The untold history of African socialism after independence—and how it became a useful tool for capitalist interlopers.

In the mid-twentieth century, skilled workers were seen as the keys to economic development. For newly independent African countries, this was a formidable challenge: to build a thriving economy, they needed an educated labor force. As it turns out, that wasn’t their only obstacle.

Ambition and Adjustment reveals how responses to this human-capital problem from the political left and right converged in unlikely ways to block Africa’s postcolonial progress. Focusing on nation-building projects in Zambia and Tanzania, Priya Lal recounts how the first generations of Africa’s professional class shouldered great expectations from both sides—from foreign planners demanding economic growth and from local socialists decrying higher education and professionalization as wasteful and elitist. When African development later stalled, international institutions like the World Bank took up parts of both narratives, justifying structural-adjustment programs that defunded African universities and hospitals under the guise of socialism. Indeed, Lal shows that the neoliberal austerity in the 1990s was packaged as an artifact of Africa’s socialist narratives from the 1960s.

By unearthing this forgotten history, Ambition and Adjustment upends traditional accounts of postcolonial development—and how African states were formed not from one economic system or another, but by the conflicts between the two.