, this has been difficult, for the previously predominant Marxian perspective saw Africa’s constitutions having fallen foul of what Okoth-Ogendo (1991) terms ‘the power map’ (whereby state elites appropriated themselves unfettered discretion over public affairs). In contrast, the new constitution-making tended to be dominated by a liberal paradigm that rested upon the twin pillars of limited government and individual Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 147 rights and freedoms. As Shivji (1991: 258) wryly observed, that paradigm required Marxists and Leninists to direct their analytical skills to upholding the positions of the liberal thinkers Montesquieu and Locke! An important outcome of the resulting debate has been a critique of liberalism and ‘good governance’ discourse as legitimating the right of Western powers to intervene in Africa whilst shielding the ‘democratic’ West from scrutiny. In turn, that has been linked to an insistence that for constitutionalism to take root in Africa it must recognize not only socio-economic rights but also collective rights, notably those of internally oppressed peoples (Shivji 1991: 256). This provides something of a linkage to the important debate, in the South African context, of the potential of consociationalism. Democratization and development The concern to render constitutionalism viable has been closely linked to debates around the complex interrelationships between democratization and development. Demands for democratization arrived later in Africa than the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), introduced by the Bretton Woods institutions in the 1980s in a bid to restructure economies, by reducing the ‘swollen state’. By the early 1990s SAPs had been joined by a democratization agenda that called for the replacement of one-party and military regimes by multipartyism and freely elected governments. This linkage between externallyinduced economic and political reform was explicit, the core of the argument being that democracy was not, in practice, to be found in the absence of capitalism. Such a position has proved immensely troubling for radical Africanists, many of whom are still having to come to terms with the collapse of the socialist model internationally. The standard response has been twofold. First, the orthodox western-institutional position has been regularly taken to task for defining democracy in minimalist terms, that is, in terms of the existence of free elections and multipartyism. This is routinely condemned as an extremely impoverished version of democracy. The importance of fundamental liberal freedoms cannot be denied; but they are not likely to mean much to the mass of African populations who live in dire poverty. This critique has been greatly Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 148 AREAS strengthened by examples such as Moi’s Kenya, where multipartyism failed to curb rampant corruption and the continued gross abuse of human rights, and Musuveni’s Uganda, where a ban on political parties is tolerated by Western ‘donors’ because of the proclaimed successful implementation of structural adjustment. Such cases merely indicate what many observers are convinced has become more obvious – the severe limitations of liberal democracy ‘in crisis-ridden, dislocated, marginalized, and impoverished economies’ (Ihonvbere 2000: 187). The solution, regularly proposed, is for African societies to become yet more democratic, for pro-democracy movements to base themselves more thoroughly upon civil society, trade unions, and human rights groups and so on to force through a more thoroughgoing reformulation of the state. ‘This will include a restructuring of the military, a transformation of the bureaucracy, a revitalization of the judiciary, constitutional engineering, the guarantee of basic rights and liberties, and the protection of minority rights’ (Ihonvbere 2000: 188). Romantically, perhaps, ‘democratization’ has come to replace ‘revolution’ as the radical panacea. However, analytically the debate may be said to have bifurcated into a struggle between the two poles of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘popular democracy’ (Saul 1997). On the one hand, the ‘political science of democratization’, typified by the work of American political scientists like Larry Diamond and Samuel Huntington, is based ultimately upon the political elitism of Joseph Schumpeter and the American theorists of ‘polyarchy’ such as Robert Dahl. Market economies develop, while state-socialist economies fall behind. For democratic reforms to proceed without provoking crisis, the costs to privileged economic interests must not exceed the benefits. Competing elites therefore have a formative role to play in crafting ‘pacts’, whilst disruptive popular pressures need to be contained. In contrast, the ‘political economy of democratization’ argues that such a focus on ‘low-intensity democracy’ abandons the pursuit of public purpose and fetishizes the market. In Africa, market reforms have undermined the capacity of states to manage economies in accordance with social, ethical and political priorities. By destroying indigenous industries and domestic employment they have accentuated social tensions. Ironically, therefore, globalization Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 149 and structural adjustment undermine rather than develop a basis for democratic peace and state-building. Saul’s (1997) very influential article argues that the proponents of the ‘political science of democratization’, along with the World Bank and fellow donors, have increasingly come to appreciate this paradox, and have accordingly resorted to a ‘political science of development’ which stresses ‘good governance’. This recognizes the need for viable statelike structures to maintain a minimum of order and legitimacy, and in effect to balance the contradictory pressures of political opening and economic reform, of managing dual transitions. Yet such approaches tend to downplay the socioeconomic policy content that such models are designed to ensure: ‘governance’ is presented as ‘performance-oriented’, akin to business management, designed in effect to contain disruptive popular pressures that might inhibit economic ‘progress’. The emphasis that such an approach places on holding the state to account and constructing democratic institutions capable of containing communal differences (‘statecraft’) are clearly vital (as is demonstrated by the collapse of social cohesion in countries like Rwanda and Somalia). But they can only go so far in humanizing Africa’s contradictions, so long as the economic landscape remains so ‘fertile’ for throwing up ‘pathological deformations’. In these circumstances it remains impossible to disentangle the twin issues of ‘capitalism and socialism’ and ‘liberty and dictatorship’. While the possibility of realizing socialism looks remote, demands for democracy and equality whose realization will require progressive social and economic reorganization are rising in country after country, and in the long term have to hold out hope for Africa. Africanists are understandably less concerned with exploring the general relationships between economic development and democratization that attract much interest in contemporary comparative politics and, even, among some economists (see Chapter 3 of this book, by Addison). As the literature tends to associate democracy with national wealth (albeit with important qualifications), it makes depressing reading for anyone concerned with the poorest continent and invites pessimistic long-term prognoses of individual cases like South Africa, widely touted as Africa’s best hope for progress (see Lane and Ersson 1997). Saul’s visionary Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 150 AREAS perspective therefore articulates a radical optimism that for many engaged scholars constitutes an intellectual and political necessity. The broader consensus, however, argues that, given limited prospects for successful developmental states in Africa, liberal democracy currently constitutes the only attractive option, notwithstanding its obvious limitations. Conclusion: the way forward Wiseman (1999) advances the grounds for ‘demo-optimism’ in Africa. Obstacles to democracy in Africa remain legion, and democratic progress is highly uneven, yet the continent’s political systems are, overall, more pluralistic and more open than they were before 1990. And democracy remains on the agenda because there is no plausible alternative. The debates outlined above will carry on. But alongside that, ‘demo-optimism’ might be reinforced by taking the analysis further forward in the following three directions. First, there is need for more extensive concern with democratic accountability. At one level, this will require greater attention to the concept and practice of political opposition, a dimension of democratization that has been largely subsumed under studies of political transition. However, establishment of the idea of opposition as legitimate, of oppositions as alternative governments, and of opposition as a vehicle for movement away from a politics of communalism towards a politics of ideas is central to continued momentum towards democracy in Africa (Southall 2001). At another level, there is growing urgency for the quality of democracy, and how it can be measured, to be investigated. Baker (2000) has argued for the expansion of conventional notions of accountability (revolving around popular judgements of politicians at the poll) to embrace rendering all those who make significant societal decisions (private or public) accountable to their relevant communities. All public power-wielding bodies, legal authorities and security forces, private power-wielding bodies (from corporations to churches), individual citizens (such as large investors), international legal and political bodies like the Organization of African Unity, and international financial institutions Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access AFRICA 151 should be scrutinized more closely. Measures for assessing the accountability of all such bodies are either available or can be developed, even though they will have to be supplemented by qualitative judgements. Their results will both allow for systematic cross-country comparison and more importantly can be utilized to strengthen and reinforce the accountability of power-holders who affect the lives of ordinary citizens. A second, related effort should be upon expansion of the study of participatory democracy in Africa. Both the cross-national study of political transitions and individual case-studies have often been divorced from examination of grass-roots level political participation. Focus upon democratization at national level has neglected the implications for local government, even though in many countries this is where ‘delivery’, whether by national government, ‘donors’ or non-governmental organizations, has to be implemented. In contrast to voluminous writing and theorizing about ‘civil society’ and its centrality to democratization, there have been relatively few systematic studies of what ordinary, poor, African people understand by ‘democracy’ and how they view their rulers. In this regard, Cherry’s work on African political participation in Kwazakele township in Port Elizabeth (1999), carried out over nearly ten years and spanning the transition from the apartheid struggle to the present day remains seminal. Significantly, she demonstrates the co-existence within popular consciousness of a joyous embrace of liberal democracy and confusion when it comes to people’s experience of the institutions of direct democracy (both party and municipal). Unrealized hopes of participatory democracy have led to growing cynicism and political demobilization, posing long-term dangers to the rooting of democracy in South Africa. Finally, there is greater need for elucidation of the interconnection between democratization and globalization in Africa. Far too often the response of African intellectuals to the impact of globalization has simply been one of rage. Hyslop (1999) protests that this is a product of a simplistic (and fashionable) notion of globalization as merely the latest stage of the expansion of capitalist production. Yet the expansion of communications and information systems, changing experiences of time and space, and massive cultural Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access 152 AREAS changes towards new social forms that collapse any distinction between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ compete as contenders with the economic for the title of being the driving forces of globalization. African rhetoric, looking back to the autarkic logic of dependency theory, only intensifies the continent’s marginalization. Instead, the way forward must be for African struggles against external economic domination, militarism, state repression and cultural imperialisms to link up with similar struggles elsewhere. Cheru (1996) admits that in the African context there is much hard work to be undertaken by social movements in developing a counter-project to current oppressions, yet this is vital if Africa is to participate in international moves towards shaping ‘a just, democratic and sustainable new world order’. Africa’s internal politics clearly need to be democratized, yet there is a growing consensus that this goal goes hand in hand with growing demands for the transformation of a global distribution of power and wealth that is fundamentally undemocratic. Roger Southall - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 06/30/2020 12:40:54AM via free access