Third World Communism in Crisis: The Fall of Afro-Marxism

In December 1989, officials in the avowedly Marxist state of Benin were about to unveil a new bronze statue of Lenin. Suddenly, President Ahmed Kérékou announced that Marxism-Leninism, the country's ideology since it had been imposed in 1974, was being revoked. Within a few hours of the president's announcement, several hundred demonstrators attacked the new Lenin statue with hammers and tried to tear it down. Afterward, the workers marched through the streets demanding President Kérékou's resignation.

After the historic East European revolutions of 1989, it is only natural to ask whether African countries like Benin, which proclaimed allegiance to "scientific" socialism in the 1970s, or other countries that adopted "African" forms of socialism in the 1960s, will now bow to popular disaffection fueled by economic crisis and follow Eastern Europe in a halting march toward democratization. The recent legalization of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party have rendered this question all the more pertinent. It is now uncomfortably obvious to many Africans that South Africa currently has more political dialogue and unbridled debate than almost any other country south of the Sahara. If State President F.W. de Klerk succeeds in reforming apartheid, this embarrassing disparity will become more vivid in the years to come. Also, the future of countries that adopted some form of socialism is in question because of growing disaffection over the performance of the one-party state. Indeed, even former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, once the leading proponent of eliminating party competition, has warned that the single-party state was not "God's command."

But while there may be important political openings in some countries over the next few years, it appears that most of Africa will not abandon the single-party state as quickly as did Eastern Europe. Although even the most doggedly ideological socialist states, including Mozambique and Angola, now recognize that the Marxist model of economic development is a failure, this recognition does not necessarily mean that all of sub-Saharan Africa will follow the East European countries in their quest for multiparty democracy. The revolutions in Eastern Europe were not primarily about the overthrow of Marxism, which was already widely recognized as a faulty economic doctrine. The chief goal was rather to overthrow Leninism—in particular its notion of the all-powerful party-state—as a political doctrine. Leninism, although wounded, is regrettably still very much alive in all too many African countries.

The revolutions in Eastern Europe did have some immediate effects on African countries. In the first place, some 60,000 "technical-economic cooperants" from the Soviet Union and Eastem Europe have started to leave Africa. In some countries, primarily Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Angola, but also Congo-Brazzaville, Somalia, and Ghana, the exodus of the technicians is sorely straining large parts of the administrative system. The departure of the East Germans may also cause specific problems in the security systems of Zimbabwe, Angola, and Ethiopia. More generally, Gorbachev's "new thinking" and greater regional cooperation between the superpowers have led to a winding down of Soviet and Cuban aid for the Ethiopia government of Mengistu Haile-Mariam and to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola.

The events in Eastem Europe are also driving home the lesson that socialism is finished as an economic policy. Disillusionment with socialism was already mounting in Africa because of poor economic performance. Even Soviet deputy foreign minister Anatoly Adamishin noted while visiting the Congo that "there are few people in the Soviet Union who would recommend building a socialist society under these particular conditions in Africa."¹ Indeed, continued adherence to the Marxist or socialist label has become an outright liability because to many it signals hostility to economic liberalization and foreign investment, as well as a reluctance to deal with multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank.

The fall of the East European regimes and the rise of perestroika in the Soviet Union challenge the socialist countries of Africa in other ways as well. Perhaps most importantly, the rejection of the one-party system by...