From Consensus to Colonial Ballot: The Displacement of Ethno-Populism
By: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Across much of precolonial Africa, governance was neither autocratic nor opaque. Contrary to the stereotype of “absolute chiefs,” political life was often communal, participatory, and transparent. Decision-making processes revolved around consensus, kinship assemblies, and visible accountability.
In Yoruba polities, for example, citizens gathered in the town square and raised their hands in open assent or dissent, with the king or oba ruling not by fiat but by aligning with the expressed will of the people. This was not unique to the Yoruba: across thousands of interspersed African kingdoms and communities, governance was rooted in what I theorised as ethno-populism—a system where rulers remained accountable to the immediate collective will of their kin-based constituencies (Makinee, 2023).
Consensus as Accountability
The African model of governance thrived in small-scale but numerous communities. These were often tightly knit societies where kinship bonds functioned as social glue, ensuring both trust and participation. Voting was not secret but openly visible, designed to reaffirm communal unity rather than shield individuals from scrutiny. Unlike Western monarchy, where rulers often imposed decrees over subjects, African kingship was consultative, and legitimacy rested on popular acceptance.
Raising hands in public assemblies, or voicing decisions through councils of elders, embodied a culture of direct accountability. This form of governance operated less like the mechanics of Western democracy and more like what I later defined as populocracy—conditional governance in which citizens make decisions for the government to enforce, rather than governments making policies for citizens to obey.
Colonialism and the Bifurcation of Power
The intrusion of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries profoundly disrupted these traditions. European administrators imposed bureaucratic systems modelled after their own states, privileging secrecy and paperwork over visibility and consensus. As Mahmood Mamdani (1996) explains in Citizen and Subject, colonial governance produced a bifurcated state: urban spaces were governed by imported bureaucratic institutions, while rural areas were relegated to “customary law” under chiefs co-opted by colonial power.
This sidelining did not dismantle indigenous institutions outright; instead, it hollowed them out. Traditional assemblies persisted in parallel, but they were marginalised, deemed irrelevant to the new machinery of “modern” governance. The introduction of ballots—first oral, then standardised paper versions like the “Australian ballot” of 1856—was a central part of this shift. Ballots were presented as progressive innovations, but in practice they displaced visible consensus with secretive mechanisms controlled by the state.
From Consensus to Ballot
The colonial ballot carried both symbolic and practical consequences. Symbolically, it redefined legitimacy: no longer rooted in public assent but in secret individual choice tallied by state officials. Practically, it introduced vulnerabilities unknown to the communal model. Ballot papers had to be printed, stored, and counted—often under foreign supervision. In many African countries, even after independence, ballots continued to be printed abroad, leaving sovereignty itself compromised.
What was once a collective act in the open became an individualised ritual behind curtains and ballot boxes. The people’s will was no longer verified in real time by visible majorities but mediated through opaque bureaucracies. The communal link between ruler and ruled—an open social contract visible in the town square—was severed.
Populocracy and the Digital Restoration
My theorisation of populocracy reclaims this African inheritance for the 21st century. While democracy privileges state-driven decision-making, populocracy envisions governance where citizens issue binding directives to governments. In this sense, populocracy is not an invention of the present but a modern articulation of Africa’s ancient ethno-populism.
Emerging technologies such as blockchain now offer a means of digitally restoring this principle. By giving every voter a unique, timestamped reference number published in real time, blockchain voting creates a digital town square. Just as Yoruba assemblies made consensus visible through raised hands, blockchain ledgers make electoral outcomes verifiable at scale. The difference is that instead of only a few hundred villagers in a square, millions of citizens can now observe and authenticate their collective will.
Conclusion: Returning to Africa’s Political Future
Colonialism replaced visibility with opacity, consensus with secrecy, and commicratic ethno-populism with bureaucratised democracy. Yet traditional systems were never fully erased—they persisted in the rhythms of local governance, in village assemblies, and in the moral memory of communities. Today, as Africa confronts the limitations of paper ballots, contested elections, and external dependencies, the turn toward blockchain and populocracy offers not just a technological innovation but a return to Africa’s own heritage of open accountability.
Far from being alien imports, blockchain-led verification and populocracy resonate with the deepest traditions of ancient African governance. They extend the raised hand of the town square into the digital age, binding rulers once again to the transparent will of the people.
References
- Makinee, O. (2023). Manifesto of African Corporatist Society, Volume 4: Populocracy: Social and Economic Bases of Collective-Individualism. Retrieved from https://makinee.com/populocracy/
- Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Falola, T., & Heaton, M. M. (2008). A History of Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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