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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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A Study in Non-parliamentary Democracy in Africa
| Panel |
71. African political leadership: any alternatives?
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| Paper ID | 310 |
| Author(s) |
Dokkum, André van
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | Discussions about democracy in Africa usually focus on post-colonial state institutions. The question whether or not processes of democratization in Africa are foreign, European developments are discontinuous with local indigenous political practices is, though not entirely absent, rarely addressed. The focus in the debates is usually framed in rather general terms, for instance by denying that anything like democratic processes can be found in Africa’s non-European heritages because of the lack of institutions and practices associated with parliamentary democracy. Or, on the contrary, it may be asserted that such heritages generally was or is democratic in the sense that the people concerned look(ed) for consensus, without being precise on just how consensus was or is arrived at. In-depth studies of political practices in local situations, from the viewpoint of democracy, are rare.
Some of the problems in the current debates on Africa and democracy may be identified as:
- the persistence of a controversy about the universality of political institutions, values and norms versus the cultural relativism of these;
- the assessment of the roles of specific African cultural aspects from a viewpoint of conflicts, conflict resolution and the promotion of democracy and political institutions;
- the conceptualization of central terms in research and the associated debates;
- the compartmentalization of research according to academic disciplinary boundaries.
These problems form a considerable but interesting challenge for research on Africa and democracy in the near future. The present paper focuses on anthropological, philosophical and political scientific aspects, with anthropology as the main discipline.
The empirical illustration incorporated in the research project will be that of the political role of spirit mediums among the Shona people in Southern Africa. During trance sessions, spirit mediums are able make statements about political processes believed to be deriving from dead chiefs who speak through their mediums. Spirit mediums themselves, however, are usually not members of chiefly lineages but often from commoner families. It seems that spirit mediums provide something of a voice of, and for, the common people.
Despite these indications that spirit mediums play important political roles amidst and on behalf of commoners, there is, as far as I know, no systematic analysis available in the literature about just what this means for the theory of democracy in Africa.
In the paper I intend to explain how explicit attention for conceptual topics can help to address at least some of the problems listed above. I will start with giving my views on the “culture” concept, then discuss the concept of “democracy,” after which more can be said about the practical elaboration of these discussions in a proposed empirical study among the Shona in Mozambique.
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