One of the problems that most African countries face today is that they have to deal with deep ethnic divisions. Since independence, a large number of ethnic conflicts have taken place in these countries.
There is a long argument that democracy is exceptional in severely divided societies. For this reason, the early modernization theorists suggested that ethnic identities needed to be erased. They anticipated that if a national identity were created, ethnic conflict would be reduced. Marxist theorists also argue that ethnicity will be weakended by class conflict. However, it is difficult to believe that such an assimilation of ethnic identities into a national identity will take place. We had better not make efforts to assimilate people, but arrange the political institutions which can reduce ethnic conflicts in order to establish peace and democracy.
A. Lijphart has shown one way, the consociational democracy model. He argues that consociational democracy enhances the democratic stability of a plural society not by making it less plural, but by making it more plural. Although his arguments are based on European small countries, we can apply the essence of consociationalism to the plural societies in Africa in order to reduce ethnic conflicts.
In this article, I will show the cases of The Gambia and Nigeria. The former has succeeded in keeping stable democracy with consociationalism, and the latter has changed its political institutions from the majority-rule model to the one closer to the consociational model. These case studies may help to develop the classical consociational model into a more general theory.