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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | African Perspectives on Democracy and the Dilemmas of Postcolonial Intellectuals |
| Author: | Eyoh, Dickson |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Periodical: | Africa Today |
| Volume: | 45 |
| Issue: | 3-4 |
| Pages: | 281-306 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Africa |
| Subjects: | democracy Politics and Government Bibliography/Research |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4187229 |
| Abstract: | This article is a preliminary assessment of the African debate on democracy. It explores the premises of the debate in order to determine the extent to which they signal continuities and shifts in key postulates of postcolonial African intellectual thought about the relationship between political organization and development. The author first sketches the debate's origin, which can be traced to explanations of the fundamental causes of the development crisis, and discusses the dependency approach, which was the reigning African intellectual paradigm during the 1970s and 1980s. Then he outlines the main perspectives in the current African debate on democracy: the universalist perspective, which counts among its leading proponents Jibrin Ibrahim and Peter Anyang' Nyong'o; the popular democratic perspective, which includes among its proponents Issa Shivji and Mahmood Mamdani; and the nativist perspective, articulated in the works of the late Claude Ake and Maxwell Owusu. Using as reference African contributions to the amorphous body of contemporary scholarship that is designated as 'postcolonial criticism', the author concludes with a comment on how the debate is exemplary of a new posture in African nationalist discourse. Notes, ref. |
