The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a column by Raya Dunayevskaya (“The African Revolution, I“) on the state of the African revolutions circa early 1959. Dunayevskaya here critiques the turn away from the mass initiative of the initial post-war period toward authoritarian state solutions to economic and political problems, as practiced by leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Nkrumah’s rule ended when a military officers’ coup was mounted against him in 1966.

Of interest here is also the discussion of George Padmore, the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist and Comintern official, who was a close advisor of Nkrumah’s. Padmore died in September of 1959, the year this piece appeared.

For a further development of Dunayevskaya’s critique of the course of the African revolutions, see Chapter 7 (“The African Revolutions and the World Economy”) of her Philosophy and Revolution (1973).