Democracy's March Through Africa.(Brief Article)

It was a day of celebration. on Jan. 7, when Ghana's chief justice administered the oath of office to John Agyekum Kufuor, the country's newly elected president, people across the continent cheered. With unintended irony, the Accra Mail had declared in November, "With Americans gearing up this week to celebrate the fruits of yet another milestone in democracy, all that it seems [Ghana] can do is gawk in admiration and envy as [its] 'democracy' plods on, fraught with anxieties, angst and uncertainties." But after watching the drawn-out saga of the U.S. elections, voters in Ghana cleanly voted out the party of long-serving president Jerry Rawlings and elected the Oxford-trained Kufuor--the first democratic transition since independence in 1957.

Africa badly needs such victories. Contrasting starkly with the image of the so-called Dark Continent, they confirm its slow but steady embrace of democracy. That evolution appears to be stronger than the many obstacles still ahead: dictatorship, intolerance, complacency and armed conflict. Zimbabwe, Guinea and Togo, to name a few examples, still balk at democratic change. Peace, the first requirement of democracy, remains a distant prospect in Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo and Sudan. And coup makers still plot, as last week's attempt by disgruntled Ivorian soldiers to topple the country's civilian regime proves.

That coup's failure should be a lesson to those who don't choose the democratic path. Rawlings, who came to power in a popular coup 20 years ago, understood the changing times when he chose in 1992 to ...