Political Parties in New African States: A Comment on Robert F. Gray's View of the Matter

Extract

Mr. Gray's argument, if I have understood it correctly, is that two-party political systems, which he equates with the register of a vote for any purpose, are culturally linked with a philosophy which sees true and false, right and wrong, as polar opposites and which springs from the claims of the Christian church to final authority in matters of truth and morals. He argues that we are moving away from such a philosophy in the light of recent discoveries in physics, notably Einstein's theory of relativity and presumably (though he does not mention this) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He draws support from Dr. Apter's statement of a generalization familiar to the student of politics, that in a successful two-party system both sides must court the “floating voter”, and this leads them to moderate their opposition rather than carry it to extremes. Mr. Gray does not accept this as a general proposition, but takes it as a description of a recent change in the attitudes of political parties, to be correlated with new trends in philosophy. Hence, he argues, the two-party system is not an essential element of democracy and there is no need to be distressed if it is not adopted in African states. African culture, he argues, is not based on our philosophical premises, and the evidence he advances is that Africans are free in some societies to choose between the cults of different deities.