Ali A. Abdi University of Alberta Canada

1. Nominal Democracies and the Re-colonization of the African Public Space: Implications for Educational and Social Development Ali A. Abdi University of Alberta Canada

2. Pre-colonial African societies have diverse political systems that assumed, indeed, practiced some governance systems that could be described as democratic; • while these societies may not have used the terms ‘rule’ by the people, the consultative systems involved in the process of the governor/governed relationships undoubtedly spoke about a process of public affairs management that was not dictatorial (Lewis, 1967; Abdi, 1997) • With the arrival and presence of full-fledged colonialism in almost all parts of the continent, from mid 19th century to mid-late 20th century, African systems of consultative governance as well as projects of educational and social development were derided as primitive, backward and non-tenable in the dominant-subordinate relationships that were established

3. This involved, as Chinua Achebe, in his brilliant and now classic work, Things fall apart (2005 [1958) discussed, not only the replacing of indigenous administrative systems with a colonial one, but as well, the comprehensive recasting, indeed, whole scale destruction of complex primordial relationships, complemented by new re-inscriptions of the way Africans design and practice government and all issues related to it • With the rescinding of historico-culturally rooted and socially binding governance and relational structures that have sustained the lives of the people over millennia, colonialism moved to its next target of deconstructing, without indigenously intended reconstructions, of Africa’s cultural and educational platforms

4. In colonizing Africa, these deconstructions were important in the sense that colonialism had specific and very complex trajectories that seemingly triggered one another in sequences that assured the final aims of the overall project; that is the full exploitation of the continent’s human and natural resources • As such, European colonialism in Africa was firstly psychological, it was then cultural and educational, and from there political and economic (Abdi, forthcoming) • The sequence here was not accidental, it was deliberately designed to achieve maximum impact in the psychosomatic depreciations of the persona Africana • It was also intended to be of longue durée and had/has the potential for inter-generational continuities

5. The rationale for the multiple trajectories of the colonial project should not be difficult to see • In any project that involves the mass oppression of peoples on the basis of who they are, this time as Africans, one need not highlight the goodness of the damned (to use a line from Fanon, 1967); one need not equate the people to be oppressed with the oppressors, for that itself would dilute the long-term viability of the processes of oppression • Rather, any colonizing or oppressive entity will portray its victims as deserving of the wrongs that would be committed against them • Indeed, the systematic vilification of Africans was designed and implemented long before most of 19th century European colonizers set foot on Africa’s coastal areas and hinterlands

6. In critically and circularly reading the history of colonialism, one should not also miss the philosophical and literary onslaughts that were pioneered (for deliberate wording) by Europe’s so-called luminaries of thought and ideas: men like Hegel, Kant, Voltaire, Renan, Montesquieu and Hobbes were complicit in describing Africa as void of any workable governance, learning and social development structures • The pre-mass colonization work of European philosophers actually became a precursor of the benighted ‘mission civilsatrice’ that was propagated to justify the conquest of foreign lands and their peoples • In speaking about the great-scale projects of emptying African public management, resources use and social development forums, the still timely observations of, inter alia, Hamidou Kane (1963), Julius Nyerere (1968), Walter Rodney (1982), NgugiwaThiongo (1986, 2009) and Ivan van Sertima (1991) all become important components of the epistemic arsenal African analysts and anti-colonial writers should deploy so as to reconstruct the continent’s rightful place in the historical and cultural annals of the world.

7. Indeed, the governance dislocations of Africa were immediately followed by the deliberate, indeed systematic destruction of the continent’s educational and social development forums (Nyerere), which represented, or contained in themselves, the foundational life ways that cemented the way people relate to one another , and in their actual governance locations, manage and share their resources • Certainly, Africa’s pre-colonial political structures were characterized by sound policy management systems that assured the survival of each as the survival of all • Such co-survivability was not just a form of political expediency, it was also extensively attached to the continent-wide practiced Ubuntu philosophy of life where we are only humans through the humanity of the other (Tutu, 1999) • Undoubtedly, someone who even partially adheres to the praxis of ubuntu philosophy, will find it difficult to conquer, colonize or enslave others. For me, and I hope for many others, this starkly explains the thinness of Africans colonizing or enslaving other people

8. With the above points, which are intended to affirm the historical origins of today’s western style nominal democracies in Africa, one need not go further into the history of colonialism or the postcolonial but pre-1990 mixtures of problematic political and governance structures including quasi-’democratic’ civilian administrations, meta-temporal military regimes and the general reign of the so-called ‘big men’ whose political practices were the exact repetition of everything they learned from their colonial masters • In essence, therefore, postcolonial (or the condition of postcolony, Mbembe, 2001) did not represent any move to viable platforms of democratic governance. Indeed, in many instances, the political system looked like the colonial government with those now in power being of African descent • Here, let me problematize my use of the terms ‘democracy and democratic’: with the exception of very few cases which themselves may not be mature enough to be called fully democratic (e.g. Ghana), I do not think that most postcolonial African democratic types are real democracies, even in the incomplete ways such political systems are now arranged and practiced in the west; needless to add that the paper is not basically about the meaning, strengths and weaknesses of general democracy, but on problematic governance systems labeled ‘democratic’ that emanate from colonial deconstructions of primordial African governance structure

9. With those facts, for Africans and their countries, the end of the Cold War might have represented both an opportunity and some danger with respect to the post-1990s future of their countries • The loss of the super power card in a world that immediately became uni-polar was of course, obvious, but in terms of viable democratic development, the intentions should have been robust, but Africans were actually never given an opportunity to think about the new political demands emanating from the west where suddenly they were supposed to become democratic • Clearly such demands were only responding to the ideological dispositions and the desires of the west where just like other impositions that were already failing African education and social development platforms (e.g. neoliberal globalization and its problematic structural adjustment programs - SAPs), the commandments from Washington, D.C., London and Paris were very clear: democratize or perish • With these, the meanings and the practices of what one might have called ‘African democracy’ were not discussed; the viability of this type of governance for African political and socio-economic terrains were never analyzed, and if so, Africans were not consulted

10. Once again, though, the culprits were not just western governments but as well, African leaders, who just like the way they failed their people at the end of colonial rule, once again, accepted, with no concern for the welfare of the public and only for the sake of their own political survival, the hollow ‘democratic’ instructions that were being dictated from far away • As Mbembe (1990) noted then, the whole story of African democratization mainly represented former dictators and their conspirators assuming the colors of something called democracy; basically as he put, the re-institutionalization of previous dictators to continue ruling the peoples they have oppressed for so long • In stark terms, therefore, these claims of ‘democratization’ represented the second major failure of the African postcolonial elite to aim for viable governance structures that should have extricated their peoples from the myriad of problems they were facing in their daily lives.

11. Indeed, Julius Ihonvbere’s observation that the so called processes of democratization dangerously representing a new false start (after the one committed immediately after independence) still hold so much relevance (see Ihonvbere, 1996). • At the international level, the problems were not limited to the irrational impositions of immature ‘democratic’ claims on Africans, but as bad was the deliberate lowering the bar where undemocratic elites claiming that have established democratic regimes were taken at face value, and from there, the reign of these elites were facilitated by their foreign sponsors • I do not need to go into too much details here, but what democracies did Africa’s so-called (and once hopeful) second generations of leaders in many parts of the continent (in social development terms) achieve since the late 1980s/early 1990s? For all pragmatic undertakings, not much; worse, some of them have done so much damage • What actually happened was the intensification of neoliberal globalization where as John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an economic hitman (2005) spoke about, the outright derailing of any viable development possibilities for poor ‘third world’ countries were purposefully designed and implemented.

12. With this in place, the cluster of SAPs conditionalities that were imposed on the continent were all bad for Africa (e.g. reducing public expenditure on public education and health and creating private schools in countries where hardly anyone could afford the fees) • These were complemented by exclusionist loan fees where African countries were being charged four times in interest than Europeans with the result of Sub-Saharan countries paying in debt servicing more than what they have spent on education and health care combined (UNDP, 2001) • It is with these realties that Africans were losing their power to create, public, educational or development policies, all under the guise of false ‘democratic’ impositions • This led to the emergence of what many analysts rightly called the new processes of political and economic recolonization (Plank; Saul, 1993; Leys, 1996; Abdi, 2008) • Certainly the African public always hoped for something better; in many cases, the slogan that ‘we do not know much about this thing called democracy, but it cannot be worse than what we had before’ was heard in more than few countries • Bratton (1999), for example about the combination of suspicion and hope about the rhetoric of the Zambia of early 1990s

13. But things did not get better in most countries and as we speak, the unemployment rates in many zones of the continent are savagely high: 51% in Namibia, 48% in Senegal, 40% in Kenya, Officially 25% in South Africa (although pragmatically estimated at around 39%), and 24% in Nigeria. These bare economic development failures were never heard in pre-nominal, neoliberal driven impositions of western style democracies • On the education front, things are not fairing that well either, and while again, the global rhetoric of MDGs and EFA are around, what matters more, i.e., a quality education that uplifts the lot of the African people is as elusive, and African learners performing four grades or even six grades below their levels is more common than otherwise; with respect to tertiary education, the ongoing crisis does not need more elaborations here • Certainly therefore, and based on all of the above, the problems of education and development in Africa are fully attached to the continent’s re-colonized political spaces where Africans are not the masters of their policy platforms, with that leading to the exiling of African ways of doing politics, economics and education from African spaces of life. • Certainly the situation needs a lot of rethinking, reframing and reconstructing, which should start with the re-building of African philosophical, epistemological, governance and social development ideas and platforms • It is with these reconstructions undertaken at a massively active level that Africans could reconstitute for themselves some tangible forms of liberating praxis in their political and social development platforms and relationships.