Authoritarian and Single-Party Tendencies in African Politics

Abstract

With the exception of Libya, Egypt, the Sudanese Republic, and Ethiopia, where no political parties exist, some variation of the single-party political system or a distinctive tendency in that direction may be found in nearly all of the independent African states. That this should have come to pass within the relatively short period of the rise of African states has been a surprise to some observers of African nationalist movements and parties during the colonial period—who were rather sanguine about the prospects of Western-type democracy and party systems in Africa—as well as to the colonial powers themselves (especially Britain and France)—who presumably assumed that their policies of decolonization in Africa were providing the institutional framework within which Western-type party systems and politics would prevail.