‘When the market is buying, sell, and when the market is selling, buy.’ This Stock Exchange maxim might be equally productive applied to academic fashions; and that it has been fashionable to extol the ‘single or single-dominant party system’ in Africa is undeniable.

One way of questioning this fashion – and a fruitful one – is to examine the very concept of a ‘single or single-dominant party’. Its very clumsiness discloses the difficulties of conceptualization, when states in which only one party is legal are classed together with others where one party has succeeded in winning an overwhelming preponderance of seats, or where states whose governments have seized every chance to harass opposition elements are lumped together with others where little or no such pressure has been applied. Not only that. The word ‘party’ itself requires further definition. In what sense was the (now defunct) PDD of Dahomey a ‘party’? Or the FLN of Algeria? The party in Mali or in Guinea is quite clearly a very different animal from the party in Malawi. And so is the style of politics.

In the debate on the Native Authority (Amendment) Law of 1955, the late Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, replying to the demand that ‘it is high time in the development of local government systems in this Region that obsolete and undemocratic ways of appointing Emirs’ Councils should close’, commented that ‘the right traditions that we have gone away from are the cutting off of the hands of thieves, and that has caused a lot of thieving in this country. Why should we not be cutting (off) the hands of thieves in order to reduce thieving? That is logical and it is lawful in our tradition and custom here.’ This could be read as a defence against social change, a recrudescence of ‘barbarism’ after the inroads of pax Britannica, and a plea for the retention of the status quo and the entrenched privilege of the political elite.

On 15 January 1966, a crisis-bound Nigerian government was overthrown by a swift military coup d'état. The Prime Minister of the Federal Republic and his powerful associate, the Federal Minister of Finance, were seized by soldiers in Lagos. Neither survived, although the death of the Prime Minister, who was not personally unpopular, may not have been premeditated. His political chief, the premier of the vast Northern Region, was killed in Kaduna, and the latter's ally, the premier of the Western Region, died violently in Ibadan. Their major opponents among Nigerian office holders, namely the President of the Republic and the premiers of the Eastern and Midwestern Regions, escaped death. The President was on leave outside the country; it is not clear whether the two surviving premiers were spared by design or mistake. In any case, the tendency in Nigerian politics with which the survivors had been identified did appear to have triumphed despite their personal losses of power.

How simple the Ghana picture now seems! First, the opposition of nationalist demands to colonial rule; later, the opposition of local movements to the national government, then the internal opposition of sectional groups within the single party until the military intervened to turn everything awry. The story has a familiar ring to it. Anti-colonialism, one can argue, was mistaken for nationalism; but as soon as it became clear that the British were preparing to withdraw, politics became a destructive conflict between the would-be nationalist movement and tribal interests. In terms of this argument the overthrow of the Nkrumah regime has to be seen as simply one more example of the weakness of the structure of control in the newly independent states. Frailty, thy name is African nationalism ! The African colonies became self-governing before it was clear that a single ‘self’ existed; they are states before they are nations, and lack that ‘self-aware unity’ which is needed as the basis for a stable political system. Ghanaian history under Nkrumah (one concludes) is the history of every African ex-colony, the only difference being that the rise and fall of first the opposition and then the Convention People's Party in Accra occurred a little earlier in time than comparable events in other capitals.

Since the separate independence of Senegal in June 1960, after the breakup of the Mali Federation, organized political opposition in Senegal has not been able to maintain the position which it enjoyed before independence. The failure of the opposition can be explained only in part by reference to the repressive measures adopted by the government over this period; it should also be seen as a result of the internal weaknesses of the opposition itself. The purpose of this article is to outline the various conditions which have enabled the governing party, the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (UPS) of M. Leopold Sédar Senghor, to remain in power until the present time, despite its own lack of strict internal discipline or general sense of purpose.

Societies are generally neither monolithic nor homogeneous; every political system must deal with the problem of pluralism in some way. But political systems tend to be organized hierarchically, with power and authority concentrated at the top. The confrontation of social pluralism and political concentration can well give rise to tensions, since centralized political structures deal with diversified social interests. Tensions are also likely to grow out of pluralism within the political structure itself, as factions form on the bases of personalities, programmes and interests. Factions can exist within a single organizational or institutional framework, or they can be reflected in competing parties, checking and balancing institutions, and separated powers. The single-party regime has often become a familiar way of containing these tensions and factions in developing countries, particularly in Africa, and the existence of many African single-party regimes has led to efforts to discover the common elements behind the common phenomenon. The purpose of this study is not to challenge these explanations, but to look more broadly into the nature of interests, factions and power in developing polities, suggesting a model of political development that puts both unipartism and political pluralism in their places.

From the country's independence until May 1966 two factors profoundly affected the nature of politics in Uganda. These were, first, a latent violence between groups and, secondly, a vigorous constitutionalism as a style of political contest. Both factors were, inevitably, connected with events and tendencies which went back to well before independence.

The possibility of political violence in the country was linked to a few key issues. These included, first, the degree of autonomy to be enjoyed by Buganda as the largest and most developed region in the country; secondly, the unresolved problem of the Lost Counties of Bunyoro; thirdly, relations between the Baganda and other tribes, an issue which later culminated into an alleged Bantu/Nilotic cleavage; and fourthly, the tensions of party allegiances within the parliamentary system. We shall discuss these issues more fully later in this analysis.

In Tanzania, as in other legally established one-party states, it is not appropriate to think in conventional terms of a government and an opposition. For while such states allow free discussion, perhaps within fairly broad limits, they proscribe free association outside the single party system. Those who disagree fundamentally with the ruling party are not free to form a rival political association in order to promote their own views. They must either keep quiet and conform, or seek to advance their cause by resorting to unconstitutional action.

It follows therefore that in order to test the ‘democracy’ of a oneparty state, different questions have to be asked than in the case of a country where two or more parties are allowed to operate. Taking political competition as a central issue in any one party system, the questions are: how much political competition is judged legitimate ? Where, and within what limits, is competition encouraged ? How far is it real or nominal ? It is also relevant to ask whether interest groups can find satisfaction within the single-party structure and how stable is the system as a whole.