The Times and Challenges of Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This chapter addresses the ways a cross section of diverse African states has confronted the issues of democracy and development over the past 25 years or longer, and introduces how the authors of the book present their “state of the field” assessments of the individual African states examined in their work. This chapter sets out to use historical assessments to add new perspectives on the political economy of African states, and how what may appear to be new conditions often have much longer antecedents that can be best understood by careful historical framing by scholars and practitioners. The goal is to provide specific evidence rather than try to distill such divergent experiences down to a set of essentialized variables that are made to fit all African nations. We argue that it is less important to fit African experiences into typologies of democratic practices on a spectrum of less to more, but rather to compare the specific realities found in the case studies presented here. We intend to present qualitative historical evidence to assess the dynamics of democratization in Africa without trying to reproduce the older ‘report card’ approach to the topic. Unfortunately, the decades-long search for a successful mix of democracy and development in Africa has produced several troubling assumptions in the scholarship that are difficult to discard. We examine some of these assumptions in this opening chapter.