Africa’s receptiveness to Western fashionable concepts and theories appears to have suffered little from repeated demonstration of inappropriateness. The list of inapt imports is long and quite familiar to the older generation of Africanist academics who had a hand in fashioning and disseminating them. It began with the imperative of the “nation-state” that was to be forged in the process of national integration and institution building. Economic development was to come via industrialization, “import substitution” and diversification of exports, and social modernization would follow the passing of traditional society. Political development had a complex formula: “constitutionalism” and “rational legitimacy,” “interest articulation, aggregation and representation,” “functionally specific” bureaucratic institutions, and “prescriptive” as opposed to “ascriptive” recruitment.