Finally, romantic gloriana in its very admiration of kings, emperors and eminent scholars of the past, is predicated on a respect for hierarchy and stratification, with its capacity to produce historical achievements. Idealised primitivism on the other hand, is predicated on village egalitarianism. Important schools of African thought assert that traditional Africa was classless. Societies without rulers, and certainly without kings, were based on limited class differences and very modest disparities of power between and among the different sub-groups. Julius Nyerere combined this egalitarianism with the fellowship of village life to provide what he regarded as the ancestry of his own brand of socialism. Nyerere used the Swahili word “ujamaa” (familyhood) for the fellowship of modern Africa rooted in the ancient virtues of equality and co-operation. As Julius Nyerere once wrote,

[begin quote] We in Africa have no more need of being taught socialism than we have of being taught democracy. Both are rooted in our past, in the traditional society which produced us. [end quote]

President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia’s ideas on Africa’s humanism also include this assumption of equality in African traditional life. Kaunda once described his policy of decentralisation as a form of returning power to the people. He expressed faith in the people’s capacity to exercise power properly, in their natural wisdom as ordinary rural people and in the tradition of egalitarianism in Zambia from pre-colonial days. To some extent Kaunda’s conception of traditional Africa is somewhere between romantic primitivism and romantic gloriana.