The Elite Africa Project is a global network of scholars working to shift how Africa and its elites are understood.

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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to The Elite Africa Project

Watch a video introduction to the project and database.

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Introducing: The Elite Africa Project Database

Learn more about the Elite Africa Project and our Online Database!

Dafe Oputu

Scholar Spotlight: Sishuwa Sishuwa - Part 2

Part 2 of our interview with Zambian historian Sishuwa Sishuwa.

Elite Africa Roundup - 22 November 2024

Uganda's opposition leader abducted, artist Shonibare at Art Basel

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Elite Africa Roundup - 1 November 2024

A big week for art in W. Africa, SA supports ICJ case against Israel

Domains of Elite Power

The mechanics of how power—the essential condition of elite status—is meaningfully generated and exercised

Economic

Economic and business elites

Coercive

Military elites and those in security agencies

Ritual

Royalty, nobles, “traditional” rulers

Aesthetic

Art, literature, music- and media-based elites including new online influencers, clothing designers, architects, etc.

Religious

Religious and spiritual leaders, and intellectual/academic elites

Political

State-based or state-focused elites including international techno/bureaucrats

The Elite Africa Project

is a Canadian-based global network of scholars working to challenge predominant understandings of Africa and its elites.

Both in academia and in wider public discourse, African elites have either been ignored or depicted as grasping and self-interested. This framing perpetuates negative depictions of the continent and its peoples and draws on a simplistic understanding of what power is and how it is wielded. Our work aims to counter these perceptions by initiating global conversations about “who leads” in Africa and how they do so.

We seek to disrupt and renew both academic and public discussions of African leadership, refocusing attention on a wider, qualitatively different set of elites from those that have predominated in the past (such as the parasitic “Big Men” of neo-patrimonial politics).

Burna Boy, Nigerian musician, rapper and songwriter; in 2021, his album Twice as Tall won the Best World Music Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, and he enjoyed back to back Grammy award nominations in 2019 and 2020.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigerian economist, fair trade leader, environmental sustainability advocate, human welfare champion, sustainable finance maven and global development expert. Since March 2021, Okonjo-Iweala has been serving as Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

This project focuses on Africa’s elites, defined as those who operate at the highest level across a range of domains, wield significant power, and possess expert knowledge, skills, and personal strengths that are deployed in strategic, creative, and generative ways. While elites are those who possess the most consequential and powerful agenda-setting and decision-making capacity, Africa’s elites have either been sidelined in many of our analyses or rendered monotonal. When we switch frames to consider the continent as embodying and projecting new, generative forms of power, it changes our view of Africa. It may also change how we understand power itself.

We look at six domains of elite power, from the political to the aesthetic, and ask how we might shift how we think about and study Africa, and how this shift would impact our conceptualization of power and its exercise. Our goal is to contribute to popular conversations about Africa and to highlight the achievements of the astonishing new generation of leaders for a broader public audience.

This website will serve as a hub for collaborative activity by scholars, activists, and practitioners working on Elite Africa and house a searchable database of primary and secondary materials on African elites.

Kofi Annan (1938-2018), Ghanaian-born diplomat, trained in economics, international relations and management; was the first UNSG to be elected from within the ranks of the UN staff itself and served in various key roles before becoming Secretary General.

Namwali Serpell, Zambia award-winning novelist and writer; Recognised early on with the Caine prize, her numerous subsequent awards include the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, one of the world’s richest literary prizes.

Mohammed "Mo" Ibrahim, Sudanese billionaire businessman. He worked for several telecommunications companies, before founding Celtel, which when sold had over 24 million mobile phone subscribers in 14 African countries.

The Elite Africa Project

is a Canadian-based global network of scholars working to challenge predominant understandings of Africa and its elites.

Both in academia and in wider public discourse, African elites have either been ignored or depicted as grasping and self-interested. This framing perpetuates negative depictions of the continent and its peoples and draws on a simplistic understanding of what power is and how it is wielded. Our work aims to counter these perceptions by initiating global conversations about “who leads” in Africa and how they do so.

We seek to disrupt and renew both academic and public discussions of African leadership, refocusing attention on a wider, qualitatively different set of elites from those that have predominated in the past (such as the parasitic “Big Men” of neo-patrimonial politics).

This project focuses on Africa’s elites — those who operate at the highest level across a range of domains, wield significant power, and possess expert knowledge, skills, and personal strengths that are deployed in strategic, creative, and generative ways. When we switch frames to consider the continent as embodying and projecting new, generative forms of power, it changes our view of Africa. It may also change how we understand power itself.

This website is the hub for collaborative activity by scholars, activists, and practitioners working on Elite Africa and will house a searchable database of primary and secondary materials on African elites.

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ELITE AFRICA PROJECT DATABASE

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Hearn, Bruce, Roger Strange, and Jenifer Piesse. “Social Elites on the Board and Executive Pay in Developing Countries: Evidence from Africa.” Journal of World Business : JWB 52, no. 2 (2017): 230–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2016.12.004.

This study applies a new multi-focal actor-centered institution-theoretic approach to examine the association between executive pay and the recruitment of social elites to the board of directors in developing countries. Using a sample of 119 initial public offerings (IPOs) from 17 African stock markets to model this relationship, the results suggest that a higher proportion of elites on the board is associated with lower executive pay. This is moderated by institutional quality; that is, lower institutional quality is associated with more directors drawn from social elites and with higher pay, while the opposite is true in higher-institutional-quality environments. The findings confirm the importance of the social environment within which governance is embedded.

Source: Article abstract

Hearn, Bruce, Roger Strange, and Jenifer Piesse. “Social Elites on the Board and Executive Pay in Developing Countries

This is some text inside of a div block.

This study applies a new multi-focal actor-centered institution-theoretic approach to examine the association between executive pay and the recruitment of social elites to the board of directors in developing countries. Using a sample of 119 initial public offerings (IPOs) from 17 African stock markets to model this relationship, the results suggest that a higher proportion of elites on the board is associated with lower executive pay.

Economic

Nafziger, E. Wayne. Inequality in Africa : Political Elites, Proletariat, Peasants, and the Poor. Cambridge [England] ; Cambridge University Press, 1988.

This study of inequality in Africa, first published in 1988, not only rejected the orthodox approach of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which neglected income distribution and advocated greater external economic reliance, but also the statist Lagos Plan of Action, which supported comprehensive planning, large capital-intensive state firms, and increased government intervention in peasant prices. Wayne Nafziger's political economy analysis shows how the colonial legacy, the contemporary global economic system, and the ruling elites' policies of co-opting labour, favouring urban areas, distributing benefits communally, and spending on education to maintain inter-generational class exacerbate discrepancies between regions, urban and rural areas, and bourgeoisie and workers, even under 'African socialism'. The author's policy discussion eschews technoeconomic solutions, arguing that reducing inequality requires democratising political participation as well as economic control.

Source: Book description

Nafziger, E. Wayne. Inequality in Africa

This is some text inside of a div block.

Wayne Nafziger's political economy analysis shows how the colonial legacy, the contemporary global economic system, and the ruling elites' policies of co-opting labour, favouring urban areas, distributing benefits communally, and spending on education to maintain inter-generational class exacerbate discrepancies between regions, urban and rural areas, and bourgeoisie and workers, even under 'African socialism'.

Economic
Political

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500–1650: Slavery, Commerce, and Elite Formation.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 4 (2019): 805–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000276.

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan. It argues that over the course of the sixteenth century, commercial relations between Deccan ports such as Goa and Chaul, and the Swahili coast, came to be strengthened through the intervention of the Portuguese and their military-commercial system. At the same time, large numbers of African slaves reached the Muslim states in India, especially in the period after 1530, where they played a significant role as military specialists, and eventually as elite political and cultural actors. The shifting geographical dimensions of the African presence in India are emphasized, beginning in western Gujarat and winding up in the Deccan Sultanates. This contrasts markedly with the African experience elsewhere, where the meaning and institutional context of slavery were quite different.

Source: Essay's abstract

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500–1650

This is some text inside of a div block.

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan.

Economic
Coercive
Political

Igoe, Jim. “Becoming Indigenous Peoples: Difference, Inequality, and the Globalization of East African Identity Politics.” African Affairs (London) 105, no. 420 (2006): 399–420. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi127.

Although the term ‘indigenous’ implies a state preceding that which is foreign or acquired, indigenous movements in Africa are a recent phenomenon. Drawing from the author’s research of the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement in the 1990s, this article argues that indigenous identity in Tanzania does not represent miraculously preserved pre-colonial traditions or even a special sort of marginalization. Rather, it reflects the convergence of existing identity categories with shifting global structures of development and governance. Specifically, it reflects a combination of ‘cultural distinctiveness’ and effective strategies of extraversion in the context of economic and political liberalization. The Maasai, who are ‘culturally distinct’, and who have a long tradition of enrolling outsiders in their cause, naturally dominate this movement.

Source: Article's abstract

Igoe, Jim. Becoming Indigenous Peoples

This is some text inside of a div block.

Drawing from the author’s research of the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement in the 1990s, this article argues that indigenous identity in Tanzania does not represent miraculously preserved pre-colonial traditions or even a special sort of marginalization.

Political

Anderson, David M., and Adrian J. Browne. “The Politics of Oil in Eastern Africa.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 369–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2011.573187.

After many years in which the potential for the development of the petroleum industry in eastern Africa has been largely ignored, the last five years has seen a resurgence of interest in oil exploration across the region. Long characterised as a "risky" frontier because of the difficult nature of the region's geology and the volatile character of its politics, the sharp rise in international oil prices, coupled with the difficulties in accessing other supply areas, has altered the prospects for successful commercial development of smaller fields known to exist in the region. The successful discovery of large oil deposits in the Lake Albert region of Uganda has encouraged the industry to view the region more positively, bringing an influx of new and established companies to tender for exploration rights in a wide range of fields covering Puntland, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, Uganda, the DRC, Kenya, and Tanzania. This paper charts the extent of this oil exploration and industry investment in the region over the past decade, and discusses the economic and political implications of significant oil finds for future development. Additional exploitable oil fields may yet be discovered, but if only the Uganda fields are developed this is likely to have a considerable impact of the regional economy and upon relations between neighbouring states.

Source: Article abstract

Anderson, David M., and Adrian J. Browne. The Politics of Oil in Eastern Africa

This is some text inside of a div block.

The successful discovery of large oil deposits in the Lake Albert region of Uganda has encouraged the industry to view the region more positively, bringing an influx of new and established companies to tender for exploration rights in a wide range of fields covering Puntland, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, Uganda, the DRC, Kenya, and Tanzania. This paper charts the extent of this oil exploration and industry investment in the region over the past decade, and discusses the economic and political implications of significant oil finds for future development.

Economic
Political

Melber, Henning. The Rise of Africa’s Middle Class: Myths, Realities and Critical Engagements. 1st ed. Vol. 10. Uppsala; London: Zed Books, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350251168.

Across Africa, a burgeoning middle class has become the poster child for the 'Africa rising' narrative. Ambitious, aspirational and increasingly affluent, this group is said to embody the values and hopes of the new Africa, with international bodies ranging from the United Nations Development Programme to the World Bank regarding them as important agents of both economic development and democratic change. This narrative, however, obscures the complex and often ambiguous role that this group actually plays in African societies. Bringing together economists, political scientists, anthropologists and development experts, and spanning a variety of case studies from across the continent, this collection provides a much-needed corrective to the received wisdom within development circles, and provides a fresh perspective on social transformations in contemporary Africa.

Source: Book description

Melber, Henning. The Rise of Africa’s Middle Class

This is some text inside of a div block.

Bringing together economists, political scientists, anthropologists and development experts, and spanning a variety of case studies from across the continent, this collection provides a much-needed corrective to the received wisdom within development circles, and provides a fresh perspective on social transformations in contemporary Africa.

Economic
Political
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