ABSTRACT
These pages have reviewed mixed experiences in the recent electoral history of Anglophone Africa. On the one hand, the round of elections which began in 1989 in Namibia and inaugurated regime changes in central and southern Africa, culminating in the demise of apartheid and the democratic transition in South Africa, represented a definitive shift away from authoritarianism (whether in the form of military junta, single-party state or racial autocracy) towards some form of pluralist democracy as the normative basis for political rule in Africa. Set against the alternative political scenarios which Szeftel noted in the first chapter - predatory elites using the coercive force of crumbling states to repress and plunder and/or the actual collapse of such states into warlordism or communal violence - the democratic impulse which the elections examined in this volume represent is an impressive achievement indeed.
