The Future of Socialism in Africa

In Africa, as elsewhere, the debacle of socialist thought can be attributed to intellectual as well as circumstantial causes. During the colonial era, and for some years thereafter, socialist intellectuals in Africa had routinely identified capitalism as a barrier to social progress and an impediment to the distribution of a fair portion of the world’s wealth to African people. By the late 1970s, however, a growing number of specialists and others who were informed about conditions in...