18 - Conclusion African Ethnic Politics & the Paradoxes of Democratic Development

Summary

IT is a necessary truism that, in understanding the development of democratic polities, issues of theory, both normative and empirical, and of institutional design cannot be dealt with in a historical and political vacuum. For Africa this involves recognizing the specificity of the context of the development of ethnic communities and identities, particularly over the past century. The fundamental characteristics of this development were outlined in the introduction to this volume and investigated in the empirically focused chapters that followed. These characteristics, and the idiosyncratic forms they assume in particular states, shape African responses to efforts at political reform and institutional engineering in ways that may produce results strikingly different from those experienced in other polities where such institutions and practices were first successfully introduced. In concluding this volume, we shall briefly reiterate the characteristics of the African ethnic context and note their relationship to the various forms and levels of democratic institutional development.

1. • First, contemporary African ethnicities are modern, not primordial survivals of some primitive tribal past. As the chapters of this volume have shown, they are relatively recent and dynamic responses to the political, economic and cultural forces of Western modernity as introduced to Africa during and after the epoch of European colonialism. Ethnicity is the contested outcome of intense political processes through which the boundaries, political ethics and moral economies of African communities have been continuously fought over and redefined in response to powerful and often disruptive forces of social change. These political processes have been expressed in an idiom of reinterpreted meanings of custom and tradition, including the syncretic incorporation of diverse elements of other African and European cultures.

2. • Second, contemporary African ethnicities are intimately linked to the processes of colonial and post-colonial state formation and the development of capitalist market economies. They are grounded in, and express, in particular, the inequalities of, economic development and access to state resources both within and between ethnic communities.