The Populist Dimension to African Political Thought: Critical Essays in Reconstruction and Retrieval

Aside from the fairly superficial work by Peter Boele van Hensbroek (Political Discourses in African Thought, Praeger, 1999), there is a glaring dearth of comprehensive texts on African political thought. Significant earlier works on the subject, such as William Friedland and Carl Rosberg Jr.'s African Socialism (Stanford University Press, 1964) or G. C. M. Mutiso and S. W. Rohio's Readings in African Political Thought (Heinemann, 1975), are outdated and out-of-print. The teacher of this subject has to resort to the tedious and cumbersome process of sifting through the seminal texts by key political thinkers and putting together his or her own collection of readings.

P. L .E. Idahosa's The Populist Dimension of African Thought is thus both welcome and timely. A development studies scholar who directs the African Studies Program at York University (Canada), Idahosa reexplores the political thought of three of the most prominent African thinkers/leaders of the early postcolonial era: Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Julius Nyerere. Their discourses are still relevant today and need to be taken seriously "because they constitute an interesting legacy [of] which people should be reminded" and "because they speak to a problematic that has not gone away" (6, emphasis in original). According to Idahosa, each of these three had a distinct profile and a unique experience: "Fanon was the revolutionary witnessing national liberation; Cabral, the revolutionary activist engaged in national liberation and the partial construction of state power; and Nyerere, the philosopher-statesman who has achieved state power" (52). As such, each deserves separate and detailed treatment.

In chapter 1, Idahosa delineates the boundaries of the nationalist and populist problematics. He starts from the observation that for populists, nationalism and national sovereignty embodied in an independent nation-state are a means and a beginning, not the end, as it is to the nationalists. Populists recognize the reality of class conflict and acknowledge that the nation-state benefits classes unequally. "Populism's principal concern," he observes, "is with its peasant constituency and it sees the state as rational only insofar as it serves peasant interests and recognizes popular demand" (32). Starting from the premise that "these concerns of many African thinkers can be usefully examined by placing them within the problematic of nineteenth-century Russian populism" (13), the author devotes chapter 2 to an analysis of prerevolutionary Russian populism and the rural socialism debate. Revisiting the works of such authors as Alexander Herzen, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Peter Lavrov, Vladimir Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin, Idahosa notes that these authors "introduced to populists the vision of the commune as a democratic socialist form of agrarian-based economic and political association and a Russian alternative to Western forms of democracy and socialism" (63). Idahosa believes that Russian populism's main message is "that without a culture and a politics of production, there can be no politics of liberation" (97). In chapters 3, 4, and 5, he follows up with an exhaustive analysis of the political thought and practice of Fanon, Cabral, and Nyerere within the context of the populist problematic.

In brief, Idahosa views these three authors' distinct models of development as follows. In his quest for an alternative path to capitalist development, Fanon believed that Africa could educate Europe; he saw the need for a new ideology and new institutions as the basis for political and socioeconomic transformation and participatory, people-centered democracy. Cabral advocated "a model of development that avoided capitalism, one that used familiar, existing institutions to develop people's self-consciousness and an awareness of their power to make their own history, but one that amended existing institutions and transformed popular culture to facilitate the development of socialism" (204–5). As a Fabian populist, Nyerere saw ujamaa—the African nation as an extended family engaged in cooperative activities and direct participatory decision making—as the basis for a noncapitalist path to development and for agrarian socialism in Tanzania. In his conclusion, Idahosa discusses the continuing relevance of African populism, an ideology based on the premise that the capitalist path of development is both inappropriate and impossible: "Populism's appeal... should continue to lie in its consideration of people as subjects, as real agents of change" (268). He argues further that "African populism recognized the peasantry... as an enduring and continued feature of African production and political landscapes" (270); they were to be at the "core of the utopian populist vision" (273).

By providing a comprehensive, abundantly documented, and decidedly sympathetic survey of the political thought of Fanon, Cabral, and Nyerere, Idahosa has done a great service to the Africanist academic community. Using a Marxist framework of analysis firmly located at the level of production, and occasionally drawing on the recent postcolonial and postmodern literature on the subject, he boldly tackles many of the complex and vexing issues that continue to perplex Africanist and developmentalist scholars. One of these is identifying the social class best qualified to undertake the necessary revolutionary transformation of African society: proletariat, lumpen-proletariat, or peasantry (the latter being the populists' favorite). All indications are that the African peasantry should, indeed, be seen as the revolutionary class par excellence. Another unresolved problem of populism concerns "the relationships between leadership and the grass roots, between technical expertise and producers. These relationships are often cast as the conflict between bureaucracy and democracy or between expertise and popular participation" (273). The central role of culture in revolutionary transformation, as thoughtfully analyzed by Fanon and Cabral, is another key issue of concern.

In spite of these positive features, the book exhibits a number of significant flaws. At the conceptual level, the distinction between African nationalism, populism, and socialism is not clear-cut, and there is much overlap between these three concepts. Concerning methodology, while a comparative study of Russian and African populism provides many valuable insights, its usefulness and relevance in the African context are questionable, as the author's advice to the Africanist reader to skip the chapter indicates! Furthermore, his adoption of a Marxist analytical framework leads him to a theoretical impasse—witness his excessive focus on production. At a more general level, Idahosa tends to evaluate African political thought according to Western ideological criteria, be they Russian populism, British Fabian socialism, or Marxist-Leninism, rather than on its own merits. The book also suffers from careless editing and lack of attention to detail. (For example several sentences early in the book are repeated verbatimeight pages later.) Most irritatingly for the scholar concerned about checking sources, the author repeatedly fails to provide the appropriate bibliographical reference for items quoted in the text. Chapter 3 contains twenty-two pages (101–123) dealing with general issues such as the colonial problematic and cultural nationalism before finally broaching the chapter's real subject, namely, Fanon's political thought.

Be that as it may, The Populist Dimension to African Political Thought tackles an under-researched subject and provides a comprehensive, well-documented, and sympathetic overview of the political thought and practice of three of the greatest African thinkers of the twentieth century.