The Populist Dimension to African Political Thought: Critical Essays in Reconstruction and Retrieval (review)

P. L E. ldahosa. The Populist Dimension to African Political Thought: Critical Essays in Reconstruction and Retrieval. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004. iv + 274 pp. Bibliography. Index. $24.95. Paper. Aside from the fairly superficial work by Peter Boele van Hensbroek (Political Discourses in African Thought, Praeger, 1999), there is a glaring dearth of comprehensive texts on African political thought. Significant earlier works on the subject, such as William Friedland and Carl Rosberg Jr.'s African Socialism (Stanford University Press, 19.64) or G. C. M. Mutiso and S. W. Rohio's Readings in African Political Thought (Heinemann, 1975), are outdated and out-of-print. The teacher of this subject has to resort to the tedious and cumbersome process of sifting through the seminal texts by key political thinkers and putting together his or her own collection of readings. P. L .E. Idahosa's The Populist Dimension of African Thought is thus both welcome and timely. A development studies scholar who directs the African Studies Program at York University (Canada), ldahosa reexplores the political thought of three of the most prominent African thinkers/leaders of the early postcolonial era: Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabrai, and Julius Nyerere. Their discourses are still relevant today and need to be taken senously "because they constitute an interesting legacy [of] which people should be reminded" and "because they speak to a problematic that has not gone away" (6, emphasis in original). According to Idahosa, each of these three had a distinct profile and a unique experience: "Fanon was the revolutionary witnessing national liberation; Cabrai, the revolutionary activist engaged in national liberation and the partial construction of state power; and Nyerere, the philosopher-statesman who has achieved state power" (52). As such, each deserves separate and detailed treatment. In chapter 1, Idahosa delineates the boundaries of the nationalist and populist problematics. He starts from the observation that for populists, nationalism and national sovereignty embodied in an independent nationstate are a means and a beginning, not the end, as it is to the nationalists. Populists recognize the reality of class conflict and acknowledge that the nation-state benefits classes unequally. "Populism's principal concern," he observes, "is with its peasant constituency and it sees the state as rational only insofar-as it serves peasant interests and recognizes popular demand" (32). Starting from the premise that "these concerns of many African thinkers can be usefully examined by placing them within the problematic of nineteenthcentury Russian populism" (13), the author devotes chapter 2 to an analysis of prerevolutionary Russian populism and the rural socialism debate. Revisiting the works of such authors as Alexander Herzen, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Peter Lavrov, Vladimir Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin, Idahosa notes that these authors "introduced to populists the vision of the commune as a democratic socialist form of agrarian-based economic and political association and a Russian alternative to Western forms of democracy and socialism" (63). Idahosa believes that Russian populism's main message is "that without a culture and a politics of production, there can be no politics of liberation" (97). In chapters 3, 4, and 5, he follows up with an exhaustive analysis of the political thought and practice of Fanon, Cabrai, and Nyerere within the context of the populist problematic. In brief, Idahosa views these three authors' distinct models of development as follows. In his quest for an alternative path to capitalist development, Fanon believed that Africa could educate Europe; he saw the need for a new ideology and new institutions as the basis for political and socioeconomic transformation and participatory, people-centered democracy. Cabrai advocated "a model of development that avoided capitalism, one that used familiar, existing institutions to develop people's self-consciousness and an awareness of their power to make their own history, but one that amended existing institutions and transformed popular culture to facilitate the development of socialism" (204-5). …