Rational Grounds

It's likely true that many African nations lack a long history of sound civic institutions and a tradition of political freedom, but the same could be said for just about any country or region before it made the move to democracy. Europe had a history of strongman rule going back to the dissolution of the Roman senate, until the Enlightenment rolled around. Japan and Korea were strangers to democracy before its haphazard introduction following World War II, yet they're both doing quite nicely now.

I took a class on international human rights law at Columbia back in 2002, and in it I read a piece by Amartya Sen where he talked about a similar strain of thought concerning East Asia. He was addressing the idea that "Asian Values" such as discipline and subordination to the group (community, society, etc.) were both superior economically to Western political freedom and specifically better for Asian nations because of their historical identification with Asian traditions. I think he captures a key flaw in approaching political freedoms in this way:

Although instrumental issues [economic advantages] have been in the forefront of the claims in favor of 'Asian values,' it would be a mistake to think that the proponents of these values have confined themselves only to instrumental reasoning. The heritage of Asia has been much invoked, and the reading of traditional Asian values has influenced the nature of the argument for adherence to these allegedly ancestral norms and mores in that region. The focus on discipline as opposed to rights has received support not merely from the supposed effectiveness of that priority, but also from the importance of being true to Asia's 'own traditions.'[...]

This way of seeing the 'clash of cultures' is increasingly prevalent now, but to see the conflict over human rights as a battle between Western liberalism, on the one side, and Asian reluctance to go along with that, on the other, is to cast the debate in a form that distracts attention from the central issues, which concern Asia itself. In the battle over the role of human rights and such matters as press freedom (a battle that is certainly forceful in contemporary Asia), the primary parties are Asians of different beliefs and convictions, even if occasionally a visiting American might get caned in an Asian country.[...]

There is a further reason for removing this debate from the perspective of Western anxiety about Asian practice. That often-invoked perspective gives the immediate impression that the primacy of human rights is a fundamental and ancient feature of Western culture, and one not to be found in Asia. It is, as it were, a contrast between the authoritarianism allegedly implicit in, say, Confucianism vis-a-vis the respect for individual liberty allegedly deeply rooted in Western culture. There are good historical reasons to doubt each of the two claims implicit in the contrast. In answer to the question, 'at what date, and in what circumstances, the notion of individual liberty ... first became explicit in the West,' Isaiah Berlin has noted: 'I have found no convincing evidence of any clear formulation of it in the ancient world.' Also, insofar as we do find arguments championing freedoms in some generic sense in ancient Greek treatises (as we clearly do, for example in Aristotle's _Politics_ and also in the _Nicomachean Ethics_), it is not hard to discover comparable championing of generically described freedoms in the writings of many Asian theorists, such as the Indian emperor Ashoka who was among the first - in the 3rd century B.C. - to tackle the difficult issue of protecting minority rights in a multicultural and multireligious polity.

Indeed, the rhetoric of freedom is abundantly invoked in many of the Asian literatures. Buddha even explains 'nirvana' in the language of 'freedom,' to wit, freedom from the miseries of life. If there is a real gap today in the acceptance of freedom and liberty in the West vis-a-vis those in Asia, the roots of a hard division lie much closer to our times.[...]

If the grabbing of 'Asian values' by the champions of authoritarianism has to be effectively and fairly questioned, what is needed is not the claim - often implicit - of the preeminence of what are taken as 'Western values,' but a broader historical study of Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, and other Asian literatures (in relation to corresponding writings in the Western classics). Nearer our times, acknowledgment would have to be made to the contributions of national leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who were, already a hundred years ago, cogently vocal in defense of the widest forms of democracy and political and civil rights.
(Amartya Sen, Human Rights and Economic Acheivements, in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, edited by J. Bauer and D. Bell, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp88-103)

Again, I'm not sure how exactly that debate might map on to the question of African political freedoms and philosophy because I know just about nothing about African philosophical traditions and very little more about the status of political freedoms in the region. But I'm always reminded of this piece when someone says some country isn't ready for democracy, or perhaps just not full democracy.

Looking at survey results like this I can't help but think that vanishingly few people, in any country, truly get the idea of individual liberty. But everybody is ready for democracy.