To this American, some aspects of the Dakar colloquium were curiously nostalgic and unreal. They were reminiscent of the discussions of left-wing intellectuals in the early thirties—in the U.S. at least—when any proposed solution of a pressing social, economic, or political problem had first to be blessed by the appropriate ideological rationale or actually couched in ideological terms. The compulsion to make obeisance to socialist ideology before getting down to discussion of the concrete problems confronting African countries was apparent in many of the addresses. At the same time the discussion of the problems themselves and the solutions proposed frequently bore little relation to socialist ideology. Non-socialists might very well have discussed them in exactly the same terms and come up with the same conclusions or solutions.