Penguin Books. Baltimore. 1961. African Series coll. David & Helen Kimble, eds. 217 p.
For some time I have thought it would be worth while to write a short account of African political parties: not in order to say anything new, but simply to pull together what is already known and what can reasonably be conjectured. By now there is a good deal of material dealing with this subject — in the form both of party documents of various kinds, and of studies of particular parties and territories. But much of it is hard to come by. And there has been little attempt so far to look at the evidence in a connected or systematic way.
The familiar Argument from Unripe Time might, of course, be urged against attempting anything of this kind at the moment. Admittedly the data are fragmentary: African parties and interparty relations are in a fluid state, there are as yet few biographies or autobiographies of party leaders; detailed field studies of party organization in a given area have only recently begun to be undertaken; there is no agreed method of inquiry, no accepted formula regarding the questions to be asked. None the less, I hope that this attempt to summarize the present state of our knowledge may save students a certain amount of time and trouble, and suggest possible lines of investigation to those who wish to explore the subject more thoroughly.
This is then simply an introductory essay on African parties. It is intended especially for the use of Africans, whose interest in these parties is practical as well as academic. My main source of information and ideas has naturally been the Africans who have built, managed' and participated in these parties at various levels. My hope is that this effort to pull together the threads of political history from many different territories will seem to them to be justified, and will in a small way contribute to the growth of communications and the breaking down of barriers between the various African peoples.
The term “African political parties” also needs some explanation.
First, I am concerned only with parties whose leaders, members, and supporters are predominantly Africans; not with the predominantly or exclusively European parties which are to be found in southern Africa, Kenya, or Algeria. Second, I have taken most account of those territories in Africa north of the Equator in which fully-fledged, as contrasted with infant or embryo, parties have emerged: Morocco, Tunisia, the States of former French West and Equatorial Africa, Togo, Cameroons, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. But I have tried to pay some attention also to territories — such as Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, and the Belgian Congo — in which organizations of a party type became established during the late 1950s. On the other hand, I have made little reference to southern Africa — including the Union of South Africa, the Central African Federation, Angola, and Mozambique — where the institutional framework has been such that African national movements, in so far as they have enjoyed any legal form of existence, have taken the form of ‘congresses’ rather than parties. There remains a final category of territories in which parties have existed in the past but are, at the time of writing, prohibited: Libya, the United Arab Republic, and the Republic of the Sudan. Their parties are historically important, especially in the Sudan. Third, this study is limited in time as well as in space. Contemporary African political parties are, in almost all cases, products of the period since the Second World War — though one or two, like the Tunisian Neo-Destour, can trace a continuous history back to the 1930s. Hence relatively little will be said here about the forerunner organizations, the nationalist pressure-groups and proto-parties of the ‘colonial epoch’, from the late nineteenth century until about 1945.
Whether it is reasonable to try to paint with such a broad brush and on such a large canvas may well be disputed. Even those who admit the value of this comparative approach to the political institutions of Africa south of the Sahara may question the usefulness of including North Africa, with its predominantly Arab culture, in such a general survey. This is not the place to discuss the ties — religious, cultural, commercial, and political — which have linked North Africa with the Sudanic belt of Africa south of the Sahara during the past millennium, though these seem to me in themselves a good reason for avoiding the customary dichotomy. More immediately relevant is the resemblance, from the point of view of structure, objectives, and ideologies, between the political parties which have developed in the territories north and south of the Sahara during the recent period of decolonization. Of course the diversities are also very important. The various African States in which parties have emerged differ widely from one another in their histories, ethnic composition, types of economic and social system, dominant religious beliefs, and the like. In some cases Nigeria for example, they also contain within themselves a rich variety of peoples and cultures. Any attempt at a general discussion of African parties needs constantly to take these diversities into account.
The fact remains that, over a large region — from Morocco to Nyasaland, from Senegal to Somalia — with a population of well over 100 million, political parties have become an integral part of the political system, for the time being at least. They have developed their specific types of institutions, rituals, and symbolism — their branches and congresses, membership cards and subscriptions, flags and slogans, demonstrations and rallies. In most of this region it is the parties which provide the main mechanism for the selection of political leaders — ministers, members of legislatures, local councillors. Those who play an active part in the management of these parties, the militants, whether they express themselves in English, French, or Arabic, Bambara, Hausa, or Somali, speak and understand, in a political sense, a common language.
There is nothing to be gained by attempting a precise definition of the term ‘party’ at this stage. Part of the purpose of an essay of this kind is to try to clarify what one means by ‘parties’ in the contemporary African context. It is, however, possible to draw some rough and ready distinctions between parties and other types of political or semi-political organization, such as clubs, committees, ‘movements’, revolutionary fronts, mafias. In general, one might say, political parties possess some discernible structure, basic units of some kind linked, however loosely, with a central directorate; they advocate certain policies and make public from time to time some form of party programme; they are interested in using the mechanisms of representative institutions to achieve political power, or at least an extension of their political influence; and to this end they compete with other parties (where these exist) and appeal to an electorate for allegiance and votes. But even such a loose working definition raises various problems which must be discussed. For the moment it is probably most convenient to consider as 'parties' all political organizations which regard themselves as parties and which are generally so regarded.
One special difficulty which occurs in the study of African political parties arises from the sheer rapidity of social and political change. This is perhaps the reality which lies behind all the mythology about Africans being ‘transported from the Dark Ages into the twentieth century’. There is, of course, no reason why African history should in the least resemble European history. But it is true that, superficially at any rate, there appears to be taking place in many African territories a kind of telescoping of phases which those who are most at home with European, and more particularly British, history tend to think of as distinct. Societies in which relations based upon kinship, tribal sentiment, and chiefly power seem sometimes as strong as in the Highlands of Scotland before the Union may at the same time generate a national consciousness and loyalties as compelling as in Ireland before the Easter Rising. They may throw up popular agrarian movements that remind us of the Rebecca Movement in early nineteenth-century Wales, and contain a nascent proletariat whose protests against the established social order take the kind of militant forms that were familiar in Chartist England. In these same societies the introduction of universal suffrage may have brought into being what we are accustomed to regard as an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon, the mass electorate, and with it the political leader whose power in part depends upon the use of modern techniques of propaganda.
Hence the types of social context within which contemporary African political parties operate are highly complex. We have to be careful not to expect them to behave in at all the kind of ways in which contemporary Western European or North American parties behave. We have to seek to understand them as they are, avoiding any rigid application of categories and schemata derived from a study of Western political history and institutions. And we have to recognize that, given the tempo of political change, statements made now, even if they give a reasonably correct account of the present state of affairs, may cease to be relevant in a few years', or a few months', time. At best they may continue to have a certain historical interest.
Important developments have indeed taken place since the writing of this book was substantially completed in mid-1960: the post-Independence struggle for power in the Congo; the emergence from their former obscurity of organized national movements in the Portuguese territories, associated in Angola with a major revolt against the colonial regime; the appearance of independent Somalia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and a pleiad of formally independent French-speaking states; the rapid advance towards independence of the states of former British East Africa; a strengthening of the trend towards one-party systems in independent states; and new alignments in inter-state relationships, associated in part with the conferences at Brazzaville, Casablanca, and Monrovia. If I were to set out to write this book again, I would certainly want to write it somewhat differently taking account of these and other new facts. But in essentials the argument remains, I hope, valid.
The purpose of this essay then is to ask, and try to give provisional answers to, certain basic questions about African political parties. First, in what circumstances have these parties emerged? What forces in modern African society have especially influenced their growth? Second, how have particular parties originated? Third, what broad distinctions can be drawn between various types of African party? Fourth, what can be learned about the organization, structure, and leadership of parties ? Fifth, what activities do parties undertake, and what techniques do they employ? Sixth, what objectives do the various parties pursue? By what ideas are they mainly influenced? The book ends with some tentative hypotheses about parties and party relationships in modern Africa. In addition, in order to avoid overloading the text with a quantity of detailed factual material, I have included an appendix containing brief notes about the main political parties operating in the various African territories during the period 1945 to 1960.
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