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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2021
The remarkable yet untold story of the straggles to democratize African political systems is that they owe much of their recent success to the pivotal role played by university student groups and faculty associations as animateurs of protest demonstrations, debates about issues deemed taboo by the state, and as organizers of militant campus movements. At a time when most associational groups were banned or rendered politically impotent by being incorporated into existing state structures in order for them to serve state interests, secondary and university student groups and faculties remained virtually the only sources of pressure and protest against authoritarian regimes on the continent. Thus, from Dakar to Nairobi, from Addis Ababa to Harare, student movements and demonstrations, fought pitched battles with state security personnel and stimulated civilian opposition movements.
Cyril K. Daddieh is Associate Professor of Political Science at Salisbury State University, Salisbury, Maryland.
1. This is part of a larger edited work in progress by Professors Jon Kraus and Cyril K. Daddieh. For more on the evidence suggesting the centrality of the role of students, see Kraus, Jon, “The Politics and Political Economy of Student Protest in Africa.” Paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, November 20-23, 1992.Google Scholar
2. Ottaway, Marina, “Democracy and the Challenge of Ethnicity,” African Demois, vol. III, no. 4 (March 1995), p. 22.Google Scholar
3. See Daddieh, Cyril Kofie, “The Management of Educational Crises in Cote d’Ivoire,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 4 (1988), pp. 639–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Legum, Colin, “The Year of the Students: A Survey of the African University Scene,” in Legum, Colin (ed.), African Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents, 1971-1972, London and New York, 1972.Google Scholar
4. For more on these strategies, see Daddieh, “The Management of Educational Crises in Cote d’Ivoire,” pp. 639-59; and Legum, “The Year of the Students.”
5. Ibid.
6. See Gerald Bourke, “An Autocrat Democrat,” West Africa (1-7 May 1989), p. 676.
7. Nii K. Bentsi-Enchill, “Cote d’Ivoire: Stealthy Alleyways,” West Africa No. 3677 (February 8, 1988), p. 209. See also Lyse Doucet, “Cote d’Ivoire: Politics and the Courts, West Africa (December 14, 1987), pp. 2430-31.
8. See Africa Research Bulletin, vol. 25, no. 2 (March 15, 1988), p. 8787.
9. Bourke, “An Autocratic Democrat,” p. 676.
10. See Gerald Bourke, “Day of truth,” West Africa, no. 3764 (October 1989), p. 1684.
11. Ibid., p. 1684.
12. Ibid, p. 1684. My emphasis.
13. Although no Ivorian or African students have done anything as dramatic as Wang Weilling, the nineteen-year old Chinese student who, on June 4, 1989, stood alone in front of a tank column at Tiananmen Square, their courage is no less real.
