Are Some African Countries Becoming More Democratic Than Trump’s America

I’ve finally finished reading Olufemi Taiwo’s book Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (London: Hurst & Company 2022). Taiwo’s a political philosopher and a profound critic of the decolonisation movement in African politics and culture. This seeks to purge African political and judicial institutions and culture of anything derived, or believed to be derived, from colonialism. Taiwo argues against this that colonialism preempted modernity in Africa, and in rejecting intellectual, cultural and political movements and institutions derived from the West, Africans are in fact harming and impoverishing their own politics and culture and cutting themselves off from the benefits of global modernity.

Against those arguing against western philosophy unless the terms for its subjects can somehow be found to have equivalent concepts in indigenous African languages, Taiwo states that languages, including African languages, borrow from each other all the time. His own native tongue, Yoruba, has loans from other African languages such as Nupe. Thus, borrowing terms from the colonial languages for concepts that have no exact African equivalents should be perfectly acceptable. He also shows that while some of Europe’s leading philosophers, such as Kant, had very pejorative views of Blacks and Africans, there were a large number of Black and African writers and activists, like Olaudah Equiano, who were well able to use European philosophy to denounce slavery and their racist maltreatment and demand equality and dignity.

The last chapter, ‘Decolonise This!’ attacks the movement to decolonise liberal, representative democracy in Africa. Its opponents believe that multi-party democracy has no place in Black Africa because it is too alien and incompatible with indigenous African traditions, and another hangover from European colonialism. Instead, the decolonisers claim that indigenous political forms such as the monarchies, aristocracies and oligarchies that governed many African nations were democratic, governing through consensus rather than multiparty elections. He’s scornful of this claim, as the monarchies claimed to be democratic were absolute, with the power of life and death over their subjects. And across Africa, in practice, people are protesting for democracy, not against it. This includes the various Arab revolutions that began in Tunisia, and the people of Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, campaigning against their absolute monarchy. There have been stout defences of multiparty democracy by many of Africa’s greatest leaders, politicians and intellectuals, and in practice Africans are at least content to retain to retain the multiparty political systems that they inherited from their colonisers. What is needed here, is not decolonisation, but an explanation and solid philosophical justification for real, multiparty democracy and its supporting philosophical doctrines such as the dignity of the individual and the rule of law in African culture and society.

His views on this subject at time are the similar those of Conservative American scholars such as Thomas Sowell. Sowell has argued in his book that Africa’s terrible history of authoritarian regimes and dictatorship doesn’t come from the presence of imperial rule in Africa, but because that rule was too short for genuinely democratic ideas and traditions to take root there. Taiwo contrasts Africa with Jamaica and the Caribbean. These are also Black majority countries, but, apart from an attempt by an Islamist group to take over Trinidad and a very brief revolutionary regime in Grenada, there have never been military coups there. Not even during the violent electoral contests between the two major Jamaican parties, which he describes as civil wars. And when a Jamaican army sergeant slapped a man for haranguing a policewoman during a joint police/army operation, it was loudly denounced. Questions were asked in the Jamaican parliament and the sergeant duly reprimanded.

He puts this difference down to the fact that, unlike in Africa, the peoples of the Black Caribbean were not subject to indirect rule by indigenous chiefs, and so had to deal directly with European political and judicial institutions and use them to govern themselves. This is contrasted with Africa, where the colonial authorities enforced indigenous political traditions whether Africans wanted them or not, and the result has been to freeze African political culture. While modernity, or elements of modernity, began in the West, it is now universal. Democracy has been accepted in India, which was governed by Britain far longer than Africa, and there are democratic movements fighting for change across Asia in countries such as Myanmar. Those former colonies that have accepted and incorporated democracy into their culture have overtaken Africa. And, he adds drily, Africans are content to receive their alms while rejecting the very democratic institutions that have enabled these nations to prosper and overtake them.

But this chapter also presents positive, optimistic examples of African democracy in Action, two of which predate the colonial era. In 1871, when Britain was debating whether or not to expand its colonies in Africa, the Fanti Confederacy in what is now Ghana formulated a democratic constitution. The country would be ruled by a king-president, and assisted by a vice-president. But all other posts would be elected. Fascinating. I hadn’t heard of this, and I doubt many people outside of African political scholarship have either. There was a similar movement among the Edo people of Nigeria, but this was wound up when Lord Lugard united the country in the first decade of the last century. But he also gives recent cases where African elections have been narrowly contested, but where the losing candidate has quietly stepped down instead of demanding a recount or a coup.

One of these examples is the Ghanaian presidential elections of December 2008. He writes

‘The two leading candidates in the first round had a run-off that was won by the man who until July 2012 was president of Ghana, John Attah Mills. That by itself is no cause for comment. But he won by a slight fraction of one per cent of all votes cast. Initially it sounded like the losing candidate was going to ask for a recount or even to go to court to contest the outcome. Ultimately he chose to accept the results: that is, no recount, no challenge no acrimony. According to him, he and his party have four years to undo the results and he chose to gear up for that next election against the incumbent. Contrast that outcome and the losing candidate’s equanimity with the sordid record of Florida in 2000 or Donald J. Trump’s continuing refusal, abetted by his Republican Party, to acknowledge that he lost the November 2020 presidential elections by a wide margin to President Joseph Biden. I do not recall Ghana’s successful elections attracting much coverage in the American press.’ (pp. 215-6).

He also contrasts the Zambian elections of 2011, where the losing candidate also quietly accepted defeat rather than overturn the result. But there is another aspect to it, in that the winning vice-presidential candidate was a White Zambian. However, unlike Barack Obama in America, there was no outbreak of ‘birtherism’ by his opponents trying to disqualify him by accusing him of being born outside the country. But this accusation was used as a weapon against the country’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda. (p. 217).

There is also another fascinating piece of information presented by Taiwo about post-War France. Apparently, many of the intellectuals and activists who fought to stop Fascism gaining hold there after World War II were French people of African descent. This, like the Fanti constitution, is something I’d like to know more about it, particularly as it may well be relevant after the rise of the populist right across Europe and especially Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France.

Taiwo states that in the preface or introduction to the American edition of one of his books, he urged Americans to be aware of the threat to their modern democracy by people who held pre-modern views. Which sounds very much like a reference to Trump, although I think there are also politicos with the same anti-democratic instincts in the Democrats. The radical American political magazine, Counterpunch, described how the Democrats in Florida messed around with the electoral system in order to prevent Blacks and other demographic groups they felt were undesirable from voting.

I bought the book to see if it had anything relevant to say about the decolonisation movement in the West. It doesn’t have anything directly to say about it, except that possibly the demands that indigenous tribal shamans should be included in displays in the Wellcome Museum of Medicine and White medicine decentred come from the same demands to marginalise western institutions as colonialist and put Blacks and other ethnic minorities at the centre of history and culture instead. But it is obviously very informative about the intellectual and cultural decolonisation movement in Africa, and how this is damaging the country, as well as the demand for multiparty democracy in Africa and its benefits despite this. My fear, reading this, is that some of the Black radicals in Britain may be influenced by the decolonial critics of democracy, and start claiming that British democracy is similarly racist and unsuited to their ethnic needs and traditions. There’s no trace of this yet in British politics. Black radical, Sasha Johnson, with her Taking the Initiative Party and abortive Black militia, was influenced less by African politics than by the Black Panthers in America. But nevertheless, I think the potential is there amongst the radically racially disaffected.

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