IS DICTATORSHIP IN AFRICAN DNA? Robert Mugabe’s re-election to an eighth five-year presidential term in Zimbabwe and the passing of the Public Order Management Bill in Uganda got a friend of mine so despondent that she sent an email wondering whether Africans are genetically anti-democratic. Put another way, my friend was asking, is dictatorship, conflict and poverty in our DNA? The quick answer is no. Like all other human beings, Africans aspire to life, liberty, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. So where does the tendency to anti-democratic behavior come from? Some would say that it is rooted in tribalism or sub-ethnic nationalism. Others would contend that the trouble stems from corrupt and greedy elites. But those are merely symptoms of the deeper underlying and widely unacknowledged cause. You cannot begin to honestly understand why dictatorship, conflict and poverty persist in Africa unless you address the huge white elephant in the room; the African state. The present day African states were created by the European imperial powers. Chinweizu, the Afro-centric writer and thinker, calls them “Lugardist States” after Sir Frederick Lugard aka “Kapere Lugadi”, the colonial officer who helped establish and shape Nigeria and Uganda. The Lugardist States were established by colonialists, to serve their interests. They were born repressive and anti-democratic for the purpose of facilitating the extraction and expropriation of wealth without any transparency or accountability to the natives. In a fantastic article written in 1967 for the Journal of Modern African Studies entitled “The Inevitability of Instability”, James O’Connell described the colonial tradition, upon which the Lugardist State was founded, thus: “First, colonial power rested on the overt or latent threat of force. Though it attempted to justify itself in terms of social progress and civilizing burdens, the ultimate foundation of colonial rule lay in the external force deployed in the initial conquest and in the subsequent maintenance of alien rule. Secondly, in its mode of operation colonial authority combined executive, legislative, and judicial powers in the hands of a single foreign caste and permitted only a minimum separation of those powers.” It was these alien, repressive and essentially anti-democratic institutions that the narrow class of “nationalist” African politicians inherited at independence. Writing about Mugabe and analyzing how he became the man we know today, the late Heidi Holland thought that the white Rhodesians were unrealistic when they failed to acknowledge the “impossibility of shifting smoothly from a police state of their creation, to the democracy of their self-serving dreams.” Making the same point, Robert Kalundi Serumaga cheekily compared thinking that the African Lugardist States can become prosperous liberal democracies, just because they are being led by black Africans, to believing that a matatu becomes a jet plane when Captain Mike Mukula assumes the drivers’ seat. Things did not get better at Independence because of the false and dangerous premise that post-independence nationalists all accepted as gospel truth. According to the Europeans, history began when they came to this continent. Everything native to this continent was inherently primitive and wrong, if not downright evil. Through education and religion, it was drilled into the nascent African elites’ heads that everything African is bad and that everything European is of God and must be aspired to. So instead of fighting to have sovereignty returned to where the European colonialists had taken it from and seeking to modernize and adapt the native African state and community structures, the “nationalists” struggled simply to inherit the armed bureaucracies of the Lugardist States. (Source: thecitizen.co.tz/oped/-/1840568/1957440/-/brnlrl/-/index.html)
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 21:41:56 +0000
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