The African Prospect

Abstract

Much socialist discussion of Africa has appeared to suffer from assumptions that are mutually contradictory as well as generally mistaken. On the one hand, there was the thought (or perhaps it was rather more an attitude of mind?) that African situations and experience have been, or are, so entirely "different" as not to be comparable with the situations and experience of peoples elsewhere. On the other hand, there was the thought (again, perhaps, merely an attitude of mind?) that models for radical change elsewhere could be usefully applied to the problems of Africa. Of these two assumptions, alike the offspring of a lack of understanding which was itself the child of imperialism, the second has probably done the more damage, since it has led to a repeated failure to notice, much less to analyse, the specificity of African conditions for growth and change.