I would like to highlight some assumptions that I perceive underlie
Ali Mazrui's comments about contemporary Africa made at Georgia
State.
It appears that Mazrui assumes that there is a fundamental
difference between colonial and post-colonial politics. The former
is somehow 'unnatural' while the latter is 'natural'. He argues that
Sierra Leoneans accepted the political system imposed on them by
their colonial masters and that this 'unnatural' system is the reason
why this former colony is experiencing a day of reckoning.
This dichotomy between 'unnatural' and 'natural' is false. I would
argue that political systems in any situation, be it colonial or
post- colonial, change and mutate as various interest groups and
classes fight for access to scarce resources. While I am not expert
in the history of Sierra Leone, I suspect that groups in that colony
did not 'accept' a generic political system from Europe. I suspect
that a newly independent Sierra Leone inherited a political system
that was a result of the process of conflict that pitted various
groups for and against each other at various points of time.
My research has been on Uganda's history. It is quite clear to me
that the political system in Uganda was not imposed as a generic
system but was a zone of continual conflict between various groups
within Buganda, between Buganda and other regions, between these
groups and the colonial state, and between groups in the colonial
state itself. As well, pre-colonial political conflicts in Buganda
continued to influence the development of the political system in the
colonial period. In effect, the colonial political system in Uganda
was already the result of an integration of 'traditional' African
and 'modern' western administrative and legal models.
Political systems develop as a result of political conflict.
Colonial political systems developed no differently than have
post-colonial or pre- colonial systems. To posit the colonial
political system as 'unnatural' seems to deprive African people of
agency during the colonial period. The socioeconomic and political
conditions of Africa in the colonial period certainly profoundly
influenced the development of colonial political systems just as the
same conditions influence the development of political systems today.