Howard Barrell
CONSOLIDATING DEMOCRACY: SOUTH AFRICA’S SECOND POPULAR ELECTION by Tom Lodge (Witwatersrand University Press) AFRICAN DEMOCRACY IN THE ERA OF GLOBALISATION by Jonathan Hyslop (Witwatersrand University Press)
When people start talking of “miracles” to explain unexpected political developments, one can usually smell intellectual surrender. For, if they are anything, miracles are supposed to be absolute answers to problems, and inexplicable.
The post-1990 South African miracle, such as it is, is neither complete nor inexplicable. And academics do us all a favour when, in readable prose, they expose to us our society’s loose ends and show how far we have come and how far short we are of the destination we have set for ourselves.
Tom Lodge and Jonathan Hyslop have done us such a favour. Lodge provides a highly detailed, well-constructed and frank analysis of South Africa’s second post- apartheid election, held last year. It is an important piece of contemporary political analysis.
“This book,” he says in an introductory note, “is primarily concerned with a political process – democratisation – which does not begin or end with elections but which is most easily evaluated during the times when they take place.”
One of the few South African academics who any longer speaks his mind – and one of the even fewer who speaks sense when he does so – Lodge examines in detail our electoral system, the row over the voters’ roll, the extraordinarily disparate group of people who call themselves South Africans, and how the parties sought to put across their messages.
And he intelligently picks his way through a set of conclusions which, refreshingly, indicate a real independence of judgment on his part and, in the process, give South African democracy a conditional bill of good health.
Lodge’s book will be as valuable a read for lay students of politics as it will be a work of reference.
The collection edited by Hyslop is also concerned with democratisation. But its focus is different.
The papers – by a range of African- and British-based academics – trace the impetus towards democratic outcomes in different parts of Africa that seemed to develop during the 1990s, not least in South Africa. Many papers concentrate on one country or locale, and examine the development of democratic movements there.
Hyslop’s individual concern is why this evident impetus towards democracy should have developed when it did. And the “era of globalisation” mentioned in the title provides a good part of the explanation, in Hyslop’s view.
In a brief introductory essay, he explains how the end of the Cold War removed protection from many African dictators of both the left and the right; how the end to East-West rivalry made possible an increasing global interconnection which, for the moment at least, appears to entail an environment favourable to the spread of democratic ideas; and how a history of failures by, among other things, the one- party state led to “a striking delegitimisation of ideologies of benevolent authoritarianism throughout Africa”.
Hyslop adds: “There was an ideological exhaustion. Thus the turn to liberal democratic forms was in part a result of the discrediting of most of the available options. Multiparty democracy was the only ideological option that was not obviously in serious trouble.”
This is an idea worth exploring further in the African context – free of ridiculous American suggestions that the current triumph of liberalism means the end of fundamental political contestation and, so, “the end of history”. Hopefully, Hyslop, or someone with a similar grasp, will take up this challenge.
The 19 papers in Hyslop’s collection were presented at a conference at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994 to examine the shift to democracy in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. Four of the essays are concerned with South Africa.
Three deal with the other sub-Saharan giant, Nigeria; the remainder cover, among other countries, Madagascar, Mozambique, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.