African Political Thought, Part 8: the call for democracy
Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka giving a speech earlier this year. Photograph by Jodie C.
Welcome to Part 8 of our ten-part ten-minute lecture series on African Political Thought, brought to you by Stephen Chan, Professor of World Politics at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS). Each week, a short reading list will be published alongside the lecture. Viewers are also encouraged to pose questions they have for Chan in the comments section below.
If you’d like to get an update when new episodes go up, please send an email with subject line “APT” to [email protected] and you’ll be notified when new lectures are posted.
In this episode, we look at:
The call for democracy: the critique of Soyinka; new constitutionalisms and the looking eastwards to China, Singapore and Malaysia; the model of Russian democracy
For an audio-only version:
Reading list for Part 8
Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Previous episodes
- Part 1: Antecedents: race and romanticism in Africa – from WEB du Bois to the Manchester Conference to Senghor’s “˜negritude’.
- Part 2: The thought of liberation: Cabral and the Lusophonic thinkers; the “˜pacific’ counterpoint of Kaunda.
- Part 3: The New African Man: the political thought of transformation – Kaunda, Nyerere, Obote, Nkrumah.
- Part 4: The degeneration into “˜Big Men’: case studies of Mobutu and Banda; the critique of Mbembe.
- Part 5: The coup “˜artists’ and the new nationalisms-on-command: from Gowon to Rawlings; the contrasts between Sankara and Amin; the contrasts and similarities between Obasanjo and Abacha.
- Part 6: The old liberationists and their reassertion in new nationalisms: Mugabe’s political thought.
- Part 7: Africa in the world: Mbeki’s African Renaissance – nostalgia and the toleration of the carnivalesque; Ngugi’s linguistic chauvinism; Mandaza’s neo-Marxist retrospection.
Coming next…
- Part 9: On Yvonne Vera’s novel of trauma after liberation, gender equality and other equalities in constitution-building for nation-building.
- Part 10: African intellectual currents and philosophy today: going it alone vs integration with a hegemonic world; Africa and the ICC, Africa and electronic globalisation; the thought of the outlawed commons.
