Secondly, claims of an indigenized ‘African democracy’, to quote Nigerian literatus Obi Wali [in another context] is “deodorized dog shit.” It may smell good, but it is still shit!

Critics of democracy often quote Alexis de Tocqueville and chide it as “tyranny of the majority,” where a “majority public opinion” officially terrorizes the minority. 

This is actually fetishized authoritarianism; the powerlessness of the majority is hidden under the exciting performativity of democracy – periodic elections (one person, one vote – where even idiots have the same power as Ivy League university graduates), and constitutionalism (crafted through a numbers game, not the best arguments).

That a “majority public opinion” is innocent and free is the lie of the 21st century.

With Enlightenment Europe of the 1600s preaching liberation of the individual from “self-inflicted tyranny” such as belief in religion, this period saw the celebration of the individual as a free thinking being.  In Emmanuel Kant’s words, this movement stood for “public use of one’s reason in all matters.” 

The Enlightenment period heralded the emergence of intellectual salons across Europe, a growth of a book-reading population, which also shared these books feverishly to as far as rural areas.

With the scientific and industrial revolutions coming around the same time, independent thought, and the fields of mathematics, astronomy, physics, politics, economics and medicine and philosophy were updated and expanded.

A great deal of knowledge was generated and the Enlightenment did not only give us the French Revolution of 1789, but also popularized the Athenian notions of democracy – majority’s choice.

The picture that emerges is that democracy could only thrive on two grounds: after knowledge (in politics, philosophy, economics, medicine, physics, and literature and other fields) has widely spread; and secondly, being under industrial-scientific – not farming – societies.

These two grounds undergird the assumption that those who participated in choosing leaders in an election were fully literate/informed beings.  By also depending on their labour, for which they paid taxes, they were directly affected and concerned by the actions of their leaders, and would uncompromisingly call them to order.  

Sadly, years down the road, even in fully industrial societies, with sizeable intellectual communities such as the United States, these assumptions were shattered a long time ago. Rational thinking and independent choice are but a façade.

Choice is not born; it is learned over time. This makes it open to control and manufacture. Secondly, rationality is not the only ground upon which decisions are made: other grounds include irrational ones such as race, tribe, sentiment, money, religion, coercion, etc.

These have often destabilized the neat package of rationality that democracy preaches. In sub-Saharan Africa, we are presented with entirely different dynamics.

With many societies on the continent still agrarian, democracy remains the finest tool through which wananchi are manipulated and exploited.  Through a general disinterest – not ignorance – inspired by an agrarian lifestyle and morality, many do not understand the workings of the state.  

As long as their source of sustenance, land, is not affected, peasants do not understand, neither are they interested in learning the connection between their subsistence and the ways in which they are governed. 

This renders them comfortable – not gullible – with simple things such as cash, appeals to tribe, or gifts such as clothes when called upon to choose leaders.

With democracy coming under alien/colonial state institutions with otherwise strange practices such as legislating in foreign languages, oppressive fashion standards, a painful monogamy, and strict timekeeping, majority Africans do not relate with these rather capitalist standards. 

Endowed by nature, farming communities in tropical Africa seek to express themselves in other ways and thereby come to democracy or the so-called “modern state” as a pastime.

It only matters on issues of security. In the end, the tiny colonial elite hypnotized by colonialism and happy to sell their souls (and land) to capitalists (so-called foreign investors) have cobbled themselves into modern monarchies.

Periodically, they return to their disinterested (and partly ignorant) agrarian compatriots with presents such as money, or appeals to tribe/ethnicity for a renewed mandate.

The author is a PhD fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research.