| Summary: | This chapter focuses on two prominent scholars—Kwasi Wiredu and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze—the interlocution between whose work has sparked renewed and refocused enquiries into questions of democracy and deliberation within contemporary African Political Thought. The chapter proposes that, despite their disagreements, a normative understanding of communal rationality, and of dependency, lies at the heart of both Wiredu’s and Eze’s arguments concerning the consensual possibilities for democracy’s practice. The nature of the democratic freedom that both Wiredu and Eze envisage for African countries, and for the no-less post-colonial societies beyond the continent’s borders, depends on taking seriously the major challenge both these scholars pose—What if there are more morally agreeable ways of thinking about the things that order our politically determinant interactions with each other?
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