Moses:
There is a missing Point 9:
If a new "system" emerges, it does not mean it will be static. No system works for ever.
TF
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, October 28, 2022 at 12:06 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracy
Just to be sure and to repeat my clarifications from the earlier debate, let me make a couple of points:
1. Given the current reality of not just the failure of liberal democracy in Africa but the profound damage it is doing to African societies, I'm a strong advocate for searching for an alternative to it.
2. However, I have never argued that we uncritically adopt or implement an African or precolonial African mode of governance as a replacement for liberal democracy, as doing this would be fraught with its own complications and anachronisms. I am not one of those whose solutions to all African problems is to decolonize and return to some recoverable African essence that predated colonialism but was distorted or undermined by it. In fact some old members of this forum may remember my debate on this subject with the late George Ayittey. Even for the sake of argument, if we accept that colonization distorted all African democratic and political systems, I don't believe that everything that was distorted can be restored to its factory setting, or that even if it were possible to do that, this would be desirable or compatible with the evolved aspirations of Africans in the twenty first century, 60 years after independence.
3. I am interested in deconstructing, historicizing, and demystifying the fetish of liberal democracy, which many people, including many Africans, tend to accept uncritically as a settled, normative, and superior modality of leadership selection and governance.
4. I argue that if you don't know where a problem began, you cannot tackle it. As Achebe says it, we need to go back to when the rain began to beat us. To this end, I want to bring the conversation back to the moment of liberal democratic imposition, the recent post-Cold War period when the West took advantage of Africa's economic desperation and need for external assistance to compel African states to "democratize" (accept and adopt liberal democracy in exchange for loans and other forms of assistance) under the ubiquitous and well-funded rhetoric of political and economic liberalization.
5. I argue that debates and discussions of appropriate political models should be left to people within each African society instead of a system that evolved from the experiences of Euro-America (liberal democracy) being imposed on them under the pretext that that system has universal applicability and works for all peoples at all times. Ultimately, it should be up to Africans themselves if they want to stick with the competitive electoral model of liberal democracy, revisit, modify, refine, and implement a system derived from their own political experiences and histories, or develop a new hybrid that combines elements of liberal democracy with African political traditions and modalities.
6. I argue that crafting an alternative democratic system for Africa necessarily entails the decentering and detotallizing of liberal democracy and its dominance over current African political praxis and discourse.
7. I strongly insist that crafting a new African democratic model must not ab initio discard or ignore African political histories and democratic systems but must critically draw upon them as part of the ideational and programmatic menu to foreground debates and political innovation. In some cases, the point of departure and reference for the debate and conversation must be African political systems and African principles of governance and societal management.
8. For me, a discussion of African democratic alternatives to the failed and destructive liberal democracy should not privilege or assign a higher instrumental and deterministic weight to the tenets of liberal democracy than to those derived, however problematically, from African political histories and experiences. Both must be put on our discursive scales on equal ontological terms. Both must be subjected to the same critiques, scrutinies, and rigorous interrogation both in terms of their flaws and their suitability for modern, diverse, socioeconomically challenged African nation-states.
In a nutshell, do not rig and settle the debate in favor of the failed liberal democracy before the debate begins or before African political ideas and democratic systems have been given a good faith chance to compete in the marketplace of political ideas and practices.
Do not reinscribe the flawed premises and assumptions of liberal democracy as baselines of the debate while offhandedly rejecting all elements from African political traditions as unacceptable for modern times.
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 27, 2022, at 9:48 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
Okay, Ken.
I answered in the context of Gloria's question:
If democracy, as defined by elections, produces a fascist, what should we do?
While we protest, we usually do not call for mass suicide.
Alas!
TF
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 5:06 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracyaccept might imply the opposite of resist. can't we resist someone who is in office? to be clear, i accepted the supreme court decision to give the election to bush, though i believed it was an unjust decision, and florida should have run the election over. but i marched, signed petitions, talked with people i knew, about how to oppose trump.
yes, i accepted that he was president; but not that he should have his way.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin.falola53@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 5:12 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracy
Ken:
Who was your president when Trump was in power?
This is what I meant, not as a philosophical idea of personal choice.
Whether I like a Dean, President, Provost or Head is a different matter, but as de facto power, I have to accept.
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 4:10 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracyi didn't accept trump. i wouldn't accept neofascists.
resistance can be multifaceted.
that's the short answer. the longer answer lies with gramsci for whom the problem of countering fascism with rising populism defined his times...you know, mussolini etc.
i'd also say that to be decent, we should have lines that we would never accept being crossed without going further than peaceful protest.
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 4:22 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracy
You accept, just as we accepted Trump!
From: 'Emeagwali, Gloria (History)' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at 3:22 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracy
There is one question I would like to get an answer to:
What happens if/ when neo-Nazi fascists are elected through
the ballot box?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 2:32 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracy
EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click any links or open any attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe.
thanks to moses for returning to the issue of african democracy.
i think we can all agree that the ideal of democracy is rough, is going through rough times, in much of africa. while moses says it is too reductive to suggest that it cannot simply be seen as standing against autocracy, and while we can all agree that in many cases it is democracy in name only, while manipulative forces control the electoral process, it leaves me still troubled by the realities of autocratic rule. i think of kagame who is a strongman, and who crushes the conventional democratic institutions like a free press, an independent judiciary, and a just police force, still they hold elections periodically where he receives most votes. in contrast, the recent elections in the drc were close, contested, and if not totally fair, at least not autocratically determined.
it is very very hard for me not to see the way elections in the west are held in contrast to those in russia or china, or other autocratic states.
if i were a citizen in any state in the world, i would want to have the freedom to vote, and if a democratic process is not working well, would i then say, take away my participation and give it to the wiser, more just electors who stand above me. the original american model of the electoral college was flawed for that reason, and its flaws now haunt us.
but the yoruba model of the oba in the piece moses is cited is equallly troublesome to me. who is to judge the electors and guarantors of the oba? if the oba really embodies the people, as the article claims, then we have an example of rousseau's Will of the People, which is basically infallible. he claimed the revolutionary leaders needed no check, because they embodied that will....like the claims re the oba. but the lack of a competing authority meant the guillotine had no check. those who select or authorize the oba, if they are hereditary figures, not elected, are not answerable to the people, and that means they control the power of the state...and the oil wells. i don't see the philosopher-king model, or inherited ruler model, as free from the basic neoliberal capitalist flows of power. to the contrary.
i think france did the right thing in eliminating royalty and aristocracy and their privileges; the u.k. should have done th same.
i think the bolshevik ideology of the vanguard is its achilles heel, and destroyed the great glories of revolutions that were directed against wealthy elites, inherited power, and the ideologies that sustained them.
i don't write this so as to defend the failures of democracy in african states. i will confess i work with colleagues in amnesty international so as to try to prevent abuses of human rights, which entails defending the rights of people to freely debate their views on statehood and to vote freely, to hear a free press. i don't care if it is capitalist or socialist, those fundamentals should not be shifted onto an oba and his court or courtiers in trusting them to do a fairer job.
i wonder how the workings of botswana could be judged given the interplay of traditional rulership and democratic rights? i wonder if we could open this question by asked which states comparatively seem to be working best for the interest of the population as a whole, as opposed to those doing the opposite.
at that point i quit and ask those political scientists who actually try to measure this question, using whateve GINI charts or measurements they have, to opine. is it better to press for decentralized power vs centralized, so that we'd have swiss models instead of american?
who should get to decide when books are to be banned or not?
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 8:13 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Yoruba-centered Critique of Liberal Democracy
I don't want to resurrect our recent discussion and critique of the damage and problems of liberal democracy (with its emphasis on competitive, zero-sum, and majoritarian principles) in Africa, but this piece (linked below) by Ayodeji Ogunaike is the type of thoughtful, original, and transcendental critique we're talking about. This is where the debate is headed, decentering and historicizing liberal democracy and unearthing Africa-centered alternatives to it.
Perspectives like this reject and go way beyond the farcical and shallow binaries of democracy versus dictatorship, election versus selection, participation versus non-participation, singularity versus pluralism, etc, which do little to get us out of the ontological and programmatic conundrum of a fatally troubled liberal democratic practice in Africa.
The piece is part of our think-piece series being published on Africasacountry.com, with the edited volume to be published thereafter by UVA Press.
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