ABSTRACT
The round of elections which began in 1989 in Namibia and inaugurated regime changes in central and southern Africa, culminating in the demise of apartheid and the democratic transition in South Africa, represented a definitive shift away from authoritarianism towards some form of pluralist democracy as the normative basis for political rule in Africa. From a narrower perspective, doubts about democratic prospects in Africa stem from a certain boredom with the continent’s problems in influential Western policy circles, and from a profound ‘Afro-pessimism’, which views the continent as increasingly marginal to world developments. For Afro-pessimists, the democratic awakening in Africa constitutes a false dawn. Democracy has yet to prove that it can succeed. For many African countries, the fragility of the post-colonial order was such that the alternative to democracy was not authoritarianism but the collapse of the state itself.
