When Milton Obote was inaugurated as Uganda’s first prime minister in 1962, the future of the country that Winston Churchill had called ‘the Pearl of Africa’ looked brighter than ever. Independence from Britain had come with a carefully constructed federal constitution that gave some internal autonomy to the ancient kingdom of Buganda and its king, while Obote and his government could still maintain effective control of a country with diverse ethnic and interest groups.

Independence brought democratic institutions at a time when the economy was booming. The ‘cash crop revolution’ involving cotton and coffee that started with the construction of the railway from Uganda to the Kenyan port at Mombasa in 1901 had spread rapidly during the following half-century. In the first decade of independence, coffee exports more than doubled.

Socialism is one alternative for Africa. Although pronounced dead at the end of the twentieth century when its struggle with capitalism was formally ended with the former being forced to surrender to the later, the persistent and worsening maladies of capitalism as a system must lead to further discussion of socialisms. Founded on the basis that nothing substantially good can come from capitalism, a system based on exploitation, wage theft, burn out, plunder, and ecological crises on a world scale, socialism promises a link between a more social world and the good society. Two of its defining features are the redistribution of land and the nationalization of industry. Does this cluster of options constitute a firmer and more reliable path to inclusive African development? Using examples such as the land reform in Zimbabwe, the chapter argues that, although the Marxist critique of capitalism has been relentless and long-standing (especially its rejection of capitalism and imperialism), and in many cases quite successful, its analytical reach can be extended and its policy and political alternatives can be reoriented.