As Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga accepted the Supreme Court's upholding of Uhuru Kenyatta as the election victor and president-elect on Saturday, the dust of Kenya's elections has settled in the courts rather than stirring up street violence.
Kenya is believed to have learned lessons from the post-election violence in 2007 rather than repeating the historical mistake again.
Actually Kenyans may well be heaving a sign of relief as early as the voting ended. Two days after Kenya election, the country's stock market had surged 7 percent, and GDP growth is estimated to land at 6 percent again.
One week later, according to Reuters, business owners in Kisumu, Odinga's tribal heartland, began to plan a full resumption of trading after many had run down their stocks in the run-up to the vote because of uncertainty about the future. At around the same time, the calm made the China Road and Bridge Corporation, currently building an important bypass in Nairobi, cancel their withdrawal plan.
The early-warning system implemented by the government, donations from international NGOs to support conflict resolution, advocacy from religious leaders and activists to reject clashes, and other collective efforts from every corner of society made peace happen. The election is worth celebrating.
However, does it mean that Kenya has reached a mature democratic stage? If the benchmark of democracy just focuses on the majority vote, then Kenya meets the criteria.
Yet democracy is more than fair and open elections, especially in a country where voting mostly depends on ethnic lines. The tribal card is still played by both Kenyatta and Odinga during the campaign, which could easily ignite deeper mutual antagonism among their supporters.
The politicization of ethnicity may enhance conflicts among the different ethnic communities and make it difficult for political leaders to move beyond tribal interests. Under the name of "tribalism," the government can also increase their authority by manipulating people's tribal loyalties.
Kenyans are inclined to vote based on ethnicity rather than policy because of their tribal identity. This helps explain why popular government fails to be responsive to ordinary Kenyan's needs and why violence, corruption, rampant unemployment and low wages plague Kenyan society.
The political landscape of Kenya brings us the view that democracy is on the march, at the same time, in retreat. To some extent, Kenya's dilemma is the very epitome of democracy in most of African countries.
"African democracy" has followed Western models since the early 1990s after the third wave of democratization. As these countries were in haste to embrace democracy with the support of Western countries, they neglected their own sociocultural realities.
Contemporary Africa is still a communal society which features primordial loyalties and pre-capitalist social structures. It is tribal identity that defines people's perceptions of self-interest and freedom.
In this context, the assumptions of Western democracy make little sense in Africa. Individualism, while highly stressed in Western democracy, is lacking in Africa. Political participation there is strongly linked to communality.
That's why too often people vote for tribal rather than personal interests. It's easy for the political elites to use the trappings of the tribe as a means to get power under the guise of democracy.
The historical attempts to create "African democracy" supposedly based on collectivist decisions proved disastrous in the aftermath of independence and rapidly slipped into dictatorship and tribalist oppression. "African democracy" and "collective values" were used by numerous tyrants to justify their own thefts and killings.
But attempts to impose an abstract model of one-size-fits-all democracy may be equally doomed by sociocultural realities. Rather than depending on elections alone, Africans need to develop a democracy based on communal traditions but not just theoretical models.
The author is an editor with the Global Times. wuningning@globaltimes.com.cn