[ad_1]
One day, if they follow the instructions, the new African democracies will become "real" like those of Western Europe and North America. This hypothesis makes little sense – but it influences the way many people in the West and Africa think of African democracies.
Challenging this myth is a central theme of my book Power in action: democracy, citizenship and social justice, which has just been published by Wits University Press.
The book notes that over the last two decades, democracy has flourished in Africa: in 1990, the continent was home to at most four democracies. Today, the countries in which the government is not at least elected by free suffrage, where the opposition parties compete, constitute a small minority. However, academics, policymakers and Western journalists are deeply convinced that African democracies are not yet "the finished product" – that they are still on the verge of becoming full democracies.
Western academics and policymakers are still deeply rooted in the feeling that African democracies are not yet "the finished product".
This point of view gave birth to a field of university study in the West: the search for "democratic consolidation". This came about because academics badumed that the new democracies were not yet "complete", even if they claimed to be democratic. They therefore sought to know if the democracies of Africa (and Asia and Latin America) were "consolidated", which meant that they were the finished product. Academics have never said how we could experience a "complete" democracy when we saw one. They do not have to do it – it is obvious in their writings that to become "the finished article", democracies must become like those of the West. Academics reflect a widely shared vision. Western governments that aimed to democratize the world were trying to "help" the democracies outside the West become similar to those that compose it. European and American politicians concerned with democracy elsewhere share this point of view. The same goes for many Africans.
State of Colonial Mind
African academics want to know if their democracies are about to "consolidate" and many commentaries on the continent badume that an "adult" democracy resembles Britain, France or the United States. United. This is particularly the case in countries like South Africa, which is home to a large minority of people of Western origin, many of whom believe that the West is home to the civilization to which the rest of the world should aspire.
This view has a distinctly colonial flavor. The moral excuse of colonialism was that it brought to the colonized "civilization," which meant everything the people of the colonizing country valued. There is no difference between that and trying to persuade the colonized elders that their democracies can only become "real" if they mimic those of the West.
But it makes little sense to claim that Western democracies are the "finished product".
It makes little sense to claim that Western democracies are the "finished product".
First, Western democracies differ from one another. So what version are people in Africa supposed to imitate? Should their countries become unitary states like Great Britain or France, or federal states like the United States and Germany? Should African states give trade unions and professional badociations a say in decisions, like Sweden, Austria and Switzerland? Should linguistic or religious groups have a say, as did Belgium and the Netherlands? It is difficult to know which of the many forms of Western democracy Africans are supposed to want to be.
Second, the "finished products" of the West are not as finished. Britain has an unelected chamber of traditional chiefs and clergy – the House of Lords. The US system allows half a million residents of one state to have the same voice in the Senate as the 35 million of another. Several Western democracies hold suspects without trial – the United States has been doing so for nearly two decades at Guantanamo Bay, far longer than the state of apartheid in South Africa has ever detained people without judgment.
Specialists from several Western countries are considered less free than those from certain non-Western democracies. To show the absurdity of claiming that Western democracies are always better, imagine what would happen if an African president was elected because he had won the vote in a state where voting machines were flawed and where the governor was his brother? That happened in the United States in 2000 – and no one said it was an "incomplete" democracy.
What if an African president was elected because he won the vote in a state where the voting machines were flawed and the governor was his brother?
Third, the democratic idea is that every adult should have an equal voice in decisions that affect them. Where is it going? Nowhere. So, no democracy is a "finished product". Not all of them achieve the democratic objective and Western democracies are therefore no more real than elsewhere. It is also unreasonable to claim that one democracy is more advanced than the other – democracy has many aspects, and in some cases the newer democracies outside the West are more distant than the ones they have. are supposed to be. More people vote in some African countries than in some Western countries. South Africa does more to promote women's participation than most Western countries. A study conducted by Botswana revealed that its people did not like democracy, as only 45% of voters knew the name of their MP – but the equivalent figure in Sweden was only 33% and several other European countries were far behind Botswana, whose voters are better informed than the Swedes.
Photo AP / Themba Hadebe
Inferiority complex
In summary, the complex of democratic inferiority of many Africans is unjustified. The idea that our democracies are of "grade B" and those of the West of paramount quality is false.
None of this means that African democracies are better than Western ones. This means that the idea of "real" and "not yet real" democracies expresses a colonial mentality, not a reality.
Like all democracies, African countries still have a lot to do. But they will never become what they could be as they struggled to become a copy of a westernized, romanticized democracy. African democracies will progress if they focus on the fundamental democratic principle – giving more and more people the floor to talk about more and more problems – and debating how to do it in their particular circumstances.
Steven Friedman, professor of political studies, University of Johannesburg
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Sign up for the Quartz Africa weekly report here for news and badysis on African business, technology and innovation in your inbox
Source link
