The Comintern, Socialism and Revolutionary Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa: Evidence from Egypt, Libya and Burkina Faso

Abstract

On the eve of independence in the 1950s/60s, many African leaders denounced western capitalism as being exploitative and retrogressive, and in its place, canvassed and sought to operationalise the notion that socialism was the only way out of the new states’ problems and the pathway to nation-building and rapid socio-economic development, which many Africans eagerly awaited as the dividends of political independence. Some African personalities and anti-colonial movements of socialist persuasion emerged to challenge colonial injustice and exploitation, and thus raised the possibility of radical social change in their respective states. African socialist governmental experiments across states shared some overlapping features that created platforms for postcolonial resistance and nation-building. This paper argues that despite the weak links and ‘contradictory’ relationship between the African nationalist movements and the Comintern, some African nationalist leaders and movements derived inspirations through the Comintern’s socialist ideology in their anti-colonial struggles. Using Egypt, Libya and Burkina Faso as main focus, this paper is a discourse of the legacies and significance of the deployment of socialist ideology in post-colonial Africa. Essentially, the study seeks to investigate the extent to which socialist ideology served as an agent of liberation struggle, nation-building and social change in Africa since independence, with particular respect to representative government and socio-economic development. The study adopts the historical method.

Keywords: Socialism, Postcolonial Resistance, Social Change, Nation-Building, Africa.