THE AFRICAN CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY

Host to a variety of social, economic, and intellectual stimuli, Africa finds its destiny directed into new and uneasy patterns. In the vast subcontinent today we witness a clash of cultures and ideas as the tribal peoples of many colonial territories move toward Western forms of social organization.

Such a process is a challenge to Western political practice and belief. Can the content and structures of democratic popular government serve as a medium of reintegration for the many peoples of Africa as they seek to modify their activities and their aspirations in the light of modern practice ? Is the centuries-old development of parliamentary government in England suitable to the conditions of African life in British colonial territories ? If answers to such questions are in the affirmative, then we can say that parliamentary practice is still revolutionary. Reducing the risk of authoritarianism, it gives voice to newly articulate millions, allowing them, increasingly, to make their own decisions and participate in political life. It provides opportunities for expressions of social organization which, possibly, can incorporate older and more traditional systems of politics into a larger scheme of national and democratic society.

It remains an open question whether or not the structures of parliamentary government are suitable for the development of African social organization from tribal to national systems of social interaction. The present task will be to examine the process where it seems to be occurring successfully — in the Gold Coast. We shall treat this process as a case study in political institutional transfer. The policy, problems, and activities of both Gold Coast Africans and British expatriate officials will be examined in detail. We shall attempt to find some of the crucial factors in the process of developing a modern British-type parliamentary democracy in the Gold Coast, where only a half-century ago the rule of the British was limited to the coastal area and the chiefs reigned supreme in the hinterlands. In such a study one set of variables is provided by the indigenous social and political pattern which predated the coming of the European. A second is provided by the impact of European rule upon Africans.

Parliamentary Government in Africa

It is in British Africa that nationalist movements of considerable proportions have developed. British colonial policy, for a considerable time, has involved a program of devolution of powers to a local variety of parliamentary system. Conciliar organs have been adapted and modified to fit the conditions of the African environment and the special requirements of each colony. In parts of East and Central Africa this policy has given European interests a much freer hand in dictating to the African. It has been argued, for example, that the British abdication of imperial responsibility in Kenya would be a way of ducking a formidable multi-racial problem represented in more open and official form in the Malan government of South Africa. Yet the same policy, in areas where Europeans are non-resident, has meant a genuine devolution of authority and responsibility to Africans themselves. In the Gold Coast, Africans are in very real control of the internal decision-making processes of the territory.

Authority patterns which the West has established in Africa have succeeded in bringing forth new images as well as new gods. These new images increasingly reflect concern by African groups for greater freedom of action. Political autonomy has become an insistent theme. As the desire for autonomy sharpens, two great cultural traditions clash with one another. One points to the past, when tribal freedom represented a period of dignity and independence within the traditional pattern of life. The other points to a national future: instead of the tribe, the state; instead of the colonial administrator, the African politician; instead of the mission school, public secular education; instead of colonial status, parliamentary democracy.

Between these two cultural tendencies, Africans today represent all varieties of adaptation and accommodation towards the varied groups with which they have been in contact. In some areas in the Gold Coast they have been dealing with Europeans for over four hundred years. Christianity has made heavy and often strange inroads. Islam has crossed the desert and been incorporated with varieties of religious belief indigenous to the area.

There is the Africa of the European who is born in the White Highlands of Kenya or in the urban centers of Johannesburg. There is the Africa of the bush and the tribe, still the dominant social pattern. There is the Africa of the industrial worker in Nigeria or the Congo, or South Africa, where the family may live in a tribal preserve and the husbands and sons may be away most of the time, seeking their fortunes in more lucrative employment than agriculture. There is the Africa of the politician who may take on the frustrations of others as his own, directing the destiny of his people, or perhaps seeking an easy road towards money and power.

In spite of all these "Africas" which coexist side by side with one another, a gradual redefinition of social life is occurring throughout the continent. What happens in one area has its repercussions in others. People are less bewildered and less passive to European rule. In West Africa self-government has become more than a remote possibility.

Obstacles to Self-Government in British West Africa

British West Africa (including the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria) is an area having no permanent European settler population. The Gold Coast is the most advanced towards self-government. Nigeria, having gross difficulties with her diverse ethnic and religious groups, has not yet been able to operate successfully even a modified federal system. Yet self-government by 1956 has been a motto of Nigerian political leaders in the southern regions. The Gambia and Sierra Leone trail behind Nigeria in the development of self-government but the pattern has already been demarcated, particularly in Sierra Leone. The main difficulties facing these West African territories in their program...