Luise White
Department of History, CLAS
Politics of Violence in Africa
I will do research in Zimbabwe and South Africa to look critically at the history of the franchise in Central Africa in the era of decolonization, from the late 1950s and ‘60s. As a pedagogic goal, I want to counter the idea that voting and elections are transparent practices that Africans cannot claim as their own. Voting in Africa has a history, one that is far more convoluted that a straight path to one man, one vote and something called free and fair elections. I will look specifically at several draft constitutions in Central Africa and their debates about what should constitute qualifications to vote; should it be literacy or property, or both? How then does a society, even a racially segregated colonial one, account for the differences between African and European forms of wealth, or available schools? Studying debates about who has the right to vote reveals political strategies about inclusion and exclusion at their most vulnerable moment, the eve of independence, as these debates become part of larger Cold War strategies of development and democratization in Africa.