Democracy for Africa?

Thinking about a possible African variant of democracy is sometimes reminiscent of the ‘discovery’ of the okapi by Sir Harry Johnston in central Africa a century ago. As Richard Sklar re-tells the story, the okapi was an animal resembling a giraffe, a deer and a zebra. It was unknown to the European zoologists of the time, but they were nevertheless reluctant to acknowledge its existence as a distinct genus (Sklar, 1996: 708-9). Likewise, the genealogies of liberal democracy in the West have been multiple, as have been the prescriptions for its attainment. Its historiography is of relevance to African discourses to underscore its peculiarity in the Atlantic tradition, as well as to assert the possibility of uniqueness in Africa (Ake, 1993). Alexis de Tocqueville early on observed its oddity even within the Atlantic world. Democracy, he observed, had been a truly revolutionary impulse in France, overthrowing the existing feudal-aristocratic order and setting up a whole new stratum of bourgeois class rule, whereas the contrary had happened in America, where democracy had been appropriated by the Republican Party for the pursuit of essentially conservative goals.