The Place of Socialism in African Art

In his 1967 essay “African Socialism Revisited,” Kwame Nkrumah makes a distinction between his own philosophy, Consciencism, and what he characterizes as “African socialism.” Whereas the first president of Ghana saw his project as an effort to build socialism in Africa, he distanced himself from Léopold Senghor's Négritude and Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa, noting provocatively, “‘African socialism’ has now come to acquire some of its greatest publicists in Europe and North America precisely because of its predominant anthropological charm” (Nkrumah 1967). For Nkrumah, the problem with his opponents was an excessive emphasis on the uniqueness of a socialism built on Africa's cultural edifice, which he saw as a deviation from a more pragmatic focus on political economy. His wish to differentiate socialism in and from Africa touches on a central concern in the continent's radical history: which is the qualifier in the relationship between “Africa” and “socialism”? Senghor, an...