Socialism, African

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS: THE GENEALOGY OF AN IDEA

THE FIRST WAVE: POPULIST-SOCIALIST REGIMES

THE SECOND WAVE: SCIENTIFIC-SOCIALIST REGIMES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are two basic models of African socialism that represent its variations and development on the continent (Rosberg and Callaghy 1979). The first, more populist type refers to a “first wave” of socialist regimes that emerged during the early years of independence—from the late 1950s throughout the following decade. Flexible, pragmatic, and attuned to local conditions, these first socialist governments in Africa recovered the communalism of traditional culture after breaking free from colonial domination. The second leading model represents a “second wave” of more militant regimes that consolidated power during the 1970s, favoring scientific socialism, an exclusive vanguard party, and a command-style economy while renouncing the false consciousness of traditional culture. These two models are of course abstractions and should not obscure the discrepancies between theory and practice, rhetoric and realpolitik, as well as principles and personalities found within each “ideal type.” If a populistsocialist such as Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) could force resettlement in Ujamaa villages (Khapoya 1994, p. 202), a vanguard Leninist such as Marien Ngouabi (Congo-Brazzaville) could protect French interests in phosphates and timber (Decalo 1979, pp. 258–259). Indeed, given that all African economies remain fundamentally mixed and export oriented, African socialism may well be more about the political manipulation of ideological resources than the public ownership of the means of production, particularly in the geopolitical context of the cold war. Nonetheless, the rise and fall of such powerful ideologies illuminates the broader historical forces that shaped African socialism and account for its different forms. One must begin with a discussion of the ideological origins of African socialism before moving on to its first and second “waves” of implementation.

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS: THE GENEALOGY OF AN IDEA

The mythic origins of African socialism are found in Victorian evolutionism, with primitive hordes, group marriages, and the glaring absence of private property representing the earliest stages of society. Ethnologists such as E. B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan established unilineal pathways from savagery to civilization that reinforced the racial hierarchies of imperial ideology with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top. The influence of this evolutionary perspective was pervasive, informing Sir Henry Maine’s transition from status to contract in comparative law, Ferdinand Tönnies’s sociological distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and of course the “primitive communism” of Marx’s pre-alienated man. When mapped onto the ur-terrain of the Dark Continent, a romanticized image of an original socialist Africa took shape, laying the foundation for the varieties of Pan-Africanism that developed in the first half of the twentieth century.

Edward Blyden (1832–1912) is generally acknowledged as a founding father of Pan-Africanism and its associated socialist traditions. Born in Saint Thomas and raised in Venezuela and the United States, Blyden moved to Liberia, where he advocated the repatriation of blacks to Monrovia. His ethnographic forays into West African hinterlands—commissioned by the British Crown—inspired such important works as Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887) and African Life and Customs (1908), in which he moved away from Christianity toward Islamic and indigenous frameworks for African government and self-determination. Of “pagan Africa” he wrote: “Social life … is communistic or co-operative. All work for each, and each work for all,” citing such proverbial wisdom as “What is mine goes; what is ours abides” (Blyden 1979, pp. 81, 89). Challenging Victorian myths of primitive savagery with utopian counter-myths of African socialism, Blyden’s stylized portrait of the continent would be refined in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (1939), Carter G. Woodson (1936), and in the Négritude of Leopold Sédar Senghor, all of which effected an important ideological transformation. Reworking the imperial opposition between civilization and barbarism, in which racial stereotypes between whites and blacks were largely preserved, Pan-Africanism reversed the hierarchy itself. The individualistic, hyperrational, industrializing societies and economies of the West were no longer signs of superior civilization but symptoms of profound alienation, expressed by the very separation of mind and body diagnostic of Western enlightenment. Africans, by contrast, were more “organic,” integrating mind and body, feeling and thought, and most importantly, self and community into collective forms of ownership and everyday life. Africa emerged as a positive foil against which the West was negatively recast, with its crime rates, rapacious greed, and growing inequality. The historical arrows were similarly reversed. Whereas the racist Hamitic Hypothesis of imperial discourse attributed the cultural achievements of Africa—such as political centralization or the invention of iron—to exogenous infusions of “Hamitic” or “caucasoid” blood, the Pan-African vision attributed Africa’s decline to the depredations of foreign conquerors and slavers who undermined the traditional fabric of economy and community. Identified and recovered, the socialist underpinnings of Pan-African culture would restore Africa’s rightful place in the world.

The Pan-African project took shape against the formal frameworks of European colonization at the turn of the twentieth century. The important Pan-African philosophies of this movement, including Léopold Senghor’s “Négritude” and Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Personality,” cannot be separated from the congresses and colloquia that brought together activists and intellectuals from Africa and the African diaspora. (One of the best comparisons of Négritude and African personality remains Irele [1990]). The four Pan-African congresses organized by Du Bois in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1937 were framed primarily in terms of race, challenging the “color-bar” through Pan-African alliances that included British socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, and H. G. Wells. But the fifth, so-called Manchester Congress held in 1945, reflecting the rising influence of George Padmore, signaled an explicit shift toward decolonization, mobilizing Africans in discourses of trade unionism, socialism, and self-government. It also influenced the careers of Nkrumah, Azikiwe, and Kenyatta, who became icons of independent nationhood. Nkrumah went on to organize the Union of African States (1960) with Guinea and Mali joined by Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt to form the Casablanca group (1961) with a militant commitment to continental unity.

Thus formed a “militant wing” of the Pan-Africanist movement, countered by the more pragmatic Brazzaville and Monrovia groups seeking socialist solutions through economic regionalism. Tensions between militant and moderate socialisms; between national, regional, and continental priorities; between North African and sub-Saharan “cultural” divides; and between inherited colonial philosophical dispositions persisted within the Pan-African community, not only in the Dakar Colloquium (1962), where Senghor reasserted Négritude’s universalism, but also within the Organization of African Unity after it was founded in 1963. Nonetheless, a general model of “open” African socialism emerged (Senghor 1964), emphasizing state-directed public-sector development, trade unionism, marketing cooperatives, people’s banks, limited land reform, independence from foreign export markets, political mobilization through mass party organization, commitment to egalitarianism, and relative geopolitical autonomy based on the indigenous values of African cultural unity. Principled autonomy from the Soviet Union was also a major theme of the Afro-Asiatic Bandung Conference in 1955, a conference considered by Senghor (1959, p. 3) as the twentieth century’s equivalent of the 1847 Congress of the Federation of Communists, which commissioned “The Communist Manifesto.” Pan-African in rhetoric, African socialism took root after independence within the political confines of the new nation-states.

THE FIRST WAVE: POPULIST-SOCIALIST REGIMES

It is difficult to separate the first socialist experiments in Africa from the charismatic leaders who brokered independence, such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Léopold Senghor in Senegal, Sékou Touré in Guinea, Modibo Keita in Mali, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Nkrumah’s brand of socialism is hard to pin down as it shifted between nationalism and Marxism, public-sector development and multinational capital, respect for traditional socialist values and disdain for traditional “reactionary” chiefs, and finally, between the mass principles and exclusionary practices of its ruling Convention People’s Party (Apter 1972). Squeezing cocoa farmers through its extractive marketing boards, the state sought to underwrite industrialization and infrastructural development, but as debt increased and productivity dropped, the economy slid into a downward spiral. Fearing political conspiracies within and neocolonial enemies from abroad, Nkrumah became increasingly radicalized and isolated and was ousted by a coup d’état in 1966. In similar trajectories of socialist development and decline, Modibo Keita in resource-poor Mali and Sékou Touré of mineral-rich Guinea collectivized agriculture, nationalized banking, and blended Marxism with African cultural models. In both cases, peasant producers lost out in the reforms, and agriculture stagnated. Whereas Keita was overthrown by a coup in 1968, Touré, who died in 1984, gradually abandoned his socialist policies for Western economic investment.

The most extensive socialist project based on “African” principles was Nyerere’s Ujamaa villagization scheme, in what became the hallmark of Tanzania’s commitment to self-reliance. In Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (1968), Nyerere offers a doctrine of traditional extended “familyhood” (ujamaa ) as a blueprint for African unity and development. Enshrined in the Arusha Declaration of 1967, this doctrine rejected heavy industrialization, with its dependency on foreign capital, in favor of collectively organized agricultural production in newly formed Ujamaa villages. What began as “voluntaristic, grass-roots, cooperative socialism,” however, became “socialism imposed from above” (Young 1982, pp.114–115) as recalcitrant peasant producers in scattered peasant homesteads were relocated into cooperative communities. Dean McHenry (1979, p. 43) estimates that 91.3 percent of the rural population was living in ujamaa villages by 1976. Although villagization, combined with Scandinavian aid, improved education, medical care, and public utilities in the rural areas, an overall decline in peasant production, including severe food shortages in 1974, eventually brought the experiment to an end. Nyerere resigned in 1985 to make way for neoliberal reforms, but his legacy of national unity and the correlative absence of ethnic politics in Tanzania has endured.

THE SECOND WAVE: SCIENTIFIC-SOCIALIST REGIMES

If the first wave of African socialist states in the 1960s sought the recovery of cultural traditions (Senegal and Tanzania more than Ghana and Guinea), the scientific socialist regimes of the 1970s emphasized more radical ruptures—from the shackles of tradition, from colonial domination, and from preceding military juntas. Elevating a Leninist-styled vanguard party to control the state, these more centralized regimes used the language of class analysis in claiming peasants and workers as their social base, attacking incipient class formation, and thereby justifying coercion in the persecution of political dissidents and internal enemies. In many areas, however, ideological principle was tempered by realism: If foreign owned banks and insurance companies were easily nationalized, more capital-intensive and productive multinationals were given freer rein as revenue-generating engines of growth. In geopolitical terms, greater solidarity with the Soviet bloc in the United Nations did not translate into firm Soviet trade relations and aid. Many of the Afro-Marxist regimes remained interested in Western capital investment, and thus economically nonaligned.

Crawford Young (1982) distinguishes military Marxist regimes from those that grew out of national liberation movements against Portuguese colonialism. Among the former, Congo-Brazzaville was the first to establish a Marxist regime in 1969, when Marien Ngouabi declared a People’s Republic and inaugurated the Parti Congolais du Travail (PCT). Somalia followed under Mohammed Siad Barre in 1970, when Soviet military interests enabled Somali national consolidation within an enduring Islamic idiom. In the Republic of Benin, Major Mathieu Kerekou created the Leninist Parti Révolutionaire du Peuple Beninois (PRPB) in 1975, developing new public corporations and peasant cooperatives without sacrificing economic relations with France. A more radical Marxist-Leninist state was implemented in Ethiopia by the revolutionary Derg (“committee”), a secret inner circle of the military who deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1975 and instituted major reforms, including the nationalization of land ownership and tenancy to undermine the Amharic feudal aristocracy. Given its notorious “Red Terror” and rule through fear and intimidation, however, the Derg never secured popular legitimacy (Donham 1999).

Notable among national liberation movements were the protracted struggles in Angola and Mozambique against entrenched Portuguese settlers and political overrule that lasted until 1975. In Angola, a bloody civil war became a cold war battleground where a sizable force of Soviet and Cuban soldiers (20,000) and technicians (17,000) backed the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) against Jonas Savimbi’s reactionary União Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), supported by South Africa and the United States. (Angola’s political identification with the former Soviet Union still resonates from the hammer and sickle on its national flag.)

By the 1990s, the Leninist role of the MPLA degenerated into coveted disbursements of economic and political patronage based on control over oil and diamonds (Hodges 2004). In Mozambique, socialism developed through similar struggles against the Portuguese and, after independence, during a long civil war with South African-backed Renamo rebels. Samora Machel’s revolutionary vanguard party, FRELIMO, emerged as a highly disciplined organization supporting liberation movements in former Rhodesia and South Africa while promoting women’s rights, peasant collectives, state farms, and heavy industry at home. The dislocations of the civil war, however, and the atrocities of the Renamo fighters, exacted a heavy toll on the country and economy after a cease-fire was signed in 1992.

If socialism in Africa, like elsewhere, lost ground after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the rising tide of neoliberal reforms, its central concerns have not withered away (Saul 2001). These remain the role of the state in regulating trade, the growing inequalities associated with economic liberalization, the political economy of “tribalism,” and the complex character of class formation in postcolonial Africa. Like the colonial heritage that it fought and opposed, socialism in Africa—even when disavowed—remains deeply embedded in the politics of national development (Pitcher and Askew 2006).

SEE ALSO Anticolonial Movements; Capitalism; Christianity; Civilization; Collectivism; Colonialism; Decolonization; Dependency Theory; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Ethnology and Folklore; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; Leninism; Liberalization, Trade; Liberation Movements; Neocolonialism; Neoliberalism; Nkrumah, Kwame; Nyerere, Julius; Pan-Africanism; Primitivism; Socialism; Socialism, Christian; Socialism, Islamic; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Apter, David E. 1972. Ghana in Transition. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Blyden, Edward W. 1979. Extracts from African Life and Customs. In Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa, 1856–1970: Documents on Modern African Political Thought from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. J. Ayo Langley, 78–87. London: Rex Collings.

Decalo, Samuel. 1979. Ideological Rhetoric and Scientific Socialism in Benin and Congo/Brazzaville. In Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Assessment, ed. Carl Rosberg and Thomas Callaghy, 231–264. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies.

Donham, Donald. 1999. Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1939. Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Henry Holt.

Engels, Friedrich. 1972. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. New York: International Publishers.

Hodges, Tony. 2004. Angola: Anatomy of an Oil State. 2nd ed. Oslo: Fridtjof Nansen Institute (in association with James Currey, Oxford, U.K., and Indiana University Press, Bloomington).

Irele, Abiola. 1990. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Khapoya, Vincent B. 1994. The African Experience: An Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

McHenry, Dean E. 1979. The Struggle for Rural Socialism in Tanzania. In Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Assessment, ed. Carl Rosberg and Thomas Callaghy, 37–60. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies.

Nyerere, Julius. 1968. Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism. London: Oxford University Press.

Pitcher, M. Anne, and Kelly M. Askew. 2006. African Socialisms and Postsocialisms. Africa 76 (1): 1–14.

Rosberg, Carl, and Thomas Callaghy, eds. 1979. Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Assessment. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies.

Saul, John. 2001. Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Senghor, Léopold S. 1959. African Socialism: A Report to the Constitutive Congress of the Party of African Federation. Trans. Mercer Cook. New York: American Society of African Culture.

Senghor, Léopold S. 1964. On African Socialism. Trans. Mercer Cook. New York: Praeger.

Young, Crawford. 1982. Ideology and Development in Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Woodson, Carter G. 1936. The African Background Outlined; or, Handbook for the Study of the Negro. Washington, DC: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.

Andrew Apter

SOCIALISMS, AFRICAN.

Socialist ideas have been in Africa before the advent of colonialism at the turn of the nineteenth century. African socialisms represent various combinations of African thinkers, politicians, and activists' absorption with and reconfiguring of nineteenth-and twentieth-century European socialist ideas and practice. The sources are multiple, from trades unions and contact with European workers, to affiliations with European political parties, and through contact with Pan-African (West Indian and African-American) radicals. Many African thinkers and movements have identified with various strands of social democratic and Marxian forms of socialism, seeking to indigenize them to Africa.

The rise of African socialisms as a movement coincides with the early phases of nationalism and national development, the high point of which was the non-nonaligned movement and Third Worldism. African socialism as practice began with the first self-proclaimed socialist-nationalist revolution in Africa, Gamal Abdel-Nasser's (1918–1970) 1952 Officers Coup in Egypt; and intended with globalization meeting South Africa's thwarted redistributive social democracy.

All African socialisms shared overlapping features that provided bases for nationalism and approaches to postcolonial development and nation building. First, was a combination of state ownership, an equitable distribution of wealth, and increasing citizen well-being; second, was the urgency of conquering underdevelopment, of "catching up"; third, was creating relevant noncapitalist institutions that would shape economic development; and fourth was creating well-balanced social relationships of citizenship that could establish cohesion between people and the state.

Prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, socialist ideas and practices were mooted among sections of the African middle and working classes. The Sierra Leone Weekly News in 1913 compared union-based socialism in industrial Europe with the supposed hallmark of an indigenous socialism, African "hospitality," auguring in sentiments (and myths) subsequently invoked by African Socialist-nationalists and political leaders. Striking laborers and clerks in Lagos in 1897 had neither socialist ideas nor organization to mobilize them against low wage labor policy for Africans, yet African socialist movements begin with the development of a modern work force.

Where industrial capitalism had penetrated more deeply in Africa, as in South Africa, Egypt, and Algeria, burgeoning workers and trade union movements would become subjects of communist and socialist ideas. Established primarily by settler, expatriate or European unionists and intellectuals, these movements learned their socialism in metropolitan-based parties. Striking white miners between 1906 and 1907 and from 1913 to 1914 in South Africa would beckon the call of (white) trade unionism and socialist organizing and practice, as would black workers in 1918. Socialism's claim to social justice would uniquely shape South Africa's national experience, where a class divided by race would force the national question to the center of discussions about the nature of socialism and independence in South Africa.

The first communist party in Africa (and in the Arab world) was formed in Egypt in 1921, where textile and transportation workers became the subject of communist attention afterWorld War I. The general orientation of Egyptian Marxists and socialists was directed to the Arab world, which would persist into Nasserism. Egyptian communism remained small; having a large impact upon intellectual Marxism, debating many important questions about socialism in a backward country; it had little impact upon Egyptian politics and was unable to develop a mass following among a large indigenous working class, a well-developed trade union tradition, and millions of Egyptian peasants, or fellaheen. The party eventually disbanded in 1965 through in-fighting and Nasser's repression.

Until the formation of the 1970s Afro-Marxist regimes, movements espousing revolutionary Marxism were nonexistent. An exception was one the large metropolitan, European dominated, Algerian Communist Party, formed in 1936. By the 1950s it had disgraced itself by constantly placing the French interests above Algerians'. Two other exceptions were Sudan Communist Party and the South Africa Communist Party (SACP). In the early twenty-first century the SACP remains numerically strong, while the large Sudanese Communist movement, founded in 1946 under the influence of Egyptian Marxists, played a role in the nationalist movement, retaining significant influence in Sudanese politics before General Gafur Nimeri's murderous purges in the early 1970s.

Marxist influence would find homes within African socialism. Soviet and Chinese communism were benchmarks of socialism throughout colonialism, nationalism, and the formative years of national development. With few exceptions, like self-management in Algeria (1960–1965), alternative or academic socialisms had little foothold in Africa. If communist party formation was prohibited during colonialism, many independence parties (especially in Francophone Africa) were modelled on communist parties. Many African leaders, even when seeing communism as threatening, were impressed by the rapidity of its modernizing achievements through centralization, planning, and the one-party state. The Cold War also demanded positions on communism; most African states preferred charting unaligned vistas between it and Western capitalism.

North African, "Arab" Socialisms

Nasserite Egypt (1960–1974), Bourguiba's Tunisia (1954–1986), Algeria from Ahmed Ben Bella's and Boumediene's through the reforms of the mid-1980s Qaddafi's Libya (1969/ 1977–) represented the beginning and end of North African socialisms.

Like the Cold War, the Egyptian Young Officer's coup would prepare a template for much of the continent's independence with its one party, state capitalist socialism; it also demonstrated efficacy in achieving power through armed force. Originally hostile to socialism, Nasser eventually used "Arab" socialism to rationalize confiscating large landed estates, foreign nationalizations, and outlawing political and religious opposition, all identified with holding back national development. A trademark of African socialisms was invoking development in the "people's" name, and populist state capitalist socialism became a practice of legitimation. The imperative of rapid economic and social development through planning was put forward as guaranteeing modernization and equitable redistribution that only the state could be charged with. Multiparty democracy was viewed as a disruptive extravagance the progress of the "people's" developmental state could ill afford, and trade unions, once a ground of radical support, were expected to have no role other than to support the aims of the state.

One finds similar rationalizations in all other North African socialisms, despite differences over, for instance, the extent to which there was a need for the state to own socialized property, rather than direct the redistribution of wealth. In Habib Bourguiba's modernist appeal to socialism at independence in 1956 through the Tunisian nationalist Neo-Destourisime; in Algeria's attempt to come to terms with the reconstructive aftermath of a brutal war of independence, in the response to the chaos of the early years under Ahmed Ben Bella's (1918–) chaotic self-management; and Houari Boumediene's (1965) coup, auguring in "Real Socialism," the rationalized normalizing of the revolution combing technocratic development through state-led industrialization; as well as Ghadaffi's coup and eventual 1977 announcement of Jamahiriya (the "people's" state) socialism for Libya. In their different ways, each sought to balance national identity as Islamic, with the demands of modernizing under the quasi-secularist nationalizing, one-party state. Each feared fragmentation, and each sought centralized political and economic control to overcome it. Each restricted political parties, undertook a more or less centralized state for fear of unfettering dormant interests uniting around religion, class, and ethnicity. All claimed to have modern egalitarian and equitable ends, and all wanted to justify themes consistent with religion, while keeping the ulemma and conservative classes allied with them under control, ensuring religion did not interfere with its national cohesion and national development.

Only Ghadaffi clung to fictionalizing socialism's name as real; by the early twenty-first century Tunisia had abandoned all simulation, embarking on the most controlled secular march toward modernizing the society and the economy; while Algeria continued to live with the effects unleashed by the (1978–1991) economic and political liberalization, forces repressed by one-partyism. From the breakdown of the state from ethnic loyalties to the violence of Islamist backlash in the face of annulled elections in 1993, the facade of socialism was all but forsaken.

African Socialists

Nkrumah's Ghana (1957–1966), Ahmed Sékou Touré's Guiné (1958–1984), Modibo Keita's Mali (1960–1968), Julius Nyerere's Tanzania (1960–1985) Leopold Sédar Senghor's Senegal (1960–1981), and Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia (1964–1991) are the primary examplars of "south of the Sahara" African socialisms.

African socialists were nationalist-politicians who believed the anthropologically problematic idea of a long-established ethos within the precolonial community's traditions of extended family networks of social mutualism, social egalitarianism, and a consensus system of political order. This order could be modernized but able to avoid conflicts inherent in European class societies, as in Tanzania's Julius Nyerere's (1922–1999) vision of a policy of education for self-reliance that would enable a willing peasantry to accept collective decision-making in villages organized by the state. Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) is often identified as the major figure, not because he was the most original; nor because of his execution of socialism when in power. It lies, rather, in his posthumous stature among Pan-Africanists and because he left a corpus of writing after his overthrow in 1966 that identified his credentials as a rebirthed radical. While in power, however, his political policies followed a familiar trajectory of one-party socialism—the imprisonment of the opposition, the banning of strikes by the same unions he would demand take up the cause of revolutionary socialism after his overthrow. There is little in his thought or, indeed, in much of his practice that to varying degrees, one cannot find in Mali's Modibo Keita (1915–1977) or in Guiné's Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922–1984), or for that matter much that is different in the North African socialist variants. In the case of Touré, he claimed that because prior to Guiné's independence in 1958, colonialism's inability to create class antagonisms was because extensive private ownership barely existed. The Africanization of Marxism could begin by building upon the supposed solidarity of a precapitalist caste-based society. His early, distinctly radical rule tried to create the cadres for a socialist revolution. As his policies failed, Touré responded with greater centralized rule and fiercer social oppression, which was mirrored in a collapse of the economy and livelihoods in Guiné.

Consistent with notions that the one-party state was best suited to carry out nation-building and development tasks, after independence Modibo Keita promptly moved to declare the Union Soudanaise Independence Party the single party of the Malian state, pursue a socialist policy based on extensive nationalization, and court both the Soviet Union and China. Malians were constructing socialisms through choosing the best from their Islamic past, where duties to the weakest and poorest in society were part of Afro-Islamic egalitarianism. Keita genuinely believed economic and financial decolonization from France and the establishment of socialist structures throughout the country. To this end, from 1961 before his overthrow in 1968, Keita's regime would maintain the necessity of structural sectorial reforms.

In contrast, Leopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a pragmatist for whom socialism was a cultural vision. Less interested in immediate structural transformations in the economy, he was more interested in an identification of the alleged mores of African societies, which, he claimed, were forms of social humanism. For Senghor, African socialism as culture never translated, except pragmatically, into much more than a cultural disposition that could modify some of the more corrosive values of western individualism. There were never the attempts at the large-scale socialization of production found among the more radical African socialists, in part because of the intimate economic and cultural relations Senegal had with France, and also because of the various conservative members of coalitions that supported the ruling Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (UPS), especially the Islamic Brotherhoods, who maintained some control over much of Senegal's main export commodity, groundnuts.

Political compromise rooted in production and key resources made political commitments appear rationalizations. So, Kenneth Kaunda's (1924–) eclectic African humanistic justification of state nationalization and state welfare through bringing together elements of Christian and Fabian socialisms allied with a selective liberalism was joined to a putative African collectivism. If it appeared well meaning, it could also appear a rationalization of state patronage through Zambia's major industry, copper: accumulation by political elites through nationalization. Profiting from soaring copper prices on world markets for over a decade after independence, many urban Zambians benefited from state subsidies and an expanded welfare system. Less than a decade later, however, these services shrunk under the burden of low world commodity prices and accumulated debt, revealing that the socialization means of production benefited a freeloading bureaucracy that contributed little but their vacancies.

Between 1965 and 1977, Nyerere's ujamma (familyhood) socialism was the highest profile African socialism and development. Initially meant to promote an egalitarian ethos, and a way of forestalling the development of classes and inequality, it failed because of a long price depression for its export commodities, costs sustained in removing Idi Amin from power, and the inability for the state to genuinely understand the needs of its peasantry. Peasants, the supposed source of ujamma modernization from below became subject to state-sanctioned bureaucratized replacement of traditional rural households with the forced displacement of nine million rural dwellers into planned resettlement "development" villages.

Nyerere said that villagization was not socialism but a technical decision concerned with the concentration of resources in settlements with little input from the peasantry; socialism and its full appreciation would come later. They never did. Very much reliant upon foreign aid for development programs, Tanzania was anything but self reliant. After a decade of economic failure, and compelled by the demands of international financial institutions (IFIs) to adjust and stabilize its economy, by the time he left office in 1985 there was no more African socialists.

Afro-Marxism

Marxist socialisms grouped under the rubric of Afro-Marxist regimes, which came into and out of existence between 1963 and 1995, primarily coming to power through military coups. They include Congo's Massemba-Debat to Sassou Ngeusso (1963–1991), Ethiopia under Menigstu Haile-Miriam (1974–1991), Somalia under Siad Barre (1969-1991), Mathieu Kérékou's Benin (1972-1991), and Didier Ratsiraka's Madagascar 1975–1993, 1997–). Also included is Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe (1924–), who came to power through armed struggle and subsequent elections, and who also used Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. African "scientific socialisms'" only real affinities to Marxism-Leninism and most practicing African socialism were one-partyism, the nationalization of industries, and authoritarianism. There were also Marxists, like the Cap Verdian Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), the Angolan Augusthino Neto, and the Mozambiquans Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, whose successors came to power inheriting very unstable states in the violently uneven and unresolved Luso-phone national liberation struggles. All regimes accepted some alliance with the Soviet Union. The one actual social revolution, which sought to socialize production and attempt to actually transform society, was the Ethiopian Revolution (1974), which was also the most bloody, killing thousands in its wake. Afro-Marxists also came into existence at a time when there was a revivification of Third Worldism, but also at a time when world markets were contracting, and debt was beginning to grow.

Afro-Marxism's rhetoric and practice were divorced from the realities they enforced themselves upon. Few understood, even cared to understand, both peasant life and the ethnic environments within which they inhabited. The exceptions were the assassinated leaders, Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane (1920–1969). For both Marxism had little utility unless it allowed activists and peasants alike to understand their worlds as ends to participation and well being, and both felt that understanding the materially cultural aspects of the populations that sought liberation was practically and normatively important. Striking about all of Afro-Marxist regimes is how easily they either collapsed or so easily altered themselves from Marxist-Leninist parties to liberalizing recipients of neoliberal adjustment policies. The regimes and leaders that did not collapse transformed themselves into devotees of the advice offered by (IFIs). Often leaving a bloody bequest of failure and death, these regimes' rhetoric was as deep as their commitment to actually revolutionize the relations and forces of production.

Conclusion

Whether Marxist, social democratic, or state-capitalist, African socialisms reflected diverse political economies and polities, covering theoretical intents, ideological perspectives, political movements, cultural and regional orientations, revolutionary struggles, and formerly actually existing socialist states. Over half of Africa's states have celebrated themselves as socialist or social democratic, have identified socialism in the pages of their liberation charters, and/or have retained "socialist," or socialism in their constitutions.

Like most other African political systems, African socialisms failed to meet people's aspirations and needs. They sometimes employed opportunistic and brutal ambition to thwart people's wishes for greater freedoms and choices over the nature and status of their needs. Equally, they frequently had their hopes aborted as casualties of Cold War realpolitik and vacillating economic desires of a world capitalist system.

African socialism's prospects look inauspicious. The wave of post-1970s, liberalization, and the collapse of the regimes, or death of many important leaders associated with African socialism's preeminence and disgrace, also saw many of these socialisms go with them. Increasing constraints of economic deprivation and debt, the imposition of adjustment and stabilization, and the demand, internally and externally, for greater pluralism and political choice, further limit prospects for renewal. African socialism became a consensus metaphor for failure—of the centralization, authoritarianism, and inefficiencies of state malfunction. The history of socialism in Africa suggests much failure and a history of false promises; it also suggests, however, that those failures arise from development failure, a failure not generic to Africa and not to socialism alone. African socialism was a history of intent; as such it should also be remembered as past optimism for what it promised, even where it couldn't fulfill it.

See also Socialism .

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