The Dynamics of Political Africanisation

Abstract

The assumption most widely shared by Africanists in the past thirty years has been that of ‘development’, a movement forward, progress, between a notional ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ Africa.¹ To be sure, there have been many different, and often contradictory, views on the causalities between economic and political development. Whatever those differences, however, the political analysis of contemporary Africa has, with few exceptions, been constructed upon an (implicit or explicit) teleology. The interpretation of what has happened in contemporary Africa has thus rested on a prior assumption about what ought to have happened there after independence. Even, for example, a concept as useful as that of the ‘shrinking political arena’ — which actually does illuminate what seems to be a general rather than aberrant process in much of Africa — rests on a notion of what the development of a ‘political arena’ ought to be.²