ABSTRACT
The latter part of the 20th century turned out to be the most difficult era for many African states since slavery and colonization. The continent as a whole witnessed several human disasters which obviously could have been prevented had attention been paid to the crisis of economy and society embedded in de-colonization. In contradistinction to the modernization mode of thought, radical scholars challenged the thesis of traditionalism which according to them ignores the historical patterns of global capitalist development. Increasing numbers of sociologists, and scholars in other related disciplines, are concerned about the deteriorating agrarian conditions in the Third World. Agrarian transformation theories have been equally dominated by perspectives informed by the neo-classical economic model. Paul Baran's work in the early 1950s consistently challenged the neo-classical modernization model of development. Baran's critique of the neo-classical perspective inspired several radical researches in the late 1960s and 1970s.
