Africa does not need to borrow democracy; it needs to reclaim it

For far too long, African youth have been told that democracy is something imported, something borrowed, something foreign to their identity. But history gives us a very different truth. Democracy is not an idea that arrived from the West. It is a human idea. And Africa practised it long before modern states existed.

Africa’s democratic inheritance is older than the colonial borders that sliced the continent into fragments. In the Somali shir, every man could stand, argue, and vote in open councils that decided collective affairs. The Oromo Gadaa system developed rotating leadership and fixed term limits centuries before they became fashionable anywhere else. Igbo communities governed through village assemblies that rejected kings and insisted on consensus. The Ashanti used councils of el