It was set up to provide an international forum for moderate socialists in Africa, and proclaimed that "democratic socialism" was the only possible path to African development.
[2] The decision to set it up was taken at the 1976 Geneva meeting of the Socialist International by a group of African social democrats led by Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.
[3] At the time vice-president of the SI, he was "entrusted" with the task of setting up a local organisation that would be free of accusations of any affiliation to Moscow.
[5] Senghor was unable to attract all the continent's socialists; prominent exceptions included Zimbabwe and Namibia.
The Soviet press declared the union of "bourgeois" parties was dangerous and opportunistic, and that the Socialist Inter-African was "programmed in Western Europe and designed in Dakar and Tunis.