There Are No Dogmas For the Practice of Democracy

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Here (below) is a link to my think-piece in the series from our conference on democracy and religion in Africa. It was published this morning on Africasacountry.com as part of the series. Every week, a new think-piece is published in the series.

https://africasacountry.com/2022/11/there-are-no-dogmas-for-the-practice-of-democracy

[Harrow, Kenneth]

Dear moses, i read your thought piece, in which you say you don’t wish to romanticize the past in africa. You describe the pre-colonial days as having as systems of governance the following traits: “They were variously founded on consensus, inherited authority, or sacred, religious, and ancestral ordination. What they all had in common was legitimacy, the basic idea of a leader, group of leaders, or a political configuration being accepted as representing the will and interest of a people at a particular time. Not only did these precolonial forms of African democratic practice possess the key ingredient of legitimacy; they had in-built mechanisms of accountability, participation, and checks and balances. Moreover, there were procedures for addressing post-selection grievances and managing the occasional crisis of succession and leadership failure.”

I wonder why this is not romanticizing. If it was consensus, i wonder how that accounts for conflicts. You are the historian, so i rely on you to affirm the claim that brother did not kill brother to obtain the throne, as you can read in various epics like Sundiata. Epics are just legitimizing praise singing, not history; but i can’t imagine consensus as you describe without the enforcement of the ruling clan/family/lineage. 

You say representing the will of the people: is this the same as Rousseau’s ideal that the revolutionary leaders embodied the will of the people, therefore obviating the need for opposition. That opens the way to the vanguardism, which also was rule without limits. 

What were the checks and balances, if not also grounded in power? How might they differ from american checks andbalances which are fundamental to democracy? Is voting not a mechanism for participation? Should it be reformed, do you think? Or ditched?

All these are questions: i do agree with your plea that local roots of governance not be ignored. But again i wonder how that differs from british conservativism as opposed to french revolutionary thought? Mean 18th c.

Lastly, african history was marked by european ties, both for the good and the bad. The bad was slavery and colonialism, and i’d all neocolonialism. These systems had complicity among african peoples, but also, and most importantly, resistance. Shouldn’t that function as part of any indigenous element, as it did in s africa’s forging a constitution when freeing itself from apartheid?

Ken

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 3, 2022 9:45:15 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - There Are No Dogmas For the Practice of Democracy

 

Here (below) is a link to my think-piece in the series from our conference on democracy and religion in Africa. It was published this morning on Africasacountry.com as part of the series. Every week, a new think-piece is published in the series.

https://africasacountry.com/2022/11/there-are-no-dogmas-for-the-practice-of-democracy

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[Toyin Falola]

Ken and Moses:

Four quick points:

1. There is intellectual origin of power and authority. The intellectual origins of colonial and post-colonial power are rooted in Western philosophies. This is a problem.
2. Colonial powers took power from chiefs and kings, but transferred it to an elite they created. Why not return the power to the people you took it from? This is another source of problem.
3. Many of what we study as “precolonial” were corrupted by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and remnants remain. The remnants we have not fully studied.
4. The location of corruption is still a problem—it is located in politics, instead of in businesses. In the West, resources, via taxation, are collected from people and transferred to corporations. A corporate elite model of corruption is far more effective in producing elite consensus than the African bureaucratic model.

TF

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

Dear. Toyin and moses

How can you imagine returning power to this or that group without taking into account the economic order. This order determines the structures of power, and those have radically changed with the onset of capitalism and postcapitalist or neocapitalist structures, with industrialization and now globalization. The west or the west versus africa strikes me as not the real issue, but rather the struggles and inequalities that globalization has unleashed. I don’t see how resistance to those forces lie in a return to any earlier historical structures.

This is strikes me as abstract. As i am not an historian, i wish you historians would explain more precisely how this reliance on older forms would function in the current socio economic order. Again i thought i had read this botswana achieved this, at least somewhat?

Ken

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 3, 2022 6:08:45 PM

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Interesting analyses 

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[Dr. Oohay]

Yes, corruption is located in politics, where the end justifies the means. The Prince (of M is sadly and logically right?)--  

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/PH0PR06MB90040227A008460B007B7C60F8389%40PH0PR06MB9004.namprd06.prod.outlook.com

.

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

It's not romanticizing when you point to the "leadership failures" and "crises of succession." It's not romanticizing when you describe the features of precolonial African political systems, which, varied as they were, were legitimate, meaning that they embodied the will of the people. I'm not one of those people who argue that precolonial Africa was a blissful, stable, and crisis-free political universe and that the white man came and messed things up. I am saying that, whatever the faults of the precolonial systems, they had all the four elements of democracy I outlined, and they had accepted consensual mechanisms for dealing with the inevitable political crisis. It's not romanticizing if you're saying that the precolonial political institutions cannot simply, anachronistically be imported into the present but must be included in a menu of ideas and practices to be debated, refined, and modified, if need be, for the present. Also included in that menu are ideas of liberal democracy with provenance in the West. The key point is that the people themselves must make the choice and not be compelled to adopt a system of rule that evolved in Euro-America but is now being sneakily universalized.

Obviously, if one is going to argue, as I do, that precolonial African democratic political institutions should be a baseline or one of the baselines of democratic conversation and "democratization" today, one has to disprove the Eurocentric nonsense that precolonial Africa was a site and incubator of despotism and authoritarianism. That constructed racist lie was used by colonizers as one of the alibis to justify colonial conquest. They claimed that they were civilizing, liberalizing, and democratizing an African political space riddled with tyranny and despotic oppression, and antithetical to democracy. 

I had to explain the salient features of the precolonial systems that many observers and analysts often miss, but strangely that act of describing and explaining has earned me the charge of romanization from you. How else does one restore the credibility of African political systems and challenge the erroneous but influential paradigm that there are no African provenances and traditions of participatory, accountable, democratic governance and leadership selection?

This problematic and dismissive view of precolonial and "traditional" African political institutions is so paradigmatic that many Africans have accepted it. I even see traces of it in the questions you've been posing to me and in the views you've been expressing on this issue. 

Where do we begin with your question of checks and balances? Have you not heard about the Oyo system of layered political power and leadership, with its vertical and horizontal checks? Have you not heard about Igbo republican leadership systems? Have you not heard about the consensual villagesquare democracy of many African polities? We can debate the scalability of these systems, but that's another debate entirely.

Even in systems that skewed towards the monarchical centralization of power, there were oracular, ancestral, spiritual, and, in the Islamic sphere, theological and clerical checks on the power of the king/queen. There were guidelines, written and unwritten, on how power should be exercised, to what extent, and for what purposes. I don't have the time to go into more detail, but Mandela has a great description of Xhosa democracy in his autobiography, which approximates the essence of a participatory legitimate system that gave everyone a spiritual, religious, and secular stake and in which everyone participated and had a say but not through the divisive instruments of universal suffrage, adversarial elections, and majoritarian tyranny.

Were these protocols and modalities of rule breached and violated ? Of course they were. Did they always function smoothly? No. But people worked out the difficulties associated with them or were willing to try because they were invested in them and shared in their legitimacy. These systems represented something authentically theirs and so they were willing to fight to preserve them. Liberal democracy by contract is alien. It lacks legitimacy in Africa. When the chips are down and when it is troubled, as it is in many parts of Africa, people are not willing to fight for it. Instead, they enthusiastically welcome coups and other authoritarian interventions. You're seeing that in several countries.

Finally, you're absolutely right that any claim that the precolonial political space was some unspoiled, unadulterated, pure, uncontacted, and authentically African is as problematic as the claim that Africans had no notion of democracy and liberal, accountable, and participatory political values before colonization or before interaction with the white man. Africa was never the isolated political exotica that some Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists claim it was. Nonetheless, on the eve of colonization, there were discernible political tendencies and forms that exhibited, however imperfectly, the four tenets of democracy I enunciated in the piece. 

My argument, which you say you agree with, is that you cannot ignore those systems. You should not ignore the history, tradition, experience and sociopolitical evolutionary processes that spawned those systems while uncritically copying a system of liberal democracy that the West developed for themselves in consonance with their own political histories and aspirations and then imposed on you by coupling it with economic liberalization reforms and aid during your moment of economic distress. Until you undo that foundational error, you cannot hope for anything other than the cascading socioeconomic and political failures liberal democracy is wroughting on the continent.

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

Hi moses, thaanks for this detailed answer. I disagree slightly with you on some of your assertions, or wording. At every major point i am in agreement, and i certainly highly value your claims.

I hesitate at accepting the arguments for legitimization you make as based on the will of the people. I just don’t see how any will can be expressed without something like a vote. I don’t see why you return to that wording, the will of the people, as though the ruler somehow embodied it.

Maybe the ruler and his followers felt that way; maybe those his regime put out of business or ruled over or taxed or opposed felt otherwise, and no human system exists or existed without some measure of internal conflicts. 

Well, i know, as you said, about councils of elders or lineages that hedged sovereign powers; but not everywhere, and not always. My impression is that the great sweep of military regimes, like shaka’s, were not like that; in contrast to the more stable rule in w africa of various kingdoms. And i’m just as interest in this same question when it comes to chefferies or local rule. 

As i am not the student of this history, but picked it up from general histories or literary texts, the picture i get is very variegated. I also get the impression that arms changed the scene, that the great jihads of the 18th and early 19th century were true military affairs, nothing to do with the “will of the people.”

Your criticisms of the colonial enterprise are such that no one nowadays would quibble with you. I prefer to use the word “conquest” in describing it, and you are right that the ideologies of colonialism, their discourses, were riddled with hypocritical or naive pronouncements that innately implied racist superiority of europeans whites etc. but eventually, and before liberation, opposition that grew and grew. Negritude was born 30 years before independences. And i follow foucault in that all systems of oppression include opposition to them. We all know the oppression included the use of tirailleurs and african allies to the colonial regimes, and the regimes were in some measure tools of various dominant african groups. How could it not be the case? It was tutsis, or wolofs, who aligned with the colonial conquerors, and profited from that alignment. With independence, in rwanda and burundi, came a reckoning and revolutions and ultimately genocide. The rulers used these grouos, how could that not have been the case? So mobutu used banyamulenge or tutsis in e congo, and they are still fighting in the guise of m23 against congolese people who really hate them.

That history is marking today’s regimes, isn’t it? Everywhere?

Ken

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Sent: Friday, November 4, 2022 10:51:06 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - There Are No Dogmas For the Practice of Democracy

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAAHJfPoip%3DubHnaZkZVwTqk9W9Fms%2BLX%3DLy3U6C-6UqY2%3DsrPQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

“With independence, in rwanda and burundi, 

came a reckoning and revolutions and

 ultimately genocide. “

The role of France in the Rwandan genocide

should not be underplayed and so, too, the

divide and rule politics of the Belgians.

If you want to talk about group relations in

the debate about governance that is fine, 

but you would have to account for the

 barbaric, genocidal activities 

of the democracies that you are holding

up as models ie genocide of Native 

Americans, brutality of captive Africans,

and unsavory practices such as lynching,

segregated facilities etc..I don’t need

to mention the horrific atrocities and

theft carried out by the European 

democracies abroad in India, Vietnam, 

Indonesia and so on. In short, you would 

have to account for the atrocious  domestic 

and foreign record of countries with 

ballot box politics,  and voting 

capabilities, and explain why they 

should be taken as role models.

Were these actions the Will of the

people?If the answer is no, then

it points to non-functioning 

democracies.If the answer is yes

it points to the ballot box as an

enabler of violence.  And now that the far right

has been voted in to power in at 

least three prominent regions

you should have new thoughts 

about the ballot box, shouldn’t you?

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 4, 2022 12:58 PM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - There Are No Dogmas For the Practice of Democracy

 

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

I think it is inevitable that gloria and i don’t see eye to eye, except occasionally. Can Ye be bad? I just read a column by charles blow who describres him as an enemy of the race. Can africans do no wrong in gloria’s vision, or is it that it is always europeans who are at fault? If that is so, it becomes a case that true autonomy and responsibility to act lies always with the evil whites or europeans or, gloria’s favorable bugbear, the french. It makes it hard for me to try to see a way to respond under these conditions. The genocide in rwanda was initiated by hutu nationalists, we could say extremists, genocidaires, who vilified tutsis and described them as non-human monsters needing to be exterminated, cut short, and sent back north where they came from. This horror of genocide and its practice deserves unreserved condemnation, which doesn’t mean that history is irrelevant. The problem is historicism, viewing this event only through the lens of going back to its starting point—in this, and typically all cases she cites—the colonialists. The germans with their ethnic identifiers, the belgians same. The history is much richer than that, the nuances much more complex, with a real, actual, complicated set of relations between hutus and tutsis that was not monoform or eternal.

I don’t want to rehearse it here; that is one history i have read up on deeply enough to recognize that seeing history as determinist and one-track is journalistic history, not real history.

So, to come to the point of her intervention. I very much agree that the “will of the people”—of a large segment of the people who were responsible for the conquest and destruction of native cultures in the americas and in the colonies—sustained their govts. Democracy does not mean good decisions will be made. After all they gave us trump yesterday, netanyahu today, etc. but they also gave us obama and carter, decent men, and another set of good and bad elsewhere. They gave us many wars, like vietnam or iraq, but also the peace movement and anti-nuclear movements, to which stuart hall devoted much of his life.

What’s the point? Is it to suggest the failures of the conquerors to be decent, the failures of genocidaires, were attributable to democracy and voting? Or just to one race or people? That makes no sense to me. It was the reality that when stronger peoples put down the weaker, at times it is with violence and much destruction. There is no end of historical examples everywhere, including kingdoms in africa before and during the slave trade, or in recent years in the shocking death machines in sierra leone, liberia, the drc, etc. those same states also gave us post-traumatic justice after the genocide, courts and govts intended to redress the ills. 

Where does any of this implicate democracy? The charles taylors of the world were not created by colonialism, the west, or democracy; neither was nelson mandela. In fact there is only one truth i see in all this: africans are humans, like europeans or americans. Humans and their systems or governance are fallible, at times truly reprehensible; but also, and always, to counter the foucaultian negative view, capable of redress and true humanism, as with Dr. Denis Mugwege or Doctors without Borders who counter the evils of many places. If there is a systemization of evil human impulses i would look not to liberal democracy or the west but to the forces implicit in neoliberal capitalism and globalization for whom there seems to be no place for ethical considerations or decency or humanity. And if you can accept it, you can see that alongside of powerful western corporations are russian oligarchs and chinese companies and their profiteers. They might destroy us unless we can mount real resistance to them instead of fighting within our ranks.

I hope for a dialogue without rancor, and am sorry if i fail by that standard…but i do hope for it.

Ken

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From: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 4, 2022 4:06:21 PM
To: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

I only read the first two sentences 

of the response - and let me state

 clearly that I find Kanye West to 

be despicable. Obama called him a 

jackass,too, and he was right.This s a 

guy whose wealth went to his head.

His antisemitic rant and his comments

 about George Floyd are incorrigible. 

 A neo - Nazi,  Trumpistador evangelical  

with Afrophobic narcissistic inclinations 

could hardly be a model. Ok. Let me 

read the rest of the  response.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 4, 2022 4:32 PM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Ok. Democracy is fully 

implicated in the mayhem,  for 

those of us who look at outcomes,

and the big picture.If a religion

is systematically producing pedophiles

misogynists, colonialists  and 

assassins you have to step back 

and take count of the

theology that guides it.The same for

political ideology.Yep I question

the French - who have been

involved in the assassination 

of countless leaders,  and prop up

the bad ones, so that you can 

point your finger and talk about

culpability. Why did they constitute 

the “tirailleurs”in the first place if 

not to manipulate, assassinate and

exploit?They have been working 

with groups like Isis and Al- Qaida, 

ISWAP and their cousins, giving  

them bags of money to destabilize 

the West African region in the 

present era.But you and I can’t 

see eye to eye, and that’s great!

Good to know that Jeffrey Sachs 

gets it.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

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From: 'Emeagwali, Gloria (History)' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, November 4, 2022 5:14 PM

To: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - There Are No Dogmas For the Practice of Democracy

 

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