WHAT HAS BEEN THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY AFTER INDEPENDENCE IN AFRICA?
In the post-independence period the problem around state-civil society relationships in most African countries have been centred to a large degree around the role of the rural majority. They have in most societies been ruled according to colonial structures and systems, also after independence, which implies that their political and legal relations have been decided by local authorities acting directly at the instructions of the urban state structures. This has often taken the form of local societies being organised through the establishment of either state or party organisations. This means that social institutions in the rural areas, with the possible exception of churches, are either of a "pre-modern" type or a direct inheritance from and prolongation of the colonial state, which did not extend the principle of civil society to the colonized.