Populism in Africa: Political constant, Leadership Legitimator and Democratic Determinant

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This thesis examines populism in Sub-Saharan Africa across its historical, institutional, and contemporary expressions, advancing the central argument that African populism constitutes a historically deep, ideologically distinct, and democratically consequential political tradition whose full significance has been systematically obscured by the field's disproportionate reliance on European and Latin American analytical frameworks. The study is organized around three research questions: concerning the emergence and development of populist personalities and patterns across the focus countries of Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya; the degree of populism's presence on the continent and the conditions that shape it; and the impacts of populist leaders and parties on African democracies, legal systems, and political landscapes. These questions are approached through a methodological trident of Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Historical Analysis, and Visual Discourse Analysis, applied within a qualitative and interpretivist framework attentive to the historical embeddedness and contextual specificity of populist expression. The thesis makes several original contributions. First, it advances a revisionist historical argument, demonstrating that African populism predates the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1960s that most scholars treat as the continent's populist point of departure, locating proto-populist expressions in the West African Cocoa Boycotts, the Kebaka Yekka movement in Buganda, and the agrarian resistance of the Bakwena ba Mokgalong in the Witsieshoek region. Second, through a chronological analysis of twentieth-century African populism organised around a generational cleavage between first-wave socialist-nationalist figures and second-wave military-revolutionary populists, the thesis demonstrates that African populism is not a static phenomenon but a generationally adaptive political technology whose forms and strategies were shaped by the conditions and failures of each successive era. Third, the thesis argues that populist legal reforms in post-colonial Africa — specifically the Popular Revolutionary Tribunals of Sankara's Burkina Faso and Touré's people's courts in Guinea — were substantive instruments of democratic state-building rather than rhetorical exercises, grounding judicial legitimacy in popular sovereignty and extending meaningful access to legal processes for communities that colonial legal frameworks had systematically excluded. Fourth, the thesis introduces the guerrilla populist as an original typological contribution to populist literature, describing figures like Julius Malema and Bobi Wine who access the symbolic capital of armed liberation struggle through ideological identification rather than biographical participation. Finally, through comparative case studies of the NRM in Uganda and the EFF in South Africa, the thesis demonstrates that populist parties have functioned as agents of democratic construction and renewal in post-colonial Africa — the NRM as democracy's architect in Uganda's post-civil-war institutional vacuum, the EFF as a democratic challenger that fractured South Africa's dominant-party system and restored substantive policy competition to its political landscape. Taken together, these findings issue a principled challenge to the dominant scholarly tendency to frame populism as presumptively antithetical to democratic norms, arguing that the relationship between populism and democracy is not fixed by the nature of populism itself but determined by the specific democratic conditions into which populist actors intervene. In the post-colonial African context, those conditions have historically made populism not the enemy of democracy but, in significant and documentable measure, its vehicle.

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