4

Chapter 8

The A fr i c a n i s t-Pop ulist

I d e o lo g y
Popul ar Democracy and
Development in Afr ica

Africa . . . is isolated. Therefore to develop, it will have to depend upon

its own resources basically, internal resources, nationally, and Africa will
have to depend upon Africa. The leadership of the future will have to devise,
try to carry out policies of maximum national self-reliance and maximum
collective self-reliance. They have no other choice. Hamna! [There is none!]

—Julius K. Nyerere, “Reflections,” quoted in

John S. Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle, 159

I ntro duc tio n

As we saw in Chapter 7, Frantz Fanon’s warning to African people, leaders,
and scholars was that for popular democracy and development to succeed
in Africa, they must stop blindly following the West: they must stop aping
Western culture, traditions, ideas, and institutions; they must think “outside
of the box”; and, above all, they must be bold and innovative and develop
their own ideas, concepts, and institutions based on African values, culture,
and traditions. This alternative path to Western liberal democracy and capi-
talist development is precisely the line of thinking of an emerging African
scholarship, exemplified by the four African scholars whose political ideas are
examined in this chapter.
More specifically, this chapter reviews the ideas and values for a new, free,
and self-reliant Africa put forth by African scholars who have the best interest
of the African people at heart and thus advocate a popular type of democracy
and development. However, unlike the populist-socialist scholars, the Afri-
canist-populist scholars refuse to operate within the parameters of Western
G. Martin, African Political Thought
© Guy Martin 2012
130 African Political Thought

ideologies—whether of the socialist, Marxist-Leninist, or liberal-democratic

persuasion—and call on Africans to get rid of their economic, technological,
and cultural dependency syndrome. These scholars are also convinced that
the solution to African problems lie within Africans themselves. Thus they
refuse to remain passive victims of a perceived or pre-ordained fate and call
on all Africans to become the initiators and agents of their own development,
with the ultimate goal of creating a “new African.”
It is interesting to note that all these individuals are first and foremost aca-
demics, deal strictly with ideas, and have not been directly involved in politics
(although the majority are political scientists). The four Africanist-populist
scholars that will be the focus of this chapter are Ghanaian political scien-
tist Daniel T. Osabu-Kle; Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake (1939–96);
Tanzanian scholar-journalist Godfrey Mwakikagile; and Kenyan political
scientist Mueni wa Muiu. Note that all these scholars are dedicated Pan-
Africanists, and many would shun the reference to their nationality and much
prefer to be simply called “Africans.” Again, our focus here is on the ideas
(and what binds them) rather than on the individuals.

Daniel Tet teh Osabu-Kle

A Biographical Note
Daniel T. Osabu-Kle was born in Ghana in 1942. He is currently an associate
professor of political science—with a joint appointment in the Department
of Political Science and the Institute of African Studies—at Carleton Univer-
sity in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). His teaching and research areas include
development politics and administration as well as African politics. He was
educated in Pakistan and India and completed his graduate studies at Car-
leton University. He is the founder and chief executive officer of two Ghana-
based nongovernmental organizations: Flodan International, involved in
humanitarian work, and Flodan International Academy (FIA), dedicated to
providing quality primary and secondary education to low-income families
in Ghana.

Compatible Cultural Democracy

Not unlike Thomas Sankara’s Revolutionary Democracy, Muammar Qad-
dafi’s Third Universal Theory, and Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness, Daniel
Osabu-Kle’s analysis starts from the observation that forty years after inde-
pendence, Africa remains in a permanent state of political, economic, social,
and cultural crisis, due in large measure to the fact that the Western type
of liberal democracy actively promoted by Western countries and agencies
(notably the international financial institutions) has dismally failed to take
root in Africa. Thus the central thesis put forward by Osabu-Kle in Com-
patible Cultural Democracy is that “only a democracy compatible with the
African cultural environment is capable of achieving the political conditions