Chance or Risk of Contagion from the North of Africa to sub-Saharan countries1

André Thomashausen2

The question whether the momentous transformations currently underway in the North of African
and in the Middle East could ignite a similar wave of political uprisings further South and in sub-
Saharan Africa has been on everyone’s mind over the past weeks.

Having lectured international and comparative law for my entire life, I often came across the
bewilderment in students and young colleagues alike, when they have to conclude that what appear
to be the same circumstances and the same challenges, will not necessarily produce the same results.
For, instance vague and unimpressive human rights concerns in the case of Saddam Hussein’s
Republic of Iraq, coupled with anti-American rhetoric by its leaders and unproven assumptions of
military capacities and weapons, led to the largest and most costly ever humanitarian intervention
and occupation in 2003. A decade earlier, when the vastest genocide since the Nazi holocaust occurred
in Rwanda in 1994, resulting in the mass killing of over 800.000 Rwandan citizens, not a single
government proposed any kind of humanitarian intervention.

Political Science in this context will simply refer to the phenomenon of ‚double standards‛ in
international relations. But a closer examination of what we consider when comparing, shows that
humanitarian intervention and indeed any kind of use of force in international law, is determined first
and foremost by the own security, political and economic interests and perceived opportunities of
state actors, rather than by any assumed or proclaimed normative force of noble principles, or human
rights standards. So the simple answer is that the choice of wrong measures of comparison can easily
lead to the wrong conclusions. Not the degree of human rights violations in any particular country
will determine whether a humanitarian intervention may occur, but rather whether such human
rights violations are perceived by crucial state actors to impact on their own security, political and
economic interests.3

We must thus be cautious with conclusions that focus only on a few similarities such as the number of
years of leaders hold on to power, or the fact that colonial borders are artificial in North Africa and in
the Middle East as they are in Africa, or, further, that in most of the countries compared we can attest
an absence of due process and the rule of law.

A finer set of diagnostic tools has been developed already in the 1960ies by Brinton in his fundamental
work ‚The Anatomy of Revolutions‛ (New York 1965). I amplified and expanded Brinton’s analysis in

1 Paper delivered at Seminar ‚Uprising of the Arabic World‛, Unisa College of Law, Institute for African Renaissance Studies
(IARS), Pretoria, South Africa, 2 March 2011.
2 andre@legesmundi.com. About the Author: Prof Thomashausen is professor of international law at the University of South

Africa in Pretoria and Chair of the Department of Public, Constitutional and International Law as well as the Institute of Foreign
and Comparative Law, at the same University. He is an admitted Attorney at the Bar of Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and
holds the degree of doctor iuris of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. He is also a sworn translator of the
Supreme Court of South Africa, in German, English, French and Portuguese. Prof Thomashausen has produced over 90
academic and general publications and papers read at national and international conferences. He has also delivered over 1.200
expert opinions on private and public international law, as well as comparative and constitutional law. He acted as legal
consultant for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (1984-1986), the establishment of the transitional Government of National
Unity in Namibia (1984), as facilitator in the Rome Peace Negotiations for Mozambique (1989-1992), and as Special Advisor to
the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations Operation in Mozambique (1993-1994). He consulted
repeatedly for the Angolan Parliament and acted as facilitator for the Constitutional Committee of the Angolan Parliament,
since 1999.
3
See: Sophie Maria Thomashausen, Humanitarian Intervention in an Evolving World Order: The Cases of Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo and
East Timor, Africa Institute of South Africa, Pretoria 2002, pp139-140.
Thomashausen: Contagion of sub-Saharan countries Page 2 of 4

my own work on analysing and predicting the downfall of Apartheid South Africa, as a result of its
own disintegration from within, as far back as in 1983. 4

In summary, the qualifying element of a revolution is pure and simply the rupture with evolution.
The distinguishing criterion is to be seen in the purported and eventually achieved aims and not in the
means employed. As the opposite of evolution, revolution does not aim at the improvement of an
existing constitutional and governmental system, but rather at the entire radical substitution and
overthrowing of such an existing system. Revolution will seek to replace existing fundamental values
of a society by new and opposing principles and values, and this may happen with or without the
employment of violence. Consequently, it will never be possible to spark a revolution without the
previous existence of a crisis of values and beliefs, upon which the legitimacy of a governmental and
constitutional system are founded. Attempts to provoke a revolution in the absence of such pre-
revolutionary conditions will never lead to revolution, but merely to what is known in Latin America,
as ‘pronunciamentos’ or simple revolts, illegally substituting one group of leaders by another.

From the comparative and historical analysis of revolutions, the following indicators of pre-
revolutionary conditions can be summarized:

(a) a crisis of identity and conscience amongst the ruling class;

(b) the estrangement and withdrawal of intellectuals from the government system;

(c) a disintegration of society on the level of neighbouring and competing social classes and sub-strata;

(d) an opposition of economically privileged groups and social strata, hostile to the system of
government as such, assuming the leadership of pre-revolutionary perceptions, identifications and
activities;

(e) the administration of government is too inept to innovate and is engaged in merely defensive and
reactive adaptation.

These elements are all too familiar for those who know modern Tunisia, Egypt or Libya, and I dare
say, also Iran.

The ruling classes in all these countries are ideological defensive and possibly insecure because of a
worldwide rejection of their values and purported ideals. They have lost credibility internationally
and nationally and the support they still enjoy is opportunistic. They have become stagnant and
incapable of succession. Their mostly historically grounded legitimacy is eroded as its people become
more educated, mobile, industrialized and secularized.

The best intellectuals including students and aspiring academics, feel ashamed of their political
leaders, become disrespectful of them, and learn to despise them for their oppressive leadership, and
often live and work in voluntary exile. In such a context, it is fashionable to be anti-government, and
nobody wants to be left out of this alternative political and cultural identity.

The various levels of the middle classes are highly suspicious of each other and divided in relation to
their differing levels of access to economic opportunity in economies built on patronage, but also
between those who manage to interact with foreign economies, and those who remain locked into the

4
A Thomashausen, ‚Experiences and Parallels of Political Change in Pre-Revolutionary Portugal, and in South Africa‛, in 13
(1983) South Africa International, pp 253-271.
Thomashausen: Contagion of sub-Saharan countries Page 3 of 4

national economy, or in simpler terms, those who have access to foreign currency and can afford to
send their children to study abroad, and those who cannot.

The economically most privileged classes have little or no confidence in the national banking system,
and perceive the need to engage with and secretly support any opposition to the government.

The governments themselves will engage in small reforms, ‚too little - too late‛ and continuously act
from an ideological defensive, investing vast efforts in propaganda which in turn will accelerate the
undermining of their integrity and political legitimacy. Often cosmetic constitutional and law reforms
will be undertaken with efforts disproportionate to their actual significance. In the final phase,
escalation of violent repression and brutal intimidation will accelerate the momentum towards the
collapse of the system.

Most essentially, the fate of political leadership and political systems is all about the ability of political
elite to continuously renew its legitimacy, as the most important basis for the exercise of authority.
Lenin in his appeal to the soviets, published in Pravda on the 22nd of April 1917 analyzed:

The striking feature of our revolution is that it has established a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and
foremost; unless it is understood, we cannot advance…. Nobody hitherto thought, or could have thought, of a
dual power. In what does this dual power consist? In the fact that side by side with the Provisional Government,
the government of the bourgeoisie, there has developed another government, weak and embryonic as yet, but
undoubtedly an actually existing and growing government -the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

The erosion of the legitimacy of political power is inevitable if such legitimacy is founded solely on
concepts of historical or charismatic leadership. Such leadership tends to ignore the teachings of Max
Weber that for political power to achieve continuity, in addition to its historical and charismatic
legitimacy, it requires rational approval and support. Such rational support can only result from
regularly recurring elections in which credible alternatives are put to the electorate.

So what are the conclusions if we apply the above analysis and teachings to governments in Africa?

First of all, in many countries where one could characterize the governments quite easily as despotic
or lacking in legitimacy, we are faced with societies that have no or only very small middle classes. As
Moeletsi Mbeki has shown very compellingly in 2004 in his paper on The Private Sector, Political Elites
and Underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa (at SAIIA), most African societies continue to be peasant or
subsistence farmer societies. He quotes Marx to argue that peasants and small-holding peasants are
unable to form an in dependant political force and will always be politically orphaned. The political
elites in Africa only need either the support of the donor community, or the support of resource
exploiting industry, to remain in power. For as long as 90 to 95% of the population continue to be
economically disenfranchised, the only agents for change will come from within the clans and factions
that make up the political and economic elites. The most likely scenario in Africa continues to be that
of ‚pronunciamentos‛ or coups, rather than popular uprisings. Except for South Africa, the millions of
middle class citizens, educated and infused by political consciousness, that we have seen and continue
to see in the public places in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, simply do not exist in African countries.

Hence it is my suggestion that we must apply the criteria that identify a pre-revolutionary society
carefully, when considering countries in Africa.

In Angola, Equatorial Guinea or Zimbabwe, for instance, there are no signs of any crisis of identity
amongst the ruling classes. Intellectuals in the traditional absence of academic freedom and with the
exception of small numbers, who have preferred to emigrate, are mostly subservient and eagerly
competing for political access and patronage. The middle class is almost totally employed by and
Thomashausen: Contagion of sub-Saharan countries Page 4 of 4

dependent on the state. The working classes are poorly or not at all organised. And there are no
economically privileged groups that could operate outside the sphere of government support and
approval. And the governments are not at all on the defensive, but very much in charge, continuously
expanding and strengthening their systems of bureaucratic and traditional and tribal patronage.

Under these circumstances, the only realistic expectations for the immediate future can be either the
advent of popular rebellions of utterly desperate and actually starving masses, or the loss of unity
amongst the ruling elite resulting in coups that will opportunistically seek approval by populist but
not necessarily spontaneous uprisings. The latter will become inevitable in those countries, such as
Angola and Zimbabwe, where the advanced age of the leaders will naturally weaken their ability to
hold together competing factions and clans.

This assessment rests on the assumption of the continuing frailty and insignificance of the middle
class in Africa. This assumption will have to be carefully examined and verified for each case. In many
countries in Africa, especially over the past decade, education has made huge progress, and the
numbers of young professionals and intellectuals have grown rapidly. As Europe has become a
virtually impenetrable fortress for immigrants, exile is no longer an option for the educated in Africa.
Their expectations and growing political awareness will put new pressures on the stagnating political
systems. In most African countries, even since the advent of multi-party elections since the early
nineties, political elites continue to rely on their historical, anti-colonial liberation legitimacy. As
elections over the past few years are showing, the persuasiveness of these claims of historical
legitimacy is wearing off.

Southern Africa has known three successful and peaceful transitions where violent revolutions were
pre-empted and avoided. These are the case of Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique. They were
negotiated transitions, two of which were implemented with the help of an international and UN led
intervention, whilst one (in South Africa) was the result of entirely autonomous effort. All three cases
have set standards for the rest of Africa, possibly including North Africa and the Middle East.

The standard of managing a complex transition and thereafter in conducting elections in South Africa
is today an undeniable and continental yardstick. The competence and professionalism of the South
African Independent Electoral Commission which has excelled the standards in many fully
industrialized and developed nations, has created a new election reality in Africa, as is evidenced by
the SADC PRINCIPLES AND GUIDELINES GOVERNING DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS, adopted in
August 2004 by the Mauritius Summit. Neither Robert Mugabe, nor José Eduardo dos Santos will be
able to continue to escape the net thus cast. In years to come, clear and compelling election standards
will become the basis for the gradual political renaissance in the whole of Africa, including North
Africa and the Middle East.

South Africa’s experience using political dialogue is part of this repository of knowledge on African
conflict resolution and good peacekeeping practices. South Africa’s history has taught its political
leadership as well as its people, to communicate carefully and to listen. Sincerity makes up for its
sometimes criticized lack of sophistication. This goes hand in hand with a culture of respect and
personal humility which is so much exemplified by Nelson Mandela, and which will hopefully
continue to be the trademark of South Africa’s good offices, diplomacy and initiatives throughout the
continent.

Summing up, and although I am doubtful of the spread of the Egyptian Revolution, to become an
African Revolution, I am optimistic about the persuasive strength of the principles of democracy,
personal freedom and the rule of law, as the great modernising energies of Africa.

**********