International records / OpenAlex research

History and independent Africa's political trauma

The study of tropical Africa's politics has passed through a number of phases since shortly before independence came to the greater part of the continent in the early 1960s. To begin with, a great deal of pioneering work was done on the emergence of African nationalism, party formation, charismatic leadership, and the like. This was later to be much criticised for advancing too simplistic a ‘modernisation’ thesis, but it remains an invaluable source of important data. There was then a great spurt of neo-marxist analysis, with its accompanying ‘dependency’ theory. At its best, in Colin Leys' st…