ABSTRACT
Africa at the dawn of a new century remains locked in a struggle for a democratic future which refuses consolidation. Twice-born in constitutional form in most decolonization settlements, then again with the surge of democratization at the end of the 1980s, democracy remains in arrested adolescence. In the 1960s, democratic experiments were swept away by single party monopolies and military mle, decanting into patrimonial autocracies. In the 1990s, democratization in many instances seemed limited to its formal trappings, or captured and tamed by wily incumbents, who in the telling phrase of the widely admired late Nigerian intellectual Claude Ake ‘may now embrace democracy and enjoy democratic legitimacy without subjecting themselves to the notorious inconveniences of democratic practice’.1
