Africa: Democratic Theory and Democratic Struggles

...Most African states are not nation-states...

...A wedge was thereby driven between political and social movements, and this cultivated a postindependence environment that allowed the emergence of state parties—at first several, and then one...

...Consequently, the ultimate impact of the reform was to emancipate and to stifle...

...It has also made it far more difficult for Western governments to explain away—either to people at home or to Africans—pressure for internal reform as a Trojan horse for "Soviet subversion...

...in response to Article 53 of the European Convention of 1950, which excluded the non-Metropolitan countries from its provisions, Leopold Senghor cautioned fellow deputies in the French Parliament lest they prepare a Declaration of the Rights of "European Man" — which is exactly what they proceeded to do...

...Hardly a decade later, few countries could boast multiparty politics...

...one cannot simply "apply" and "respect" pre-existing Western notions...

...But is the equation of human rights with SUMMER • 1992 • 317 Democratic Theory and Struggles in Africa citizen rights appropriate to the social reality of Africa...

...A democratic struggle that champions the rights of these groups and individuals will have to question these assumptions...

...light similar occurrences: destruction of property, widespread disorder, death, and so on...

...Although it is tempting to read the influence of East European "pro-democracy" movements into the growth of African reform movements, the force of immediate example has come not so much from Eastern Europe as from the West Bank and Soweto...

...The defeat of the South was also a defeat of the principle of the "right of nations to self-determination" in the United States...

...That same year, the "Sopi" ("Change") youth rebellion in the streets of Dakar, Senegal, consciously evoked "Soweto...

...if not, it was illegitimate "secession...

...There is no country within Africa with a settler majority...

...But is the alternative to turn things upside down...

...Was the reform, for all its claims, decisive in demobilizing democratic forces...

...This introduced a new element: the claim to rights was given a residential basis...

...Has the attempt to solve the question of "national minorities" in Europe— Poles, Armenians, and Jews in an earlier period, and Serbs and Croats today—through statehood, allowing the "national minority" to become a "national majority," worked...

...This both preserved the union and undercut any demand for self-determination by the indigenous inhabitants of the United States...

...Can Africa afford to duplicate this and grant each national group ("nationality," "tribe") the right to its own state...

...Junior officers frequently join the National Conference...

...But when the two histories are divergent, especially as political economies transcend state boundaries, the basing of rights on citizenship in the state community disenfranchises growing numbers of people...

...From the former spring notions of pluralism, from the latter those of rights...

...Consequently, rights must be rescued from the confines of state citizenship and linked to a more universal fact of labor (such as residence...

...In some instances, reformers have won the day: in Mali, one of Africa's oldest dictatorships was overthrown by a combination of civil and military forces...

...Ironically, the claims of liberalism as a theory of the market may be weightier than those of liberalism as a theory of rights...

...Although this may seem obvious today, it was often obscured in the continent-wide celebration that marked the postindependence environment...

...Paralysis is more evident in Zaire, where a National Conference convened with the participation of "Sacred Union" (a coalition of over 130 political parties) and "Civil Society" (a coalition of numerous local "associations"), but has been unable to overcome one of Africa's most brutal dictatorships...

...In the colonial period, the autonomy of social movements and the press was compromised by state supervision...

...On the positive side, there is a partial repudiation of narrow statist assumptions in liberal rights theory...

...These theories derive from two sources: the post– World War II colonial reform that was Africa's last attempt at a continent-wide democratic transition and the global influence of liberal ideas, especially following the collapse of Soviet-style communism...

...whereas the movement of such a chronology was at best cyclical and repetitive, the stuff of historical movement was progress...

...There is a curious tendency in contemporary Africa to view democracy as a set of established institutions that only need to be put in place...

...In granting citizenship to blacks and Indians, the Thirteenth Amendment shifted the locus of citizenship from individual states to the federal government...

...who are these "peoples" in Africa...

...How many have forgotten that, when the struggle for Eritrean independence was raging, its legitimacy in African intellectual circles hinged on one question: is Eritrea a "nation" or not...

...in the other they testify to the darker and primordial side of tribal society...

...But if Africa has no nations, only tribes, who is to be the bearer of the right of self-determination there...

...Stripped of its social basis, the history of struggles of colonized peoples to control their own destinies—in other words, the history of their democratic struggles—was easily interpreted as some kind of a pathological "tribal" response...

...many heralded the first democratic transition in Africa...

...The final result: the one-party regimes that emerged after independence...

...Yet stripped of sociohistorical context, similar events appear devoid of reason, are bizarre and mindless, expressions of the irrational—as numerous studies present the Mau Mau...

...Or were these forces too weak and disoriented to consolidate democracy...

...The result is to render the existing presidency ceremonial and to paralyze the army command...

...Behind urban demonstrations, from Khartoum/Omdurman (Sudan) in 1985 to Lusaka (Zambia), Abidjan (COte d'Ivoire) and Nairobi (Kenya) in 1990, there has been the organized strength of professional associations (lawyers, academics, even doctors in some instances), trade unions (miners, railway workers, taxi operators, workers in manufacturing establishments) and churches...

...It is ironic that South African efforts to strip citizen labor of rights (through apartheid) was universally considered illegitimate, while its denial of the rights of noncitizen migrant labor (for example, immigrants from Mozambique) seldom came up for public discussion...

...The revolutionaries of 1789 proclaimed "the Rights of Man and the Citizen...

...Contemporaries argued over whether citizen's rights should be confined to males or be extended to women...

...nor can it be to declare "tribes" to be "nations," each entitled to separate statehood...

...But if, as I am suggesting, a highly restricted notion of pluralism prepared the soil for single-party dictatorships in the past, simplistically equating democracy with multipartyism —a common assumption of contemporary oppositional movements in Africa—is likely to lead to a similar outcome...

...It was in Europe, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, that theorists chipped away at the notion of divine right...

...it introduced political pluralism but it undermined social and ideological pluralism...

...Critics also pointed out that the rights embedded in the Civil Code of 1790 were restricted not just to men but to "men of property...

...Where the social and political history of peoples largely coincided, as in nineteenth-century Europe, citizenship served to enfranchise labor...

...The conference is inevitably chaired by a church dignitary with high moral standing and allows participants to vent a host of grievances, focusing on two issues in particular: official corruption and arbitrary government...

...Of this there is little doubt: faced with state repression, often unleashed in the name of national unification, democratic struggles inevitably give rise to demands for group rights...

...The new effectiveness of domestic reformers is, to an important extent, a result of international developments...

...This was as true of Julius Nyerere's Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in eastern Africa as it was of Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's party of the Gold Coast (CPP) in the West...

...Only when extreme injustices are meted out does this reality come to public light, as illustrated by the expulsion of Ghanians from Nigeria, or Rwandese from Uganda...

...Laws initiated in the colonial period but expanded after independence empowered the registrar to refuse registration to a publication in the interest of "peace, order and good government...

...It would surely be futile to attempt a historical sociology of these peoples as one might of nations...

...It was Lincoln's genius to recognize that what was distinctive about the American experience was the dispersal of SUMMER • 1992 • 315 Democratic Theory and Struggles in Africa nations and not their coming together.* For America, unlike Europe, was a settler country...

...In one case violence and disorder may appear as the "midwife of history...

...For migrant workers there is a radical rupture between the land of one's birth and that of one's labor, between the country of one's citizenship and that of one's residence...

...In response, colonial powers ceded reforms that, for the first time, introduced multiparty politics in most African countries...

...And, of course, "peoples without history" have no legitimate claim to rights...

...Why are four million Norwegians a "nation" and eight million Baganda a "tribe...

...Conservatives tended toward organic theories, viewing nations as products of tradition—that is, not created but inherited...

...and this was said to be particularly true of the "Dark Continent...

...In Africa there were "tribes," not nations...

...in its place, they erected an edifice of national sovereignty...

...An episodic description of both would bring to I am indebted to discussions with Robert Meister of the University of California at Santa Cruz for this observation...

...In West Africa, colonial powers moved masses of populations from the semi-arid inland (the Sahel) to coastal plantations...

...This also shaped South African attempts to solve the question of apartheid by creating Bantustan citizenship, that is, by denying citizenship and rights to all migrant labor within South Africa...

...Whereas state-controlled broadcast media coexisted with state-supervised print media in the colonial period, both came under state control under the new regime...

...Pluralism was then conceived only in political terms...

...Similar controls were extended over the media...

...In short, accountability to membership became secondary to the organization's accountability to the authorities...

...Registration involved acceptance of state supervision over an organization's rules, finances, and activities...

...When the dictatorships outlawed all expressions of autonomy in public life, whether in organization or expression, they built on supervisory powers embedded in colonial legislation...

...By mid-nineteenth-century, a confluence of nationalist and statist notions fashioned a consensus in Europe: the legitimate political authority in human affairs is the state, and it is the right of each nation to have one...

...In other words, even if there is agreement on the definition of rights, to whom should they legitimately belong...

...Drafted in the heyday of the postwar reform, the "Societies Ordinance of 1954" gave the colonial governor "absolute discretion" to declare a social organization unlawful if "used for any purpose prejudicial to, or incompatible with the maintenance of peace, order and good government...

...Today, this type of thinking is upheld by the simplistic equating of a multiparty system with democracy...

...Take, for example, two historical events of great emotive significance: the French Revolution and the Mau Mau rebellion...

...The Registrar of Societies had the power both to "register" and "deregister...

...Or should we recognize that the terms "nation" and "tribe" are overloaded and emotive precisely because one has been considered the legitimate bearer of the right to "self-determination" but not the other...

...The core issue in the Civil War was not slavery but the claim by the southern states of a right to self-determination...

...But liberals and conservatives then argued over who or what was a nation...

...Rather, there is a continuum: the soil that nurtured the single-party regime was prepared by the limitations of the earlier reform...

...Charter proclaimed the right of "self-determination of peoples" at the end of the Second World War...

...But received theories of democracy often clash with contemporary African realities...

...The political economy of a number of countries in its southern half (South Africa, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland) was shaped by migrant workers...

...If the answer was "yes," then the demand for a separate Eritrean state was a legitimate struggle for "self-determination...

...The South African settler minority would prefer "an American solution" that would shift focus from the collective right of self-determination to the individual right of non-discrimination...

...Since "human rights" in liberal theory flow from membership of a political community ("citizenship") and not of a laboring community ("residence"), millions of migrant laborers are effectively and legally stripped of their "human rights...

...The statism of liberal theory creates a sharp disjuncture between the rights of citizen labor and the lack of rights of noncitizen labor...

...But whether they were liberals or Jacobins, male supremacists or feminists, colonizers or colonized, and while they argued over how far the definition of citizenship may be restricted or stretched, they all agreed that rights were the prerogative of the "citizen...

...Yet, both liberals and conservatives agreed that the right to self-determination belongs to the nation...

...With an eye toward the latter, I shall try to explore this tension by focusing on two issues that are of particular salience in the present transition...

...The first is the narrow understanding of pluralism that is the legacy of postwar colonial reforms that led most African countries to independence in the sixties...

...The second issue that highlights the clash between received (democratic) theory and living (African) reality is the question of who should be the bearers of rights...

...Ever since demonstrators in Khartoum and Omduran drove Sudan's Jaafar Numeiri out of power in 1985, pressure from the streets has extracted political concessions from regime after regime...

...The reduction of social history to political history and of political history to political biography was facilitated by the fact that the colonial reform undid the ties between political and social movements...

...Human Rights, Citizen Rights One would have thought that the development of theories of human rights would have effectively countered statist definitions of the "right to self-determination...

...Take the example of Tanzania...

...Generally speaking, democratic, liberal conceptions tended to rest on concepts of "social contract," depicting the nation as freely associating individuals...

...We must, on the contrary, question what underlies both solutions: the assumption that "self-determination" must mean, in the final analysis, independent states...

...Before it, discussion of rights tended to be cast in European terms...

...The collapse of the Soviet empire has tempered geopolitical considerations in shaping Western policies toward Africa...

...As a political movement, nationalism gathered strength when it was anchored in popularly based social movements...

...now autonomy was liquidated...

...Was there something in the very nature of the colonial reform that paved the way for dictatorship...

...How significant is the "right to development," formulated by the Senegalese jurist Keba M'bay, formally recognized by the U.N...

...My point is simple...

...I have tried to argue that both these claims need to be reexamined for meaningful democratic reform in the context of contemporary Africa...

...Consider, for example, the notion of the "nation" as the bearer of the "right to self-determination" and the "citizen" as the bearer of "human rights...

...The nineteenth-century European response was to recognize the "right of nations to selfdetermination...

...Should they be "individual" only or also "collective...

...Rights Most discussion of rights in Africa tends to center around such questions as: Should rights be "negative" only (that is, defining what government cannot do) or also "positive...

...Algerian demonstrators evoked the "Intifada" when they called for greater political participation in 1988...

...Put in the context of a broader social history, this chronology would gain a larger meaning...

...318 • DISSENT...

...Or did this occur despite the reform...

...In this context, the reforms of the fifties permitting multiparty systems, and the singleparty regimes that came later, do not signify opposed alternatives: on the one hand pluralism, on the other, the lack of it...

...More often, outcomes are mixed...

...Theories and Realities As democratic struggles bring forth reforms, an unexpected consequence is likely to be tension between demands and solutions...

...some observers have even 316 • DISSENT Democratic Theory and Struggles in Africa asserted that in Africa, states set out to create nations...

...This is where an aspect of the American experience has relevance for African realities...

...In Congo 312 • DISSENT Democratic Theory and Struggles in Africa (Brazaville), a National Conference was temporarily successful: sections of the army tried to remove the new government, only to be challenged by street demonstrations...

...Whereas the colonial reform promoted a narrowly political pluralism, the one-party, postcolonial regime liquidated all pluralism...

...For liberalism, the bearer of individual rights came to be "the citizen," a member of the political community defined by the state...

...The debate on rights now became one of nationhood...

...It is well known that for the first two years of the Civil War, Lincoln was prepared effectively to guarantee the seceding states a constitutional right tb slavery if that would keep the union intact...

...Or has it served simply to proliferate "national minorities" in Europe...

...Today over two million Bourkinabe migrant laborers live and work in COte d'Ivoire...

...Ironically, after becoming president of independent Tanzania, TANU's leader, Julius Nyerere, used these same powers to ban an autonomous and remarkably successful peasant organization (the Ruvuma Development Association...

...This assumption was embraced by African nationalists on the morrow of independence...

...afterward, rights theory was shaped strongly by local conditions...

...It was the eve of independence...

...More than the outcome of internal social histories, they reflect the exigencies of external geopolitics...

...The dividing line in American constitutional thought is the Civil War...

...Instead of linking power and rights, this would displace the question of power by that of rights...

...314 • DISSENT Democratic Theory and Struggles in Africa There was a similar pattern in legislation pertaining to freedom of expression...

...A compilation of occurrences over that time could generate a chronology of dates and events, but not a true history...

...In Africa's context, the notion of rights as an attribute of citizenship has increasingly antidemocratic consequences...

...Political and social movements were separated, and political movements that once articulated a broad social vision were gradually reshaped by their leaders into votegathering machines...

...In fact, the solution to "tribalism" in Africa cannot be to declare demands for self-determination "illegitimate" and repress them...

...Their existence in time was quantitative, not qualitative...

...This demand originated in French-speaking Africa, but has spread far beyond (to Kenya and Nigeria, for example...

...What passes as nationalism is by and large statist ideology...

...In Rwanda, the regime tried to forestall the demand for a National Conference, but reformers have kept up pressure through a regular one-day-a-week strike combined with oppositionists milling in the streets of Kigali...

...Even demands for pluralism going beyond the narrowly political, for example, demands by opposition parties for access to state-controlled broadcasting media, confirm that, as a rule, democratic pluralism is interpreted by opposition movements between the Sahara and the Limpopo to mean no more than party pluralism...

...Europeans and Americans who vigorously debated the nature and rights of "nations," "nationalities," and "national minorities" within Europe and America were all agreed that there were no nations among colonized peoples...

...A truly novel form of oppositional activity is the demand for a "National Conference...

...Although such discussions place African intellectuals and activists in the mainstream of international human rights debates, they obscure the specificity of the African situation and the potent question of who should be the legitimate bearers of rights in the African context...

...The governor used these powers in 1957 to declare several local branches of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) "unlawful societies," without explanation...

...Liberal theory is formulated around two constructs: citizenship and the market...

...Political parties flowered, but social movements and the popular press wilted...

...The ruling party fashioned a single trade union, a single cooperative, and various "mass organizations" (usually of women and youth) under its own tutelage...

...More: those who lack a social history can only possess innate and primordial characteristics...

...Later, militants from within the anticolonial movement would demand that the colonized be treated as "citizens," not "subjects...

...It was aborted...

...Whether Jews or Armenians or Poles were nations or not was a question about whether they had a legitimate claim to the right of self-determination, that is, the right to establish their own states...

...Tension between theoretical assumptions and existing realities can either lead to sterile attempts to enforce textbook solutions or to rich, creative reflection...

...After all, what makes eight million Swedes a "nation" with a legitimate right to selfdetermination and millions more Hausas a "tribe" with no such right...

...Ironically, in its attempt to find a ground for "rights" that could not be violated by the state, liberal thought became circumscribed within a state-defined logic...

...Hence the core of liberalism was defined in terms of individual rights and limited government...

...The responsible minister could cancel registration for the same reasons, and the president could prohibit a publication in "the public interest...

...In Africa more than in any part of the world, there has been little coincidence between the history of nation formation and that of state formation, between social history and political history...

...In fact, this problem has surfaced in democratic struggles in Africa...

...For anyone interested SUMMER • 1992 • 313 Democratic Theory and Struggles in Africa in shaping the next round of reform, the answers to these questions are vital...

...The restrictions of rights to citizens is a presumption of both the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, adopted by the 1981 Summit of the Organization of African Unity, and its radical predecessor, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples of 1976, otherwise known as the Algiers Declaration...

...The American legacy is dual...

...they were invited to prepare for electoral contests and eventually for a transition to independence...

...One is an artifact of political life, the other of economics...

...Both systems rested on the negation of the social and ideological dimensions of pluralism, and consequently limited it to its political aspects...

...Only a concept of pluralism that incorporates a social, ideological, and political dimension can check this...

...Hence, the significance of the shift from the "right to self-determination" of nations to the "right to non-discrimination" against individuals in American constitutional thought...

...I shall argue that certain notions received from EuroAmerican liberalism—that the bearer of the "right to self-determination" is the nation, and that the bearer of "human rights" is the citizen—are so restrictive that they will disenfranchise increasing numbers of groups and individuals under present conditions in Africa...

...as early as the 1950s, nearly 40 percent of the population of Buganda comprised Banyarwanda immigrants...

...In the recent multiparty election in COte d'Ivoire, the opposition refused to recognize rights of Bourkinabe migrant labor, but the regime championed the right of migrants to vote, incorporating their demands into its own project...

...In this contradictory context, nationalist parties with a transformative social agenda were recast, usually from within, into no more than crafts unions of professional politicians whose objective was to enhance their political careers...

...These suggest a shift from rural to urban protest, from peasant society ("the people") to civil society ("the citizens...

...While in some instances old-fashioned force was employed to pursue change—for example, the armed struggle waged by Eritrean and Tigrai movements that forced Mengistu out of power in Ethiopia in 1991—new forms have, by and large, developed across the continent...

...And, of course, Africa is not Europe...

...The tenacity of the postwar democratic movement was nourished by the relationship between political and social protest...

...Both drew militants as well as supporters from social sectors already set in motion by trade unions and peasant cooperatives, women's and youth societies, and dissident anticolonial religious groups...

...On the negative side, there is an extremely individualist notion of rights, which is a byproduct of the shift from the collective right of self-determination to the individual right to non-discrimination...

...Many state boundaries in Africa date from the 1960s, from the decade of independence...

...From the settler point of view, the right to national self-determination presented problems: irrelevant to a settler population of multinational origin, it raised the uncomfortable question of the right of the indigenous population to self-determination...

...more appropriate to study tribes with the tools of an ahistorical anthropology...

...During the guerrilla war in the Luwero Triangle—residence for a large number of Banyarwanda migrants in Uganda— the National Resistance Army (NRA) linked the exercise of rights in village-based Resistance Committees to residence rather than citizenship...

...This was the context in which freedom to organize political parties was introduced...

...Yet it would be false to claim that "the right to self-determination" is irrelevant in Africa because nations do not exist there...

...The U.N...

...On the eastern side of the continent, the outmigration of impoverished peasants from Rwanda and Burundi has constituted a parallel development...

...Commission on Human Rights in 1977 and endorsed by a General Assembly Declaration in 1986...

...Unlike nations, tribes were presumed to have no social history...

...As President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda notes, the end of superpower rivalry has "orphaned" many governments in Africa...

...Tribalism," in much of the literature of anthropology and political science, comes to denote the real nature of the "native," stripped of the veneer of civilization...

...The Question of Pluralism In post–World War II Africa, widespread democratic aspirations fueled powerful nationalist movements...

...and as nationalism itself was refashioned into state ideology, political history often became no more than the biography of the nationalist leader...

...To make of every African "tribe" a "nation," each with the right to self-determination...

...The consequence was an uneasy balance of two contradictory foundations for rights, one in citizenship (federal), the other in residence (state...

...Every nation was deemed to have the right to its own state...

...Africa is a continent of extensive migrant labor...

...After all, throughout seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France, liberal thinkers tried to articulate a system of fundamental individual rights against the state...

...Political movements were recognized while the autonomy of social movements was undermined...

...One must grasp what is unique about the African context to arrive at a notion of rights adequate to it...

...In British colonies, for example, social movements—that is, trade unions, peasant cooperatives, "friendly societies" (for women, youth, or religious groups), burial societies, or mutual help associations—were required by the reform to register with colonial governments in order to obtain legal recognition...

...in Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, one of Africa's longest surviving presidents, was replaced through a multiparty electoral contest...

...The "right of nations to self-determination" has a strongly European flavor—as "human rights" has an American flavor...

...In those years, intellectuals tended to write the political history of nationalism at the expense of its social history...

...Africa is not the Americas...

...The source of all sovereignty," declared French revolutionaries in 1789, "is essentially the nation...

...The question is vital because it goes to the heart of defining democratic participation in contemporary African conditions...

...bathed in a deeper hue, it could reveal milestones in the unfolding of world-historical developments, such as in the general conception of the French Revolution...

...Its statist character is underlined by the related claim that the right to self-determination ultimately is not possible without the establishment of a state and that the bearer of "human rights" must be a member of the political (state) community...

...The conference deliberates and often announces the appointment of a new government, with an executive prime minister at its head...

...A different turn occurred in the United States...