Voting, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Late-Colonial Africa

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. GABRIELLE LYNCH University of Warwick NIC CHEESEMAN University of Birmingham AbstractIn the face of considerable scepticism from some British commentators, elections by secret ballot and adult suffrage emerged as central features of the end of British rule in Africa. This article considers the trajectories of electoral politics in three territories -Ghana (Gold Coast), Kenya and Uganda. It shows that in each of these the ballot box came to provide a point of convergence for the disparate ambitions of nationalist politicians, colonial policy-makers and a hopeful, restive public: performing order, asserting maturity and equality, and staking a claim to prosperity. Late-colonial elections, we argue, constrained political possibility even as they offered citizenship, presenting the developmentalist state as the only possible future and ensuring substantial continuities from latecolonialism to independence. They also established a linkage between nationhood, adulthood and the ballot that was to have enduring political force. Yet at the same time, they established elections as a space for a local politics of clientelism, and for kinds of claims-making and accountability that were to complicate post-independence projects of nation-building.In 1958, Britain's Colonial Office initiated a policy discussion on the role of elections in the end of empire. The discussion ran over the next two years -even as the pace of decolonization quickened across Africa. 2 low standards of living and education'. Nevertheless, the document argued that, since international expectation and African nationalists demanded elections before independence, they must be held. 2The doubts expressed in 'Democracy in backward countries' were not unusual, as we shall show below. Yet British planning, as much as international opinion or nationalist demands, had come to focus on elections by universal adult suffrage and the secret ballot. Critically, these were relative novelties in Europe at the time; and in India, universal suffrage had followed several years after the end of empire, rather than preceding it. So why did they become the norm? Why didAfrican politicians demand such elections? And why did the restive subjects of late-colonial states queue up to register and vote? What part, in short, did elections play in the entangled processes of decolonization and nationalist mobilization?Prominent as they were in the end of empire, late-colonial elections attracted considerable academic attention at the time, 3 but have rarel...

African Studies Keyword: Democracy

“…Against the notion that modern democracy is a Western imposition, we suggest that there is considerable evidence of "fragments of democracy" in the pre-colonial era (Freund 2016;Cheeseman 2015). We also demonstrate that key democratic institutions, such as competitive elections, have become deeply embedded in African political practice (Willis et al 2018). That this is not always recognized, and that "African democracy" is so often imagined to exclude "Western" accountability mechanisms is in part the product of the silencing of democratic practices and histories, first during the colonial era and second in the period of authoritarian rule that followed independence.…”

“…In addition to high levels of intrinsic support for democracy, multiparty elections are valued because they have become enmeshed in local conversations about the distribution of power and resources in a way that had great meaning for those who participated in them. Writing about Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda, (Willis et al 2018(Willis et al :1113 argue that elections matter to citizens not only because they represent an opportunity to demand more from the government-and in some cases to receive handouts of cash and gifts-but also because they are bound up with important questions such as how resources should be distributed and how leaders should behave. Thus, one reason that political participation remains high in many countries in which elections rarely lead to a transfer of power is that "campaigns create an opportunity to make claims and advance moral projects that genuinely matter to people at multiple levels of the political and social system" (Cheeseman et al 2020:9).…”

Post-Colonial Citizenship and Decolonisation as a Turning Point: Continuities and Discontinuities in African States

“…those citizens who are eligible to participate in democratic selfgovernment) presupposes that the demos by whom or on whose behalf a decision is taken is already composed in a way that makes its boundaries legitimate' (Bauböck, 2017, p. 61). Even at the practical level, those creating the first electoral rolls struggled to determine eligibility to vote when so many held no official identification documents of any kind (Cooper, 2012b;Willis, Lynch and Cheeseman, 2018).…”

The history of elections in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. What We Can Learn from These ‘National Exercises’

“…African nationalism looked forward to the 'nation of the future' (Reid 2015); its enemy, even more than colonialism, was the proliferation of alternative political possibilities, for local ethnic patriotisms raised the possibility that there might be other future nations. Against those threats, elections by adult suffrage and the secret ballot -with their bureaucratic, territory-wide processes of registering, nomination, listing, queueing and counting -had made both the nation and its counterpart, the loyal individual citizen, briefly and tantalizingly visible at the end of empire (Willis et al 2018). Elections drew together nationalist politicians and colonial officials who shared a strong awareness that they were subject to a sceptical international gaze.…”