By Melvin Kiyimba
You ever notice how most of us don’t even really know what communism is? Like, not in any real way. We’ve never read The Communist Manifesto, never actually looked at what Marx or Engels were trying to say.
We just know it’s something we’re supposed to fear. That fear is passed down like family tradition. You hear it in movies, see it in textbooks, and it gets reinforced in conversations where people nod knowingly but never explain much.
Ask someone to define it and they’ll say something about dictators or failed states. Ask where they learned that and you’ll get a shrug or a story about a school lesson that never went deep.
But if you strip away the fear and look at what communism is trying to do, it’s really just an idea. One that says people should own the work they do.
That wealth should be shared based on what people need rather than who they know or what they were born into. That the community should have a real say in how things run, not just vote every five years and hope the right billionaire wins.
It sounds simple but it’s powerful, especially for people who have always been on the losing end of capitalism.
That’s why the idea scared the West so much. Not because it was cruel, but because it offered poor countries and poor people a different route.
A route that said maybe we don’t need to sell ourselves to survive. Maybe we don’t need foreign investment to build roads. Maybe we can decide for ourselves how to live.
And when people started believing that, when they actually started building systems around it, the pushback came fast and violent.
The first real test of communism on the world stage came in 1917 with the Russian Revolution. Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar and attempted to build a society based on Marxist principles.
No aristocracy, no landlords, no capitalist class. They pulled Russia out of World War I, redistributed land to peasants, and placed factories under worker control.
It wasn’t perfect. There was a brutal civil war, and after Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took over and hardened the system.
Under Stalin, the USSR industrialised rapidly, bringing electricity, schools, healthcare, and modern transport to a vast territory, but at the cost of political repression, forced collectivisation, and purges that took millions of lives.
That’s the part we always hear about.
What we don’t hear as often is that by the 1950s, the Soviet Union had gone from a semi feudal empire to the second most powerful country on Earth.
It defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, launched the first satellite into space in 1957, and by the 1960s was providing free education and healthcare to its entire population.
The model inspired revolutions across the world. Cuba in 1959. Vietnam in 1975. Angola and Mozambique in the mid 1970s.
Each one was a blow to Western dominance, and each was met with either war, sanctions, or assassination attempts.
Look at China. Before 1949, the country was broken. It had been humiliated by colonial powers for over a century from the Opium Wars with Britain to the brutal Japanese invasion during World War II.
Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party led a revolution that ended that cycle. They overthrew the corrupt Nationalist government, redistributed land to peasants, and launched mass literacy and health campaigns.
Under Mao, life expectancy in China rose from 35 in 1949 to over 65 by the late 1970s. Illiteracy fell from over 80 percent to less than 20 percent.
Rural health clinics, women’s emancipation, and mass education became part of the national fabric. Yes, the Great Leap Forward was a disaster. Millions died due to famine and poor planning.
But to only focus on that is to ignore the massive structural transformation that allowed China to become what it is today.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping introduced what he called Socialism with Chinese characteristics. He opened up the economy to limited market reforms while keeping state control over key sectors.
It was a gamble that paid off. Between 1980 and 2020, China lifted over 800 million people out of poverty according to the World Bank. It became the world’s largest manufacturing hub.
It controls vast supply chains, leads in green technology, and is challenging US global dominance not with bombs, but with infrastructure, trade, and diplomacy.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative now stretches across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, connecting 150 countries through roads, rail, and fiber optics.
Meanwhile, the West is still selling the same broken idea that capitalism can be humane if we just call it something new. Stakeholder capitalism. Green capitalism. Inclusive growth.
These terms sound progressive, but they are marketing, not solutions. Stakeholder capitalism is supposed to consider the interests of all involved, employees, communities, the planet.
But look around. Amazon workers still get fired for organising. Oil companies are still destroying Indigenous land. Green capitalism claims to solve climate change, but still depends on profit and extraction.
It sells you electric cars while cobalt miners in Congo work in horrific conditions for pennies.
Capitalism cannot stop exploiting. It is built on it. It needs cheap labor. It needs debt. It needs inequality to function. The problem isn’t a few greedy people. It’s the system itself. And every time someone has tried to create an alternative, they have been crushed.
In Africa, this pattern is even clearer. Patrice Lumumba in Congo wanted a self-determined path. After independence in 1960, he leaned toward the Soviet Union for support when the West tried to keep control over Congo’s vast mineral wealth.
The CIA labeled him a threat and helped engineer his capture and assassination in 1961. The country was handed over to Mobutu, a dictator who ruled for over 30 years with Western blessing while multinational companies bled the country dry.
Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso rejected foreign aid and focused on self-reliance. He launched vaccination drives, planted millions of trees to fight desertification, outlawed forced marriages, and promoted local production.
Within four years, his country went from one of the poorest in the world to nearly food self-sufficient. In 1987, he was assassinated in a coup led by Blaise Compaoré, widely believed to have had backing from France.
Amílcar Cabral in Guinea Bissau and Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique were both inspired by socialist ideas and fought for liberation.
They were assassinated before they could finish what they started. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the first African country to gain independence, pushed for Pan Africanism and socialist development.
He was overthrown in a coup supported by Western powers in 1966 after he criticised American imperialism.
These men weren’t saints. But they all shared a dream. A free Africa, guided by its people, not its former colonisers. That dream often included socialism or communism, not because they were obsessed with ideology, but because they understood that capitalism would never let Africa breathe.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us with questions we need to ask out loud. Why are we still being told what to think about systems we’ve never truly experienced? Why is it that every time a country dares to try a different way, it gets sanctioned, invaded, or sabotaged? And more importantly, why do we still believe that we only have one option?
Africa has the youngest population in the world, the richest resources, and a deep history of community centered life. We don’t have to copy the East or the West.
But we do have the right to choose what works for us. Whether that’s socialism, communism, a hybrid, or something entirely new. What matters is that we choose it ourselves.
Without fear. Without manipulation. Without permission.
Because maybe the real threat to the system isn’t communism. Maybe the real threat is an Africa that finally stops asking for approval and starts building a future on its own terms.