Comment: Process of Political socialization in Afro-Asian societies. (1997)
Classic Western studies of political socialisation assumed a settled nation whose family, school and party transmit an agreed culture across generations. Post-colonial Afro-Asian states had no such inheritance: the nation itself had to be taught. Their socialisation has therefore been discontinuous, contested and state-directed, and it is now being remade by a digitally connected youth.
A Discontinuous Process
- Two worlds of learning. Lucian W. Pye (Politics, Personality and Nation Building, 1962), studying Burma, found children raised in kin-centred homes, then pushed into Western-style schools, bureaucracies and armies. The mismatch between primary and secondary socialisation bred an elite identity crisis and cynicism towards authority.
- Politics fused with community. In “The Non-Western Political Process” (1958), Pye argued that politics in such societies is not separated from social relations. Parties become identity communities rather than interest coalitions.
- Primordial agents dominate. Kin, caste, tribe and religion, the primordial attachments of Clifford Geertz, often outweigh school and media. In India family and caste pass on a structure of obligation, not merely a party preference.
The Colonial Imprint
- Dual socialisation. Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s Minute on Education (1835) sought a class Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste. Colonial schooling split a Westernised elite from the vernacular mass.
- Internalised hierarchy. Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Decolonising the Mind, 1986) showed how the coloniser’s language and curriculum taught the colonised to despise their own world.
- Nationalism as counter-socialisation. Anti-colonial movements became mass schools of politics. Mohandas K. Gandhi‘s satyagraha and constructive programme drew villagers into politics, and Kwame Nkrumah‘s Convention People’s Party did the same in Ghana.
Nation-building by Design
- Party and state as teachers. Julius Nyerere‘s TANU spread Swahili and ujamaa as a civic creed. Indonesia made Pancasila compulsory doctrine, and China’s Patriotic Education Campaign after 1989 rebuilt legitimacy around national humiliation and revival.
- Charisma and the army. Founders personalised authority; where civilian institutions were weak, as in Pakistan, the army became a rival socialiser.
- India’s democratic route. Universal franchise in 1951–52, when most voters could not read, made elections themselves the school. Yogendra Yadav‘s participation gradient, with turnout higher among Dalits, Adivasis and the poor, shows how effective that schooling has been.
The Digital Generation
A smartphone generation now learns politics from peers and platforms, not parties. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (2022), Bangladesh’s July uprising (2024), Kenya’s Finance Bill protests (2024) and Nepal’s Gen Z protests (September 2025) were largely organised online. Nepal’s protesters used a Discord poll to put forward Sushila Karki as interim prime minister, and the Rastriya Swatantra Party then won 182 of 275 seats in March 2026.
Limits of the Frame
“Afro-Asian” hides wide variety. Treating Western socialisation as the norm is ethnocentric. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) showed caste associations acting as vehicles of democratic learning, not obstacles to it.
Conclusion
In Afro-Asian societies socialisation has been a political project, not a quiet inheritance: colonialism fractured it, nationalism and the state rebuilt it, and digital peers are now remaking it. Resting on participation, as in India, it has rooted democracy; resting on imposed doctrine, it yields compliance that can collapse suddenly.