Chetuya Chinagolum@Chetuyachinago
I was able to study this highly contentious article in great detail and write down some key points before it was abruptly taken down by Substack.
The article was incredibly lengthy, but its entire thesis revolved around dismissing Pan-Africanists (like myself) who lean toward Marxist thought as "pseudo-Marxists," even going so far as to use the highly derogatory, condescending phrase "super-Marxists" to describe our movement.
This fierce ideological battle has been quietly ongoing for weeks and months on this platform, turning into a brutal cold war that has completely polarised and fractured the entire Pan-African revolutionary movement on this platform. From the text, the author desperately attempted to justify why our geopolitical analysis should be based exclusively on race rather than class. Finally, these "race-first" Pan-Africanists seem to heavily favor a paternalistic, highly centralized strongman approach to governance. Instead of building robust state institutions that are philosophically grounded in Marxist-Leninist dialectical and historical materialism, they insist on a "Bonapartist" leadership model, where a singular military strongman like Captain Ibrahim Traoré simply comes to power to kickstart the process of nation-building.
In this essay, I shall argue that these "race-first" Pan-Africanists who champion this strongman leadership model over building state institutions grounded in Marxist-Leninist philosophy are logically unsound, historically naive, and will never change the structural dependency of Africa. I will also demonstrate that using race as the primary lens to analyze the current state of Africa is intellectually lazy, theoretically flawed, and politically fatal.
1. On the Warnings of the Original "Supermarxists"
The term "supermarxists" was originally coined by the late Dr. Opoku Agyeman, a highly respected Ghanaian political scientist and African nationalist who spent several decades in the United States studying, researching, and teaching. He rose through the academic ranks to become a full professor and eventually Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Agyeman later received a prestigious Fulbright Visiting Scholar grant to teach in Tanzania in 1999, which marked the exact moment he returned to the continent and finally settled down at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM).
At that time, UDSM was not just a regular university; it was one of the most radical, intellectually vibrant, and revolutionary academic hubs in the entire Global South, famously referred to by scholars as the "Dar es Salaam School".
The legendary Walter Rodney was personally teaching in this school, and his seminal, world-altering book, "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa," was birthed within those very university walls.
It was also during this politically charged era that Julius Nyerere was in power, leading a socialist government. But Nyerere famously rejected orthodox Soviet communism and instead pioneered his own unique, highly romanticized brand of African Socialism known as "Ujamaa" (meaning familyhood or communal brotherhood in Swahili). It was an ambitious attempt to build a cooperative, self-reliant society that did not rely on Western capitalism or Soviet-style industrial collectivism, but was instead supposedly rooted in traditional African values of communal living, mutual aid, and shared labor. What Nyerere did was sweepingly nationalize all major industries, make Swahili the compulsory national language, ban the private ownership of land, and completely reject all foreign loans. He forcefully moved almost 80 percent of the rural population into communal "Ujamaa" villages, forcing them into collective agriculture by arguing that it was impossible for the state to provide basic healthcare, education, clean water, and security if the citizens lived in scattered, uncoordinated homesteads in cities.
However, Nyerere faced intense, relentless criticism from the Marxist scholars at the Dar es Salaam School. This was because Nyerere explicitly, proudly rejected the Marxist concept of class struggle. He wrote that Ujamaa was fundamentally different from both Western capitalism and "doctrinaire socialism," which he claimed sought to build its happy society on a toxic philosophy of inevitable conflict. The Marxists repeatedly, loudly warned him that post-colonial Tanzania was already deeply, structurally divided into hostile classes (impoverished peasants, urban proletariats, wealthy commercial elites, and state bureaucrats). They argued that by completely denying the existence of these classes and banning active class struggle, Nyerere’s ideology was not building socialism, but was actually protecting local exploiters, corrupt politicians, and state bureaucrats from being challenged by the working class under the false, pacifying guise of "national unity."
Particularly in 1967, when Nyerere nationalized foreign banks, insurance companies, and major manufacturing industries, claiming he was putting the economy in the hands of the Tanzanian people, his moves were heavily scrutinized. The brilliant Tanzanian Marxist scholar, Issa Shivji, wrote a devastating critique in his classic book, "Class Struggles in Tanzania," where he explicitly argued that this sweeping state nationalization did not create socialism at all. Instead, it merely birthed a new, highly parasitic domestic exploiting class: the "bureaucratic bourgeoisie". This new state-backed elite used their absolute control over the state apparatus to systematically accumulate wealth, defeat their local commercial competitors, and secure their own class privileges, all while hypocritically using the radical language of "socialism" and "Ujamaa".
One of the primary reasons Nyerere faced such intense criticism was his enforcement of "Operation Vijiji" starting in 1973. When the rural peasants naturally resisted moving voluntarily into these cooperative Ujamaa villages, Nyerere's government abandoned peaceful persuasion, deployed the military, used the federal police, and weaponized the state bureaucracy to forcefully, violently relocate millions of rural families. The Marxists saw the state-sponsored violence, forced migrations, and coercion of Operation Vijiji as the ultimate, undeniable proof of Ujamaa's internal contradictions. It clearly demonstrated that the state was absolutely not acting as an instrument of the peasantry, but as an alien, coercive power. The state was forcing peasants into highly regulated, easily monitored villages not to liberate them, but to make it easier for the rising "bureaucratic bourgeoisie" to control, monitor, and extract agricultural surplus from them to fund the bloated state apparatus.
It was during this period of intense debate that Opoku Agyeman, fresh from his long academic stay in America and operating as a staunch African nationalist, accused these class-first Marxist scholars at UDSM of being "Supermarxists". He claimed they were merely importing a rigid, Eurocentric, and "color-blind" European doctrine that completely ignored the unique, constitutive role of race and global colonial extraction in the African experience.
However, because of the subsequent economic stagnation, severe food shortages, and absolute financial collapse in Tanzania, Julius Nyerere eventually stepped down from power, and the incoming administration immediately, eagerly dismantled all his socialist policies. The state institutions were privatized, the nationalized industries were auctioned off, and the local bureaucrats who had managed them happily became the new private owners. They eagerly took predatory IMF loans, implemented devastating Structural Adjustment Programmes, and today, they comfortably constitute the wealthy corporate elite in Tanzania while the ordinary people continue to shoulder the entire weight of the collapsed economy. This is exactly what the Marxist scholars of the Dar es Salaam School had brilliantly, mathematically predicted would happen. Nyerere's denial and dismissal of class struggle within African society was a naive, costly mistake.
So ironically, the people the author is heavily criticising as being supermarxists actually brilliantly predicted the economic reality of Tanzania. However, I must add that I do personally agree with over 90% of Julius Nyerere's policies in Tanzania, and he's one of my favourite African Revolutionary figures whose political thoughts greatly motivated me. I should add that his denial and dismissal of "class-struggles" in African society was naive, as we shall soon see in more detail below.
2. On the Problems with "Race-First" Analysis in Africa
The "race-first" Pan-Africanists frequently quote Walter Rodney from his posthumous work, "Decolonial Marxism," to assert that race and colonial extraction are not merely "superstructural appendages" (the ideological, legal, or cultural justifications built on top of an economic system), but are the very "mechanisms of capital accumulation" themselves.
The fundamental problem with this popular analysis is that it completely, incorrectly collapses the base and the superstructure of capitalist society. I
n classical Marxism, there is a non-negotiable distinction between the economic "base" (the forces and relations of production, such as who owns the tools, who controls the land, and how labor is organized) and the "superstructure" (the legal institutions, political systems, cultural narratives, and ideologies, like race, religion, or nationalism, that exist to justify the base).
If you assert that race and colonial extraction are themselves the economic base, you commit a massive theoretical error. You completely conflate what is being accumulated (the actual surplus value and physical goods extracted from raw human labor power) with how that extraction is politically, socially, and ideologically managed (using racial divisions, apartheid laws, and arbitrary colonial borders).
Several states across Africa, including Nigeria, the Sahel region, Somalia, and Sudan, are currently under constant bombardment from devastating terrorist attacks, local banditry, and proxy wars. In each of these cases, precious minerals, gold, lithium, and crude oil are being mined, refined, and shipped out by foreign corporations. This material extraction of wealth constitutes the classic economic "base" of these capitalist operations. But the ideological superstructure used to justify, coordinate, and mask this theft on the ground is almost never race. Instead, it is tribalism, religious jingoism, or regional ethnicity, as we see in the case of the warring factions in Sudan or the Tuareg rebels in Mali. In each of these countries, the local foot soldiers and militants genuinely believe they are fighting for a holy, righteous cause, either for their God or for the sovereignty of their specific tribe, but we all know that this is a highly engineered, corporate-funded illusion.
The historical Crusades serve as a perfect example of this mechanism. The ruling Western European elites, the Catholic Church, and the feudal lords successfully mobilized their impoverished citizens, marching them thousands of kilometers to the Levant. Thousands died of disease, starvation, and warfare, all under the holy justification that they had to conquer the infidels and reclaim the sacred city of Jerusalem. In naked, material reality, however, the Crusades were a highly calculated corporate plunder, and the biggest powers in Europe ended up owning enormous tracts of land, strategic trade routes, and tax-exempt feudal estates, directly enriching the papal banking systems of the Vatican and the nobility of Western Europe.
We see this exact same playbook unfold in real time today, as US Presidents use "weapons of mass destruction," "defending democracy," or "fighting authoritarianism" to justify to the American public why they must use their tax dollars for foreign invasions. But in reality, these wars are fought solely to create a secure, unregulated market where American defense contractors, weapons manufacturers, and oil majors can rake in massive corporate profits. This is why we absolutely cannot base our primary geopolitical analysis on race alone. This is not to deny the horrific reality of racism, or its massive, devastating role in direct colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Rather, it is to remain analytically rigorous, scientific, and historically precise, recognizing that these racial categories were deliberately created, structured, and legally enforced to justify the material extraction of labor. The true, primary enemy is global capitalism, which must be systematically dismantled. Treating the ideological symptom of racism while completely ignoring the underlying disease of capitalism will never solve the great problems facing our continent.
Furthermore, insisting that race and direct colonial extraction are the essential, primary mechanisms of capital accumulation is a highly dangerous, theoretical dead end. If this were true, then global capitalism should logically collapse, or at least severely struggle to sustain itself, the very second those specific colonial mechanisms are removed. But as we have clearly seen in South Africa, the racist Apartheid government was successfully dismantled decades ago, and the new government is heavily Black-dominated, yet the capitalist system remains completely intact. Wealth, land, and capital are still hyper-concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, with the only material difference being that this exploitative class now includes wealthy Black faces.
Nigeria is a perfectly identical case study: the white colonial administrators have been gone since 1960, yet we still have highly parasitic local elites who are enthusiastically using state institutions, corrupt police forces, and military networks to hoard massive wealth for themselves and their families while violently crushing public dissent. Billionaire monopolists, oligarchs, and political godfathers like Aliko Dangote, Atiku Abubakar, Arthur Eze, Tony Elumelu, Atedola, etc are practically untouchable giants in Nigeria. Indigenous small businesses continuously complain of extreme, state-protected monopolies, where these elites weaponize maritime laws, customs duties, and regulatory agencies to confiscate the goods of their competitors to maintain their own strategic, unchecked edge in the market.
We also see this in the modern corporate strategy of "diversity and inclusion," where multinational corporations and Wall Street investment firms are happily integrating Black people and other people of color into high-profile leadership positions. A Yoruba man from Nigeria sits as a prominent corporate director at BlackRock with significant voting rights, yet this does absolutely nothing to change how the IMF and World Bank systematically suffocate African economies. An Igbo woman sits as the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, yet the global capitalist trade rules that guarantee African resources will always be cheaply available to Western corporations remain completely, structurally intact. Likewise, Harvard's admission of elite Black students and Western civil rights laws have been completely unable to change the grinding, economic exploitation of the Black working class in America.
So, in essence, as a direct criticism of Walter Rodney's decolonial framework: if global capitalism can successfully, endlessly accumulate capital without legally enforced racial supremacy or direct, formal colonial rule, then race and colonial extraction are historically contingent rather than essential to the core economic mechanism of capitalism. Treating them as identical makes it impossible for you to explain why global capitalism remains so incredibly resilient, adaptive, and dominant even when formal racism and direct colonialism are dismantled.
Another major danger of collapsing the base and the superstructure is that it lazily reduces every single socio-economic problem on the continent to a mere manifestation of external colonial extraction. In this flawed, race-first model, the direct exploitation of African workers by the local African capitalist class is often excused, minimized, or framed as a secondary, "downstream" effect of global imperialism. While this may appear true in some instances, it is absolutely false as a general rule. The direct, highly calculated exploitation, wage-theft, and marginalization of Africans by fellow Africans are happening in real time across several African states. If we use a blanket, race-first approach to explain these local class conflicts, we descend directly into the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum, historical revisionism, or analytical laziness, leaving us completely blind to domestic exploitation.
Finally, it is a hilarious contradiction when these "race-first" Pan-Africanists desperately defend the Sahelian revolutionary structure (the AES), because that military government is currently being held intact, armed, and trained through a direct alliance with the Russian Wagner Group, who are mainly white Europeans. On this specific contradiction, the author of the original article presented a brilliant, materialist justification. He argued that a socialist or anti-imperialist state does not exist in a vacuum; it must trade on capitalism’s terms, secure food, and defend itself militarily. Therefore, working with Russia is a tactical, state-to-state maneuver to break a Western-enforced economic blockade. It is absolutely not an ideological endorsement of Russian domestic politics. He argued that it is incredibly unwise, idealistic, and infantile to expect the AES states to only accept military aid from racially "pure" or ideologically "pure" partners, calling such demands "audio internationalism" and "institutional fetishism," which is an academic luxury that ignores the immediate, material threat of military defeat and total state collapse.
But if we can use the cold, materialist reality of state survival to justify a Black-led African state allying with a white-led Russian state internationally, why must these same theorists still insist that race is "constitutive of the base" domestically? Why not admit the universal truth: that wealth extraction (class) is the ultimate, universal constant of the global system, and race is indeed just an adaptable, superstructural appendage? If geopolitical survival is powerful enough to force the Alliance of Sahel States to bypass racial solidarity and ally with Russia, then class, wealth extraction, and the relations of production are the only true, universal constants of the global system. The local Sahelian peasant is not being exploited by the domestic comprador class because of race (since both the peasant and the comprador are Black); they are being exploited because of their relation to the production of wealth. Insisting that race is part of the "base" domestically while discarding it internationally is a highly hypocritical, opportunistic use of political theory. The race-first Pan-Africanist-Marxists are merely using theory as a convenient tool to mobilize local nationalistic fervor when it suits them, but discarding it the moment the state needs to purchase military hardware from a white-led nation to protect the government. Class is primary, and race is superstructural.
3. On the "Strongman" Approach to Governance
A prominent, highly dangerous bias held by this race-first group of Pan-Africanists is their deep-seated, paternalistic preference for the "strongman" approach to governance. They heavily favor a highly centralized, paternalistic state, romanticizing historical figures like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, and recently, Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso. Usually, these military strongmen rise to power by tapping into genuine, explosive popular anger against corrupt civilian elites, economic inflation, and foreign corporate extraction. While their immediate, top-down decrees (nationalizing mines, expelling foreign troops, or tearing up unequal treaties) are objectively progressive, this strongman model possesses three fundamental, structural weaknesses that make it a total strategic failure.
First, any sovereign state whose entire revolutionary project depends on the heartbeat, physical safety, and personal charisma of one single man is inherently fragile. If the strongman is successfully assassinated (like Thomas Sankara in 1987), co-opted, or deposed by a rival military faction, the entire anti-imperialist project can be completely rolled back overnight. This is why I am consistently shocked that Pan-Africanists still enthusiastically endorse and support this model. This has been the single greatest flaw in our anti-colonial struggles. The very moment an African leader begins to threaten the neocolonial extraction model, it is incredibly easy for the colonial masters to reverse those progressive decisions, simply because all they need to do is cut off the head of the government. This is why African states are so incredibly easy to infiltrate; the leadership is built on a cult of personality rather than an institutionalized, class-conscious ideology. All the imperialists need to do to collapse a state of over 240 million people is to simply change the face of the single man sitting in Aso Rock, and the entire system immediately reverts to default, allowing our resources to continue flowing freely to Western capitals.
Secondly, under this paternalistic strongman model, to maintain social order and guard against foreign-sponsored counter-coups, power is always heavily centralized within the military officer corps, the presidential guard, and the state bureaucracy. By concentrating all political agency, strategic decision-making, and organizational control in the hands of the military and the higher-ups, the government inadvertently demobilizes and pacifies the working masses and the peasantry. The ordinary people are reduced to passive, cheerleading spectators who merely watch "their" leader from the sidelines, rather than active, organized, and politically conscious agents of their own liberation. Without active, bottom-up class organization, the masses have absolutely no structural capacity to defend the revolution if the state elite eventually betrays them. This is precisely why, the moment Thomas Sankara was removed, the Burkinabè masses merely stood by, watched, and did absolutely nothing, because they possessed no independent, organized structures to defend his revolutionary ideas.
Thirdly, the historical, anti-fragile survival of socialist states like China, Vietnam, and Cuba, which have successfully withstood decades of relentless imperialist containment, military blockades, and economic embargoes, is due entirely to their reliance on highly structured, deeply institutionalized collective systems, rather than a single cult of personality. We must, at some point, permanently renounce this childish obsession with merely grabbing state power. Instead of basing our fights, protests, and movements on the volatile charisma of a single military strongman, we need to understand that a revolutionary society fundamentally requires a highly disciplined, ideologically cohesive Vanguard Party populated by trained, dedicated cadres.
A Vanguard Party provides a systematic, institutionalized, and peaceful succession process. If the top leader dies, retires, or is assassinated, the party machinery simply appoints a new representative, and the ideological trajectory of the state remains completely unbroken. The revolution is no longer vulnerable to a single point of failure. The cadres are highly disciplined, structurally trained militants embedded in every factory, farm, school, laboratory, and military unit. They act as the active "nervous system" of the state, ensuring that the policies of the central command are executed on the ground, while continuously conveying the material grievances, economic needs, and local suggestions of the population back up to the leadership.
