New Left Review I/156, March-April 1986

Mahmood Mamdani

Peasants and Democracy in Africa

The contemporary crisis in Africa is having contradictory political effects. On the one hand, the increasing subordination of the continent’s political life to the calculus of factional interests ensures that even cabinet reshuffles become violent affairs, tragi-comic ‘revolutions’. On the other hand, the deepening socio-economic crisis of the African countryside has left ever-widening circles of society without organized political participation or voice. Everywhere is heard the chorus of dissatisfaction and the demand for ‘democracy’. While a number of progressive writers on Africa have recently warned against the attitude that dismisses democracy as a mere ‘bourgeois’ question, peripheral to the struggle over the relations of production, [1] C.f., Issa Shivji (ed.), The State and the Working People in Tanzania, Dakar 1985; Clive Thomas, The Rise of the Authoritarian State in Peripheral Societies, New York 1984; and E. Wamba-dia-Wamba, ‘Struggles for Democracy in Africa: The Case of the People’s Republic of Congo’, Philosophy and Social Action (New Delhi), X, 1–2 (1984). it is also time to warn of the opposite extreme—the tendency to eulogize democracy only in the forms conceptualized by the middle classes. By putting a halo around a single demand—that for a multi-party system and fair elections—as the sum and substance of the democratic process, it is possible to make the ‘democratic opening’ so narrow that it would only grant meaningful freedom to rival bourgeois factions, leaving most of the popular classes beyond the pale. To reconstruct this debate from the standpoint of the producing classes, it is necessary to recognize democracy as more than an artifact of formal institutions. For if democracy is to be an activity of meaning to all classes in society, and in particular to the peasantry and working classes, then its form and scope must indeed be meaningfully related to their living conditions. In other words, a discussion of the political form of the state can not be divorced from an analysis of existing production relations or systems of exploitation. In the contemporary African context this means linking the question of democracy, first and foremost, to an analysis of the agrarian question—because Africa remains, preeminently, a ‘continent of peasantries’. While this essay will consider different perspectives on the relationship between the peasantry and democracy in Uganda, I hope its general significance to the broader African scene will be apparent.

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