why did socialism did not spread with popularity during the cold war in africa?

[egonkrenz]

Communism or socialism spread like a wildfire in Europe. apart from the two big ones Angola and Mozambique. given the climate of poverty why was the idea of a communist system not more popular in Africa? why did the u.s.s.r not influence these countries more?

[cyu]

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

(...tip of the iceberg)

[Tim Cornelis]

It did though. Many anti-colonial movements claimed allegiance to socialist thought, and some to Stalinism. Of course, it was not communism — it was a sort of communitarianist approach to capitalist development, or capitalism with socialist trappings (bourgeois socialism).

Angola, Madagascar, Somalia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Benin, Congo-Kinshasa, Zimbabwe all had regimes during the Cold War that claimed to be either 'Marxist-Leninist' (Stalinist) or some African nationalist socialist system.

The reason no more authentic socialisms developed is presumably because of low capitalist development, and the proletariat being but a comparatively small percentage of the population in most of Africa.

[Hrafn]

I made a little map of all countries in Africa which have had heads of state / regimes which self-identified as some form of "socialist".

May have missed one or two.

http://i.imgur.com/IzxqoDL.png

[Tim Cornelis]

^
I think it's important to distinguish between the socialism that was liberal-oriented, and parallels Western social-democracy (e.g. Ghanese National Democratic Congress), and the socialism that rode the wave of Cold War socialism, even when not explicitly identifying as Marxist-Leninist (e.g. Ghana's Kwame's Convention People's Party).