In 1963 Kenya's minister of labor, Tom Mboya, published “African Socialism” in the journal Transition. Writing in the wake of independence, Mboya argued that African societies were inherently predisposed to socialism through their traditional structures and philosophies, but that developing “African socialism” required a commitment to interpreting and implementing the concept in the context of a decolonizing Africa. The first “responsible” group comprised “intellectuals”—would they, he asked, having read his discussion of the “socialist outlook in our tradition … pick up the threads and help us defeat intellectual imperialism?” (Mboya 1963: 19). In service of African socialism, the intellectual was, in Mboya's mind, to confront the frames that had historically bounded knowledge about the continent. The intellectual must dismantle deleterious colonialist epistemologies. The task, no matter the discipline, was a political one.
In the early 1960s, reclaiming the writing of Africa's cultural and political history was a major...