An Approach to African Politics

Extract

The bulk of research on African political institutions has been conducted by political scientists trained in the precepts of Western culture, and thus an appreciation for the uniqueness of the contributions of African society is lost. Many Western scholars even go so far as to insist that Africa offers no new theoretical problems since human beings are the same and political problems similar the world over. This is false for two reasons. First, man is a direct product of his environment and his problems are defined meaningfully in terms of that environment. Second, environmental and procedural conditions in Africa differ significantly from those in Europe and, by extension, the United States. In Africa social processes do not represent, as they do in Europe, static, readily identifiable forces and interests. They tend rather to defy neat and convenient type-casting and classification.

Let me cite three examples. The average Western scholar looks for institutions in discussing governments. He normally asks, what type of government is this? Unitary, federal, or confederal? Yet the African government is personal, not institutional. To the African, what matters is not the formal function assigned to an institution by its name, but the phases of the flow of policy to which the institution and its personnel contribute. If we look first for institutions and then ask what functions they perform, we may see a less comprehensive picture of the African world than we would by first identifying the political process and then asking which sub-systems contribute to its various branches.