On Democratization of African Democracy

The standardization, if also universalization, of the Euro-American model of democracy as the only legitimate form of governance has stifled the growth of diverse democratic traditions in Africa and the affirmation of Africa’s unique and complex political history. This book project, On Democratization of African Democracy, explores the implications of readingAfrican democratic forms through the lens of the very philosophical/theoretical frameworks within which the concept of democracy is fashioned. Here, the concept of democratizing African democracy is predicated on the presupposition that democracy cannot exist except for the people who will it into being, and for which they constitute its only legitimacy. And just as democracy cannot exist outside thewill of the people, its content, orientation, performance, and augmentation must be directed, affirmed, or superseded only by the African people. However, since the universalization of the Euro-American model of democracy also valorizes Euro-American political history, when imposed, it represents the evacuation of African democratic reality/history/people/experience from their own “democracy.” Therefore, this book offers a self-reflexive and self-formative political reconstruction of African democracy through the same democratic principle it must espoused. It opens the door for speculation, experimentation, augmentation, and supersession of the conventional democratic paradigms, theories, and philosophies. The centering of African political history and its people, in a radical sense, is a way of humanizing Africans who, for centuries, have been stripped of their histories, being, and knowledge systems through a perverse Hegelianism that entombs them in a perpetual state of childlike dependency, only fit to be dictated to by a superior Euro-American civilization. The methodology employs a mixed approach, combining archival sources with theoretical and philosophical analyses. Thus, my objectives include conducting archival research in Ghana and the UK on Ghanaian traditional (Akan) concepts/history of “democracy” as well as the colonial genealogies of the contemporary postcolonial democratic form, in order to account for the particular path that the present postcolonial political form has taken. At the intersection of these conflicting accounts will be the reconstruction of African democracy both against the constraining colonial dictations and within African political historiography.