I was reading this article and it claims,
Despotism and dictatorship did not exist in traditional African political schemes. In fact, the famous British economist, the late Lord Peter Bauer, noted this in his book, "Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in Economics of Development" where he wrote, "Despotism and kleptocracy do not inhere in the nature of African cultures or in the African character." Stateless societies such as the Somali, Igbo, and Tiv—which are characterized by the rejection of any centralized authority or “government”—did not have leaders who could be despots or dictators. Rather, these political systems stressed customary law and emphasized justice, or the establishment of justice, as the ruling principle.
King Mswati III is often portrayed as the prototypical “traditional” ruler, his bad deeds emblematic of an unsophisticated and backwards political society. However, an examination of history reveals something altogether different. Rather than corruption and despotism being inherent to traditional rule, it is the undermining of traditional checks on executive authority by the colonial state that has left the population exposed to the whims of their despotic king. Moreover, by writing traditional checks, such as destooling, out of the political narrative of Africa, the colonial legacy has painted a false picture of African leadership. It is time to re-examine the traditional priority of executive accountability, and once again hold Africa’s leaders to task.
There are three main theories on the failure of democracy throughout most of post-Colonial Africa. The first is that traditional African kingship before colonialism resembled dictatorship more than it resembled democracy, so Africans defaulted to historical forms of government, cloaked in the trappings of a modern, Western republican system. This view was promoted not only by Western imagination, but by regimes like that of Mobutu in Zaire, who used the motif of tribal kingship to legitimize their rule. For reasons you have already touched on, this view draws a false equivalency between pre-colonial African kingship and European monarchy. As Joseph Hayford explains, traditional kingship in the Gold Coast and Nigeria closely resembled modern local democracy: the Oyo and Gold Coast societies had elected kings, and provisions for impeachment if the King displeased his constituents. Ainslie and Kepe, in a study on the resurgence of traditional authority in South Africa after 1994, note that in that region as well, locals often feel that traditional authority was more democratic and representative than the present-day Republic of South Africa.
The second theory, which has gained more popularity in recent years, is that African democracy failed simply because Africa is poor, and poor countries can't have democracy. An influential paper by Barro noted, "Increases in various measures of the standard of living forecast a gradual rise in democracy. In contrast, democracies that arise without prior economic development … tend not to last." By the late 2000s, this view was so widespread that Daron Acemoglu called it "conventional wisdom"
This theory is actually completely backed by correlation. Indexes of political freedom and GDP per capita show an almost perfect correlation. Causation is intuitive as well - poor countries tend to be less educated and less stable: the populace simply doesn't understand finer things like democracy, and if they do have it, it will inevitably be destabilized by irrational fears. This theory is in vogue for two reasons: first, it appealed to the general backlash against neoliberalism after the Iraq War. Second, it benefits everyone involved in the discussion. Some of its most zealous evangelists are actually African politicians and scholars. Searching for ammunition against the IMF, which demands political reform for economic grants, politicians like Museveni of Uganda have become die-hard promoters of the growth-first argument. The theory has the added benefit of legitimizing the powers that be - excusing abuses and allegations of corruption as normal for poor countries.
However, on further investigation, this causation does not exist, and there are a number of confounding variables. Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared 2008:
although income and democracy are positively correlated, there is no evidence of a causal effect. Instead, omitted—most probably historical—factors appear to have shaped the divergent political and economic development paths of various societies, leading to the positive association between democracy and economic performance. Consequently, regressions that include country fixed effects and/or instrumental variable regressions show no evidence of a causal effect of income on democracy over the postwar era or the past 100 years.
A variety of factors (spread of technology and Western institutions concurrently during the industrial revolution, spread of those same institutions and technology to Asia after the US occupation of Japan, etc.) have produced a strong correlation between democracy and growth, but there is no evidence that the causal mechanism exists. Counter-examples such as the poverty of Bangladesh compared to the wealth of China are evidence against this.
The third argument is structural - the idea that post-colonial leaders inherited an oppressive colonial system and simply made themselves masters of it. Some, like Mswanti III and Mobutu, cloaked their basically exploitative regimes in traditional symbolism, while others shrouded it in the vestiges of Western democracy.
Colonial regimes basically intended to restructure African society to become dependent on outside sources for industrial production, to produce resources, to be easy to control, and to be integrated into the world market. Moses Ochonu:
A supreme goal of colonizers' economic policies was to transform African subsistent and semi‐subsistent farmers into export oriented peasants‐‐peasantization in the jargon of African economic history.
Some examples of this include the rail structure in Africa - which, instead of targetting population centers, were directed towards resources. Local colonial forces, such as the infamous Congolese Force Publique, also were structured to maximize control, with mercenaries from one region dispatched to oppress locals in another. Not every regime after decolonization immediately defaulted to oppressive methods, but there were clear incentives, and few checks and balances, on those that did.
A number of regimes, such as that of Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, were honest in their intention to break the vicious cycle of resource dependence and industrialize. As Waldner points out, however, such an effort in itself required centralization.
Two types of developmental enterprises composed the world-historical context of post-colonial regime dynamics: state building, or political development, and economic development which, for most of the twentieth century, meant industrialization. Both of these projects, loosely termed modernization, involve struggles for control over the transformation of the agrarian political economy. State building involves transferring the authority and control over politically relevant resources from local elites to national centers of power while economic development involves shifts in relative prices that transfer wealth produced by the primary sector to the nascent urban industrial sector.
In order to achieve industrialization, reformist governments had to force sacrifices on the rural population which would be harder to obtain in democracies.
This all begs the question as to why no countries simply chose to deconstruct old economic relationships, reform the mercenary armed forces inherited from colonial masters, and devolve government back to local authorities. The answer lies both in class and incentive factors. First, the first generation of leaders after decolonization were predominantly Western educated and upper class, and would not cede control to the less educated masses. Second, colonial economic and political structures persisted because of influence from internal actors. While Western intervention in internal African affairs declined sharply after decolonization, local elites preserved the existing structures for their own gain. Most of the commercial activity in East Africa, for example, was controlled by an Indian minority, who facilitated the old resource-exporting economic relationships. In Congo, wealthy African businessmen co-operated with Belgian mining companies, and strove to maintain their business connections after independence. Two groups of these businessmen funded mercenary armies and seceded when the Congolese government drifted from Belgium, creating the Mining State of South Kasai and the Republic of Katanga. Finally, the first generation of native African generals had no incentive to instill civic duty in post-colonial militaries that were controlled mainly by pay and personal loyalty. The less civic consciousness the soldiery had, the easier it was to launch a coup.
TLDR: Post-colonial leaders inherited the colonial power structure, and all the most important businessmen and military officers were happy with it. Some tried to use funds from resource export to industrialize, but this too required centralization and dictatorship.
Sources/further reading:
Stateless societies such as the Somali, Igbo, and Tiv—which are characterized by the rejection of any centralized authority or “government”—did not have leaders who could be despots or dictators.
Dr Ayittey is oversimplifying the case of the Igbo here. There has been a long debate in Igbo historiography over the precolonial social-political structures, and whether there historically was Igbo kingship which later gave way to the egalitarian tendencies seen in the late pre-colonial centuries. John Oriji delves into this debate in Political Organization in Nigeria since the Late Stone Age: A Political History of the Igbo People and comes down on the side that there was a form of ancient kingship or hierarchy.
Overall, though, I would agree with dr Ayittey's core claim that colonial administrations weakened assemblies or other forms of quasi-democratic institutions that had served to limit the power of chiefs in African societies. In the book Citizen and Subject Mahmood Mamdani provides two examples (on pp 46) in southern Africa, of the Swazi libandla assembly and the Tswana Kgotla assembly:
This whole state structure, the community of peers [the liqoqo]—the king and his council, rite queen mother, the princes, chiefs, and headmen—was con strained by a popular institution called the libandla. A “national coun cil” chaired by “a senior prince from the liqoqo” the libandla’s member ship comprised both commoners and nobles. The difference lay in this: whereas attendance for commoners was voluntary, it was compulsory for the entire state hierarchy—the king and queen mother, all chiefs, princes, and headmen. Its sanction was required “on all important mat ters.” These structures did not function just at the center; both the liqoqo and the libandla were mirrored at local levels, requiring the tradi tional chief to consult the corresponding council “on various aspects of local importance.” But the assembly’s limitations are also clear: it was limited to adult males among commoners, and it met only once a year.
The changing relationship between popular (clan) and administrative (state) organs through the colonial period is well illustrated by the ex ample of Botswana. Alongside administration by state officials, there de veloped in the precolonial period the institution of the Kgotla, “a place where the community meets to discuss openly issues of common interest with the chief.” As a clan-based institution, the Kgotla, like the libandla in Swaziland, had one clear shortcoming. Neither women nor subject nationalities were allowed to participate in its deliberations. Yet this popular institution of Tswana adult males represented a check on the authority of the chief. It was a public assembly that could discuss any public issue, one where administration by public officials was subject to public scrutiny, including strong criticism in the “highly stylized form o f songs or poems.”17 At the same rime, the Kgotla also functioned “as a judicial court where the community as a whole could participate in the process of adjudication.”18
In the colonial period, this public assembly was turned into a forum where decisions were announced but not debated. A reform was initiated in 1920. Its point was not to restore the powers of the Kgotla but to reduce the autonomy of chiefs vis-a-vis the colonial power. Once this was achieved, the chiefs' powers over the local population wore reinforced in phases, starring in 1938. The 1938 law allowed chiefs to ap point a finance committee to supervise the local treasury; it also gave them powers to make bylaws “with the agreement of the Kgotla." The 1954 African Administration Proclamation gave the chiefs “legislative and executive authority, as long as they exercised it with the consent o f the Kgotla." Bur the “consent of the Kgotla” was by now a euphemism for the veto power the colonial state exercised over all chiefly decisions,19 for it was colonial authority that had the ultimate power to decide what the real interests of the Kgotla (the people) were. In relation to the peasant, however, the chiefs were all-powerful. They had the powers to allocate land and administer schools; to approve the appointment of clerks, police, and messengers; to make bylaws; and to adjudicate cases.20
Mamdani also provides many other examples, including describing the progressive colonial usurpation of the traditional right of Fante and Ashanti councils of chiefs to destool an errant chief.
I highly recommend reading Citizen and Subject because a central premise of the analysis is the colonial era creation of what Mamdani calls "decentralized despotisms" and their impact in the post-colonial era.