Popular Protest and Political Reform in Africa

Abstract

By the late 1980s, Africans joined the international clamor for democracy already ringing through eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. While popular unrest had long been an intermittent feature of African politics, the collapse of the Berlin wall-and along with it Leninist one-party rule and the bipolar world order--inspired mass protesters and challenged incumbent leaders as never before. In and around 1990, citizens took to the streets of capital cities in some sixteen sub-Saharan African countries to express discontent with economic hardship and political repression and to demand civic reforms. Governments in the region faced pressures for political change on a scale unprecedented since the dissolution of colonial rule thirty years earlier. In response, between November 1989 and May 1991, at least twenty-one governments adopted significant reform measures to permit greater pluralism and competition within the polity. Multiparty elections were actually held for the first time in a generation in five African countries. Richard Sklar's daring prediction that Africans would come to prefer the vicissitudes of democracy to the stifling abuse of developmental dictatorships began to be brilliantly vindicated.' The dynamic process of protest and reform is nascent in Africa, and the future course of regime transitions is highly uncertain. But the moment is opportune to attempt a preliminary identification of emergent landmarks. Why have cracks appeared in the edifice of authoritarian rule in so many countries of the region? By what processes of struggle and accommodation is power being divided in monopolistic political systems? What are the prospects for the emergence and consolidation of democratic forms of governance? In the present paper we undertake three tasks. First, we catalogue the characteristics of recent political protests in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the turbulent spring of 1990. Second, we analyze the nature of government responses, noting the range of political reform initiatives undertaken by African leaders and recording backlashes, crackdowns, and reversals where they occurred. Finally, and most important, we seek to explain why the political firmament is shifting in Africa after a prolonged period of institutional stasis.

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