Contemporary African Political Economy Series Editor Eunice N. Sahle University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill NC, USA Aim of the Series Contemporary African Political Economy (CAPE) publishes social science research that examines the intersection of political, social, and economic processes in contemporary Africa. The series is distinguished especially by its focus on the spatial, gendered, and cultural dimensions of these processes, as well as its emphasis on promoting empirically situated research. As consultancy-driven work has emerged in the last two decades as the dom- inant model of knowledge production about African politics and economy, CAPE offers an alternate intellectual space for scholarship that challenges theoretical and empirical orthodoxies and locates political and economic processes within their structural, historical, global, and local contexts. As an interdisciplinary series, CAPE broadens the field of traditional political economy by welcoming contributions from the fields of Anthropology, Development Studies, Geography, Health, Law, Political Science, Sociol- ogy and Women’s and Gender Studies. The Series Editor and Advisory Board particularly invite submissions focusing on the following thematic areas: urban processes; democracy and citizenship; agrarian structures, food security, and global commodity chains; health, education, and develop- ment; environment and climate change; social movements; immigration and African diaspora formations; natural resources, extractive industries, and global economy; media and socio-political processes; development and globalization; and conflict, displacement, and refugees. Advisory Board Bertha O. Koda, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Brij Maharaj, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Thandika Mkandawire, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK James Murombedzi, Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa, Senegal John Pickles, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Wisdom J. Tettey, University of British Columbia, Canada More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14915 Rita Kiki Edozie “Pan” Africa Rising The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-Capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business Rita Kiki Edozie McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Contemporary African Political Economy ISBN 978-1-137-59537-9 ISBN 978-1-137-59538-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59538-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946200 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Christopher Scott / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. FOREWORD It was G.W.F. Hegel who once claimed that Africa has no history. The rise of the Ibadan School of history helped to successfully contest this claim. The advanced civilization and history of Egypt also proved impossible for denialists of African history to ignore. Forced by the truth, denialists finally conceded only to turn around and claim that, while “White” Africans were capable, Black Africans were incapable of innovation, leadership, self-rule, and advanced civilization. So, in the case of Egypt, it was “White” Egyptians or “White” Africans in Apartheid South Africa who were the capable Africans. Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop counted this revisionist doctrine in his path-breaking book, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974), where he demonstrated that the Pharaohs in Egypt were, in fact, Black. Africans continue to be inferiorized today. In particular, their way of life, ideas, and values, in short, their culture is the primary source of mainstream explanation of their social conditions justified by mainstream economists as reflecting the poor “human capital” of Africans. First used to describe Black slaves as mere animals and things whose sole use was to help White capital- ists, human capital explanations posit African culture as responsible for the problems of continental Africa and the exclusion and exploitation of Blacks around the world. From this perspective, Blacks, the “deserving poor,” need more Eurocentric education and cast away their culture, which holds them back. But it is not just the mainstream of society that is associated with this bastardization of African culture. The left, on its part, advances the most v vi FOREWORD patronizing form of “African culture”: village life. In this representation of Africa as the lost gemeinschaft in the West, the commons in Africa is naively seen—and often appropriated—as natural reserve, much like how the colonizer saw the relationship between nature and society. Without “decolonizing nature,” so-called Western “progressives” objectify Africa and Africans. Cheikh Anta Diop was appropriately harsh in describing such currents as “the headlong flights of certain infantile leftists” (1974, p. xiv) because it does the continent injustice by misrepresenting it. More fundamentally, this representation by the left diverts attention from major causal mechanisms, in particular imperialism. In his well-known 1986 speech at the International Conference for the Protection of Trees and Forests in Paris, Thomas Sankara, revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, once noted that “This struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannahs.” Yet, the misrepresentation of Africa continues, more recently as “Africa rising.” Styled as a positive spin on Africa, in contrast to the view of “Africa as a hopeless continent,” this view is defended and extended mainly by banks, neoliberal think tanks, and investors of mostly foreign origin. “Africa on the rise” serves foreign interests by celebrating growth achieved through the exploitation of Black people, adoring growth that destroys African waters, forests, and biodiversity, and endorses growth processes that tear society apart through the eviction of the poor, and the exclusion of the masses from the economic process. Short-term in nature, this type of growth entails no structural change (Obeng-Odoom 2015; Nega and Schneider 2016). If at all, it is a case of “reprimarisation”1 or the rolling back of the little industrial base for greater expansion of the minerals sector. The very calculation of the so-called rise, is highly contentions, often centered on inaccurate data and manipulated history that suggests that Africa has never experienced growth when, in fact, Africa has always risen, perhaps even more in the days of greater care by the African state—as we know from Morten Jerven’s book, Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong (2015). There have been many alternatives to this narrative, but they are prob- lematic too. Consider the post-development view. On the surface it looks radical, but in practice it merely equates African culture to village living. Others such as homo culturalis are similarly problematic. A third is region- alism, but that is similarly Eurocentric. Europeanist views are no longer persuasive, certainly not when eminent Europeans and European scholars FOREWORD vii such as Ivan Berend conclusively show the horrifying structural problems in this region in the book, Europe in Crisis: Bolt from the Blue? (2013). Together with the seemingly better life in Asia generated by the “East Asian model” and unconditional aid, Africans have recurrently been advised to go East. Whether “looking East” amounts to looking forward, however, is contentious. As Robert Collins (2006) reminds us of the painful “African Slave Trade to Asia and the Indian Ocean Islands” and, in recent times, many Asianists and Africanists have shown in publications such as the African Review of Economics and Finance (vol. 5, no. 1; vol. 8, no. 1), Asian “generosity” may not be as benign as it appears. Chinese investment in Africa, for example, is often extolled for being benign and non-interventionist, but we know from the work of Lloyd G. Adu Amoah (2014) in Journal of Asian and African Studies that it is, in fact, a “Chinese imperium,” seeking to project Chinese