Nationalism and Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

In an earlier essay we stressed the poverty of academic debate on the relevance of socialism to development goals in Tropical Africa and advanced the argument that socialism is, in fact, rapidly becoming an historical necessity in order to ensure the further development of the area. At the same time it must be noted that the quality of debate among socialists concerning the actual possibility of revolutionary, socialist transformation in Africa in the present historical conjuncture also leaves much to be desired. Thus some circles on the Left have fallen back upon a form of "agrarian messianism", as one writer has characterized it; in this model a pure and undefiled peasantry becomes the major vector for progressive change in Africa. Other Western Marxists, in an attempt (legitimate in many respects) to counteract such tendencies, have themselves often taken stands which smack, in turn, of "proletarian messianism". If such extremes are to be avoided, and the intellectual bases for relevant strategies laid, greater attention will have to be paid both to the real nature of pre-capitalist African societies as restructured by capitalist penetration on the one hand, and to the processes of capitalist accumulation in the underdeveloped world under the present conditions of oligopolistic market structures and revolutionized technology on the other.