The Second Revolution

...The French system of each minister being surrounded by a political "private cabinet" has been maintained, and is roundly criticized by British African senior civil servants, but the price of their own neutrality in politics has been a forfeiture of influence...

...A woman, or an African of slave-caste, has little chance of a ministry...

...Sophisticated French-Africans point out that conformity is primitive by definition, and that primitivism is not a virtue in Africa...

...It is, in fact, the example to which informed African writers point as proof that an African state can sustain a genuine "opposition" system...

...Milcent also argues: "The middle class, which played such an important role in the development of European countries, is still almost non-existent...

...Practically all African governments see unions as prejudicing the investment climate, heightening the caste distinction between industrial or office worker and peasant, and making goods uncompetitively expensive...

...How is this possible if every malcontent is allowed to form a party and overthrow the government of the day...

...that it is the clampdown on civil rights that is causing restive radicalism...

...There is no shortage of middle class, with money, cars, houses and education in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana or, proportionally, even Gambia...

...But a more common view is the reply to African liberals made by Ernest Milcent and Charles Debbasch in Jeune Afrique...

...Others have also worked this theme of "senescent infantilism" to describe African totalitarianism...

...Their successors were similarly endowed with great authority, which could prove equally temporary...

...British Africa enjoys a nonpolitical civil service, and the politicization of armies everywhere seems restricted to the higher ranks...

...His compatriot, Bechir Ben Yahmed, notes that unipartitism can only be a transient expedient, a sort of auto-colonialist period, but that "once instituted, it is the last to perceive the necessity for its disappearance or evolution...

...Mamadou Diab, a Senegalese living in Dahomey, says: "Above all else, chiefs of state have a physical fear of assassination...

...But Communism is also rare...

...Somalia, a federation composed of a former Italian colony and a former British protectorate, has inherited a multi-party system, mostly regional in origin, which may not endure...

...They are ostrich policies...

...An Algerian, Ben Khader Nourredine, writes in Afrique Nouvelle: "Africa, like all world societies, is composed of different classes...

...All single-party systems, continues Kashamura, "lead to authoritarianism...

...French and Belgian Africa formed its magistrature only at independence, and the smell of patronage is overpowering...

...Organized labor has been immolated as an offering to the ruling, temporal gods...

...Only Sierra Leone has chosen Western democracy consciously, and refrained from emasculating it...

...They deny the cliché that "all Africans are agreed on basic policy," or that "opposition for opposition's sake should be avoided...

...Davies notes that most African governments are, in origin, tribal or party coalitions: In Nigeria's case, the coalition parties retain their separate identities...

...National unity could be forged at the tribal "grass roots" as well as at the more educated level of the legislature itself, where government —according to the veteran of Congolese politicians—would be the symbiosis of all the groups that go to make an African nation...

...A few white liberals—Susan and Peter Ritner in The New Leader and Philippe Decraene in Le Monde —have realized the necessity for more mature institutions in presentday Africa...

...Of course, such an overwhelming . . . unity has its dangers . . . The all-pervading nation-building organization must be able to use the man who deliberately stands apart from its institutions," Nyerere has written...

...When the single-party system outlives its possible usefulness, "the motor becomes the brake...

...disgrace...

...The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions has fought back valiantly, and still does, but even pro-Western government leaders prefer a subservient Communist-model labor movement...

...Decraene has stigmatized what he calls "government by the King's pleasure...

...Africa has fallen instead into the fascist state out of which South America is now climbing...

...Even central economic planning, perhaps the most easily accepted feature of authoritarianism in a small, new state, is no longer seen as infallible in the light of the continuing crises in Ghana, Liberia and Senegal...

...this obsession is the pretext for all their excesses...

...University graduates, the majority of whom have studied abroad, note that regional loyalties are still a factor in advanced-world politics...

...it has occupied the press of America and Europe a good deal for the past five years...

...ALBERT TEVOEDJRE, who is probably the most brilliant Dahomeyan of the day, answered these views testily: "The world should know that we [Africans] are, ourselves, worried about our situation, and do not want to be vulnerable to the universal opprobrium which hangs over the parafascist regimes of Lisbon and Madrid...

...English-speaking Africa, including South Africa but excluding Ghana, has the freest courts...

...This is no more than the traditional African attitude: Chiefs were given great power, but were regularly overthrown, poisoned or banished when they proved unsatisfactory or tyrannous...

...How, in these conditions, can one envisage the existence of several parties when it is already difficult to find sufficient people for a single political group...

...that Africans do not expect, all at once, rights such as they never possessed before...

...The Congo inherited a galaxy of parties from the final months of Belgian rule...

...how, he asks, can they serve any purpose...

...If an angry crowd gathered outside the president's palace, what would the local press report...

...Where the stability factor of strong judicial, press and labor leadership was not already in existence at independence, it has not developed since...

...The alternative, say the apologists, is conflict...

...A Togolese editor, Paulin Joachim, writes in the Paris African monthly Bingo: "Africa has made a bad start...

...A vague recourse to the UN is the only possible escape, according to many unhappy African malcontents—who note hopefully that if the international body can successfully interfere in South Africa against apartheid, then the door would be open for it to interfere against Ghana's preventive detention system or Sudan's persecution of Christians and pagans...

...Most white liberals continue to support the cause of a tight, singleparty government for Africa because they consider it as a stabilizing factor in a continent which they see as a "special case," mentally and socially, and "without class differences...

...Morocco is a quasi-absolute monarchy...

...Keeping armies out of politics is perhaps impossible in this era: Senior army officers are usually above cabinet-minister standard, hence a junta might be preferable to a government of ward-heelers...

...Such a procedure would perhaps be the formula for an African way of doing things, as opposed to the obviously borrowed unipartite and limited multipartite systems now existing...

...Thus, in few African countries is the judiciary completely free, but in few is it completely subservient...

...Debbasch is even more paternalistic: "Power is like marriage...

...What will happen, they ask, when the prisonersof-opinion in Ghana's Nsawam dungeons are released from their fetters and become the new, embittered government of the day...

...Authoritarian recipes will not change the situation...

...African fascism is, above all, inefficient and incomplete...

...since none have anything like a majority, unipartitism is impossible...

...There is, moreover, very little democracy in Africa to build on...

...slaves became freemen and eventually, at times, leaders...

...Above all, in the past man's discontent remained the ultimate authority...

...once legitimate government is rejected, usurpers will multiply and the people will be unable to decide which they want...

...Indeed, reading the pages of all such African magazines in recent months, one is aware of a sort of Encyclopedists' movement, of the first signs of a second revolution, following—with the haste that seems to typify mid20th-century African history—on the heels of the comparatively simple revolution of national independence...

...Today no two French-African countries have identical systems of government and administration, although all naturally have much in common...

...a multi-party system has been tolerated to insure that Parliament does not "gang up" on Hassan II...

...Fad will follow fad: first love, then indifference, then hate...

...Africa's present inadequately representative institutions are the fruit of its arbitrary, feudal recent past...

...Tribalism is the basic political reality, and in the congress tribal views are confronted and coalesce under the guidance of the country's Garibaldi...

...Among Africa's own apologists for single-party government, perhaps the most persuasive and intellectually acceptable has been Tanganyika's Julius Nyerere, who has called the unipartite experiment an imperative of the post-independence crisis...

...Today's caste system is more rigid...

...Tribalism and religion are the main political realities in Uganda, and government is a coalition of two widely divergent parties...

...Milcent, who is not a Marxist but the head of a Vatican publishing house called La Bonne Presse, achieves the casuistic flip-flop of maintaining that oppositions breed corruption...

...The prisons fill up...

...The annual government party congress gets star billing from most apologists for authoritarian government...

...They are determined to enjoy life, even if they are incapable of bringing enjoyment to others...

...Like most educated Africans, Diab is convinced that singleparty systems exist, not (as many white liberals believe) as a short cut to efficiency, but to keep the governments of the day in power for ever...

...Youth breaks away and revolts...

...the state, while still in its infancy, degenerates...

...Good government would be able to defeat opposition legitimately, especially bad opposition, they maintain...

...seems undisturbed by the once-powerful argument that tolerating opposition means tolerating tribalism...

...What troubles most African critics in present authoritarianism, or in trends toward it in the still slightly democratic states, is that an indigenous tyranny is so much more difficult to shake off than a colonial one...

...Russell Warren Howe, a regular contributor to The New Leader, is now traveling in Africa as correspondent for the Washington Post...

...African critics disagree...

...Inevitably, this current of subversive thinking is limited to the educated African élite—though it certainly says something which the peasant too must feel, if only vaguely...

...Debbasch, however, while not admitting that absolute power corrupts, does note that it blinkers authority from reality...

...elsewhere it is in chains...

...What safety valves exist, then, for this boiling African cauldron...

...he just wants to choose the boss freely, that's all...

...African tribal structures were based largely on slavery and caste systems, and what democracy there was existed only at the sort of aristocratic level authorized by Magna Carta...

...For those who still see dangers in a two- or three-party system, President Joseph Kasavubu of the Congo has a theory of government which he feels is a sophisticated alternative to unipartitism—the tribal patchwork...

...Coronation...

...An unexpected opponent of unipartitism is Anicet Kashamura, who was information minister in the short-lived Lumumba government of the Congo and who is now an exiled plotter...

...they view unipartitism as a closing of the safety valves—a catalyst of revenge...

...They feel that, in most cases, freedom would not be abused...

...They say that a philosophy of African government which either ignores tribalism or tries to "stamp it out" is unrealistic...

...Even slaves had a voice of sorts in these "elections," especially in places (such as the Niger Delta) where slaves outnumbered the freeman class...

...There is, indeed, no press tradition at all throughout the whole of French Africa...

...Although Premier Milton Obote almost certainly would like an unipartite government, he seems unlikely to get one in the near future...

...Confidence between comrades of the [independence] struggle is lost...

...the élite thus has little part of the present power structure...

...It is certain that many of the particularities of the French and British systems are out of place in Africa, and so would be some aspects of the American system...

...They point out that divergencies of opinion as wide as those in advanced countries, and that government, even good government, without opposition, even bad opposition, is dictatorship...

...Nigeria's multi-party system is a reflection of its size and ethnic heterogeneity...

...He writes: "To achieve . . . development . . . the entire population must agree to work for years without being rewarded by immediate results...

...The press is nearly free in South Africa, Nigeria and Congo-Leopoldville...

...Tevoedjre sees African parliaments as "monolithic organizations whose only function is to approve and applaud...

...For example, the conflict of party allegiance between the Nigerian federal government and the government of the Western Nigeria state rocked that young country...

...Sooner or later, the antagonisms will reappear with such acuity that only force will decide...

...Taking on a Messiah-like air, he reduces the public mind to inertia so that the people become incapable of reflecting on their fate, or claiming their rights...

...Class antagonisms must be recognized...

...But even when this respect for the human individual survives in unipartite society, and it rarely does, the unresolved problem is how to decide at any moment what is the "one party" and what the inadmissible opposition...

...Democratic government is not a government elected by the people once and for all time: This, roughly, is the simple fact which reappears now in editorials and articles, in French and English African papers, with the force of revelation...

...There were also, in tribal days, hardy experiments: Women became chiefs, even paramount chiefs...

...Would the government permit a railroad strike...

...These commentators note that Africa's revolutionaries failed to die off tidily at independence and are trying to be ministers...

...Even if they begin 'Leftwing and revolutionary,' they end up fascist . . . They lead to the depolitization and sterilization of the mind . . . The 'government party' is the opium of the African masses...

...The fate of democracy in Africa is hardly a new subject, of course...

...Milcent, former editor of the now African-edited Afrique Nouvelle, believes authoritarianism is necessary to check the centrifugal force of tribalism...

...Six countries have genuine oppositions (plus South Africa, which has a genuine opposition, but for whites only...

...Some African thinkers, such as Chief H. O. Davies, the Nigerian lawyer, believe African countries inherited systems too sophisticated both for government and governed...

...Nigerians cite Nkrumah's plea for "the right to govern or misgovern ourselves" and point to the obvious corollary: that a national political minority has the right to try to lead or mislead the country, since only the electorate can judge objectively between the parties...

...The French system has not been preserved in French Africa in as inviolate a way as some British African states have tried to maintain the heritage of Westminster...

...They want the road to free expression, including tribal loyalties, left open...

...Uganda's powerful opposition party was once in power, and was favored by Britain to remain in power...

...Colonialism rationalized this state of affairs and curbed its excesses, but it did not greatly change if only because there was no time...

...Lacking Latin America's uniformity of language and religion, its long experience of government and its substantial mandarin class, the experiment on this Continent may be more painful, but also more short-lived...

...Use any touchstone you like...

...When in positions of responsibility, at home or abroad, the élite are tightly leashed...

...Most African countries therefore have no secular institutions—just the temporary one of a cabinet...

...Most educated Africans today seem to decry the shibboleths of apologists for "strong government...

...Another 11 have "storefront" oppositions, either for respectability, or because the annihilation of competing parties is incomplete...

...A Left-winger, he attacks the Nkrumah type, which he says the single-party produces: "As the rivals are done away with, confidence grows: The chosen one believes himself the vessel of truth, of the message...

...The present moment is post-revolutionary and therefore equally intolerant of the individual...

...If, in addition, some "nonpolitical" offices had been "party" posts as well, the administration would probably have broken down...

...Davies believes the continuance of multiparty government and democratic safeguards in Nigeria would be more secure if ministers were not chosen from the legislature, but were, as in the United States, "supra-party...

...Many things superficially justify tight control: the need for economic development, abuse of freedom by effervescent semi-literates, the quasiinevitable struggle for hegemony between the Old Guard ("prison graduates," etc...

...Perhaps, after all, civil wars are justified as a relatively rapid, and historically respectable road to national unity, especially where independence has been premature and unprepared, and where (for instance, the Congo) a national conscience, party or loyalty is at present unthinkable...

...But when only a single and particular type of coalition is tolerated, even coalitions become tyranny...

...Could someone accused of subversion be acquitted...

...Thus Jeune Afrique—Tunisian-owned, Romepublished, with a mixed black and Arab staff—has poured particularly bitter sarcasm on those paternalistic American and European writers who have set up as apologists of African dictatorships...

...The six which have real opposition political parties are: Morocco, Nigeria, Congo, Uganda, Somalia and Sierra Leone...

...Traditions hardly have time to appear before they become gangrenous...

...Once the legal wife is rejected, mistresses mushroom...

...Of course, Milcent has in mind French Africa, where high schools are rare and, a few years ago, were rarer still...

...Almost everywhere, these standard democratic tests show local governments to be ailing...

...What is new is the sudden sharpness with which the discussion is now being carried on in Africa's surviving free journals—in Nigerian newspapers, in the magazines Jeune Afrique, Afrique Nouvelle and others, and in the reviews to which Africans contribute...

...and the bettereducated, often more universalist "new wave...

...Shaken by coups d'état, attempted assassinations and plots— the only means of progressing from one government to another in authoritarian states—Africa is discovering the need for multi-party systems, free elections, a free press and labor movement and an independent judiciary...

...But French Africa contains less than 10 per cent of Africa's population...

...Unipartitism, they say, is the rule of personalities, not institutions: It creates nothing permanent...

...The new wave, although largely de-tribalized...

...Most of the African liberals agree that the recent district commissioner and the present district commissar are right about the African "liking to know who's boss...

...He sees singleparty government as having led inevitably to "show, vulgarity, pomp, extravagance, self-glorification, flattery...

...A few African countries have retained some blend of the rough democracy of the past and the new democracy of the West...

...Making a virtue of necessity, Kasavubu notes that a multitude of tribal parties—even more than an assembly of independents—can expect almost unquestioning, "religious" loyalty from their respective constituents...