New Insights on Africa's Autocratic Past

Africa has not been immune to recent global trends in democratic backsliding. Although the vast majority of countries on the continent have been holding competitive multi-party elections since the end of the Cold War, we are currently witnessing attempts by elected presidents and ruling parties to extend their tenures through undemocratic means.1 These trends are concerning, not only for those seeing their rights and freedoms constrict, but because they are happening despite the presence of formal democratic institutions that are meant to curb the impulses of autocratic rule.|Our current era is not the first in which Africans have seen the erasure of hard-fought political freedoms as African countries turned autocratic after brief flirtations with democracy at independence. And like today, the autocracies of Africa's past boasted many of the formal institutions that we assume should constrain executives. For instance, data from the Varieties of Democracy project indicate that, for each year between 1960 and 1991 in sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent of autocracies ruled through a political party, 74 percent had a legislature, and 81 percent had a constitution.2 However, this widespread existence of formal institutions in Africa's past autocracies, as today, conceals the wide variation in these institutions' usage to constrain leaders. Contemporaneous scholarship written during the continent's autocratic era tended to bifurcate descriptions of African regimes as either ruled by 'big men' who completely disregarded formal institutions and instead treated their countries like personal fiefdoms, or as dominated by an institutionalized party-state in which the ruling party, and not the autocrat himself, dictated all aspects of governance.