In part 3 of our lecture series, we examine transformation through the figures of Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote and Kwame Nkrumah. 

A statue of Ghana’s independence leader Kwame Nkrumah in Accra. Photograph by jbdodane.

Welcome to Part 3 of our ten-part ten-minute lecture series on African Political Thought, brought to you by Stephen Chan, Professor of World Politics at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS). Each week, a short reading list will be published alongside the lecture. Viewers are also encouraged to pose questions they have for Chan in the comments section below.

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In this episode, we look at:

The New African Man: the political thought of transformation – Kaunda, Nyerere, Obote, Nkrumah.

For an audio-only version:

Reading list for Part 3

Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, New York: International Publishers, 1970.

David Birmingham, Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.

Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Henry Bienen, Tanazania: Party Transformation and Economic Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

Milton Obote, The Common Man’s Charter, radiorhino.org

Previous episodes

• Part 1: Antecedents: race and romanticism in Africa – from WEB du Bois to the Manchester Conference to Senghor’s “˜negritude’.
• Part 2: The thought of liberation: Cabral and the Lusophonic thinkers; the “˜pacific’ counterpoint of Kaunda.

Coming next…

• Part 4: The degeneration into “˜Big Men’: case studies of Mobutu and Banda; the critique of Mbembe.
• Part 5: The coup “˜artists’ and the new nationalisms-on-command: from Gowon to Rawlings; the contrasts between Sankara and Amin; the contrasts and similarities between Obasanjo and Abacha.
• Part 6: The old liberationists and their reassertion in new nationalisms: Mugabe’s political thought.
• Part 7: Africa in the world: Mbeki’s African Renaissance – nostalgia and the toleration of the carnivalesque; Ngugi’s linguistic chauvinism; Mandaza’s neo-Marxist retrospection.
• Part 8: The call for democracy: the critique of Soyinka; new constitutionalisms and the looking eastwards to China, Singapore and Malaysia; the model of Russian democracy.
• Part 9: Pan-Africanism today: thought on the African Union.
• Part 10: African intellectual currents and philosophy today: going it alone vs integration with a hegemonic world; Africa and the ICC, Africa and electronic globalisation; the thought of the outlawed commons.