Most of the recent literature on democratisation in Africa has paid insufficient attention to popular understandings of democracy and the local reception of democratic practices. This article examines the articulation of the concept of democracy with existing socio-political conceptions in contemporary Buganda. The standard translation of the word ‘democracy’ into Luganda tends to assimilate it to a local political cosmology which emphasises the values of justice, civility and open communication between rulers and subjects, and involves a conception of sociopolitical hierarchy modelled on the system of clans and kingship. Key ideological features of this conception include its construction from the bottom up, the singularity of power, regulated competition and nested solidarities. Such liberal democratic practices and institutions as elections, political parties and representation are not part of the local definition of democracy. In fact, political parties are widely condemned as antithetical to democratic governance. At a more pragmatic level, however, some of the democratisation initiatives of the current Ugandan government have given rise to a new popular allegiance to democratic elections. These reforms are unusual in that they resonate significantly with local political values and conceptions. The article suggests that more attention should be devoted to the coherence of democratisation initiatives with local socio-political conceptions.

By the early twentieth century the ruler of the historic Akan kingdom of Akyem Abuakwa in what is now the Republic of Ghana and his subjects confronted one another over issues of identity and allegiance. The evidence suggests that not only was this debate unprecedented but also that its language was novel. Such divisive issues were forced upon them by a tranche of new factors. These included the ownership of, or rights to, land as farms acquired increasing cash value in the wake of the success of cocoa cultivation. No less important in a jural setting dominated by the institutions of indirect rule was the issue of which chiefly jurisdiction applied to individual communities and even families in a kingdom with a historically varied ethnic population. The article shows how the king gradually elaborated both an ideology and a corpus of regulation which attempted to define citizenship and stranger status. The king and his council's organising principle idealised an ethnically homogeneous state. Many sections of the kingdom's population strongly contested the idea. They did so in part because this agenda potentially disempowered long-settled communities while granting new privileges to those close to the centre of ‘traditional’ power.

A moral code as ideology is gradually inculcated at different stages in the male life cycle among the Sidama of Ethiopia. The elders constitute a gerontocracy in control of the code, enabling them to link household and community in perpetuating a system of subsistence production which generates sufficient surplus to support rituals and symbols that maintain the ideology. They encourage oscillation of males between household and community until death, when the authority of the code becomes transcendent.

The following two articles were originally presented at a four-day seminar on the ‘domestication’ of modernity in Leiden and The Hague in June 1995. The aim of the seminar was to compare the different trajectories in which African societies try to appropriate modernity: how they deal with the images and dreams of a modern way of life which flood the continent—the spectacular successes of the few and the deep feelings of disappointment of the many. ‘Modernity's enchantment’—a phrase coined by Jean and John Comaroff (1992)—applies very well to Africa. Jean-Pierre Warnier's remark, in his study of entrepreneurs in west Cameroon (1993), that ‘le goût des Camerounais pour tout ce qui est importé plutôt que produit localement est légendaire’ is true of many if not all African countries. Achille Mbembe (1992) forcefully demonstrates that the popular masses are as intent as the elites on participating in the consumerist rituals of new forms of wealth and power. But it is clear also that this obsession with modernity follows very varied trajectories. Jean-François Bayart (1989) emphasises that the marked consumerism of African elites is not to be seen as just an atavistic outcome of la politique du ventre; rather, it is related to specific imaginaires of the link between wealth and power and to varying pressures ‘from below’ towards redistribution.

In Kinshasa thousands of prophetical churches of the Holy Spirit, particularly those in the Koongo area, fill in the ethical gap left, according to the people, by the marginalisation of traditional authority in the city, as well as the failure of civilisationist ‘white’ models, such as the collapse of public health and education sectors, and the dissolution of the State party. Confronted with economic collapse and miserable conditions in urban areas, these charismatic healing churches deconstruct the colonial and missionary heritage that ‘invented Africa’ in a white mirror, and the evolutionist utopia relating to modern progress. The dogmatic use that they make of biblical texts, their immoderate liturgy, and above all their ostentatious healing rituals parody and ridicule people's experience of post-colonial state constraints, the dichotomisation of the society operated by Christian conversion, and postcolonial mirrors opposing modernity and reactionary tradition, Christian values and pagan life. Healing churches deconstruct the daily seduction of the town folk by hedonistic ideals of capitalist consumption and Northern television channels which control the world. The Holy Spirit, as a substitute for the ancestral spirit, expresses itself in an heterodox manner and with multiple voices in the shape of glossolalia, dreams, and trance. During these very intense celebrations these communities, through the spirit, remobilise and, in particular, reinforce interpersonal links woven through the care of the body and from the mother within the matrifocal community or the matri-centered villagisation operating in the city. Here, in the daily quest for survival, people reassert their sense of criticism and community in the face of the fragments of state and tribal structures as well as their desire for moral integrity and sharing. And, above all, in this process of villagisation, healing churches recycle as symbolic capital the so-called forces of western imperialism, and particularly those which come from written material and electronics: the Bible, money, television, and satellite communication.

In what sense are current African politics explicable as efforts to ‘domesticate’ modernity? In Tanzania the post-socialist liberalisation has opened space for new forms and objects of competition. A scramble for control and for resources in the Kilimanjaro—Mem area in 1993 is described here. The variety of competitive activities involved is encapsulated in events in four radically different organisational arenas: in Chadema, a new national political party; in the Lutheran Church; in a sub-village on Kilimanjaro; and in a local patrilineage. These organisational frameworks are approached as partially autonomous, locally specific, sites of political activity. Each is visibly marked by a historical past while also being rapidly propelled to respond to immediate changes of circumstance in a large environment. The details suggest that classical theoretical definitions of ‘modernity’ do not always stand up as useful analytic devices.