Des ancêtres fondateurs aux Pères de la nation. Introduction à une anthropologie de la démocratie

Abstract

H. Memel-Fote — From the Founding Ancestors to the Fathers of the Nation : Introduction to an Anthropology of Democracy. The heroes of independence have three types of ancestors in the time of regional modernity, that of the mythical demiurges who created the cosmos and were God's missionaries in creating the social order, that of the historical rulers either politicians who founded closed democracies, or kings who were gods as in ancient Greece. In the time of Worldwide modernity, the heroes of independence founded the Nation as a political community of free persons with equal rights. They are the Fathers of the Nation owing to their legendary birth through a twofold, African and European, initiation. By claiming to control history, they control a sociogene-sis of a mechanistic sort, in line with a philosophy of development based on the conquest of peasant society and its environment. To this end, they have resorted to single-party Systems, dogmatic discourses and violence. The results have been material achievements and failures, cultural anomie, the formai institutions of an open democracy, etc. But a crisis has occurred : the political (not the physical) slaying of the Father of the Nation. Whereas military parricide reproduces the organic society and its contradictions, civilian parricide (since 1990 through popu-lar uprisings, national conferences or pluralisme elections) has opened a space for a contractual society and an authentic democracy founded on a philosophy of nego-tiation, which must renew not only the society's internai relations but also its relations with the cosmic environment.