Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa (review)

The recent debate—and, for some, disillusionment—over a second extension of the transition period and postponement of elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has once more served to highlight the problematic nature of democratization processes in plural societies, especially in areas suffering from deeply entrenched conflicts. The events in the DRC are the latest example in a succession of extended or simply arrested transitions that feed pessimistic sentiments about the possible success of democracy in Africa. Pessimism also followed the optimism of the wave of democratization on the continent in the early 1990s in the face of a parallel resurgence of ethnic politics and conflict. It nonetheless gave way to the realization that democratization in itself is a complex process that goes beyond institutional reform and that raises in Africa, as in other loci across the world, issues of state-society relations, of identity, of state capture and state capacities to fulfill the needs of citizens—all issues, in fact, addressed in the various contributions to Berman, Eyoh, and Kymlicka's edited volume.

In light of the increase, instead of decrease, of ethnic politics and conflict, it has become common, however, simply to lay the blame on "ethnicity" for democratic deficiencies or failed institutional reforms and democratic transitions in Africa. Whether taken as primordial or as tools to be manipulated in an unrelenting elite quest for accumulation, ethnic identities are seen as an obstacle to democratic nation-building and reform, more often than not because they are identified as the source of networks of patron-client relations that undermine state institutions. Ethnic and civic identities are therefore antithetical, and true democracy in Africa will succeed only when the latter will have completely displaced the former.

Through theoretical and empirical analyses, the contributors to Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa refreshingly and convincingly remind us instead that ethnic attachments and democracy need not be mutually exclusive. Like others before them, they argue that a constructivist approach is better suited for studying ethnicity because there exists an inherent link between ethnic identities and state and market development in Africa. Ethnic identities have been constructed dynamically as a result of the continent's encounter with Western modernity and its institutions during both the colonial era (through the actions and choices made by colonizers to build on and use them in their administration of territories) and in the postcolonial era (in which they have become a means to access state resources, to get one's "share of the national cake"). Ethnic identities continue to be constructed and exploited in the "new" dynamics of pluralism in Africa as a powerful tool for mobilizing populations.

As constructed artifacts, ethnic identities are therefore not much different from civic or national identities in the sense that they too create an "imagined community," one that fosters a sense of collective attachment, even solidarity, among individuals and that also possesses its own set of informal rules and principles. For the contributors to Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, it is precisely for this reason that ethnicity has proved so resilient in Africa: in light of the state's often predatory nature or inability to address the basic needs of its citizens, and of the resulting popular disenchantment with state institutions or simply disengagement from them, Africans have had to turn to another form of "social contract" embodied in kinship ties and patron-client relations for their security and needs. In this context, ethnic identities are "necessary and continuing features of African socio-cultural, economic and political development" (319), and need to be accommodated in order to achieve successful transitions in Africa.

But how is ethnicity to be reconciled with democratization? What institutional models can best accommodate both ethnic attachment and their dynamics and the need for the development of national and civic attachment to the country and state apparatus? Suggestions proposed revolve around traditional Western-inspired models, some already tried in various African countries, others not. They include...