‘IMPORTANT MATTERS MUST NOT BE DECIDED BY ONE MAN’
Ashoka, the Indian emperor, who hosted the third – and the largest – Buddhist Council in the third century BC in Patna (then called Pataliputra), the capital city of the Indian empire, also tried to codify and propagate what were among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion (some kind of early version of the nineteenthcentury Robert’s Rules of Order ). To consider another historical example, in early seventh-century Japan, the Buddhist Prince Shotoku produced the so-called ‘constitution of seventeen articles’, in AD 604. The constitution insisted, much in the spirit of the Magna Carta (to be signed six centuries later in 1215), that: ‘Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.’ Indeed, the importance of public discussion was a recurrent theme in the history of many countries in the non-Western world, and the understanding of democracy went well beyond the perspective of ballots and elections.
From acknowledging the relevance of global history we must not, however, move to the presumption that we cannot break from the past to initiate a radical political departure. Indeed, new political initiatives have always been needed in different ways across the world. We do not have to be born into a tradition of democratic history to be able to choose that way today. The significance of history in this respect lies rather in the more general understanding that established traditions continue to exert some influence on people’s ideas and imagination, that they can inspire or deter, and that they have to be taken into account, whether we are moved by them, or wish to resist or transcend them.
It is not, therefore, surprising – though it does deserve clearer recognition today – that in the fight for democracy led by visionary and fearless political leaders across the world (such as Sun Yat-sen, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King or Aung San Suu Kyi), an awareness of local as well as world history has played an important constructive part. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela describes how impressed and influenced he was, as a young boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the local meetings that were held in the regent’s house in Mqhekezweni:
‘Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer.’
Mandela’s understanding of democracy was hardly aided by the political practice that he saw around him in apartheidbased South Africa, run by people of European origin, who, it may be recalled, used to call themselves by the cultural term ‘European’ – rather than just ‘white’. In fact, the ‘European’ culture of Pretoria had little to offer to Mandela’s comprehension of democracy. His discernment of democracy came, as is abundantly clear from his autobiography, from his knowledge and understanding of global ideas as well as local African practice.