A Community Model of African Politics: Illustrations from Nigeria and Tanzania

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956–1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanisms or enforceable law; and few states could even extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial-era governmental structures or the many new ambitious projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence.