Abdi Ismail Samatar. Africa’s First Democrats

In Africa’s First Democrats: Somalia’s Aden A. Osman and Abdirazak H. Hussen, Abdi Ismail Samatar refocuses attention on leadership, the key question that has dominated African political discourses in the past six decades. The extant studies, in their diachronic terms, have ridiculed, insulted, and dismissed the African postcolonial leaders as colossal failures. Similarly to Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), which squarely blames poor leadership as the cause of development crisis in Nigeria, Samatar’s book laments that the leadership curse has wreaked havoc in his native country Somalia. This problem, Samatar argues, erodes national consciousness and functionality of state institutions in nurturing a robust civic life. This study is important because it draws attention to the gamut of stereotypes and wisdoms espoused by critics of African leaders. Samatar has stood up for a couple of the African nationalists and immediate inheritors of the postcolonial state by describing them as genuine democrats. The storyline is that at a time when their peers in most of Africa were subjugating their countrymen to despotic controls, President Aden A. Osman and Premier Abdirazak H. Hussen of Somalia focused attention on building democratic structures and institutions in Somalia. This admission is a new divergence because a study of this nature that is laudatory of this generation of postcolonial African politicians runs the risk of a backlash from the self-appointed gurus of African politics

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