Western democratic ideals have been imposed upon former colonies around the world. In Africa, this imposition reveals liberal democracy’s contradictions. Mebratu Kelecha invites a radical reimagining, through decolonial praxis and epistemic rupture
Western political thought typically portrays democracy as a stable institutional form — grounded in elections, legal rights, and the rule of law — and promotes it as a universal norm. This sustains global hierarchies by positioning Europe and North America as democratic exemplars, and the Global South as chronically lacking.
Yet this conception is deeply contradictory: the liberal tradition that champions democratic ideals also underwrote slavery, empire, and racial exclusion. In Africa, such contradictions were codified through externally imposed democratic models designed to serve foreign strategic interests rather than indigenous political logics or aspirations.
The tension between liberal ideals and imperial practices is not a deviation but constitutive of liberalism itself. Canonical figures such as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill — often heralded as architects of modern democracy — were deeply embedded in regimes of racial hierarchy and imperial domination.
Locke’s theory of property justified the expropriation of Indigenous lands by framing them as ‘waste’ ripe for colonial appropriation. Jefferson, while professing universal equality, enslaved people and advocated the removal of freed Blacks. Kant’s universalism coexisted with a racial taxonomy that denied non-Europeans rational autonomy. Mill defended colonial despotism, arguing liberty was suitable only for the ‘civilised’.
These were not failures of principle, but expressions of a liberal order built on structural exclusion. The Enlightenment’s rights-bearing subject was implicitly white, male, and propertied. Others — enslaved Africans, Indigenous populations, colonised subjects — were morally deficient or politically immature. Liberalism’s racialised universalism thus licensed domestic exclusion and imperial tutelage.
It was a logic that persisted in postcolonial contexts. Western democracy-promotion in Africa often assumed the incapacity of African polities. This justified Cold War alliances with authoritarian regimes that subverted popular sovereignty.
No region has been more pathologised by the West’s democratic imaginary than Africa. From donor reports to academic indices, African institutions, civic culture, and democratic maturity are persistently portrayed as deficient. These metrics codify historically contingent norms that valorise Western trajectories. Meanwhile, they occlude the coercive foundations of African state formation: slavery, extractivism, and imposed borders.
The West's democratic imaginary persistently portrays African institutions, civic culture, and democratic maturity as deficient to their own
This deficit narrative eclipses Africa’s rich and ongoing democratic experiments. From Ghana’s independence movement to Sudan and Ethiopia’s pro-democracy uprisings, from South Africa’s decolonial student revolts to pan-African feminist mobilisations, African political life has persistently expanded the horizon of democratic possibility.
These movements are not attempts to replicate Euro-American liberalism but to interrogate its ontological assumptions — reimagining personhood, solidarity, and authority. The West’s waning normative power, marked by America First nationalism and the geopolitical ascent of China and Russia, has opened a strategic space for African societies to reclaim political self-definition, assert epistemic sovereignty, and articulate democracy beyond neoliberal paradigms.
The West frames the global export of democracy — via NGOs, state agencies, and international financial institutions — as a moral imperative. Yet such framing reproduces imperial epistemologies. It presumes the incapacity of certain populations for self-rule and legitimises external tutelage.
Whether through ‘good governance’ conditionalities or ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines, democracy promotion functions as a disciplinary apparatus. It renders Global South states legible to Western norms while subordinating them to capitalist imperatives.
Postcolonial theorists have shown how this dynamic sustains dependency and forestalls autonomous political development. Walter Rodney argued that Europe’s wealth was built through Africa’s systemic underdevelopment. Thandika Mkandawire exposed how Bretton Woods-led liberal agendas deepened inequality under the guise of modernisation. These logics persist: Western powers advocate governance reforms aligned with market liberalisation yet tolerate authoritarianism when it serves strategic interests such as energy access or counterterrorism.
Contemporary liberal democracies are deeply contradictory. States that profess commitments to free speech and human rights simultaneously engage in mass surveillance, racialised policing, voter suppression, and imperial warfare. From America’s segregationist legacies to the European Union’s exclusionary migration regimes, liberalism’s normative ideals are routinely betrayed by its material operations.
The Trump administration did not alter the architecture of US power — militarism, racialised borders, and capitalist entitlements already existed. But his administration’s rhetoric exposed what liberal universalism obscures: a politics anchored in racial exclusion and imperial self-interest.
Authoritarian regimes in Africa are emboldened by the erosion of Western oversight, yet the resulting void is increasingly occupied by powers with little regard for democratic norms
In Africa, this rupture has generated a dual dynamic. Authoritarian regimes are emboldened by the erosion of Western oversight and conditionalities. Yet some states may seek to redefine political trajectories around local priorities. In practice, however, the void left by Western retreat is increasingly occupied by emergent powers with little regard for democratic norms. Rather than enabling self-determination, this merely entrenches authoritarianism.
The West will not rescue democracy by exporting it. Nor will it secure its future through technocratic reforms or civic education. We need a rupture in the epistemic foundations of liberal democracy itself.
Decolonising democracy requires a conceptual and institutional break from its racialised genealogy. It demands epistemic disobedience.
We must refuse to measure democratic legitimacy through Eurocentric metrics or imported institutional forms. Scholars like Ricardo Mendonça and Hans Asenbaum argue for a reimagining of democracy as pluriversal — a site of multiple, coexisting logics grounded in diverse political cosmologies and practices. They challenge the telos of Western liberal democracy and invite democratic forms rooted in local agency, historical memory, and cultural specificity.
To truly decolonise democracy, we must refuse to measure democratic legitimacy through Eurocentric metrics or imported institutional forms
Africa’s democratic future lies not in fulfilling the liberal fantasy of institutional maturation, but in reclaiming the political through decolonial experimentation. This includes nurturing deliberative, participatory, and radically inclusive practices that reflect the lived experiences of those historically excluded from formal political life. It also means confronting the legacies of empire — land dispossession, economic dependency, racial hierarchy — and rearticulating sovereignty beyond the nation-state.
A decolonial horizon is not a utopia; it is a struggle to make democracy accountable to the plural histories and aspirations of the people who enact it. This is not merely a critique — it is a call to reconstruct democracy otherwise.
