POLITICAL RADICALISM IN AFRICA: ‘THE SECOND INDEPENDENCE’

Abstract

THE TERM 'RADICAL' is nowadays so loosely applied to such a wide variety of extremists that the reader might understandably anticipate a definition of the author's usage at the outset. The purposes of this paper will be better served, however, by a few initial reflections. A word can never entirely escape its origin, in this case a reference to the advocacy of basic structural transformation in the direction of equality, strong connotations of 'progressiveness' becoming increasingly widely accepted in recent centuries. While, prior to the mid-19th century, this might have been construed primarily in political terms, the influence of Karl Marx-in conjunction, of course, with changing material conditions-has since proven sufficient, if not to have made us all in a sense Marxists, at least to have decisively affected our semantics. As twentieth century history has abundantly made clear, political democracy and the striving for greater economic equality, either between classes or between nations, are aims which have rarely if ever been achieved contemporaneously; and there would seem no overwhelming reason to adopt an exclusively economistic identification of radical priorities on the dubious assurance that they will ultimately prove to be congruent. Yet it would seem reasonable, in twentieth century conditions, to stipulate as a minimal pre-requisite for the description of any regime as politically progressive that it effectively defend the economic interests of its society, both in relation to the world market and in the face of the threat of growing mass impoverishment posed by rapid population increase. What is less clear to this writer is that such progress is only, or is indeed likely, to be attained in Africa by the kind of political and economic strategies for which some neoMarxists have attempted to purchase a monopoly on radicalism. The history of neo-Marxist scholarship in search of political radicalism in sub-Saharan Africa reminds one of the Spanish explorers drifting down the Orinoco in search of El Dorado. The African city of gold was at one time envisioned with chimeric clarity as necessarily emerging from the attempts of certain post-independence governments to break their 'dependency' on Western 'neo-colonial' interests. The desirability of such a structural transformation was felt to be so strong that it must, it was argued with a wilful twist of logic, rapidly materialize. The journey down the mainstream of recent African political history has, admittedly, been such as to make the prospect of arriving