How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa

6. Two Modern African Constitutions

 6  Two Modern African Constitutions In the last chapter, I argued that in accounting for the failure of a rule of law regime to take root in Africa, we must resist the temptation, however alluring it may be, to blame African cultures or any so-called defects in “the African character or personality .” Nor should we continue to accept blithely the widely held idea that there is something about Africa or its inhabitants that predisposes them to hostility toward the modern rule of law regime. If the story of African openness and receptivity toward the modern legal system is true, it is no less true of their orientation toward the modern political system, which was founded on the same metaphysical template of modernity. I would like to present evidence that in some areas of West Africa in the nineteenth century, Africans were prosecuting a transition to modernity in matters of politics and the appropriation of modern political forms that included, significantly, the embrace of liberalism, especially as regards representative democracy founded on the principle of consent as the basis of political legitimacy. They sought to remake some of their polities along the lines suggested by modernity in its political manifestation. When administrators took over in the aftermath of the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–1885, their principal concern was to dismantle the embryonic modern forms of political organization already set up by the natives because in their eyes such institutions were an affront to their racist sensibilities. Their reaction made perfect sense. Colonial rule of the variety that dominated in Africa could not have been established on the basis of the consent of the colonized. How does one tell another “Please give us your consent to rape and loot your country”? Moreover, had the colonial authorities allowed the idea to be disseminated that no one should submit to the dictates of a government to which he or she has not consented or had a hand in constituting, it is obvious that the very basis of colonial rule would have been severely compromised. In electing to preserve their rule at all costs and in refusing to school their colonial subjects in the ways of modern politics, the colonizers stunted, even aborted, the growth of a tradition of responsible and responsive government in the erstwhile colonies. I submit that we are still paying for those abortions. The political manifestation of modernity is to be found first in liberalism and only later in liberal representative democracy. It is often forgotten that many Western Two Modern African Constitutions 203 countries had long been liberal before they became democratic.1 What defined liberalism in its political aspect was its introduction of the doctrine that rulers were not emplaced by the grace of God and divine right. Rather, they were rulers by the consent of the governed and the latter’s willingness to surrender their individual sovereignty over their selves to an external body that they had had a hand in incorporating . But liberalism was beginning to fray at the edges as a result of internal changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I shall not go into the details of the historical evolution of the transitions it underwent. But the revolutionary implications of these changes marked an epochal division between the feudal past and the modern present. Not all societies can be fitted into the feudal-modern grid, and the lines of division would necessarily be different and be differently realized from one society to another. How those lines were realized in West Africa needs to be spelled out. African theorists of the nineteenth century acknowledged their debts to their conquerors. They may have been mistaken in their identification of the antecedents of the principle of political governance to which they subscribed. But we should not read back into the past our current nationalist predilections. We should address those thinkers in their historical specificity. The embrace of the principles of political modernity were no less revolutionary in West Africa than they were in Europe inasmuch as heredity ruled for some of the African polities. By accepting our African intellectual precursors’ embrace of modernity as their starting point, we can make more sense of their departure from that standard later when, shunned by the racist colonialist class, they embraced what some have called “reactive nationalism” by the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth.2 Beginning with the final abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, the earlier settling of Sierra...