African Democratic Experience and Fukuyama’s Liberal Interpretation of History

Abstract

Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is a means for world peace and contends that either liberal democracy is the end of human’s ideological history or it is the beginning of an entirely new repetition of history. Fukuyama’s declaration of an end of history with the emergence of liberal capitalism undermines other cultural history and supplants them with Western culture and ideological history. This position forecloses the concept of human dynamism and does not pay adequate attention to Africa’s cultural, historical, traditional and economic peculiarities. This paper describes history as epochal, civilisational, ideological and particular in nature. The claim is that each civilisation has its own ideology that responds to some earlier political, economic and social contradictions that arose in the course of historical development. Thus, African cultural peculiarities demand African modeled liberal ideology, since ideological history is a continuum. This paper adopts research methods of critical analysis, conceptual elucidation and reconstruction of ideas to achieve its goals.