African Socialism

Published date01 March 1965
Date01 March 1965
DOI10.1177/002070206502000110
AuthorGeorge Bennett
Subject MatterReview Article
REVIEw
ARTICLES
97
George
Bennett,
Oxford
University
African
Socialism
We
now
owe
a
double
debt
of
gratitude
to
American
writers
and
scholars
for
helping
to
elucidate and
analyze
the
difficult,
and often
elusive, concept
of
"African
Socialism."
In
May
1963
that
invaluable
New
York
monthly,
Africa
Report,
provided
pointers
in
a
special
issue
on
the
subject, and
now
Professors Friedland
and
Rosberg
have
followed
on
by
editing a
most
important
volume.
1
As
with
all
collabora-
tive
works
there
are
some
weak
links, but
the
chain
holds
in
coherent
and
well-planned
essays
written
from
widely
differing
view-points
from
the
United
States
to
Russia.
The
book's
value
is
then
further
increased
by
the
documents appended:
an important
unpublished
article
by
the
late
George
Padmore
is followed
by
the
reproduction
of
pieces
not
readily
available
outside
their
countries
of
origin. Here
are
Julius
Nyerere's
Ujamaa,
a pamphlet
published
in
Dar
es
Salaam
in
1962,
Tom Mboya's
1963
article
on
African
socialism
published
in
Transition,
a
journal appearing
in
Kampala,
and
speeches of Mamadou
Dia,
Nkrumah
and Senghor.
If
some
may consider
that
the
Senegalese
President's
ideas
merit
more
attention
than
the
volume
gives,
they
may
remedy
this
for
themselves
by
turning
to
Mercer
Cook's
trans-
lation
of
Senghor's
main
writings
on
this
subject.
2
The
first
main
problem
with
regard
to
African
Socialism is
one
of
definition.3
President
Nkrumah
may
aspire
in
writing
Consciencism
(London,
1964)
to
be
the
Lenin
of
Africa, but
he
does
not
now
command
the
same
widespread
assent
for
his ideas
that
he
did
in
the
'fifties. Now
there
are
different
"socialisms"
to
be
found
in
Africa.
Among
the
most
extreme
of
these
must
be
counted
that
of
Ghana. There,
in
the
Bureau
of
African
Affairs
and
its
journal
with a
Leninist
title,
The
Spark,
socialist
ideas
that
are
"unequivocally
Marxist
Communist"
have
been
expressed
in
what
is
after
all
a
one-party
state.
While
The
Spark
may
have
"little
popular support
either
in
the
country or
in
the
Party,"
the
fact
remains
that
the
governing
party
"was
represented
at
the
1962
conference of eighty-one
Communist
nations
in
the
Soviet
Union."
Colin
Legum's excellent
chapter
on
Ghana
setting
all
this out,
stresses
the
considerably
increasing
use
of
Communist phraseology
in
Ghana
in
these
last
years.
Yet
the
pragmatic
mixed-economy
character
of
the
country
remains.
How
indeed
are
the
highly
individualistic
cocoa-
1 W.
H.
Friedland and
Carl
G.
Rosberg,
Jr.,
A
rican
Socialism.
(Stamford
Univer-
sity
Press
for
the
Hoover
Institution,
1964,
313
pp.,
$6.75.)
2
L.
S.
Senghor,
On
African
Socialism.
Translated
and with an
introduction
by
Mercer
Cook
(New
York,
Praeger;
Toronto,
Burns
&
MacEachern,
1964,
173
%.e$6.25.)
3The
real
importance
of
Jack
Woddis's
Africa:
the
Way
Ahead
(New
York,
International
Publishers,
1964),
written
from
a communist
viewpoint,
is
to
show
what
concerning Africa
is
being
translated
into
east
European
languages.
I
noticed
a
fat
volume
of
Woddis's
collected
works
on
a visit
to
an
East
Berlin
Sublic
library
in
September.
His books
on
Africa
are
also
appearing
in
Russia,
land,
Czechoslovakia,
and
Hungary.

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