Spring 2024

As recently as four years ago, no fewer than twenty sovereign states in Africa were governed by rulers in the name of socialism. Had my article identified any two or more of the political economies in those countries as socialist …

In Africa, as elsewhere, the debacle of socialist thought can be attributed to intellectual as well as circumstantial  causes. During the colonial era, and for some years thereafter, socialist intellectuals in Africa had routinely identified capitalism as a barrier to …