African Socialism Movement.

The word “socialism” used back in the 1950 and 1960 was a term that most African leaders would use because they though that it was the perfect system that could unite the continent and make it progress. they believed that It would unite us in the recognition to restore Africa’s humanist and equality in the reconstruction of various nation-states.
Mostly Doc. Kwame Nkrumah, who was Ghana's First president,spent his life calling for Africa to unite...not only to help each others in case of any danger but to come together as one uniting their economy, policy, army as one bloc. as The United States of Africa. due to some disagreements among the leaders of that time, Africa lost the best opportunity to determine the future.
now day socialism is still mentioned in Africa, but tends to lose its objective content in favour of a distracting terminology and general confusion. Each state describes its government as socialist, has a different type of socialism than upon the need for socialist development, using it to describe a complex of social purposes and the consequential social and economic policies, organizational patterns, state structure, and ideologies which can lead to the attainment of those purposes. For such leaders, the aim is to remold African society in the socialist direction; to reconsider African society in such a manner that the humanism of traditional African life re-asserts itself in a modern technical community.

Doc. Kwame' Nkrumah, did explain the differences at the Africa seminar ''Problem of peace and socialism'' held in Cairo in 1967, saying that:

there are those who believe in a new social synthesis in which modern technology is reconciled with human values, in which the advanced technical society is realized without the staggering social malefactions and deep schisms of capitalist industrial society. because true economic and social development cannot be promoted without the real socialization of productive and distributive processes. Those African leaders who believe these principles are the ''socialists in Africa.''(1)

Meanwhile there are those who believed that ''socialism'' would,promote economical and social development having nothing to do with capitalism.
those are called “African socialists”.

and these are the leaders we are going to dedicate this page trying to find out who were they? what vision they had for Africa? and what happened to them.

African Socialists:

Nkrumah's Ghana (1957–1966),Ahmed Sékou Touré's Guiné (1958–1984), Modibo Keita's Mali (1960–1968), Julius Nyerere's Tanzania (1960–1985) Leopold Sédar Senghor's Senegal (1960–1981), and Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia (1964–1991) are the primary examplars of "south of the Sahara" African socialisms.

African socialists were nationalist-politicians who believed the anthropologically problematic idea of a long-established ethos within the precolonial community's traditions of extended family networks of social mutualism, social egalitarianism, and a consensus system of political order. This order could be modernized but able to avoid conflicts inherent in European class societies,
as in Tanzania's Julius Nyerere's (1922–1999) vision of a policy of education for self-reliance that would enable a willing peasantry to accept collective decision-making in villages organized by the state.

Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) is often identified as the major figure, not because he was the most original; nor because of his execution of socialism when in power. It lies, rather, in his posthumous stature among Pan-Africanists and because he left a corpus of writing after his overthrow in 1966 that identified his credentials as a rebirthed radical. While in power, however, his political policies followed a familiar trajectory of one-party socialism—the imprisonment of the opposition, the banning of strikes by the same unions he would demand take up the cause of revolutionary socialism after his overthrow. There is little in his thought or, indeed, in much of his practice that to varying degrees.

one cannot find in Mali's Modibo Keita (1915–1977)
or in Guiné's Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922–1984), or for that matter much that is different in the North African socialist variants. In the case of Touré, he claimed that because prior to Guiné's independence in 1958, colonialism's inability to create class antagonisms was because extensive private ownership barely existed. The Africanization of Marxism could begin by building upon the supposed solidarity of a precapitalist caste-based society. His early, distinctly radical rule tried to create the cadres for a socialist revolution. As his policies failed, Touré responded with greater centralized rule and fiercer social oppression, which was mirrored in a collapse of the economy and livelihoods in Guiné.

Consistent with notions that the one-party state was best suited to carry out nation-building and development tasks, after independence Modibo Keita promptly moved to declare the Union Soudanaise Independence Party the single party of the Malian state, pursue a socialist policy based on extensive nationalization, and court both the Soviet Union and China. Malians were constructing socialisms through choosing the best from their Islamic past, where duties to the weakest and poorest in society were part of Afro-Islamic egalitarianism. Keita genuinely believed economic and financial decolonization from France and the establishment of socialist structures throughout the country. To this end, from 1961 before his overthrow in 1968, Keita's regime would maintain the necessity of structural sectorial reforms.

In contrast, Leopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a pragmatist for whom socialism was a cultural vision. Less interested in immediate structural transformations in the economy, he was more interested in an identification of the alleged mores of African societies, which, he claimed, were forms of social humanism. For Senghor, African socialism as culture never translated, except pragmatically, into much more than a cultural disposition that could modify some of the more corrosive values of western individualism. There were never the attempts at the large-scale socialization of production found among the more radical African socialists, in part because of the intimate economic and cultural relations Senegal had with France, and also because of the various conservative members of coalitions that supported the ruling Union Progressiste Sénégalaise (UPS), especially the Islamic Brotherhoods, who maintained some control over much of Senegal's main export commodity, groundnuts.

Political compromise rooted in production and key resources made political commitments appear rationalizations. So, Kenneth Kaunda's (1924–) eclectic African humanistic justification of state nationalization and state welfare through bringing together elements of Christian and Fabian socialisms allied with a selective liberalism was joined to a putative African collectivism. If it appeared well meaning, it could also appear a rationalization of state patronage through Zambia's major industry, copper: accumulation by political elites through nationalization. Profiting from soaring copper prices on world markets for over a decade after independence, many urban Zambians benefited from state subsidies and an expanded welfare system. Less than a decade later, however, these services shrunk under the burden of low world commodity prices and accumulated debt, revealing that the socialization means of production benefited a freeloading bureaucracy that contributed little but their vacancies.

Between 1965 and 1977, Nyerere's ujamma (familyhood) socialism was the highest profile African socialism and development. Initially meant to promote an egalitarian ethos, and a way of forestalling the development of classes and inequality, it failed because of a long price depression for its export commodities, costs sustained in removing Idi Amin from power, and the inability for the state to genuinely understand the needs of its peasantry. Peasants, the supposed source of ujamma modernization from below became subject to state-sanctioned bureaucratized replacement of traditional rural households with the forced displacement of nine million rural dwellers into planned resettlement "development" villages.

Nyerere said that villagization was not socialism but a technical decision concerned with the concentration of resources in settlements with little input from the peasantry; socialism and its full appreciation would come later. They never did. Very much reliant upon foreign aid for development programs, Tanzania was anything but self reliant. After a decade of economic failure, and compelled by the demands of international financial institutions (IFIs) to adjust and stabilize its economy, by the time he left office in 1985 there was no more African socialists.

Afro-Marxism
Marxist socialisms grouped under the rubric of Afro-Marxist regimes, which came into and out of existence between 1963 and 1995, primarily coming to power through military coups. They include Congo's Massemba-Debat to Sassou Ngeusso (1963–1991), Ethiopia under Menigstu Haile-Miriam (1974–1991), Somalia under Siad Barre (1969-1991), Mathieu Kérékou's Benin (1972-1991), and Didier Ratsiraka's Madagascar 1975–1993, 1997–). Also included is Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe (1924–), who came to power through armed struggle and subsequent elections, and who also used Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. African "scientific socialisms'" only real affinities to Marxism-Leninism and most practicing African socialism were one-partyism, the nationalization of industries, and authoritarianism. There were also Marxists, like the Cap Verdian Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), the Angolan Augusthino Neto, and the Mozambiquans Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, whose successors came to power inheriting very unstable states in the violently uneven and unresolved Luso-phone national liberation struggles. All regimes accepted some alliance with the Soviet Union. The one actual social revolution, which sought to socialize production and attempt to actually transform society, was the Ethiopian Revolution (1974), which was also the most bloody, killing thousands in its wake. Afro-Marxists also came into existence at a time when there was a revivification of Third Worldism, but also at a time when world markets were contracting, and debt was beginning to grow.

Afro-Marxism's rhetoric and practice were divorced from the realities they enforced themselves upon. Few understood, even cared to understand, both peasant life and the ethnic environments within which they inhabited. The exceptions were the assassinated leaders, Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane (1920–1969). For both Marxism had little utility unless it allowed activists and peasants alike to understand their worlds as ends to participation and well being, and both felt that understanding the materially cultural aspects of the populations that sought liberation was practically and normatively important. Striking about all of Afro-Marxist regimes is how easily they either collapsed or so easily altered themselves from Marxist-Leninist parties to liberalizing recipients of neoliberal adjustment policies. The regimes and leaders that did not collapse transformed themselves into devotees of the advice offered by (IFIs). Often leaving a bloody bequest of failure and death, these regimes' rhetoric was as deep as their commitment to actually revolutionize the relations and forces of production.(2)

As conclusion, we must understand that Whether Marxist, social democratic, or state-capitalist, African socialism reflected diverse political economies and polities, covering theoretical intents, ideological perspectives, political movements, cultural and regional orientations, revolutionary struggles, and formerly actually existing socialist states. Over half of Africa's states had celebrated themselves as socialist or social democratic, have identified socialism in the pages of their liberation charters, and/or have retained "socialist," or socialism in their constitutions.

Like most other African political systems, African socialism failed to meet people's aspirations and needs. They sometimes employed opportunistic and brutal ambition to thwart people's wishes for greater freedoms and choices over the nature and status of their needs. Equally, they frequently had their hopes aborted as casualties of Cold War realpolitik and vacillating economic desires of a world capitalist system.

African socialism's prospects look inauspicious. The wave of post-1970s, liberalization, and the collapse of the regimes, or death of many important leaders associated with African socialism's preeminence and disgrace, also saw many of these socialisms go with them. Increasing constraints of economic deprivation and debt, the imposition of adjustment and stabilization, and the demand, internally and externally, for greater pluralism and political choice, further limit prospects for renewal. African socialism became a consensus metaphor for failure—of the centralization, authoritarianism, and inefficiencies of state malfunction. The history of socialism in Africa suggests much failure and a history of false promises; it also suggests, however, that those failures arise from development failure, a failure not generic to Africa and not to socialism alone. African socialism was a history of intent; as such it should also be remembered as past optimism for what it promised, even where it couldn't fulfill it.


(1)http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/1967/african-socialism-revisited.htm
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_socialism.