Over the last two decades security analysts have primarily focused on immediate threats arising from religiously inspired radicalism in Africa, particularly of the Sunni variety. They have largely neglected the understated Shia Muslim “missionary” activities of Lebanese religious professionals. Arguably, these activities have not yet evolved to the point of drawing their African target communities into Hezbollah’s operational orbit. But undoubtedly, secular radicalism had largely disappeared from the horizon of most military analysts by at least 1991, if not earlier. Ever since the fall of the USSR, African state socialist systems have been simultaneously maligned and ridiculed even as a historical memory. The default opinion on these systems was that they were not Marxist, they were results of purely foreign policy considerations, adopted in exchange for arms from pre-1978 China, the USSR, Cuba and occasionally, even the DPRK. Historians in France, South Africa and the US kept stressing the foreign impetus behind African Marxist Cold War era systems, especially military systems, and tied them to ethnic South Asian, South African Jewish (!), British radical, and other “non-African” intellectual influences.
When discussing Anglophone Marxist traditions, especially Military Marxism, I found its first fully developed theoretical expositions in the works of the late Kwame Nkrumah from around 1964 onward.
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This is why when West Africa’s newly mint Military Marxist systems, established in the second half of the 2010s, consciously and openly declared themselves Sankarist, drawing on Marxist military leader Thomas Sankara’s legacy (from Burkina Faso in the 1980s), analysts dismissed their emergence as a result of a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at “naive African constituencies.” Some could not adequately begin to analyse the phenomenon as a bona fide political theory, or even as a sui generis African political ideology. In an effort to overcome this limitation, it made sense for me to understand the movement through examining the foundational African Marxist works themselves first. I paid particular attention to the aspects that contained references to the pre-colonial African warrior tradition as defined by the legendary Ali Mazrui, global historian of Africa.
I discovered direct historical and even familial links between Sékou Touré of Guinea Conakry (who ruled a one party Marxist state for decades) and pre-colonial armed insurgency leaders. The same pattern emerged in Zimbabwe, Kenya (where the Mau Mau rebels were eulogised by 1980s Communist historians in the country) and several other countries. I also found that the tradition of Military Marxism persisted during the neoliberal decades when African options in the strategic sense were of course limited.
After examining briefly the one party as well as the ’no-party’ African socialist states (Ghana between 1961 and 1966, and again in the early 1980s), Cameroon’s insurgency until the early 70s, Guinea under Touré, Mali under Keita, Mauritania in a Chinese alliance, Zanzibar, Congo Brazzaville, Benin, Equatorial Guinea under Macías, Sudan under Nimeiri, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia under the Dergue, Somalia under Siad Barré, Madagascar (which allowed limited electoral choice despite military rule), and of course, the links between the South African Communist Party and the ANC, and the famed Simba rebellion against which Mad Mike Hoare would fight), I turned to a brief analysis of these radical regimes’ social policies, military innovations, and political doctrines. Although Ernesto Che Guevara himself had a very negative opinion on the prospects of African revolution, he was nonetheless consequently disproved by countless guerilla wars and young leftist majors who took power through coups in the 1970s and 1980s in Africa. Some built Military Marxist states.
These Cold War-era African social experiments are routinely derided as “champagne Marxism,” meaningless legimitization techniques, mere nationalism, and the like. Such interpretations do not explain their success during the Cold War and provide even less insight into their unexpected resurgence in the 2010s. Foreign policy considerations also fail to account for Kwame Nkrumah’s, Agostino Neto’s, and many other radical leader’s stress on independence from the USSR or China. This insistence on African Communist independence went as far as denying refuelling rights to warplanes and rejecting organisational ties with Northern state socialist ruling parties, much to Moscow’s frustration.
When discussing Anglophone Marxist traditions, especially Military Marxism, I found its first fully developed theoretical expositions in the works of the late Kwame Nkrumah from around 1964 onward. By 1970, Nkrumah was convinced that the way forward was only by armed guerilla insurrection – so much so that he wrote a manual for guerilla warfare. He was much influenced by his host Sékou Touré, as well as Cabo Verdean national liberation fighter Amilcar Cabral, with whom they both shared ideas at dinner in Conakry. Nkrumah spent his exile there after the 1966 coup In Ghana. Walter Rodney provided the link with the Caribbean. Amilcar Cabral, who in the beginning was a reluctant nationalist, went on to develop his own Marxist, and even arguably Leninist theory on “class suicide” by the African ’petit bourgeoisie.’ Samir Amin (an Egyptian-French scholar working in Dakar) established the theory of delinking, the economic framework for self-reliant African Marxism with a focus on peasant economies. Issa Shivji in Tanzania, Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, and most importantly, Thomas Sankara, leader of Upper Volta which he renamed Burkina Faso (1983-1987) all expanded the theory, with hints from Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu of Zanzibar (a key figure in the Zanzibari revolution that ended the Omani Arab aristocratic rule), Dani Nabudere of Uganda, and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, the Harvard philosophy professor who went on to lead a militia in his native Eastern Congo as late as the 1990s. Their work built on Ruth First’s pioneering analysis of African coups and the social meaning of armed violence on the African continent. Their theoretical output forms the focus of the first half of my book.
African Military Marxism and its unexpected resurrection is a striking example of a non-Western military-intellectual tradition that has largely been neglected, derided, and ignored.
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Since 1991, this tradition has evolved, with Mahmood Mamdani and others choosing a democratic socialist approach over militant or military Marxism. However, many continued to build earlier foundations: including Issa Shivji, Sam Moyo (the intellectual behind Mugabe’s radical land reform), Thandika Mkandawire, Yash Tandon (who famously argued that “trade is war”), Eboe Hutchful, Chinweizu, Tatah Mentan (aligned with the Ambazonian separatist movement against Cameroun), Stephanie Urdang, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Bernard Magubane, and contemporary voices such as Olufemi Taiwo and Olufemi O. Taiwo. While some of these thinkers are now based in the United States, their work continues to resonate in Africa, contributing to a secular radical African, pan-African, socialist tradition that Sahel leaders draw upon today. The fact that many of the post-1991 thinkers opted to lead INGOs only superficially contradicts their link to this tradition.
Sometimes, our Western sensibilities have failed to allow us to adequately reflect on realities on the ground in Africa. African Military Marxism and its unexpected resurrection is a striking example of a non-Western military-intellectual tradition that has largely been neglected, derided, and ignored. However, this neglect has not limited its spread in the age of Facebook, PDF versions of books, Afro-Marxist YouTubers, and legal Afro-Marxist parties such as South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters under Julius Malema, Kenyan street demonstrations, and other democratic movements on the extreme left with street credibility and a large following. Grassroots level movements shape to a large extent what military leaders may or may not do – but they also influence what they may or may not think.
Dr Adam Mayer, PhD, is an Assistant Professor, Department of International Studies, American University of Iraq Baghdad, UNED Madrid.
This piece is a summary review from the book “Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957–2023” (December 2024), by Dr Adam Mayer, published by Lexington.
