The notion of African continental government has run the gauntlet of criticism and ridicule in its day. Not a few African ‘moderate’ or conservative leaders and their agreeable tribe of western scholars have been only too keen to fire broadsides at it from time to time. Thus, Nigeria's Abubakar Balewa saw it as a ‘nightmare’; a union government, he said, ‘might come, so might world government’. To Dennis Austin the pan-African movement – ‘in its fundamentalist-Nkrumaistic sense of a united Africa’ – is ‘plainly chimerical’.1 And Scott Thompson, not to be outdone, saw the whole thing as ‘essentially a mirage’ – the ‘myth of Eden’ – and the endeavour towards it as one of ‘chasing the whirlwind ’.2
I still feel it (Marxism) has been one of the most important phenomena in history and one of the greatest catalysts for change and transformation of society. The mistake of orthodox Marxists was to assume that the Manifesto, published in 1847, contained immutable scientific truth [Djilas, 1976]. I think I have said enough to make it understood that it is neither Marxism or Communism that I renounce, but it is the use that certain people have made of Marxism and Communism of which I disapprove. What I want is Marxism and Communism to be placed in the service of the black peoples and not the black peoples in the service of Marxism and Communism [Cesaire, 1956].
Praetorianism has been authoritatively defined as a situation in which ‘the military class of a given society exercises independent political power within it by virtue of an actual or threatened use of military force’.1 A praetorian state, by elaboration, is one in which the military tends to intervene and potentially could dominate the political system. The political processes of this state favor the development of the military as the core group and the growth of its expectations as a ruling class; its political leadership (as distinguished from bureaucratic, administrative and managerial leadership) is chiefly recruited from the military, or from groups sympathetic, or at least not antagonistic, to the military. Constitutional changes are effected and sustained by the militaty, and the army frequently intervenes in the government.2
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