NLMs in southern Africa provided for the political aspiration of frustrated nationalists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries to confront settler rule and colonial capitalism. The nature of their struggle took them into espousal of alliances between the petty bourgeoisie, working class, and peasantries, although the political weight of these different classes varied between the movements. As such, they became the locus of progressive tendencies aiming at the realization of democracy, human rights, and socialism, these ideas borrowed from liberating Western traditions (liberalism, Christianity, and nationalism) which, paradoxically, were imported as ideological dimensions of the oppressive practices of settler colonial rule. At the same time, the radicalization of the struggle caused by the rigidity of the settler state was to prompt liberation movements to adopt strategies guided by Marxism-Leninism, which from 1927 had argued for the simultaneity of nationalist and socialist struggle. This did not mean that liberation movements were ‘communist’, as they were regularly accused of being by their Cold Warrior detractors. Rather, it meant that NLM ideologies constituted an uneasy mix of liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism-Leninism. However, once NLMs assumed power, the nationalist and Marxist-Leninist aspects of their ideologies tended to overwhelm (although never entirely extinguish) their liberalism.

The Marxist-Leninist tradition provided a coherent framework for understanding settler societies as simultaneously embodying racial, national, and class oppression. It also brought with it two particular conceptions which were to profoundly influence the post-liberation state: the ideas of the party as the vanguard of historical advance and of the need for the capture of state power.