Nominal Democracies and the Re-colonization of
the African Public Space: Implications for
Educational and Social Development
Ali A. Abdi
University of Alberta
Canada
• Pre-colonial African societies have diverse political systems
that assumed, indeed, practiced some governance systems
that could be described as democratic;
• while these societies may not have used the terms ‘rule’ by the
people, the consultative systems involved in the process of the
governor/governed relationships undoubtedly spoke about a
process of public affairs management that was not dictatorial
(Lewis, 1967; Abdi, 1997)
• With the arrival and presence of full-fledged colonialism in
almost all parts of the continent, from mid 19th century to
mid-late 20th century, African systems of consultative
governance as well as projects of educational and social
development were derided as primitive, backward and nontenable in the dominant-subordinate relationships that were
established
• This involved, as Chinua Achebe, in his brilliant and now
classic work, Things fall apart (2005 [1958) discussed, not
only the replacing of indigenous administrative systems with
a colonial one, but as well, the comprehensive recasting,
indeed, whole scale destruction of complex primordial
relationships, complemented by new re-inscriptions of the
way Africans design and practice government and all issues
related to it
• With the rescinding of historico-culturally rooted and socially
binding governance and relational structures that have
sustained the lives of the people over millennia, colonialism
moved to its next target of deconstructing, without
indigenously intended reconstructions, of Africa’s cultural and
educational platforms
• In colonizing Africa, these deconstructions were
important in the sense that colonialism had specific and
very complex trajectories that seemingly triggered one
another in sequences that assured the final aims of the
overall project; that is the full exploitation of the
continent’s human and natural resources
• As such, European colonialism in Africa was firstly
psychological, it was then cultural and educational, and
from there political and economic (Abdi, forthcoming)
• The sequence here was not accidental, it was deliberately
designed to achieve maximum impact in the
psychosomatic depreciations of the persona Africana
• It was also intended to be of longue durée and had/has
the potential for inter-generational continuities
• The rationale for the multiple trajectories of the colonial
project should not be difficult to see
• In any project that involves the mass oppression of peoples on
the basis of who they are, this time as Africans, one need not
highlight the goodness of the damned (to use a line from
Fanon, 1967); one need not equate the people to be oppressed
with the oppressors, for that itself would dilute the long-term
viability of the processes of oppression
• Rather, any colonizing or oppressive entity will portray its
victims as deserving of the wrongs that would be committed
against them
• Indeed, the systematic vilification of Africans was designed
and implemented long before most of 19th century European
colonizers set foot on Africa’s coastal areas and hinterlands
• In critically and circularly reading the history of colonialism, one should not
also miss the philosophical and literary onslaughts that were pioneered (for
deliberate wording) by Europe’s so-called luminaries of thought and ideas:
men like Hegel, Kant, Voltaire, Renan, Montesquieu and Hobbes were
complicit in describing Africa as void of any workable governance, learning
and social development structures
• The pre-mass colonization work of European philosophers actually became
a precursor of the benighted ‘mission civilsatrice’ that was propagated to
justify the conquest of foreign lands and their peoples
• In speaking about the great-scale projects of emptying African public
management, resources use and social development forums, the still timely
observations of, inter alia, Hamidou Kane (1963), Julius Nyerere (1968),
Walter Rodney (1982), Ngugi wa Thiongo (1986, 2009) and Ivan van
Sertima (1991) all become important components of the epistemic arsenal
African analysts and anti-colonial writers should deploy so as to reconstruct
the continent’s rightful place in the historical and cultural annals of the
world.
• Indeed, the governance dislocations of Africa were immediately followed by
the deliberate, indeed systematic destruction of the continent’s educational
and social development forums (Nyerere), which represented, or contained
in themselves, the foundational life ways that cemented the way people
relate to one another , and in their actual governance locations, manage and
share their resources
• Certainly, Africa’s pre-colonial political structures were characterized by
sound policy management systems that assured the survival of each as the
survival of all
• Such co-survivability was not just a form of political expediency, it was also
extensively attached to the continent-wide practiced Ubuntu philosophy of
life where we are only humans through the humanity of the other (Tutu,
1999)
• Undoubtedly, someone who even partially adheres to the praxis of ubuntu
philosophy, will find it difficult to conquer, colonize or enslave others. For
me, and I hope for many others, this starkly explains the thinness of
Africans colonizing or enslaving other people
• With the above points, which are intended to affirm the historical origins of today’s western
style nominal democracies in Africa, one need not go further into the history of colonialism
or the postcolonial but pre-1990 mixtures of problematic political and governance
structures including quasi-’democratic’ civilian administrations, meta-temporal military
regimes and the general reign of the so-called ‘big men’ whose political practices were the
exact repetition of everything they learned from their colonial masters
• In essence, therefore, postcolonial (or the condition of postcolony, Mbembe, 2001) did not
represent any move to viable platforms of democratic governance. Indeed, in many
instances, the political system looked like the colonial government with those now in power
being of African descent
• Here, let me problematize my use of the terms ‘democracy and democratic’: with the
exception of very few cases which themselves may not be mature enough to be called fully
democratic (e.g. Ghana), I do not think that most postcolonial African democratic types are
real democracies, even in the incomplete ways such political systems are now arranged and
practiced in the west; needless to add that the paper is not basically about the meaning,
strengths and weaknesses of general democracy, but on problematic governance systems
labeled ‘democratic’ that emanate from colonial deconstructions of primordial African
governance structure
• With those facts, for Africans and their countries, the end of the Cold War might have
represented both an opportunity and some danger with respect to the post-1990s future of
their countries
• The loss of the super power card in a world that immediately became uni-polar was of
course, obvious, but in terms of viable democratic development, the intentions should have
been robust, but Africans were actually never given an opportunity to think about the new
political demands emanating from the west where suddenly they were supposed to become
democratic
• Clearly such demands were only responding to the ideological dispositions and the desires
of the west where just like other impositions that were already failing African education
and social development platforms (e.g. neoliberal globalization and its problematic
structural adjustment programs - SAPs), the commandments from Washington, D.C.,
London and Paris were very clear: democratize or perish
• With these, the meanings and the practices of what one might have called ‘African
democracy’ were not discussed; the viability of this type of governance for African political
and socio-economic terrains were never analyzed, and if so, Africans were not consulted
• Once again, though, the culprits were not just western governments
but as well, African leaders, who just like the way they failed their
people at the end of colonial rule, once again, accepted, with no
concern for the welfare of the public and only for the sake of their
own political survival, the hollow ‘democratic’ instructions that were
being dictated from far away
• As Mbembe (1990) noted then, the whole story of African
democratization mainly represented former dictators and their
conspirators assuming the colors of something called democracy;
basically as he put, the re-institutionalization of previous dictators
to continue ruling the peoples they have oppressed for so long
• In stark terms, therefore, these claims of ‘democratization’
represented the second major failure of the African postcolonial
elite to aim for viable governance structures that should have
extricated their peoples from the myriad of problems they were
facing in their daily lives.
• Indeed, Julius Ihonvbere’s observation that the so called processes of democratization
dangerously representing a new false start (after the one committed immediately after
independence) still hold so much relevance (see Ihonvbere, 1996).
• At the international level, the problems were not limited to the irrational impositions of
immature ‘democratic’ claims on Africans, but as bad was the deliberate lowering the bar
where undemocratic elites claiming that have established democratic regimes were taken at
face value, and from there, the reign of these elites were facilitated by their foreign
sponsors
• I do not need to go into too much details here, but what democracies did Africa’s so-called
(and once hopeful) second generations of leaders in many parts of the continent (in social
development terms) achieve since the late 1980s/early 1990s? For all pragmatic
undertakings, not much; worse, some of them have done so much damage
• What actually happened was the intensification of neoliberal globalization where as John
Perkins in his book, Confessions of an economic hitman (2005) spoke about, the outright
derailing of any viable development possibilities for poor ‘third world’ countries were
purposefully designed and implemented.
• With this in place, the cluster of SAPs conditionalities that were imposed on the continent
were all bad for Africa (e.g. reducing public expenditure on public education and health and
creating private schools in countries where hardly anyone could afford the fees)
• These were complemented by exclusionist loan fees where African countries were being
charged four times in interest than Europeans with the result of Sub-Saharan countries
paying in debt servicing more than what they have spent on education and health care
combined (UNDP, 2001)
• It is with these realties that Africans were losing their power to create, public, educational
or development policies, all under the guise of false ‘democratic’ impositions
• This led to the emergence of what many analysts rightly called the new processes of
political and economic recolonization (Plank; Saul, 1993; Leys, 1996; Abdi, 2008)
• Certainly the African public always hoped for something better; in many cases, the slogan
that ‘we do not know much about this thing called democracy, but it cannot be worse than
what we had before’ was heard in more than few countries
• Bratton (1999), for example about the combination of suspicion and hope about the
rhetoric of the Zambia of early 1990s
• But things did not get better in most countries and as we speak, the unemployment rates in
many zones of the continent are savagely high: 51% in Namibia, 48% in Senegal, 40% in
Kenya, Officially 25% in South Africa (although pragmatically estimated at around 39%),
and 24% in Nigeria. These bare economic development failures were never heard in prenominal, neoliberal driven impositions of western style democracies
• On the education front, things are not fairing that well either, and while again, the global
rhetoric of MDGs and EFA are around, what matters more, i.e., a quality education that
uplifts the lot of the African people is as elusive, and African learners performing four
grades or even six grades below their levels is more common than otherwise; with respect
to tertiary education, the ongoing crisis does not need more elaborations here
• Certainly therefore, and based on all of the above, the problems of education and
development in Africa are fully attached to the continent’s re-colonized political spaces
where Africans are not the masters of their policy platforms, with that leading to the exiling
of African ways of doing politics, economics and education from African spaces of life.
• Certainly the situation needs a lot of rethinking, reframing and reconstructing, which
should start with the re-building of African philosophical, epistemological, governance and
social development ideas and platforms
• It is with these reconstructions undertaken at a massively active level that Africans could
reconstitute for themselves some tangible forms of liberating praxis in their political and
social development platforms and relationships.