In the early 1980s, a group of radical African economists working at the Dakar-based Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP) were dismissed. Among them were three Ghanaian economists, Tony Obeng, Cadman Atta Mills, and Kwame Amoa, who applied a neocolonial analysis of global political economy to critique international development policies. Although the precise circumstances of their dismissal remain unclear, it was evident that their revolutionary approach to development clashed fundamentally with IDEP’s methods.
Created in 1962, IDEP belonged to the United Nations’ broader initiative to provide Africa, Asia, and Latin America with the resources to study their economic conditions and problems. The apparent successes of the Marshall Plan had profoundly shaped institutions of economic planning like IDEP.Footnote 1 However, Obeng, among others, critiqued that model, arguing that the rapid economic growth after the Second World War was “based on insecure foundations and could not, therefore, last.”Footnote 2 Thus, while the “final and real aim of development seemed perfectly obvious” and “easy to define,” it was, in fact, part of “an era of illusions” that gave the false impression that “the model represented by the North American experience” could apply “to all the regions of the world, irrespective of their levels of development or social systems.”Footnote 3 Obeng’s analysis, an explicit critique of postindependence African economic policies, was derived from Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of neocolonialism and the Latin American school of dependency theory.
Nkrumah described neocolonialism as a situation in which a country is “in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,” but “[i]n reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”Footnote 4 Dependency theorists understood the global economy as an unbalanced relationship between a core and a periphery.Footnote 5 The core represented Western capitalistic countries, and the periphery represented so-called Third World nations whose natural resources were exploited by advanced countries through processes of unequal exchange. IDEP scholars drew on and complicated these frameworks, challenging prevailing explanations that attributed underdevelopment to a lack of “capital, know-how and managerial skills.”Footnote 6 Instead, they advanced the radical proposition of “delinking”: the idea that Third World countries should withdraw from the global economic system and build alternative networks of exchange among themselves.
This article analyzes the work of IDEP economists through three interrelated questions. First, why did the UN establish IDEP, and what political and ideological objectives shaped its formative period? Second, how did the arrival of leftist economists beginning in 1970 reorient IDEP’s approach to development economics, and how did they engage with and adapt Marxist and dependency thought to African contexts? Finally, why were these radical economists dismissed in the early 1980s, and what does their expulsion reveal about the rise of Western neoliberal development paradigms? Collectively, the answers to these inquiries illuminate how Cold War geopolitics, African decolonization, and Western neoliberal policies significantly constrained African-led economic visions and shaped the continent’s developmental trajectory for decades to come.
African economic history and development thought have been shaped by several analytical frameworks, including modernization/neoclassical, Marxist, dependency, postmodern, and institutional/cliometric schools. Modernization theorists like Arthur Lewis stressed capital accumulation and managerial know-how as the keys to economic growth.Footnote 7 Similarly, historians like A. G. Hopkins have argued that markets and agency existed in precolonial Africa but were constrained by ecological factors.Footnote 8 In contrast, Marxist and dependency approaches espoused by Samir Amin and Walter Rodney illuminate exploitation and unequal exchange.Footnote 9 In recent decades, institutional/cliometric historians, including Gareth Austin and Morten Jerven, stress the importance of indigenous institutions, climate, and statistical data in analyzing Africa’s economic growth.Footnote 10
This article makes an integrative argument: because ecological constraints, indigenous institutions, and external trade jointly shaped development, it advocates for multi-source evidence that combines cliometric data with oral and institutional records. This synthesis challenges binary debates and provides a richer lens for understanding West Africa’s economic and developmental past and its contemporary implications. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, I reconstruct the activities of IDEP and trace the rise and fall of its leftist economists. By critically reading these sources against the intersecting backdrop of Cold War geopolitics and African decolonization, I center Africans and African institutions that were engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1980s, African scholars would move beyond the simplistic core-periphery paradigm to take seriously internal factors, including class, gender, and South-South exploitation, that equally hindered Africa’s development.Footnote 11 Some of these reflections emerged at the 1980 meeting that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) organized in Nigeria, which would become known as the Lagos Plan of Action. By situating IDEP in a global context, this article moves beyond narrow economistic framings to highlight broader historical trajectories and to show that Africa was not merely a testing ground for imported theories of development. Rather, Africa was a site where radical and original economic thought was generated and disseminated.
To IDEP economists, development was unequivocally political, and it required a recognition of the history and legacy of colonialism. The dominant form of development thinking was, they argued, not merely a way of helping African countries reduce poverty and attain economic prosperity, but also an extension of the colonial project and an ideological argument for why Africa was still poor. In line with this critique, they oriented IDEP’s research toward regional economic development rather than national development, believing, for example, that building roads, railways, and lake transportation networks that connected different countries would increase the flow of people, goods, and services and facilitate better regional integration, reducing Africa’s dependence on the West. For IDEP economists, national borders were colonial impositions that stifled intra-African trade and the free movement of goods and services. Furthermore, they took seriously Pan-Africanist George Padmore’s assertion that “Development plans cannot be drawn up in vacuo, but must reflect the concrete situation and needs in each territory.”Footnote 12 Thus, they argued that UN economic policies for Africa must recognize that Africa was not a homogeneous entity.
Despite IDEP’s intellectual contributions, it, alongside many African economic institutions, has largely been marginalized in global discourses of economic thought. Some historians, however, have produced insightful accounts that center Africans and African institutions.Footnote 13 Yet much of the wider scholarship on this period remains focused on East Africa, particularly on the role Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, played and the University of Dar es Salaam as the seat of radical economic thinking.Footnote 14 Although Nyerere’s Tanzania is crucial to understanding radical Third Worldist development thought, the contributions of IDEP intellectuals remain underappreciated. Not only did IDEP economists contribute to development discourses in Africa, they also built enduring Pan-African institutions, most notably the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).
IDEP economists, including Cadman Atta Mills, Kwame Amoa, and Tony Obeng, challenged dominant Western notions of development—such as the idea that the export of mineral wealth could lead to economic growth—exposing these as misconceptions that contributed to underdevelopment. Their analyses required policymakers and civil servants to understand the continent as a site of diverse and complex economic relationships within Africa and between Africa and the West. Combining the academic study of Africa with a vision for economic liberation, Atta Mills, Amoa, and Obeng were also influenced by the then-ongoing decolonization struggle in Southern Africa, the Pan-African fervor from Tanzania, and the student protests in Ethiopia. These movements enabled these intellectuals to connect political education to popular mobilization. The scholars at IDEP saw research centers, classrooms, seminars, conferences, and public lectures as vital arenas where the struggle for African economic liberation would either be attained or lost. Their commitment to global Black and Third World liberation underpinned their goal of transforming IDEP into a radical Pan-African and leftist economic institute.
Cold War and Economic Development Thought
The 1941 Atlantic charter, which promoted free trade, self-determination, disarmament, and collective security, set the tone for the Cold War and eventually shaped Western engagement with Africa. As the Cold War intensified, American policymakers believed that the economic transformation of the “underdeveloped” Third World would persuade “nationalist leaders to join in the liberal, capitalist world order and resist the lure of Soviet communism.”Footnote 15 Consequently, in October 1949, President Harry Truman proposed promoting programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, a regional development that transformed the Tennessee River basin through hydroelectric power, in the Middle East, Africa’s Zambezi basin, and the south of Brazil to help improve the quality of life.Footnote 16 This was part of Cold War-era US and Soviet competition over the Third World.
In the 1960s, Cold War rivalry, decolonization, and new currents of economic thought gave rise to competing development paradigms. Modernization theory, promoted by figures like W. W. Rostow, presented development as a linear path in which “traditional” societies advanced only by adopting “modern” practices.Footnote 17 It attributed poverty to internal cultural/institutional deficiencies and assumed a single trajectory to modernity.Footnote 18 Critics of modernization theory, however, challenged its fundamental assumption that development was unilinear. They argued that the trajectory of economic transformation varied significantly and systemically based on how countries entered the international system.Footnote 19 Some of the most prominent opponents of modernization theory were Latin American dependency theorists, including Raúl Prebisch and Fernando Cardoso. Dependency theory provided an analytical framework to examine the reasons why Latin American countries did not experience the type of industrial development associated with advanced capitalist nations.
Because most anticolonial nationalists associated capitalism with Western imperialism, some became interested in the Soviet model of development.Footnote 20 In the 1930s, the Soviet Union invited foreigners to visit its model factories and collective farms to witness how they were addressing social problems, including rehabilitating criminals and providing for the homeless, to demonstrate socialism as an alternative to capitalism.Footnote 21 After the Second World War, the Soviet “miracle” of modernization, economic growth, and industrialization became more fundamental to its propaganda mission.Footnote 22 In 1955, the Soviets organized technology fairs in places like Indonesia and Argentina. India blamed the West for its underdevelopment and consequently embraced the Soviet model of centralized economic planning and spread it to the rest of the Third World.Footnote 23 This economic model posited that the state should play the central role in economic development. In 1958, the Soviet Union signed an agreement with Guinea-Conakry after the latter gained independence. That same year, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Indonesia, India, and Afghanistan received 80 percent of Soviet foreign aid.Footnote 24 Nonetheless, by the early 1960s, most of its recipients, including Guinea, complained about “delays, low quality, and insufficient technical standards” and the failure to build railways, roads, and modern radio transmission systems.Footnote 25 For newly-independent African countries, cash-strapped and eager to fulfil the political and economic aspirations of their citizens, such disappointments underscored how Cold War politics constrained their developmental choices. Ghana provides a particularly instructive case.
Neocolonial Development: The Ghanaian Example
As the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence, the lessons from Ghana’s economic struggles revealed that merely achieving independence was not sufficient. Foreign private companies still controlled most of Ghana’s natural and physical capital, its manpower, and its financial resources. For example, British corporations controlled over 90 percent of import trade. Two British banks handled about 90 percent of all banking transactions; expatriate companies held 96 percent of total timber concessions; foreign investors owned all functioning gold mines and controlled about half of the annual diamond production; foreign companies dominated the insurance market.Footnote 26 As a result, most Ghanaian businesses could not compete with foreign companies because of a lack of financial resources and “competent managerial personnel.”Footnote 27 Therefore, the economic difficulties that the Nkrumah government encountered as it navigated Cold War politics and the constraints imposed by the World Bank and the IMF informed how IDEP scholars theorized Africa’s underdevelopment.
The Nkrumah administration feared that nationalizing or heavily restricting foreign companies would discourage the foreign investment needed for its Volta River Project (VRP). For Nkrumah, the VRP’s hydroelectric station, large artificial lake, and irrigation potential were fundamental to Ghana’s industrial goals. While the World Bank and other investors pledged a $100 million loan, they maintained that Ghana had to attract foreign investors, enabling more foreign firms to dominate the country’s economic resources.Footnote 28 Nkrumah’s simultaneous critique of Western capitalism and acceptance of Western aid highlights the ideological and practical dilemmas Pan-African leaders faced. His pursuit of rapid industrialization demonstrates the necessity of securing financial, technical, and technological resources from both East and West to achieve his economic objectives. Accepting bilateral and multilateral aid was thus a strategic compromise within his non-alignment ideology, yet it created internal contradictions: reliance on foreign assistance often reinforced the very neocolonial dynamics Nkrumah sought to dismantle. This tension reveals a broader dilemma in Pan-African development, where idealism collided with practical necessity.
Nkrumah’s insistence that industrialization was key to Ghana’s economic progress sometimes put him at odds with his chief economic advisor, Arthur Lewis. Nkrumah had hired Lewis precisely for his expertise in industrialization and his commitment to helping African countries, rooted in his identity as a West Indian of African descent.Footnote 29 A founder of colonial and development economics, Lewis had argued in his 1949 publication “Colonial Development” that poor countries often had “surplus or redundant workers” who could be transferred to the industrial sector without harming agriculture, facilitating rapid industrialization.Footnote 30
Nonetheless, Lewis counseled Nkrumah to prioritize agricultural productivity and public services. Unlike India, he argued, the Gold Coast lacked surplus labor but possessed abundant land suitable for agricultural expansion. Industrialization alone, Lewis warned, would fail without both a domestic market and a reliable labor force. He recommended acquiring land near Kumasi and Accra for industrial estates. Nkrumah acknowledged Lewis’s advice but reminded him, “I cannot always follow this advice as I am a politician and must gamble on the future.”Footnote 31 Inspired by the Soviet model of central planning and rapid industrialization, Nkrumah sought to adapt these lessons to Ghana’s context.
Concurrently, postcolonial corruption and the birth of the neopatrimonial state contributed to economic failures.Footnote 32 For example, Nkrumah and Lewis agreed that the government should spend £2.5 million to treat cocoa trees infected with the capsid insect. They both believed this would increase Ghana’s cocoa exports to about £20 million. However, they disagreed over implementation: Lewis preferred the Ministry of Agriculture, while Nkrumah wanted the Cocoa Marketing Board to oversee the project and subcontract it to the United Ghana Farmers Congress—a body controlled by his Convention People’s Party (CCP)—ensuring part of the funds reinforced the party.Footnote 33 Additionally, Nkrumah believed that the rise of a formidable Ghanaian capitalist class could challenge his political authority, making it difficult to pursue his goals. He told Kojo Botsio, a cabinet minister, that “any Ghanaian with a lot of money has a lot of influence; any Ghanaian with a lot of influence is a threat to me.”Footnote 34 By 1961, Nkrumah had imprisoned most of his political opposition, alienating many Ghanaians who could meaningfully contribute to the project of nation-building.Footnote 35 These political maneuvers were disastrous to Ghana’s economy.
By the time projects like the VRP got off the ground, different critiques of Nkrumah were emerging.Footnote 36 The VRP’s flaws were not necessarily that it would not contribute to economic development. Instead, they stemmed from Ghana’s inability to secure the low-interest loans needed to complete the project. Nkrumah asserted that “the result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world.”Footnote 37 “Investment under neo-colonialism,” he explained, “increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.”Footnote 38 By relying on the US and the World Bank to finance this project, Nkrumah had to accept certain conditionalities that proved detrimental to the bauxite-aluminum smelting project, which he hoped would not only create jobs but also play a vital role in helping industrialize the country. For Nkrumah, finance capital was a major hindrance to Africa’s economic development. He realized that the foreign investors “only wanted cheap power to turn their own semi-processed aluminum into refined bars in a way that would bring minimum cost and maximum profit to North American industries and offered the leanest possible margin for Africa.”Footnote 39 Nkrumah argued that Africa countries, like Asian and Latin American nations, had high interest rates compared to the US or Western Europe.Footnote 40 For instance, he stated that “figures from the World Bank for 1962 showed that seventy-one Asian, African and Latin American countries owed foreign debts of some $27,000 million, on which they paid in interest and service charges some $5,000 million.”Footnote 41 These figures show that the underdevelopment of the Third World was predicated on unequal access to affordable loans.
Ultimately, external and internal factors worsened Ghana’s economic conditions. Many activist-scholars blamed the fall in cocoa prices, which accounted for more than 60 percent of Ghana’s export earnings, on “an intentional response by international monopolies to Nkrumah’s socialist rhetoric.”Footnote 42 Additionally, Nkrumah’s support for Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his visit to Eastern Europe “compromised his nonalignment in Western eyes.”Footnote 43 Furthermore, Ghana’s struggles to obtain loans with low interest rates, coupled with Nkrumah’s use of political patronage and the silencing of political dissent, significantly affected both Ghana’s economic circumstances and his popularity. On 24 February 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-backed but locally popular military coup.Footnote 44
Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification, 1962–72: The Role of Intellectual Networks
Meanwhile, development economics continued to be institutionalized at the highest level. In the fall of 1962, the ECA established IDEP to provide newly independent African countries with technical economic expertise to help them reduce poverty and attain high economic growth.Footnote 45 Influenced by modernization theory, the ECA assumed countries progressed through a series of stages and that development was largely a technical, depoliticized process. Accordingly, IDEP focused on training African officials and specialists in economic planning, emphasizing subjects such as agricultural planning and domestic financing of development.Footnote 46
The UN hoped that IDEP would enable African countries to better integrate into the international community and give them greater say in formulating policies. Despite this attempt to create equality, Obeng would later argue that the unequal economic development of the world was “accompanied by a domination of currents of thought, scientific methods, and ideologies originating from the wealthiest regions.”Footnote 47 The post-Second World War period witnessed rapid growth of the world economy, with the US as the world economic leader. This period was known as the “Golden Age of Capitalism.”Footnote 48 Therefore, it became generally accepted that African countries should follow the economic blueprint of the West.Footnote 49
With the rise of independent African countries, many intellectuals and policymakers advocated modeling the continent’s development on the Marshall Plan. In fact, in 1956, Nkrumah’s advisor George Padmore called for that very model, arguing that the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism had deprived Africa of human capital. Consequently, he opined that “a Marshall Aid programme for Africa” was the most effective means for the US to help Africa address its underdevelopment and the vestiges of colonialism.Footnote 50 Because enslaved Africans built the foundations of America, he urged the US Congress to fully finance the construction of the Volta River Project.Footnote 51 For Padmore, such a large-scale and generous financial and technical support from the US could provide the necessary capital and infrastructure for African countries to modernize their economies and improve living standards.Footnote 52
Moreover, the UN argued that because of colonialism, Africa lacked experience in the routine management of state, political, and economic affairs. For Africa to develop, it recommended that the continent obtain foreign private and public capital and train nationals to manage those resources. Thus, the ECA gave IDEP three main tasks: training, research, and advisory services, including offering a nine-month course in economic and social planning for specialists and senior government officials in Dakar.Footnote 53
In 1964, IDEP officially started its full operations, and the UN agreed to finance its activities until 1969.Footnote 54 The ECA wanted IDEP to conduct research that was “mainly geared towards the problems and techniques of economic and social development in Africa” that would be used to complement its training program.Footnote 55 Lastly, the ECA required IDEP to offer limited economic planning recommendations and introductory courses on problems and methods of planning to African governments at their request.Footnote 56 This ask reveals how IDEP thinkers’ professional relationships with the UN impacted their ability to spur economic development.
Despite its mandate to focus on training, research, and advisory services, IDEP’s first phase (1964–69) focused mainly on training personnel to address human resources shortages. Although IDEP was under the aegis of the ECA, it remained autonomous. Each year, IDEP selected about thirty civil servants responsible for their countries’ economic affairs to equip them with tools the UN deemed universally applicable for analyzing economic problems and formulating development.Footnote 57
IDEP faced significant challenges. In its first full academic year (1964–65), only thirteen of thirty-five trainees returned for the second semester, likely due to limited funding or perceived program relevance. Short-term teaching contracts led to recurring recruitment problems and frequent reliance on visiting instructors.Footnote 58 IDEP’s struggles led to a critical reevaluation and restructuring of the institute. The UN Development Program (UNDP) “questioned its very existence,” based on its assessment of the lack of leadership and the institute’s structure.Footnote 59 The UNDP insisted that it would only continue to fund IDEP if it created an academic advisory board and appointed a new director.Footnote 60 Robert Gardiner, who had served under Nkrumah as the first head of the Ghana Civil Service and the executive secretary of the ECA, became the chairperson of IDEP’s governing council.Footnote 61 In 1970, Gardiner appointed the Egyptian intellectual Samir Amin as IDEP’s director.
Amin, who had a brief stint at IDEP in 1963 and was a formidable critic of capitalism, became the director at a time when new radical thought was emerging to explain Africa’s underdevelopment. Like Nkrumah, Amin thought of independence as a form of neocolonialism.Footnote 62
Amin’s analysis paralleled Walter Rodney’s, as elaborated in his 1972 groundbreaking book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney contended that the development of Europe was directly connected to the exploitation and underdevelopment of Africa. For Rodney, structural prosperities, such as how transportation networks were built, and how the education system was setup, contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa. He argued that most of the infrastructures and social services that colonial states established were intended to benefit Europeans and not Africans.Footnote 63
Additionally, Amin’s and Rodney’s works were both informed by the scholar-activist proponents of the development school in Latin America and the Caribbean. Consequently, these scholars popularized dependency theory in Africa and promoted concepts like underdevelopment and unequal exchange to explain why certain countries were poor and others were rich. Spurred by Amin’s and Rodney’s application of these concepts to Africa, Europe’s economic exploitation of Africa remained at the center of local and international academic discourses throughout the early 1970s. What united Amin, Rodney, and Nkrumah was a shared indictment of neocolonialism and an insistence that Pan-African economic unity was critical to the complete liberation of Africa.
Amin practiced an institutional Pan-Africanism in his hiring practices at IDEP, drawing on his continental and diasporic African networks of Pan-African and leftist thinkers. Ironically, UN institutions in London, Paris, and New York allowed anticolonial thinkers to converse directly with one another. It was in Massachusetts in 1971 that Cadman Atta Mills, a PhD candidate at Boston College, met future Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who had then completed his master’s degree at MIT and was working for the ECA. Annan, who knew Amin through their work with the UN, recommended that Amin hire Atta Mills. Annan already knew Amin since they both worked for the UN. Additionally, Atta Mills’s PhD advisor, Ann Friedlaender had attended MIT with Kwame Amoa, who was then the deputy director of IDEP. In 1973, a year after Atta Mills joined IDEP, Amin invited his friend, Jamaican economist Norman Girvan, to join the institute. These professional relationships were mediated by direct familiarity, a dynamic that resulted in the recruitment of mostly men, a phenomenon that is often unexplained in intellectual histories. It was this dynamic that helped reproduce gender bias and accounted for the general absence of women at IDEP.
IDEP 1970–75: The Birth of the IDEP School of Economics
The formative period of the “IDEP radical tradition” can be attributed directly to Amin, whose economic philosophy had a significant impact on the emergence of a group of radical Ghanaian economists at IDEP in the 1970s. Helmed by Amoa, Atta Mills, and Obeng, this transnational intellectual community included Norman Girvan (Jamaica), Oscar Braun (Argentina), Héctor Silva Michelena (Venezuela), Fawzy Mansour, Naguib Hedayat, and Hassan Khalil (Egypt), Samba Sow (Senegal), Jacques Bugnicourt (France), Bernard Founou (Cameroon), Jagdish Saigal (India), Marc Franco (Belgium), and Joseph van den Reysen (Republic of the Congo). Together, these colleagues provided economic advice to African governments, institutions, and transnational Third World organizations, including the Group of 77 and the non-aligned countries that broke with modernization orthodoxy.Footnote 64
These IDEP scholars transformed the institution into an organization that analyzed African economic problems and provided solutions by highlighting the impact of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism on Africa’s development. Through conferences and seminars, they established a network with activist scholars in other parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. During this phase, Amoa, Atta Mills, and Obeng helped shift IDEP’s focus from general research in the social sciences to a greater emphasis on a critical examination of the “know-how” of conventional development policies. These scholars wanted a better understanding of the “know-why” of underdevelopment.Footnote 65 By the early 1970s, they had helped define the “IDEP school” of development economics.
The work of IDEP scholars sat at the intersection between the Pan-African developmentalist visions of Nkrumah and Nyerere as well as the neo-Marxist dependency school’s attempt at explaining the causes of global disparities. Nkrumah believed that continental unity through a United States of Africa would provide the economic foundation for rapid industrialization and modernization, with significant economic advantages, military power, and the financial resources needed to combat the forces of neo-colonialism and imperialism. As a result, he rejected a regional approach to development because he viewed it as balkanization that would hinder the total liberation of Africa.Footnote 66 In contrast to Nkrumah, Nyerere argued that “agriculture is the basis of development.”Footnote 67 His economic development project, Ujamaa, stressed self-reliance, communal ownership of land, and rural development. While Nyerere shared Nkrumah’s concerns that regionalism could undermine continental unity, he believed that regional integration could promote economic self-sufficiency.Footnote 68 However, despite their divergences, Nyerere and Nkrumah shared a Pan-African developmentalist vision whose ultimate goal was reducing Africa’s dependency on Western countries and financial institutions. IDEP economists took regional and continental economic approaches from this shared Pan-African developmentalist vision, adding ideas from Latin American dependency theorists, showing the nuances and complexity in developmental Pan-Africanism itself. IDEP scholars viewed regionalism as a critical step toward the broader aim of a united Africa and a viable solution to Africa’s economic woes.
Anchoring IDEP’s approach to economics were notions of uneven development, unequal exchange, and underdevelopment.Footnote 69 While the Greco-French economist Arghiri Emmanuel coined the term “unequal exchange,” Amin was one of the first to use it to explain the economic relationship between the West and Africa.Footnote 70 According to Amin, colonial exploitative structures led to a system in which workers in the periphery provided cheap labor for foreign investors and local capitalist classes. Consequently, labor power was valued less in the periphery than in the core.Footnote 71 IDEP scholars used unequal exchange to highlight various forms of exploitation hidden in trade. They refuted the simplified notion that “a country was poor because it was poor.”Footnote 72 Moreover, they argued that common explanations such as high proportion of the population engaged in agriculture, large-scale underemployment and unemployment, lack of capital, low per capita income, low levels of national savings and investments, small industrial sectors, low productivity, high population/land ratio, and high rates of illiteracy did not adequately explain Africa’s lack of economic development.Footnote 73
In their writings, IDEP scholars criticized the imposition of Western approaches to development in Africa. Amoa, for example, maintained that the early writings by development economists, including Lewis and Rostow, advanced a “linear development thesis.”Footnote 74 Consequently, he noted, the aim of development became a nation’s ability to reach “the level of these advanced industrial nations; that is, of closing the existing ‘gaps’ between them and the less developed nations, irrespective of the socio-cultural backgrounds of the particular countries concerned.”Footnote 75
Additionally, Amoa pointed to the flaws in the idea advanced by neoclassical scholars that foreign aid in Africa would solve the continent’s development problems.Footnote 76 For instance, he had observed that in the past decade and a half, the West had not distributed development aid equally, with certain countries, including Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Kenya, receiving more than others. And yet countries that received significant aid still had substantial issues. For example, in Brazil, Afro-Brazilians lived in extreme poverty, to the extent that they were excluded from forming an important sector of the main economy and thus rarely benefited from the “development aid transfers.”Footnote 77 For Amoa, these policies reinforced existing patterns and deepened the fundamental problem that IDEP sought to address. Thus, he argued that the economic problems of Europe after the Second World War, which had shaped development theory, “were not the same as the structural problems of underdevelopment in the Third World.”Footnote 78
By the early 1970s, IDEP scholars had begun analyzing the import of independence. Between 1950 and 1975, African countries had reduced child mortality and increased education, but they had not significantly reduced poverty, transformed agriculture, or expanded industry. It was becoming increasingly clear that African economies were failing and that Western economic models were unsuitable for the continent.Footnote 79 African intellectuals and governments began to realize that they needed more radical and alternative models.
Obeng, for example, argued that the colonial intellectual and ideological foundations that informed the agendas of African bureaucrats, policymakers, and development planners remained intact in the postcolonial era. While he acknowledged the impact of policies like Africanization of the civil service, Obeng suggested that the transition from a colonial administration to a public/development administration had been little more than a name change. He also maintained that their economic guiding principles were rooted in several misconceptions about the nature and causes of Africa’s underdevelopment.Footnote 80 Obeng opined that by assigning “externality” as the reasons for African poverty, such as “acts of God”—the idea that Africa was poor because of too little or too much rain or poor resource endowment—overlooked the structural characteristics of African poverty.Footnote 81
Obeng suggested that “the late development effect,” which purported that Africa could not be competitive in anything except its raw materials and labor, once again failed to address the structure of Africa’s dependent relationship with the West.Footnote 82 He contended that Africa’s independence did not lead to the “process of breaking the chain of African dependency, peripherisation, marginalization or bantustanisation” of the continent and posited that postcolonial leaders and economic advisors failed to see Africa as a “distinct collection of autonomous sociocultural entities responsive to its own development requirements.”Footnote 83 For Obeng, true independence could only be attained when African bureaucrats and policymakers broke away from the international division of labor that the West had “institutionalized by the imperialistic phase of European centered monopoly capitalism.”Footnote 84
Moreover, IDEP scholars criticized the world economic order that disadvantaged Third World countries. Jagdish Saigal, for instance, maintained that the international economic order was based on “power and domination-dependence.”Footnote 85 In other words, the global economic order enabled developed nations to continue their extraction of raw materials from Third World countries. Saigal maintained that the post-Second World War situation exacerbated this exploitation because Europe heavily depended on the natural resources in the Third World for its rebuilding, thus leading to poverty, unemployment, regional imbalances, and inequalities among social groups in the Third World.Footnote 86 For Saigal, the increasing underdevelopment of the Third World was due to “the international expansion of capitalism.” Thus, he explained that it would be incorrect for scholars to accept the notion that the Third World countries were “latecomers on the development scene because they were left out, or by-passed, in the process of development and that underdevelopment [wa]s merely a phase in the evolution of politically and culturally autonomous and isolated societies of the Third World countries.”Footnote 87
Furthermore, IDEP scholars argued that multinational corporations had become avenues for Western countries to continue exploiting Third World nations. At the end of the 1960s, for example, Girvan noted that multinational corporations had become “the most dynamic form of capitalist organization and by far the most important set of institutions influencing both national and international economic life in the capitalist world.”Footnote 88 For Girvan, knowledge of the role of multinational corporations was vital to understanding the continued economic inequality gaps between the West and the Third World despite the attainment of “independence.”
The work of IDEP economists was not without critics.Footnote 89 Some argued they overemphasized external causes of underdevelopment and overstated the feasibility of delinking. The success of East Asian economies like South Korea challenged the rigidity of the “core-periphery” model and its implication that countries could not develop within global capitalism. African political economists like Thandika Mkandawire and Claude Ake also argued that a narrow focus on North-South inequality obscured South-South exploitation and the complicity of African elites, thereby neglecting class struggle within African societies. Later critics contended that IDEP economists ignored gender as a vital part of political economy, with some of these critiques published in the very presses that IDEP scholars like Atta Mills helped establish at CODESRIA.Footnote 90 Taken together, these critiques illuminate the contested nature of radical economic thought in Africa and reinforce the argument that IDEP was a site of lively intellectual engagement rather than doctrinal uniformity.
The Presence of Latin America and the Caribbean
Building on these critiques of inherited colonial models and global inequalities, IDEP intellectuals espoused a particular vision of development economics that connected Africa to Latin America. They compared the two continents because both occupied the periphery of a North Atlantic-centered capitalist economic order, and they argued that this shared position made the comparison especially instructive. For these scholars, the central problem was largely empirical: what kinds of studies should be undertaken, and what policy changes could effectively transform these economies?
The circulation of social and economic ideas from Latin America and the Caribbean influenced IDEP’s orientation. While anti-imperialist intellectuals from diverse colonies met and exchanged ideas, most of these engagements occurred in the metropole. Consequently, intellectual networks rarely existed among scholars of peripheral regions.Footnote 91 However, the UN, through its various bodies such as the Conference on Trade and Development, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and UNESCO, created an avenue for a vibrant exchange of ideas between Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.Footnote 92
Nonetheless, it was universities and institutions in the Western capitals that facilitated the flow of ideas amongst economic-social scientists in the peripheral regions. For example, the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and its founding director, Dudley Seers, a British developmental economist, played a vital role in the transfer of economic and social ideas from ECLAC to Africa and Asia. Many Latin American intellectuals exposed their IDS colleagues to dependency theories, and they used IDS’s bulletin to spread their ideas. Many Asians and Africans attended IDS.Footnote 93 Indeed, before coming to IDEP in 1972, Obeng was a fellow at IDS from 1970 to 1972, where he shaped and was shaped by the institute’s intellectual nature.Footnote 94
Similarly, Amin, and by extension IDEP, collaborated with ECLAC, which enabled the exchange of ideas between Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.Footnote 95 IDEP became the intellectual home for prominent ECLAC scholars, including Silva Michelena, Braun, and Girvan. In 1972, IDEP organized a “Conference on development strategies: The experience of Africa and Latin America” in collaboration with the Institut d’Etudes du Développment Economique et Social (IEDES) and IDS.Footnote 96 The conference was chaired by Amin, Dudley Seers, and Moisés Ikonicoff, a founder of the school of Dependency Theory and director of IEDES. This period of flourishing intellectual exchange brought together scholars from IDS, IEDES, and ECLAC, who advanced diverse approaches to underdevelopment without reaching consensus. Some argued that Africa’s path required modernization and industrialization, while others insisted that Western-style industrialization was misguided and that improving agricultural productivity was more urgent.
At the conference, the participants argued that African policymakers must analyze the cause of underdevelopment from the historical, social, political, and economic outlook instead of simply from “pure economics.” Footnote 97 They asserted that historical analysis would reveal “the pattern of relations between the metropolitan countries and their countries in the colonial era.”Footnote 98 While the impact of colonial development was well-known, the central question was whether postcolonial relations with developed countries truly differed from colonial ones, and if so, how radically. For these scholars, the answer was crucial to understanding Africa’s economic struggles. As they pointed out, independence alone had not guaranteed development: otherwise, why were Latin American countries still underdeveloped after 150 years of independence?Footnote 99
A Focus on Regional Development and Planning
This comparative debate over the legacies of colonialism and the limits of independence resonated with a broader wave of political organizing. The push to rethink economic relations increasingly shaped the agendas of Third World countries, a coalition of which created the Group of 77 (G77) in 1964 to promote their economic interests within the UN. Members of G77 believed their “de jure political colonization ended only to be replaced by a de facto economic colonization.”Footnote 100 Thus, they sought to create a new international economic order to end economic colonialism and dependency through a new interdependent economy. Amoa believed that in Africa the way to such an economy was through regional development. For Amoa, a regional development framework transcended borders created by ex-colonial powers by emphasizing the spatial unit “region” instead of “country.” By the late 1960s and early 1970s, most African leaders were increasingly foregrounding regional planning as a tool of development planning. For example, Ghanaian President Ignatius Acheampong helped establish the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1975. Amoa maintained that these leaders believed that “if development [wa]s regionalized, then the problems of ‘backward region,’ ‘depressed areas,’ etc. w[ould] be solved.”Footnote 101 He also noted these officials assumed that through this approach, the developmental gap between town/country and urban/rural areas would be reduced. Attempting to address these issues, Amoa argued that most African countries were planning to adopt concepts about regional planning from developed countries without scrutiny.Footnote 102
In this context and under Amoa’s leadership, IDEP convened a seminar on “Regionalisation of Development Planning and Regional Planning in Africa” at the University of Ibadan from 16 April to 12 May 1973. The objective was to review and assess the then-present state of knowledge on the problems of regional planning and its possibilities for Africa.Footnote 103 In attendance were government-nominated scholars, international consultants, and government officials, including heads of various regional planning units and the ministry of finance, as well as local academics and leaders.Footnote 104 In its letter of invitation to African governments, IDEP encouraged participants to prepare a short paper reflecting on their regional problems.Footnote 105 Holding the seminar in Nigeria also created space for substantive exchanges between IDEP economists and Nigerian Marxist economists who were interested in Africa’s underdevelopment, albeit through different institutional and political trajectories.Footnote 106 In fact, prominent Nigerian scholars like Claude Ake regularly attended IDEP’s seminars.Footnote 107 This particular gathering exemplified how IDEP functioned as both a UN development agency and a node in the continent-wide foment of critical economic debate, expanding its intellectual reach beyond its Dakar headquarters.
The seminar’s focus on regional planning was not simply a technical exercise; it reflected Amoa’s deeper political and economic convictions about the limitations of Africa’s postcolonial borders and the need to reimagine development on a regional rather than purely national scale. Like Nyerere, who had strongly advocated for regional development, Amoa believed that African countries were too small to flourish and that African borders were politically identified legacies of colonialism. An emphasis on regions would move away from the imposition of and retention of colonial borders. Amoa pushed for regional development because of the empirical recognition that after a decade of independence, colonial borders had created inequalities within regions and countries.
Amoa and Atta Mills pointed out the example of landlocked Malawi, which acted as a labor reserve for South African mining and economic interests, but did not have the same economic prospects as South Africa. They asserted that it was vital to study the different economic relationships between African countries. Concurrently, countries like Angola and Namibia, which were still colonies in the 1970s, had a lot of natural resources, for which reason their colonial rulers vehemently withheld their independence. For Amoa and Atta Mills, the multiplicity and complexity of economic relationships between countries and regions in Africa reinforced the idea that few prospects for African development existed beyond greater regionalization.Footnote 108 Their support for regional cooperation contradicted Nkrumah’s critique that regionalism would fragment the continent and undermine Pan-African unity.Footnote 109 However, they viewed regionalism not as an endpoint, but as the first step to achieving continental unity.
Amoa organized field trips for conference participants, aimed at highlighting the revolutionary potential of regional development projects. He took them to visit Kainji Dam, one of the largest in Africa. Amoa used Kainji, which provides electricity for Nigeria and its neighboring countries, as an example of the role that regional projects could play in eliminating regional inequalities. If African countries could collectively fund hydroelectric power projects, he argued, they could transform the region into an industrial complex. Moreover, the creation of irrigation would provide more employment for farming communities. Although Amoa noted that such projects could have negative impacts on the local communities, he maintained that lessons learned could enable governments to pursue them more effectively. The key, Amoa asserted, was for African countries to be less financially dependent on the West.
Participants provided an evaluation of regional development efforts in Africa based on spatial analysis. Atta Mills noted that some scholars assumed that the spatial location of economic activity determined the character, nature, or success of economic development efforts. He argued, however, that it was the nature of economic development that shaped this spatial system. For example, he maintained that foreign development strategy had led to a system of “predatory” cities located on the coasts. Consequently, transportation networks focused squarely on facilitating the movement of goods and natural resources from these sites, marginalizing those in rural areas. Therefore, Atta Mills posited that any “attempt to alter the spatial structure,” without changing the development strategy, “would be futile as well as … grossly inefficient.”Footnote 110 He urged policymakers and planners to focus on “what strategy w[ould] result in the best spatial organization of economic activity from society’s point of view.”Footnote 111
Moreover, Atta Mills challenged the assumption that tourism formed an important basis for development, urging policymakers to assess its actual impact on local economies. He maintained that the majority of tourist expenditure funded transportation, such as airlines and ships, which were operated by foreigners. Additionally, he stated that even the food that tourists consumed would largely be imported, as in many African countries, local production and consumption tended to prioritize imported consumer goods. While tourist demand might have some positive impact on the economy, Atta Mills further asserted that the increased demand would mostly lead to domestic inflation or an increased import bill.Footnote 112 Most importantly, he explained that tourism was dictated by factors external to one’s economy, such as the state of the economic activity in the metropolitan centers. Consequently, he posited that dependence on tourism could not “lead to a situation where it c[ould] be said that the continuity of the process of production w[as] guaranteed.”Footnote 113
In his concluding assessment of the conference, Amoa noted that members of planning bodies (both national and regional) made them rethink, question, and approach economic development within their respective countries and regions. While there were no ready-made solutions for the problems of underdevelopment, Amoa maintained that the conference made African economists, planners, and policymakers attentive to the importance of generating solutions to its economic dilemmas attuned to their realities.Footnote 114 The fact that African ministers of finance and planning, and heads of ministries for local government lands and mines attended this conference, among other IDEP seminars, demonstrates the wide influence of these Ghanaian intellectuals across the continent.
Indeed, IDEP used seminars to address specific regional economic problems.Footnote 115 For instance, alongside the Pan-African Institute for Development in Douala and the National University of Zaire in Kinshasa, IDEP organized a seminar “on the scope, techniques and problems of economic and social development planning in Central Africa” in 1972. Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of senior government officials, university lecturers, and planning specialists, the seminar focused on four main objectives.Footnote 116 First, the seminar organizers asserted that knowledge of the region’s economic and social structure, especially from 1960 to 1970, offered the proper socio-economic context to generate alternative development strategies to suit the region’s conditions. Second, they insisted that the adaptation of comprehensive planning techniques highlighted the limitations of these methods when applied to the contemporary conditions of countries in the region. Third, they noted the importance of studying specific problems and methods to address planning challenges, particularly in agriculture, employment, finance, and regional economic integration. Lastly, they maintained the importance of examining the institutional framework of planning, including the role of the public sector, particularly concerning management problems of public enterprises.Footnote 117 These objectives were targeted at solving the failures of African development based on the North American approach in the preceding decade by introducing new models of development focused on regionalism. Having the conference in the region expanded IDEP’s audience and added to its growing prominence and influence as a Pan-African institution committed to the intellectual and practical work of African development.Footnote 118
Tensions and Exits: The End of a Radical Journey
The late 1970s and early 1980s were turbulent for IDEP’s scholar-activists, bringing an end to their journeys at the institute. This period saw a move to the right by the Global North, with a global economic downturn setting the stage for the rise of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan. Both leaders’ economic policies privileged privatization over state-controlled enterprises. On 17 April 1975, the Bureau of International Organization Affairs sent a memo entitled “Evaluation of UN Assistance Program in Senegal” to various organizations, including the Department of State, the secretary of state, and the UN. In the memo, the bureau stated that “IDEP, which conducts seminars and research on Economic Development in Africa, has become controversial due to its political orientation and its Marxist director, Samir Amin.”Footnote 119 Amin later stated that he, Amoa, Atta Mills, Obeng, and other IDEP scholars clearly understood that development was “a political question.”Footnote 120 In other words, development entailed highlighting sociohistorical and socioeconomic reasons for Africa’s underdevelopment, which was one of the points they made at the Conference on Development Strategies in 1972.
Amin explained that for them, “the objective was to create an independent centre in Africa for critical thought….We had to identify the main enemy: not the ‘UN system,’…but the hegemonist diplomacy through which the United States sought to make the UN bow to its own objectives.”Footnote 121 By 1980, Amin had been forced out of IDEP because his approach diverged from the institute’s philosophical foundations, but it is unclear who authorized his dismissal. Two years after Amin’s dismissal, Atta Mills and his colleagues wrote a letter to Bertin Borna, the UN system chief in Dakar and a member of IDEP, expressing their concerns about the changing orientation of the institute and that their “sustained efforts to reduce tension and establish an atmosphere of trust and genuine co-operation have been to no avail.”Footnote 122
Atta Mills believed that after Amin’s dismissal in 1980, a decision was made for a “total house cleaning.”Footnote 123 On 28 February 1983, Atta Mills and his colleague, Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua, sent a letter to the office of the UN secretary general with the subject title: “Request for a Review of an Administrative Decision to Separate us from The African Institute for Economic Development and Planning.” They explained that the IDEP administration terminated their contracts without their knowledge, and refused their request for copies of the resolution to terminate their contracts and the minutes of the governing council meeting to “know when, where, and for what reasons the Governing Council passed the resolution.”Footnote 124 Consequently, IDEP radicals became increasingly suspicious that there was “a direct link between the decision to make [them] reapply for [their] posts or be separated from the institute, and the fact that the IDEP teaching staff members unanimously expressed to the higher authorities of IDEP serious grievances against the Direction of the institute,” especially after Amin’s departure.Footnote 125
In the end, the UN ruled in favor of Atta Mills and his colleagues, with the option of either being reinstated or receiving substantial compensation and leaving IDEP. Most of the staff, including Atta Mills, opted for the compensation because they knew that next time IDEP would legally get rid of them.Footnote 126 Atta Mills explained that IDEP would have simply waited a few months until his contract ended, and he would have had no recourse.Footnote 127
Their dismissal was indicative of larger transformations. The early 1980s marked a significant turning point in African economic history. Global inflation, the 1973 oil crisis, high unemployment, the effects of a world recession, the neopatrimonial nature of African economies, inefficient command economies, bloated bureaucracies, and political instabilities collectively worsened Africa’s economic woes. In the late 1970s, African countries made up the majority of the forty-five Least Developed Countries (LDCs).Footnote 128 In 1980, Africa’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) accounted for approximately two percent of global GDP and it had the lowest average per capita income.Footnote 129 Moreover, many African countries had limited medical and health care facilities, experienced high food shortages, high unemployment rates, and high levels of poverty. Furthermore, the deradicalization of IDEP and the marginalization of its Pan-African and leftist paradigm coincided with the emergence of the World Bank and IMF-sponsored Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), aimed at privatization, trade liberalization, and government retrenchment. This moment also exactly coincided with African leaders, policymakers, and economists proposing an Africa-centered model of development and discussing strategies to address the economic crisis. Ultimately, this consolidated into the Lagos Plan.
The Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) was an African-centered response to Africa’s economic crises. In 1980, the OAU and the ECA organized a conference in Lagos, Nigeria, to discuss solutions to Africa’s economic problems. The following year, they published the LPA for Economic Development of Africa. They proposed specific economic solutions for the different countries within the continent, arguing that African countries faced diverse conundrums necessitating specific targets even within countries. Thus, they argued that a one-size-fits-all solution would not work.Footnote 130 They also sought to reduce Africa’s dependence on the West by maximizing Africa’s resources. The LPA was divided into thirteen major themes, including agriculture, science, and technology.Footnote 131 IDEP scholars commended LPA for its self-reliant development strategy. However, they criticized it for being a “classical plan for development by way of greater integration in the world economy,” and for its belief that multinationals would be able to use Africa’s resources to develop Africa’s economies.Footnote 132
Concurrently, the capitalist world was also consolidating its approach into what would become SAPs. In 1981, the year that the LPA was published, Elliot Berg produced a report for the World Bank entitled “Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Plan for Action.” This document, commonly referred to as the Berg report, proposed that African countries adopt economic liberalization. This approach limited government economic regulations and restrictions in favor of greater participation by private and foreign companies. Whereas the LPA promoted internal African self-reliance economic policies, the Berg report advanced policies of increased international trade with non-African countries, especially Western nations. In the end, the Berg report superseded the LPA, partly because it did not have the financial and global stature to stave off structural adjustments. Consequently, many Africans view the 1970s and 1980s as the continent’s lost decades.
Ultimately, the expulsion of radical scholars from IDEP can be interpreted as a microcosm of Africa’s constrained position within the international economic order, where efforts to envision alternative development strategies, especially those with anti-imperialist and socialist orientations, were increasingly suppressed by the neoliberal approach to development. IDEP intellectuals’ emphasis on development as a political question rooted in the exploitative nature of European colonialism and imperialism clashed with neoliberal policies of privatization and the rollback of state-led economic initiatives. The forced departure of IDEP radicals speaks to the combined power of Western internationalism and neoliberal development ideology. By the end of the 1970s, the triumph of neoliberalism was a fait accompli and rendered IDEP’s insistence on alternative Pan-African and leftist pathways to Africa’s development increasingly untenable.
Conclusion
Kwame Nkrumah argued that one of the main reasons Africa was underdeveloped was because foreign corporations controlled most of its trade and natural resources. He noted that it was nearly impossible for African countries to obtain favorable aid terms to galvanize industrialization. Further, most African nations depended on a single export commodity like cocoa or copper. As a result, if the international cocoa marketing board, for example, manipulated the prices, it could profoundly affect Ghana’s economy. Based on these constraints, most African countries signed economic deals that significantly favored foreign entities. Consequently, Nkrumah described the postcolonial era as neocolonial, the last stage of imperialism. By 1966, he was overthrown in a CIA-supported military coup.
Nonetheless, Ghanaian intellectuals influenced by these ideas—Cadman Atta Mills, Kwame Amoa, and Tony Obeng, all of whom also operated on the neo-Marxist assumptions of the dependency school—found an intellectual and political home at IDEP in Dakar. At IDEP, they foregrounded a political understanding of development in their scholarship at a time when Africa was experiencing economic stagnation. Their endeavors reveal that while Nkrumah’s overthrow had major political repercussions in Ghana and elsewhere, the coup caused some Ghanaian intellectuals to adopt and adapt his concept of economic neocolonialism alongside the ideas of the Latin American dependency school to explain Africa’s underdevelopment.
Alongside other scholar-activists, Atta Mills, Amoa, and Obeng worked to shift development away from a purely technocratic idea into a political debate. Treating development as a political problem meant foregrounding Europe’s economic exploitation of Africa, the retention of colonial borders, and the imposition of Western economic models as a core part of their scholarship. They argued that Africa’s development required African policymakers and government officials to view development through a socioeconomic and political lens instead of seeing the continent’s economic conundrums merely as technocratic problems whose solutions lay in assistance from the West. Moreover, they shaped development discourses in Africa and laid the foundation for important Pan-African centers, including CODESRIA and Environmental Development Action in the Third World, that emerged from IDEP. CODESRIA, for example, would play a leading role in publishing and disseminating research about Africa on a global scale. Today, it stands as the leading Pan-African research organization in Africa.
Yet, Ghanaian economists approached their research and political activism in diverse ways that influenced their outlook and those of their colleagues. Atta Mills examined how certain economic activities, and especially tourism, benefited foreign entities more than those in Africa. His analysis differed in both content and political consequences from Amoa’s, who was instead interested in assessing how the long history of Europe’s economic exploitation of Africa underscored the then-ongoing unequal economic relations between the two continents. On the other hand, Obeng investigated how North American intellectual and ideological foundations continued to determine the agendas of development administrations, which harbored many misconceptions about the nature and causes of Africa’s underdevelopment. These differing outlooks, taken together, offered productive and relevant explanations for Africa’s economic issues.
While Ghanaian social scientists gave IDEP a more explicit political orientation and helped radicalize development work, there was a clash between idealism and political reality. Their predominant focus on external forces to explain Africa’s economic predicament overlooked the ways that internal factors, including postcolonial African corruption and the neopatrimonial state in Africa, equally contributed to the continent’s crises. Despite their shortcomings, their work reminds us of a moment in history when leftist African economists refuted the dominant, anti-political, ahistorical, and simplistic Western account of Africa’s underdevelopment and urgently searched for explanations and solutions.
Acknowledgements
My conversations with Ayi Kwei Armah in Senegal in 2018 sparked my interest in IDEP. I am thankful to IDEP archivist Antonin Diouf for his assistance and to Khadija Diedhiou, Bamba Ndiaye, Maria Ndiaye, Ato Kwamena Onoma, and Fatou Thioune for their support and company during my trip. This article was based on my dissertation, so I am grateful to all the people who have provided me with invaluable feedback, including Sean Hanretta, Martha Biondi, David Schoenbrun, Miles Larmer, Terri Barnes, Sandra Greene, Kwasi Konadu, Musifiky Mwanasali, Russell Rickford, Shobana Shankar, and Jeremy Prestholdt. Special thanks to Madison Alan-Lee, Hermann von Hesse, and Afua Quarshie for their thorough edits and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. I am indebted to the Social Science Research Council and the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University for the generous financial support.
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