Socialism vs Marxism: Which way Africa?

Ranga Lovemore Mataire The Reader
ONE of the most vexing questions to confront post-colonial Africa is finding an appropriate economic, social and political model applicable to a restless populace emerging from a colonial system that treated them as mere hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Some if not most independent African countries adopted socialism as an appropriate model to take their country forward given the fact that most of them received material and financial support from the USSR and China in their struggles to dislodge colonialism.

However, survival dynamics in individual countries led to the abandonment of socialism as the panacea to their problems while others tried to “indigenise” the ideology in line with prevailing circumstances.

Abdul Rahman Babu from Tanzania and Chidi Amuta from Nigeria are two African scholars who have contributed immensely in trying to situate Africa’s place in relation to socialism and Marxism.

The two scholars conception of socialism is rooted in their belief in Marxism, which states that “it is not the consciousness of man that determine their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that determine their consciousness”.

While Babu focuses on what he calls genuine socialism as an ideological panacea to Africa’s social, political and economic problems, Amuta’s conceptualisation of socialism is nuanced in the evolvement of African literature and the periodic stages (slavery, colonialism and post-colonial or neo-colonial) within which it can be analysed.

Babu wrote African Socialism or Socialist Africa (1981) while in prison and one can detect an element of bitterness in being a bystander in the construction of an “ideal” trajectory of Tanzania’s development in particular and Africa in general.

Nevertheless, African Socialism or Socialist Africa raises thought-provoking analogies that Babu believes could take Africa on a different path of independence and development.

His first premise is that it is fallacious to view post-colonial Africa in the same manner with the Africa of the colonial days. Thus he says: “The African of today is a different person from his counterpart of colonial days. He is somewhat less gullible, less susceptible to vague and vacuous promises of a rosy… He has his own demands and he wants them fulfilled.”

Central to Babu’s conception of socialism are the workers or “the proletariat, the class of the industrial worker who has nothing except his wife and children and who must sell his labour in order to live. This is the most dynamic class in history in whose hands lies the future destiny of Africa”.

One peculiar convergence between Babu and Amuta is their fervent detestation of romanticising the African past and their views on African culture which they say pseudo pan-Africanist want to depict as one glorious episode of heroic endeavours before the advent of colonialism.

Amuta’s analysis of African literature converges with Babu in the employment of Marx and Angel’s definition of culture. Through Marx and Angels, Amuta asserts that “dialectics acquire not only a materialistic basis but also becomes systematised into philosophy of history, a scientific political theory and a social logical aesthetic”.

Both scholars desist and resist the temptation to idolise African culture and Amuta argues that “culture is the crystalisation of social consciousness in different areas of historically conditioned material and ideational practices with society as the starting point”.

Both scholars agree on the fact that culture is not an abstract phenomenon independent of people’s “revolutionary practice” but a reflection of “people’s social activities”.

In the final analysis, while Amuta and Babu’s analysis of Africa has some convergence on their emphasis of socio-historical factors affecting the continent’s trajectory, they however differ in that the later prescribes a uniform prescription of “genuine” socialism with the workers being at the centre while the former clearly stipulates that different geographical locations like the north, east and south of Africa determine the kind of social reality which determine the kind of social reality which the artist who is mediating subject derives his creative milieu.

According to Babu, the post-colonial African societies were far from being innocent and virtuous and that foreign intervention had a negative effect in undermining this innocence.

“This is obviously an idealistic view of the world and has little relevance to the real world today as it exists outside our consciousness. It a subjective outlook, not objective; and if not checked it may lead to serious social and malpractices, not excluding tyrannical practices,” Babu says.

Similarly, while Amuta exhibits an anti-imperialist stance, he deviates from “traditional and formalist” theories of literature and society, between literary theory and practice. However, while Amuta does not romanticise the past he believes that forms the foundational basis upon which African literature can be analysed because of “incontrovertible socio-historical determination of African literature in general.”

Just like Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo, Amuta believes that the artist is a social product of society and his output must consequently reflect societal expectations, anxieties, norms and experiences thus he says: “…the artist is a member of society and incarnates its structural and ideological inflections; the artist’s individuality and society’s values are mediated in the work of art; the work of art recreates both the artist and society and in itself is not a passive object but a restless concourse of images, actions, movements, experiences, statements.”