# Dependent independence  
The fact that political independence was not followed by the economic independence Kwame Nkrumah and other nationalist leaders had predicted was to present major setbacks for Africa's position in the world. Even before the new national flags were raised, Cold War ideological contestations and a global arms race were fuelling schisms and proxy wars within Africa's movements for political independence and liberation, militarizing and corrupting African politics and forestalling more revolutionary possibilities.  
Over half a century later, Africa's condition is attributed as much to national political and authoritarian regimes which, women observe, have remained dominated by men and their masculine views of the world. During the 1970s to early 1980s it became clear that African nations were being incorporated into the global economy on unfavourable terms. World systems and dependency theories treated imperialism as the global expansion of capitalism. Samir Amin  
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[^0]:    1 Two of Fanon's essays are particularly pertinent here: The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness and On National Culture (originally presented in 1959). Both are available in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.  
(1977) was among the radical thinkers who developed critiques of a world system that had set Africa on a path of neo-colonialism (Nkrumah, 1965). Theories of class struggle turned attention to the dynamics of class exploitation in African societies and to social movement studies that would generate increasingly critical analyses of capitalist modernization and its effects on Africa (Rodney, 1980, pp. 18-41; Padmore, 1971; Shivji, 1974).