African socialism is a belief in sharing economic resources in a "traditional" African way, as distinct from classical socialism. Many African politicians of the 1950s and 1960s professed their support for African socialism, although definitions and interpretations of this term varied considerably. This is due to the fact that African socialism has not been the product of one single thinker. One example of a definition of African socialism was phrased as a metaphor by de Graft Johnson, from the University of Ghana in 1962. His definition of African socialism was that “the principle of the State as a father, which is the basis of socialism, is what we have here in our clans or tribes which are in fact extended families. In our society, the collective wealth of the extended family is used for the welfare of the family as a whole. The extended families take on the functions of social insurance, and if a member of the family falls into debt, all the others help him to pay it; if he is ill, they look after him; if there is a bright boy in the family whom the immediate parents cannot afford to educate, the others help in educating him. Property, especially land, often belongs to the whole extended family. There are abuses in the extended family system, but its basic pattern, when enlarged to embrace the state, is virtually what is meant by socialism.”

George Ayittey (born 1945) is a Ghanaian economist, author and president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington DC. He is a professor at American University, and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has championed the argument that "Africa is poor because she is not free", that the primary cause of African poverty is less a result of the oppression and mismanagement by colonial powers, but rather a result of modern oppressive native autocrats. He also goes beyond criticism to advocate for specific ways to address the abuses of the past and present; specifically he calls for democratic government, debt reexamination, modernized infrastructure, free market economics, and free trade to promote development.

Ayittey holds a B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Ghana, Legon, an M.A. from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba. He has taught at Wayne State College and Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He held a National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution in 1988-89, and then joined The Heritage Foundation as a Bradley Resident Scholar. He founded The Free Africa Foundation in 1993, to serve as a catalyst for reform in Africa. In 2008 Dr. Ayittey was listed by Foreign Policy as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" who "are shaping the tenor of our time". He lives in Lorton, Virginia.

Yuri Nicholas Maltsev (Russian: Юрий Николаевич Мальцев) born in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia, is an Austrian school economist and economic historian. He is a Professor of Economics at the Carthage College in Wisconsin and is a Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

Yuri Maltsev graduated from Moscow State University with a Master of Arts in History and Social Sciences (1973) and received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Labor Economics from the Institute for Labor Research in Moscow (1980). Dr. Maltsev held, over a fifteen-year period, various teaching and research positions in Moscow, Russia. Before moving to the U.S. in 1989, he was a member of a team of Soviet economists that worked on President Gorbachev's reforms package of perestroika at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a Program Director of the International Center and a Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC.

Dr. Maltsev has appeared on PBS Newshour, CNN, C-Span, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Market, National Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio and Danish, British, Lithuanian, Russian, Spanish, and Finnish television and radio programs. Most recently he was a guest on the June 8, 2010 episode of The Glenn Beck Program. In the episode, Beck revealed — and Maltsev confirmed — that reading of "prohibited" and "samizdat" books like Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in the Soviet Union was a crime punishable by jail time.

Huey Percy Newton, (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the youngest of seven children to Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist lay preacher. His parents named him after former Governor of Louisiana Huey Long. In 1945, the family settled in Oakland, California. The Newton family was quite poor and often relocated throughout the San Francisco Bay Area during Newton's childhood. Despite this, he contended that his family was close-knit and that he never went without food and shelter as a child. Growing up in Oakland, Newton stated that "[he] was made to feel ashamed of being black." In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote, "During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire."

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (Xhosa pronunciation: [xoˈliːɬaɬa manˈdeːla]; born 18 July 1918) is a South African politician who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, the first ever to be elected in a fully representative democratic election. Before being elected President, Mandela was a militant anti-apartheid activist, and the leader and co-founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). In 1962 he was arrested and convicted of sabotage and other charges, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela went on to serve 27 years in prison, spending many of these years on Robben Island. Following his release from prison on 11 February 1990, Mandela led his party in the negotiations that led to the establishment of democracy in 1994. As President, he frequently gave priority to reconciliation, while introducing policies aimed at combating poverty and inequality in South Africa.

In South Africa, Mandela is often known as Madiba, his Xhosa clan name; or as tata (Xhosa: father). Mandela has received more than 250 awards over four decades.