Democratization Without Westernisation? Embedding Democracy in Local African Cultures

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this article is to propose an ideational approach to democratisation in Sub-Saharan Africa in response to existing democratisation literature that typically measures democratic success and failure in the region against Western-modelled constitutional democracy. The article argues that this ideational approach both explains the under-performance of democratic institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa and offers a tenable solution for remedying this situation. First, we discuss the underlying theoretical framework before presenting our methodological approach and case selection. Second, we draw on empirical literature from three groups in Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, after which we present some antithetical arguments about the relevance of traditional African leadership to contemporary democracy. We conclude with a detailed discussion that formulates a three-step approach to better ground African democracies in traditional ideas and institutions.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Rachel Hatcher and the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Throughout the article, we use the term Africa in strict reference to sub-Saharan Africa.

2 While this article bases the destruction of local institutions on colonialism, it could also be argued that slavery contributed to such a destruction. To avoid going into infinite regression, this article traces this destruction to colonialism.

3 The fact that advanced democracies in the West have their intricate systemic differences strengthens the claim for uniqueness of political culture. In the United States, for example, although a majoritarian political outcome is desirable, a minority vote can, through the balance of college votes, systematically produce a president as was the case with President Trump in 2016 and President Bush in 2000. Similarly, various democratic systems have embedded biases against certain groups within their societies. For example, some scholars have argued that the US system systematically excludes African Americans through its criminal justice system that disfavours them and, subsequently, strips them of voting rights. Other systems disfavour immigrants for certain public office categories. In other words, democracy, in its purest sense, is an ideal, and is attainable only progressively even by the standards of the most advanced Western democracies

4 The limited scope of this article, however, prohibits us from drawing on a wider empirical literature on multi-ethnic leadership convergence. For example, the Luba-Lunda people of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are constituted by several ethnic groups but under one paramount chief. Despite this multi-ethnic constitution, the Luba-Lunda people are traditionally democratic. This research could also have been stronger if it examined representative cases of various colonial legacies: British, Dutch, French, Portuguese and German. Unfortunately, the scope of the article could not permit.

5 Like Zimbabwe, colonialism fractured Zambia’s traditional leadership. Traditional leadership institutions in both countries (known as Southern and Northern Rhodesia prior to independence), as well as in with Malawi, faced systematic fragmentation by the British South African Company. The three countries were later grouped into one colonial entity called the Central African Federation.