The feasibility of democracy in Africa

Ake maintains that democratization in Africa is far from a fad, a reaction to political liberalization elsewhere or an expression of the contradictions of Westernization. It is more too than the expression of 'second independence' - from indigenous post-colonial leadership. The urge to democracy, he says, expresses a need for self-realization that is so deep that it elicits arduous and monumental risks. Democracy, Ake insists, should never be taken for granted and has to be defended in daily struggles. The book outlines, in a sweeping continental survey and with telling detail, how the democratic commitment has transformed Africa's legacy of dictatorship, military regimes and single-party rule. Yet, at the same time as 'we are all democratic message and subverted its promise. The danger of trivialising democracy into successive multi-party election, where one narrow elite succeeds another, is a real one in present day Africa, and the book spells out he hazards that lie ahead for nascent democratic movements at the grassroots. Ake throws considerable light on the big issues of underdevelopment and economic marginality, ethnic consciousness and the nature of political power in Africa. Then the international dimension of structural adjustment programmes, state-building and the end of the Cold War is correlated to political necessities within Africa. The interests of powerful domestic elites are explained in trenchant, down-to-earth terms. At the end of this scintillating exploration of the achievements and perils of democracy in Africa, Claude Ake suggests there are two distinct and incompatible views held within Africa itself. A minimalist liberal democracy focused on multi-party elections, the democracy the Western governments and the Bretton Woods institutions prefer, is at odds with the growing social democracy embraced by the masses and human rights activities, who demand material betterment, equality and upliftment, and concrete rights. A true African democracy of the second type, Ake shows, is not only feasible but necessary if Africa civilization are to survive.