African Socialisms and Postsocialisms

Abstract

In the 1980s, historic political and economic shifts dealt a fatal blow to the foundational pillars of socialist systems worldwide. Unable to respond to the challenges from within and without to their attempted monopolization of economic and political power, socialist regimes succumbed to processes of structural adjustment, economic liberalization and political pluralism. Although scholars have focused in depth on the downfall of socialist and communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern and Central Europe, the impact of these changes on socialist states in Africa was no less monumental. The 1989 collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 contributed to the demise of several avowedly Marxist-Leninist African states such as Ethiopia and CongoPR. Having lost key strategic allies and the primary referents of socialist success, they consequently underwent regime change. In addition, ruling parties in several countries such as Benin, Mozambique and Zambia jettisoned most of the rhetoric of socialism that had been employed in the 1970s and 1980s and began to speak instead of ‘emerging markets’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘democratic participation’. On the ground, the impact of the changes was much more variegated. In some places, even as companies changed from state to private hands, socialist ideology endured, persisting, for example, in Tanzania, whose populist version of socialism (termed Ujamaa, literally ‘familyhood’) defied easy classification by capitalists and communists alike. Just as ‘democracy’ today has become a common idiom of political parlance, so too might ‘socialism’ be considered for Africa an idiom of the 1950s to the 1980s. During that time, no fewer than thirty-five countries out of fifty-three proclaimed themselves ‘socialist’ at one or other point in their history. So widespread was the commitment to