The Africanist-Populist Ideology

Abstract

As we saw in Chapter 7, Frantz Fanon’s warning to African people, leaders, and scholars was that for popular democracy and development to succeed in Africa, they must stop blindly following the West: they must stop aping Western culture, traditions, ideas, and institutions; they must think “outside of the box”; and, above all, they must be bold and innovative and develop their own ideas, concepts, and institutions based on African values, culture, and traditions. This alternative path to Western liberal democracy and capitalist development is precisely the line of thinking of an emerging African scholarship, exemplified by the four African scholars whose political ideas are examined in this chapter.

Africa … is isolated. Therefore to develop, it will have to depend upon its own resources basically, internal resources, nationally, and Africa will have to depend upon Africa. The leadership of the future will have to devise, try to carry out policies of maximum national self-reliance and maximum collective self-reliance. They have no other choice. Hamna! [There is none!]

—Julius K. Nyerere, “Reflections,” quoted in John S. Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle, 159