“Illiberal democracies” in Africa or evolution of postmodern patrimonialism? The cases of Angola and Mozambique

Abstract

Sub-Saharan African post-independence political systems were never handicap replicas of main and dominant international political models. Even in extreme cases of international conditioning, as the ones here analysed – Angola and Mozambique –, under the influence of socialist models during the Cold War (and only “liberal” afterwards), their post-independence neo-patrimonial matrix proved their capacity to self-restructure in their own terms, in different historical periods, capable to reinvent and accommodate the
external influences through domestic agency. Their currently active interaction with the new international illiberal currents of thought is merely the most recent example of a long path of selective use of international tendencies in favour of dominant domestic dynamics and logics of governance. Such inner dynamics have been settling and progressing towards a post-modern patrimonialism, as here argued.