Penguin Books. Baltimore. 1961. African Series coll. David & Helen Kimble, eds. 217 p.
The question — In what conditions did African political parties emerge? — leads on to a further question about origins: How did the various parties come into being? Origins influence contemporary structure, especially in the case of parties that are in few cases more than fifteen years old. Moreover, to belong to a given party means for an African militant to belong to a party which came into being — or is believed to have come into being — in a particular way. The Bamako Conference of October 1946, which gave birth to the RDA, the meeting held, on the initiative of the Nigerian Union of Students, at the Glover Memorial Hall, Lagos, on 26 August 1944, which led to the setting up of the NCNC, these historic events have significance for party members — more, probably, than the 1899 resolution of the Trades Union Congress, which led to the establishment of the Labour Representation Committee, has for the average active member of the British Labour Party. But the mere fact that party origins are felt to be important is a reason why they have already tended to become semi-legendary.
In some cases one is dependent upon oral tradition, without even — as in the States of pre-colonial Africa — an official chronicler whose function it is to record and transmit the tradition. However, for certain parties there is a reasonable body of evidence in the writings of the actual founders, or of political historians who have gone to the sources, or both. For Istiqlal there is R. Rézette's study 37; for RDA there is a good deal of official party literature, 122, 128 and the 1952 Houphouët-Boigny D'Arboussier controversy, which probed origins 124; both RDA and BDS in Senegal have been studied in detail by Dr Ruth Schachter 33; Dr Kwame Nkrumah has given his first-hand account of the origins of the CPP 55; Nigerian party origins have been examined by Dr James Coleman 15 and Dr Azikiwe has described the events leading up to the birth of the NCNC 47. For other parties and territories the evidence is less adequate.
All these, indeed most, African parties have an extra-parliamentary origin: that is to say, they have been constructed out of pre-existing associations and groups as instruments to achieve political power (or, in the case of minor parties, to “influence … the personnel and policy of government”) 12. While, xcept in the case of the Moroccan and Tunisian parties, they have in general made use of electoral and parliamentary processes, for them — as for other extra-parliamentary parties — the electoral and parliamentary struggle has been “only one of the elements in the general activity of the party, one of the means, among others, that it uses to realize its political ends” 1.
It is true that, as M. Duverger points out, this distinction between parties which originate within and those which originate outside the parliamentary framework is not rigorous. Some African parties — particularly those which have been created in regions where there was little in the way of a pre-existing national movement, like the former NPP in northern Ghana or the NPC in northern Nigeria — have initially had some of the characteristics of “clubs” of assemblymen, and have later taken the step of setting up branches which in practice have been little more than local electoral committees. Even the Nigerian Action Group — a clear case of a party with extra-parliamentary roots — included among its supporters in the Western Region House of Assembly after the first (1951) elections “a large group of almost non-political members interested only in the welfare of their own towns”, who had to be welded into a parliamentary party and instructed in party discipline by the leaders 99. Nonetheless, the general point remains valid: to understand African political parties it is necessary to understand the pre-party forms of organization from which, in most cases, they arose.
There is by now quite a substantial literature dealing with African associations — one might say “modern” associations, were it not that the term suggests an unsound distinction between “modern” and “traditional” aspects of African social life. What is labelled “modern” — a trade union, for example — has always some roots in tradition; and what is “traditional” — such as a Muslim religious order, a tarīqa — is always partly modernized. The associations which have mainly contributed to the rise of parties are “modern” simply in the sense that they have specialized functions, that membership is voluntary, and that their leaders, however traditionalist they may be in outlook, are drawn for the most part from the new élites. Some examples of these party-generating types of association have already been mentioned: ex-servicemen's associations, which in Europe have tended to foster parties of the extreme Right, but in Africa have assisted the formation of radical mass parties; students' organizations; old boys' societies and groupings; sports associations; tribal unions and “improvement associations”; and religious bodies and movements, like the Salafiyya in Morocco, or the Matswanist Church in the Republic of the Congo.
There are other types of organization that have had a formative influence. The trade union impact has been important in some territories, particularly in Guinea, where during 1954 a group of young trade union leaders around Sékou Touré transformed the PDG-RDA into an effective mass party 38. A farmers' union, the Syndicat Agricole Africain, provided the nucleus around which PDCI-RDA in the Ivory Coast was organized in 1946 38, 7. Youth associations and movements have also played a part, for example in Ghana, where the epp grew out of the Committee on Youth Organizations 55. Literary societies, study circles, and research groups have been another source of stimulus: the special relationship between the Groupes d'Etudes Communistes and the RDA in some French African territories is a case in point 18; and in a somewhat similar way Dr Azikiwe's Nigerian Reconstruction Group of 1942-3 helped to prepare the ground for the NCNC 15.
The proliferation of associations of these and other types during the inter-war period and after assisted the growth of parties in three main ways. First, “many of the leaders of these associations, which were primarily non-political in origin” became leaders of formal nationalist organizations. Thus the associations were training grounds for the new nationalist élite 15. Second, the associations provided new focuses of loyalty — not necessarily national in character, but certainly wider than those of kinship or village — and thus “enabled nationalist leaders to mobilize and manipulate important segments of the population” 15. Third, to a varying extent in different territories, associations have formed the basic blocks of popular support out of which the mass parties have initially been constructed. This is clear, for example, in the case of the original organization of BDS in Senegal in 1948. Here the party's founders, Léopold Senghor and Mamadou Dia, “drew into the party's direct or indirect hierarchy” the leaders of ethnic and regional associations, such as the Union Générale des Originaires de la Vallée du Fleuve, the Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Casamance, and the Association des Toucouleurs du Fouta-Toro pour la Défense de la Condition Humaine 38.
Likewise in the towns the party was built around popular groupings, frequently drawn from sections of the population regarded as socially inferior, on account of their caste, occupation, or “stranger” origin: for example, the Section des Bijoutiers de Dakar; the Comité des Jeunes Griots de la Gueule Tapée; the Section BDS des Chauffeurs de Taxis à Dakar; or the Union pour la Défense des Intérêts du Quartier de Guetn-Dar et des Pêcheurs, “who founded their organization because they had no market for their salted fish, no stable prices; because they felt forgotten, their streets were ugly and unlit, their water supply was short” 38. Most of the mass parties could tell a similar story.
It is possible to attempt a rough classification of African parties on the basis of the various ways in which they have been brought into being. These distinctions must not be regarded too schematically, since the origins of every party are complex: no party conforms neatly to a single type, and in the origins of some parties one can find traces of two or more types.
In some cases a party seems to have come into being through the simple process of taking some already existing association and attaching to it a party label and party functions, without any significant changes — initially, at any rate — in structure, leadership, or ideology. One clear illustration of this process is the Northern People's Congress in Nigeria. The Congress (in Hausa, Jam'iyyar Mutanen Arewa) was founded in December 1949, as a pan-northern cultural organization of predominantly conservative Mallams' interested in securing cautious reforms imposed from above by benevolent autocrats, and at the same time in stimulating a sense of northern identity. The Congress later became moribund; but “in the middle of the general elections of 1951 … it was revived and declared a political party by an alliance hastily formed by conservative nationalists and the Filanin gida [the traditional ruling class within the former Fulani Empire], in order to meet the threat posed by the remarkable victories of the radical NEPU in the Kano elections” 15 Since then the NPC has developed more of the structure of a political party; but it still bears the marks of its origin. In somewhat the same way the Sierra Leone People's Party developed out of the Sierra Leone Organization Society, whose main concern was the promotion of agricultural cooperation 31, 75.
The Nigerian Action Group is a rather more complicated case. There was certainly a parental type of relationship between the Yoruba cultural association, Egbe Omo Oduduwa, effectively founded in 1948 on Obafemi Awolowo's return to Nigeria from England, and the Action Group, publicly inaugurated as apolitical party under Awolowo's leadership in March 1951. Indeed, the Action Group seems to have had a period of embryonic, pre-natal existence as the Action Committee of Egbe Omo Oduduwa. It is true that other influences entered into the prehistory of the Action Group, in particular the Western Regional organization of the Nigerian Youth Movement, and its newspaper, the Daily Service; and, from the first, its founders and leaders took pains to prevent it from appearing to be a purely Yoruba ethnic party. Nonetheless there was a strong family resemblance, as regards leadership, basis of support, and political philosophy, between the Egbe and the Action Group in its initial phase 32, 15, 47.
This tendency for a formally non-political type of association to transform itself into a political party seems most marked in the case of associations, like the two Nigerian examples cited, with a definite ethnic or regional basis.
ABAKO in the former Belgian Congo evolved in a somewhat similar way. Originally founded in 1949 as “Association of the Bakongo people for the Unification, Conservation, and Propagation of the Kikongo Language”, it politicized itself about the time of its 1956 manifesto 126, and acquired some of the characteristics of a party, with its main strength in Leopoldville and the surrounding region; its appeal is still limited in practice to the Bakongo 87. In other cases a party, without strictly arising out of an association, may at an early stage in its history form the kind of working alliance with an association that helps to determine its structure and behaviour. I have already referred to the way in which the Ashiqqa party in the Sudan and its successor, the NUP, were allied with the Khatmiyya order during the period 1945-6, with the result that the zawāya (cells) of the order tended to take on the functions of branches of the party (See above, p. 20-1). Indeed it was sometimes difficult to tell where the religious organization left off and the political organization began.
Parties which in this way have emerged out of, or become structurally linked with, pre-existing ethnic, regional, or religious associations start with the advantage that they can command, for electoral purposes, a readily mobilizable body of popular support. Thus it was partly the solid support of the Khatmiyya that enabled the NUP to win the 1953 election in the Sudan; partly the backing of Obas associated with the Egbe Orno Oduduwa that enabled the Action Group to win the Western Regional elections in Nigeria in 1951. But with this goes the corresponding disadvantage, that the party is liable to be attacked as “sectarian”, “tribalist” or “feudal”, by those who oppose the interests on which it is based.
At this point it will be as well to try to clear up a question of terminology. The terms “national movement”, “congress”, “party”, “front” are liable to be confusing, since they are used in different senses by different people. Most African politicians and outside observers are, I think, in broad agreement about the distinctions to be drawn, but they do not always use the same language to describe the phenomena which they distinguish. Lengthy linguistic discussions are tedious, so I propose simply to explain the senses in which these four terms are used here.
The term “national movement” is used for the most part in a very general sense — to refer to the effort of a colonized people, in the course of its history, to liberate itself from colonial rule in all its aspects 24. A “national movement” in this sense can exist without any determinate type of organization. It is, so to speak, the raw material which can take on a wide variety of institutional forms, including “congresses”, “parties”, and “fronts”.
By a “congress” I mean a political organization of a specific type, whose principal characteristics are :
This is the kind of organization to which Dr Coleman and others apply the term national movement 83, 84; and the term “movement” is sometimes used in this secondary, more specialized sense here.
The problem of defining a “political party” in the African context has already been discussed. In contrast with “congresses” the significant characteristics of “parties” would seem to be:
A revolutionary “front” is a form of organization which is only brought into being in a revolutionary situation (e.g. the FLN in contemporary Algeria). Like a “congress”, a “front” attempts to unite within itself all existing political organizations and tendencies, and seeks to bring about a total transformation of the political and social order, by extra-constitutional rather than electoral means (See pp. 125-33). On the other hand a “front” resembles a political party, more particularly a mass party, in respect of the tightness of its structure (based upon cells rather than branches), the strictness of its discipline, and the definition of its objectives.
Of course, in practice these distinctions are by no means clear-cut. There are “congresses” which are in process of becoming “parties”, “parties” which have retained some of the characteristics of “congresses” or acquired some of the characteristics of revolutionary “fronts”. What matters is simply that real differences should be noted.
The process whereby a party evolves out of an already existing “congress” — with or without the kind of rebirth which involves the adoption of a new name — is thus partly a matter of acquiring a new and more effective type of structure, with a basis in local party branches, or cellules, composed of individual members who contribute, or are intended to contribute, to party funds. This is a process which is likely in practice to be gradual, even where a definite date can be assigned to the transformation. It may occur as a result of various kinds of stimulus: the need to participate in elections; the challenge of rival, competing parties, movements or standpoints; experience of the disintegrating tendencies of the congress form of organization; or any combination of these. This, broadly, was the origin of the Neo-Destour in Tunisia: formally established at the Ksar Hellal Congress in 1934, but essentially a development out of the much older Destour movement — the movement, that is, which grew up around the demand for the restoration of a constitutional form of government (dastūr = constitution) — and, more particularly, out of the hizb al-hurr al-dastūri, founded in 1920 27. Similarly Istiqlal in Morocco was essentially a reconstruction — stimulated by the events of 1942-3, the Allied landings in North Africa, and the conversations between President Roosevelt and the Sultan — of the more loosely organized pre-war movements, the Comité d'Action Marocaine (1934-7) and the Parti National pour la Réalisation du Plan de Réformes (1937-9). R. Rézette has emphasized both the continuity and the structural difference:
“Until 1939 this party [i.e. CAM-PN-Istiqlal] modelled itself on the social structure of Morocco, rather than seeking to impose upon it institutions of a new type. From 1944 on it objectified itself; it became an independent reality, a genuine political party. 137
In Afrique Noire the R.D.A, initially described as the Rassemblement Africain, was certainly originally planned by the French African deputies and their associates who summoned the Bamako Conference, in [September] October 1946, as an inter-territorial “movement” for African emancipation. In their manifesto the deputies proclaimed the formation of a “united front”, including “all the peoples, all the races, all the political parties, all the workers' organizations, all the cultural and religious movements of Afrique Noire” 112. The immediate stimulus which produced this call for an African rassemblement was the revival of “reaction” in France, in particular the new initiative of the French colons' lobby, operating through the Etats Généraux de la Colonisation Française in Paris, and the political defeats which the African deputies had suffered on a number of issues in the second Constituent Assembly 38. After Bamako, while it still described and regarded itself as a “movement”, the RDA fairly rapidly started to organize itself as a party: partly on account of the break with Senghor and the Socialists; partly because of the influence of organization-minded Communists and communisants, closely associated with it; and partly because administrative pressure on the one hand and electoral requirements on the other both made the construction of a disciplined party essential.
A somewhat similar process of evolution, from “movement” into party, can be traced in the case of the NCNC in Nigeria though in this case the “movement” or “congress” phase was much more prolonged, lasting approximately from its foundation in 1944 until 1948. The reconstitution of NCNC as a party, after a period of hibernation, was especially associated with the decision, at its 1951 Kano conference, to move over from an affiliated-organization to an individual member basis 15. Here again the new electoral opportunities and problems presented by the liberalized Macpherson constitution of 1951 were an obvious precipitant.
New parties are also generated as a result of fission within a parent organization. In some cases major parties have originated in this way — when, for example, a more “dynamic” and “progressive” nucleus has revolted against a more conservative and traditionalist leadership, and seceded. The revolt of Mehdi ben Barka's wing of Istiqlal against the official leadership, associated particularly with ‘Alāl al-Fāsi' in 1959, which led to the formation of the Union Nationale des Forces Populaires, is a recent case in point 79. Two earlier examples of parties so formed are the CPP in Ghana and BDS in Senegal — the former emerging out of a split within a “congress”, the United Gold Coast Convention, and the latter as a breakaway from the Senegalese section of the French Socialist Party (SFIO). There were certain parallels between these two cases. Both the new party leaders expressed the dissatisfaction of the younger generation of African politicians with the outlook and methods of the older generation. Both represented the demands of the underprivileged (former subjects, in Senegal, “Standard VII boys” in Ghana) against the old élites, the intelligentsia, the Establishment. Both stressed the necessity for an effective mass organization, particularly in the rural areas, as against the older leadership's reliance on “friends”, clients, and kin. Both developed their own new types of party ideology, blending a modified Marxism with ideas of Négritude or Pan-Africanism 8, 38.
The 'Umma in the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is another example of a major party which was established as a consequence of a split within a congress — but in totally different circumstances. The founders of the 'Umma broke away from the General Graduates' Congress in 1945, when the Congress passed into the control of Ismaīl al-Azhari and the supporters of union with Egypt. They represented on the whole the more moderate faction, who were opposed to the Egyptian connexion, and prepared, within limits, to work for Sudanese self-government within the existing constitutional framework 34.
The process of fragmentation, whereby dissident groups secede — or are expelled — from major parties, and forthwith set up their own minor parties, is a familiar one, in Africa as elsewhere. Thus the National Liberation Movement in Ghana, though it received the support of the Asantehene and a large proportion of Ashanti chiefs, was primarily the creation of a group of CPP militants who broke with the dominant party over a combination of specifically Ashanti grievances, with the lowering of the cocoa price as a precipitant 12. The NCNC in Nigeria has shown a periodic tendency towards fission: the National Independence Party (later UNIP) was set up in 1953 by a group of expelled NCNC Ministers; and the National Democratic Party of Nigeria and the Cameroons was organized by Dr M. K. Mbadiwe's Reform Committee in 1958, after its failure to change the party's constitution and policy from within. In Sierra Leone the United Progressive Party and the People's National Party arose out of splits within the dominant SLPP. In the Togoland Republic, “JUVENTO was organized in 1951 by young men in the Lomé area who formerly belonged to the CUT but believed that the latter organization was not militant enough in working for unification and complete independence” 86.
In cases of this kind a section of the leadership, and sometimes of the intermediate ranks, of the parent party is carried over into the new party. The mass support is much less easily transferred, if — as in the cases cited — the party leader and his mystique, the party machine, its name and reputation, remain with the parent party. The extent to which a major party is liable to this kind of fragmentation is, of course, connected with other questions discussed below: the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of party discipline; the degree to which the party has achieved a collective — as contrasted with a personal, or patriarchal — form of leadership; its success in reconciling divergent standpoints or tendances within the membership; and its ability, especially where it controls the government, to impose pressures or sanctions upon seceders.
The break-up of the RDA after the referendum of September 1958 deserves attention as a special case. For twelve years the RDA had been, on the whole, remarkably successful in checking tendencies towards fission, in spite of the vast area within which it operated, and the various internal tensions — ideological, regional and personal — which it had to reconcile. This was partly because it was organized as a confederation of parties rather than as a single centralized party. But the referendum, which confronted parties throughout French Africa with the choice of inclusion in, or exclusion from, a reconstituted French “Community”, brought these tensions into the open, splitting the RDA for a time into three: the Guinea section, PDG, which chose independence; the Union Soudanaise which joined the newly formed Parti de la Fédération Africaine, the dominant party in Mali; and the RDA rump — the sections in the Ivory Coast, Haute-Volta, Niger, Dahomey, and Equatorial Africa — which kept the old name of the party, while losing much of the old dynamic.
The process of regrouping, or fusion, of existing parties is essentially the reverse of the process of fragmentation, described above. It is particularly liable to occur in the case of relatively weak opposition groups confronted with a dominant party which seems, for the time being, strongly entrenched. Thus in Ghana the Opposition has, since 1951, been organizationally fluid. The Ghana Congress Party was established in 1952 as a merger between the rump of the UGCC, the conservative National Democratic Party, and a group of CPP “rebels”. The GCP, however, never succeeded in transforming itself into a mass party; after 1954 it became, for practical purposes, absorbed in the National Liberation Movement, which enjoyed a genuine mass basis in Ashanti. Then, in October 1957, partly as a consequence of new legislation introduced by the CPP Government making ethnic and regional parties illegal, the NLM Moslem Association Party, Northern People's Party, and Togoland Congress — which already had a working alliance for electoral purposes — combined with other smaller groupings to form the new United Party.
While it is a fairly common phenomenon for new parties to emerge out of a fusion between minor parties which find themselves in a situation of semi-permanent opposition, unions of this kind do not necessarily increase a party's power or stability. For example, the United Middle Belt Congress was created in 1955 as a result of a merger between two competing parties operating in the Middle Belt of northern Nigeria — the more conservative Middle Zone League and the more radical Middle Belt People's Party (whose principal demand was for a separate Middle Belt region). However, the same polar opposition soon reasserted itself within the UMBC, which “broke into two factions, one headed by David Lot (founder of the MZL), which allied itself to the NPC, and the other headed by Moses Rwang (one of the founders of the MBPP), which remained allied with the NEPU and the NCNC” 15.
Fusion is not merely a way in which minor parties attempt to compensate for weakness; it may also be a means whereby major parties seek to consolidate strength. Thus the National Unionist Party in the Sudan was the product of a merger between a major party, the Ashiqqa, and other minor parties and groups supporting the principle of a constitutional link with Egypt. In a somewhat similar way BDS in Senegal expanded, and reconstituted and renamed itself, after successive infusions of new elements, becoming the Bloc Populaire Sénégalais in 1956, after absorbing the left wing Union Démocratique Sénégalaise, the regional Mouvement Autonome de la Casamance, and the Socialistes Unitaires (a breakaway from the SFIO); later, in 1958, transforming itself into the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise, after fusion with the remainder of the Socialists.
In a process of regroupement of this kind it is not simply a matter of a major party enlarging itself by swallowing smaller groups. The major party also changes qualitatively under the impact of the new groups. The regroupement in Senegal during the summer of 1956, which brought the reorganized BPS into being, took place partly on the initiative of the established BDS leadership — particularly Léopold Senghor and Mamadou Dia — but partly also as a result of the efforts of radical critics outside the party, “returned students, youth and trade union leaders, Muslim reformers, and UDS militants”, collectively known as les jeunes turcs. Moreover, “with each successive step towards the organization of a single Senegalese mass party”, the balance of party leadership moved further towards the jeunes turcs 38. But here again the tendency towards fusion was counterbalanced by a tendency towards disintegration. The new situation created by the referendum of September 1958 stimulated the secession from the UPS of its radical wing — including the majority of the jeunes turcs, who wished to choose independence rather than the French Community, and later formed their own radical party, the PRA-Sénégal.
The process whereby a major party absorbs minor parties or political groups, as in Senegal during 1956-8, is a fairly normal one. Often it is the natural outcome of an existing electoral alliance. But the effort to achieve a unified party which will overcome an inter-party oppositions and rivalries clearly raises difficult problems.
Pressure for some form of “united front” is liable to arise within and outside major parties, mainly in situations of crisis, which are seen as presenting special dangers or opportunities. In such situations the idea that “the people's safety” comes before party interests has naturally a strong appeal. But, if the crisis is temporary, the pressure for political unity tends to be relaxed, and party interests to reassert themselves, once it has passed. Thus in Nigeria the United Front Committee, which was brought into being in 1947 over an issue of racial discrimination, and the National Emergency Committee, organized as an immediate reaction to the shooting of the Enugu miners in November 1949, disintegrated once the crises which had produced them had passed into history 15.
The more ambitious movement for regroupement in French West Africa during 1957-8 — which sought an actual fusion of parties at the inter-territorial level, not merely a united front — though it achieved some temporary successes, also failed to realize its main objective. Here too the movement was stimulated by a situation of crisis: the fact that future constitutional relationships — between metropolitan France and Afrique Noire on the one hand, and between the various territories of Afrique Noire on the other — were in process of being determined. Hence the demand for regroupement, supported by important sections of opinion within each of the three major inter-territorial parties — RDA, the Convention Africaine, and the Mouvement Socialiste Africain — was in one sense a demand to strengthen the bargaining power of the peoples of French-speaking Africa in their relations with France during this critical phase. But, although the first inter-party conference, held at Paris in February 1958, resolved that “only the unification of African parties would enable territories and people to overcome their internal contradictions”, the second conference, at Dakar a month later, had to content itself with a limited measure of fusion — the creation of a Parti de Regroupement Africain, which failed to embrace the RDA 12.
Superficially the failure of these conferences to achieve total fusion turned on a minor issue — the refusal of the RD A to modify its name, which had acquired important associations for the mass of its supporters. But in fact disputes over the party label merely reflected the deeper problems which arise — in regard to leadership, structure, strategy, and ideas, as well as symbols — when unification is attempted on so comprehensive a scale. It is perhaps a revolutionary situation, such as occurred in Guinea immediately after independence, that is most favourable to the creation of a unified party comprehensive and powerful enough to absorb all former parties and political groupings.
One final question: How far do the origins of African political parties lie outside the African societies within which they function? (This is distinct from the more general question, already discussed: How far have external influences helped to produce an environment favourable to the rise of parties ?) In colonial territories there are various types of external agency to be taken into account — the Administration, immigrant communities, metropolitan political parties, Churches and religious organizations, and the like. While such agencies have undoubtedly on occasion fostered the growth of particular parties, the parties concerned have been, with few exceptions, of minor importance.
Partis de l'administration — in the sense of parties with a “moderate” label, set up on the initiative of a colonial government to counteract the influence of nationalist parties — have been fairly common occurrences in French-controlled territories, both the Maghreb and Afrique Noire, during the period 1945-55. In the case of Morocco this point has been clearly put by R. Rézette (who, having served there as a French administrative officer, is in such matters a reliable source):
The Residency then conceived the idea of encouraging the birth of parties which could be rivals of Istiqlal — capable, like it, of working among the masses, but with a relatively conformist ideology, and willing to accept the principle of the Protectorate. Hence in about 1948 two “moderate” parties were created: the Parti Démocrate Marocain des Hommes Libres, and the Parti Populaire Marocain. In spite of official support, these parties never had much influence in Moroccan circles — the personalities of the leaders chosen seeming not at all the kind to rally large sections of public opinion 37.
Rézette goes on to describe how, in the first case, Sherif Moulay Idriss — an Andalusian singer, marabout, and miracle-worker — simply transformed the organization and clientele of his tarīqa, the 'Aliya, into the organization and clientele of his party, the PDMHL —“the great majority of whose members were primarily interested in obtaining some small material advantage, administrative sinecures, police toleration, or petty official favours”.
Parties of a comparable type were floated with the support of the Administration in those territories of Afrique Noire in which the RDA was dominant during the late 1940s, when it was theAdministration's official policy to break the power of the RDA: for example, the Union Démocratique Tchadienne in Chad; the Bloc Démocratique Eburnéen, the Union des Indépendants de la Côte d'Ivoire, and the Entente des Indépendants de la Côte d'Ivoire, in the Ivory Coast 38. Parties of this type have usually withered away or been absorbed by dominant mass parties, once decolonization has begun to take place, and administrative support has been withdrawn. In British colonial territories the Administration has at times given moral support to “moderate” parties (e.g. the NPP in northern Ghana, NPC in the Northern Region of Nigeria), but has not actually created them.
During the recent post-war period the part played by members of local immigrant communities — European or Asian — in the creation of African political parties has been an altogether minor one. This is partly, of course, a measure of the increased political maturity and self-confidence of Africans, and their unwillingness to accept paternalist guidance from non-Africans, however well-intentioned. The situation was somewhat different during the inter-war period, when pre-party African pressure-groups were in some cases established and organized as a consequence of European initiative. For example, in Kenya Archdeacon Owen, an Anglican missionary, played a leading part in the founding of the Kavirondo Taxpayers' Welfare Association in 1923; and the Progressive Kikuyu Party seems to have come into existence largely under the aegis of the Church of Scotland Mission in 1928 78. Such modern parties as have come into being with Mission encouragement — e.g. the Democratic Party in Uganda, which has been described as “almost exclusively Roman Catholic in origin, inspiration and membership” 100, and the Liberal Party in the southern Sudan — have usually tried to avoid any official ecclesiastical connexion. So far as secular influences are concerned, the multi-racial United Tanganyika Party is one example of a partly African party — UTP at one time claimed 10,000 members, two thirds of them Africans — in whose creation local Europeans played a major part 65. But UTP, which was defeated by the Tanganyika African National Union in the 1958 elections, was clearly associated with an early phase in the development of Tanganyika parties, corresponding to a restricted franchise, heavily weighted in favour of non-Africans.
There is, however, one aspect of party origins with which the immigrant communities, particularly the Europeans, have been very much concerned: the formation of parties which have been formally or in fact subsidiaries of metropolitan parties — especially parties of the Left. In such cases there are two distinct external influences at work, often in collaboration — the metropolitan party, and its members, or sympathizers, in Africa. Thus the founding of the Senegalese SFIO in 1936, as a fédération within the French metropolitan party, involved the collaboration of Marius Moutet, Minister of Colonies in the French Popular Front Government, representing the party leadership in Paris, and Paul Bonifay, a French Socialist lawyer resident in Dakar 38. The RDA was an African movement, with its roots in African society and sentiment, in a much more profound sense than the Senegalese SFIO; and, though until 1950 it was connected with the French Communist Party by the ties of apparentement, there was no organic relationship between the two parties. None the less the RDA received an important initial stimulus, both from local French Communists and from the metropolitan PCF, which alone among French parties accepted the invitation to attend the founding conference at Bamako, and was thus left with a clear field 38.
In the States of the Maghreb, on the other hand, where the major nationalist parties developed almost entirely outside the range of French Communist influence, local Communist parties were established during the inter-war period by members of the local French communities which were initially simply subsidiaries of the PCF. Since about 1943, however, the Moroccan and Tunisian parties have become formally independent, have increasingly attempted to “nationalize” themselves, and have lost most of their local French support. Though restricted in influence — and, in Morocco, intermittently illegal — they can now be regarded as authentic African parties 11, 37.
It would seem then that it is mainly in the case of conservative, or “moderate” parties — partis de l'administration — and “Marxist”, more particularly Communist, parties (in the few territories where these exist), that external influences have played a significant part in the creation of African parties. They have operated, one might say, on the extreme Right and the extreme Left, but have made relatively little impact on the main body of nationalist parties. Moreover, it is principally in the very early stages of the growth of African parties that these influences — whether metropolitan or local, or a combination of the two — come into play. This generalization is well illustrated by the evolution of the parties of Afrique Noire, where the institutional framework — the “metropolitan axis of reference”— made a measure of dependence of African upon French parties unavoidable in the initial stages. But the history of these parties since about 1950 has been a history of increasing disengagement from metropolitan connexions: the RDA from the PCF; the Indépendants d'Outre-Mer, and later the Convention Africaine, from the MRP; the Mouvement Socialiste Africain from the SFIO 38. Whatever their origins, there has been an evident tendency for African parties to africanize themselves.
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