Africa: Politics, Economy, Ideology

A compact statement of a doctrine. Akhmed Iskenderov surveys newly independent Africa - its politics, its economies, its competing ideologies - but the survey is organised throughout by a single thesis: that the largely peasant states thrown up by decolonisation could cross over to socialism without passing through capitalism, led not by a working class but by revolutionary democrats, and underwritten by the Soviet Union.

Iskenderov is a serious Africanist, and the book is better than the genre usually allows because he reads the other side in the original. Nyerere's Essays on Socialism, Tom Mboya, the Kenyan planning paper, Father Bede Onuoha's Elements of African Socialism, Brian Crozier, Hans Morgenthau, Thomas Hodgkin: he argues with these texts rather than denouncing them. It is a work of scholarship in the service of a policy, and both halves of that description matter.

He is also admirably candid about what his theory requires. In the countries he is describing there is barely a proletariat to lead anything - numerically weak, semi-proletarian, still tied to the land, and in most states without a party of its own. So the revolution must be led by others, through a broad national democratic front uniting the anti-imperialist classes including bourgeois elements, and the class classical Marxism made the agent of socialist revolution is explicitly relieved of the job. From that he draws the conclusion that gives the doctrine its shape and its vulnerability: that the national liberation revolution may begin growing into a socialist one long before the working class has assumed leadership.

For once the date needs no detective work. Its horizon is the Twenty-Fourth Congress of spring 1971; Nasser is "the late President".

Translated by G. Ivanov-Mumjiev. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.