Correction to this article“THE people of Zambia have spoken and we must all listen,� a defeated President Rupiah Banda intoned on September 23rd. His Movement for Multiparty Democracy had ruled Zambia for the past 20 years. Yet when the opposition leader, Michael Sata, and his Patriotic Front won a pretty fair presidential election by a margin of 43% to 36%, the incumbent bowed out with a good grace. In neighbouring countries and across Africa such fine behaviour is still unusual.But democracy, in one shape or another, is a lot more widely practised than it was. From around 1960, when Africa’s colonies first became independent, until 1991, not a single one of Africa’s 53 countries (now 54, including South Sudan), witnessed any leader or ruling party being peacefully voted out of office, with the noble exception of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, in 1982. Elsewhere a handful of presidents, such as Tanzania’s late Julius Nyerere, voluntarily stepped down. Since 1991, however, no less than 30 ruling...