The Africanization of Political Change: Some Aspects of the Dynamics of Political Cultures in Ghana and Nigeria

Abstract

IThe inability of most African states to find a political norm compatible with the exigencies of independence is by now a truism. The inherent lack of political order on the continent and the common recourse to political violence have been the subject of much debate among scholars and observers of African political events.1 Within the general framework of instability, it is apparent that there are many differences in political occurrences in seemingly colonial-inherited and weak frameworks, and a proliferation of internal variations within each state which derive from the differential impact of values and norms nurtured on the sub-national or the traditional level. These phenomena have pointed forcefully to the need to approach the study of African political processes in African terms. Indeed, the Africanization of the study of politics on the continent may perhaps be a vital precondition for the understanding of the contemporary African political scene. The quest for African explanations for political events has, unlike parallel efforts in other disciplines, been far from smooth. Justifiably, attention was first focused on the examination of continuities and discontinuities in the political history of given areas. Such essentially micro-research efforts, while exciting in that they have uncovered new empirical data and provided important insights into the complexity of traditional African political life, are nevertheless problematic because the patterns of political thought and organization that they trace are not easily transferred to the macro level. The purpose of this paper is to isolate basic political culture constructs prevalent in the pre-colonial period in an attempt to conceptualize, in African terms, some contemporary political occurrences on the macro as well as the micro level. Two basic assumptions lie at the core of this undertaking: first, that traditional political culture models (herein defined as those general political orientations and specific political values that dictate patterns of political behavior and institutional growth) provide paradigms for political organization and action in Africa today; and second, that by examining the interaction of the concrete articulators of the various political culture models, it is possible to determine some of the main factors underlying the dynamics of political behavior in independent Africa.