THE UNORIGINALITY OF AFRICAN SOCIO-POLITICAL THEORIES: A JUSTIFICATION 67 THE UNORIGINALITY OF AFRICAN SOCIO-POLITICAL THEORIES: A JUSTIFICATION PAUL CHINENYE IREGBENU E-mail:iregbenu2002@yahoo.com INTRODUCTION The cradle of colonialism in Africa was at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which saw to the partitioning of Africa among six European nations. The African experience shows that colonialism created for the continent a socio-political situation from which she needed emancipation. Thus, as some Africans began having access to western education, they became armed with the weapons of pen and paper and in turn, sought to extricate their fatherland from the sway of colonialism. This gave rise to African socio-political theories propounded by the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo. This paper sets out to examine the originality of their theories. It is important to note here that originality referred to, is understood as creativity which entails one being the initiator of an idea or a plan. Thus, it follows that to examine the originality of the African socio-political theorists is synonymous to checking whether they are the actual initiators of these theories or whether they adopted them from someone else. Finding this out is the primary objective of this study. To do this, a lucid presentation of these theories is apropos. PHILOSOPHICAL CONSCIENCISM Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) began his move for the emancipation of Africa from the throttlehold of colonialism by criticizing capitalism. “Capitalism", according to him, "is a refined form of feudalism, which in turn is a refined form of slavery.” 1 He posits that capitalism is alien to the traditional African society. The African society, for Nkrumah, has three segments: the traditional, the Western, and the Islamic. These co-exist uneasily; the principles animating them are often in conflict with one another. The traditional segment illustrates how the principles which inform capitalism are in conflict with the