by Sean Coleman

Created on: April 22, 2008

Africa has experienced great political turmoil for well over a century and a half, when democracy was truly introduced to the continent in the new-founded country of Liberia, created to move free blacks out of the United States of America. Even as the first truly democratic country, without any rule by a monarch or dictator, the vast majority of Americans felt that blacks were naturally inferior to the Anglo-Saxons. This racism was shared even by those who have been held as the greatest men in the campaign for civil rights, such as Thomas Jefferson. The only way to keep blacks out of society short of slavery, these men believed, was to export them. It is not the fault of the African people that their form of democracy are corrupt; it is the method in which the system has evolved and reached the continent.

The first recorded civilization that was governed under the principles of democracy was the great city-state of Athens, where every man and woman voted on each issue. Athens, however, did not remain on the map in its ancient form, and society changed. With technology and more devastating weapons in Europe came the rule of whichever group was militarily dominant; for such strength, powerful, absolute leadership is necessary. In the hunt for conquest, democracy was impractical, and autocracies rose where republics had once stood. Rome became the Holy Empire, and when its satellites gained the strength for rebellion, their government had but one pattern to be built upon. Where the Romans had once conquered under religious unity and strict political and military structure, the British, Spanish, Portuguese and French stepped in and pushed far outside the boundaries of Europe, into the New World and Asia.

On the North American continent, the British were easily supreme. They set up Virginia and Massachusetts, seized New Amsterdam and gave it its new moniker in the same fashion, and as the continents flushed themselves out, they were ordered to push back the creeping French and Indians looking to reclaim their homes in the Seven Years War. The cost of such an expedition was expectedly great, and as the colonists' war, they were forced to pay the massive debt.

The colonists, however, were not wealthy, and had become far detached from the British opinion. Such a heavy toll outraged them, and the intellectuals were revolted that their overseas brethren would impose such a demand upon them without consulting those in affected. Parliament only raised taxes in more outrageous

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