Recent Books
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where well-organized and relatively
legitimate dominant political parties
have maintained control over systems
that are far from fully democratic,
while only rarely relying on repression
or fraudulent elections. Interestingly,
Morse also shows that international
pressure matters. When foreign govern-
ments and international organizations
are willing to condone nondemocratic
practices and continue their economic
support, authoritarian regimes prove
more stable.African Catholic: Decolonization and the
Transformation of the Church
BY ELIZABETH A. FOSTER. Harvard
University Press, 2019, 384 pp.The Catholic Church is often described
as one o the key instruments o French
colonialism, working in cahoots with
the administrators o France’s colonies
in central and western Africa to legitimate
French rule to its parishioners. That
may have been true in the early years o
the French empire, but Foster tells the
much more complex and interesting
story o the decolonization era, when
the church slowly but surely came to
grips with the inevitability o indepen-
dence and the need to Africanize
itself. Foster emphasizes the inÇuence
o African Catholic intellectuals, such as
the Senegalese Alioune Diop, who
argued that the church needed to become
more universalistic and less European.
The Vatican’s changing attitudes were
partly the result o sheer pragmatism;
after African states’ independence,
retaining an all-French roster o bishops
and cardinals on the continent would
have been a nonstarter. But Foster
argues that the church o the post–Worldon Facebook and over a million on
Twitter, Kenya may well be sub-Saharan
Africa’s most online country. Nyabola
describes a sophisticated community o
users who have found agency through
the Internet, whether in criticizing ££
for what they see as its Eurocentric
coverage or in publicizing corruption
and incompetence by Kenyan ocials.
The Kenyan government, Nyabola
reveals, is deeply ambivalent about the
Internet, attracted to it as a symbol o
modernity but wary o the hard-to-control
political spaces it creates. Nyabola’s
conclusions are far from optimistic. She
documents how the Internet allowed
foreign actors, such as the British politi-
cal consulting ¿rm Cambridge Analytica,
to manipulate voters during the 2017
Kenyan elections and explores how
social media may come to undermine
Kenyan democracy.
How Autocrats Compete: Parties, Patrons,
and Unfair Elections in Africa
BY YONATAN L. MORSE. Cambridge
University Press, 2018, 352 pp.
In recent years, several regimes have
emerged that combine authoritarianism
with genuinely competitive multiparty
elections. In this tightly argued book,
which focuses on Cameroon, Kenya, and
Tanzania but has implications for all
authoritarian countries that nevertheless
regularly hold elections, Morse argues
that such regimes generally rely on
organizational strength and legitimacy
to win at the ballot box—but when they
lack those attributes, they turn to
violence, repression, and vote rigging to
stay in power. Morse’s work helps
explain the resilience o regimes such as
those in Mozambique and Tanzania,