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.

Featured Posts

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.

Read More

ELITE AFRICA PROJECT DATABASE

Domains of Power

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Asuming, Patrick Opoku, Lotus Gyamfuah Osei-Agyei, and Jabir Ibrahim Mohammed. "Financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa: Recent trends and determinants." Journal of African Business 20, no. 1 (2019): 112-134.

The paper conducts a comparative analysis of financial inclusion in 31 Sub-Saharan African countries using data from the global Findex database. The authors find that while the aggregate level of financial inclusion has increased significantly between 2011 and 2014, there are variations in both the level and rates of improvement among the countries. They also find that individual-level covariates (age, education, gender and wealth), macroeconomic variables (growth rate of GDP and presence of financial institutions) and Business Freedom are significant predictors of financial inclusion. Their findings, according to them suggest that financial inclusion policies should target key populations like women and young people.

Source: Adapted from article's abstract

Asuming, Patrick Opoku, Lotus Gyamfuah Osei-Agyei, and Jabir Ibrahim Mohammed. Financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa

This is some text inside of a div block.

The paper conducts a comparative analysis of financial inclusion in 31 Sub-Saharan African countries using data from the global Findex database. The authors find that while the aggregate level of financial inclusion has increased significantly between 2011 and 2014, there are variations in both the level and rates of improvement among the countries.

Economic

Lloyd, W. 2018. "South Africa’s White Entrepreneurs: An Evolution from Opportunity to Necessity". In: Dana, LP., Ratten, V., Honyenuga, B. (eds) African Entrepreneurship. Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73700-3_12

White Capital’, encompassing both the tangible and intangible value held by that sector of the population, in its application to the South African Entrepreneurial environment, has gone through a drastic change over time. Characterised as Opportunity Entrepreneurship in the decades preceding 1994, to what would be largely defined as Necessity Entrepreneurship since the new Democracy prevailed. Defined by its history of struggle against racism and discrimination under Apartheid, in the present-day South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, with a strong commitment to human rights and respect for diversity. However, White individuals continue to be more skilled and attain higher education levels than their Black counterparts, and therefore, are more likely to seize business opportunities. South Africa needs increased transfer of these skills and knowledge from the privileged communities to the poorer Black communities, to ensure long-term economic growth and stability in the country.

Source: Abstract

Lloyd, W. South Africa’s White Entrepreneurs

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The author examines the evolution of South Africa's white entrepreneurs in South African society.

Economic
Political

Kandeh, Jimmy D. "Ransoming the state: elite origins of Subaltern terror in Sierra Leone", Review of African Political Economy, 1999. 26:81, 349-366, DOI: 10.1080/03056249908704398

Elite practices that valorised pillage, massified society, banalised violence and ‘sobelised’ the army are central to understanding the tragedy of subaltern terror in Sierra Leone. The appropriation of lumpen violence and thuggery by the political class undermined security and paved the way for the political ascendancy of armed marginals. By heavily recruiting thugs, criminals and rural drifters into national security apparatuses, incumbent political elites sowed the seeds of their own political demise as well as that of the state. Socially uprooted and politically alienated, lumpenised youth are inherently prone to criminal adventurism and when enlisted in the army are more likely to become ‘sobels’ or renegade soldiers. This article situates the transformation of praetorian violence from a tool of political domination to a means of criminal expropriation in the engendering context of elite parasitism and repression.

Source: Article's abstract

Kandeh, Jimmy D., Ransoming the state

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This article situates the transformation of praetorian violence from a tool of political domination to a means of criminal expropriation in the engendering context of elite parasitism and repression.

Political
Coercive

Labonte, Melissa T. "From patronage to peacebuilding? Elite capture and governance from below in Sierra Leone", African Affairs, Volume 111, Issue 442, January 2012, Pages 90–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adr073

Sierra Leoneans have long seen their governance institutions as unresponsive and inefficient. Following the civil war, the government adopted a plan of fiscal, administrative, and political decentralization to mitigate widespread corruption, enhance accountability, and reverse the over-concentration of central authority in Freetown. The key institutions of decentralization, the chieftaincy system and local councils, play important but uneven decision-making, management, and implementation roles, making the process prone to elite capture. This article analyses the peacebuilding implications resulting from variation in strategies to counter elite capture in decentralization. It argues that the UN's variation of this approach, which focuses on relations between elites, has yielded few positive results. A second variation, employed mainly by international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focuses on rebalancing asymmetries between elites and non-elites, and has been more effective in sensitizing non-elites to demand good governance and accountability. The challenges of redressing power imbalances between chiefdom actors and non-elites remain, and in addition to continued, robust oversight of local councils, the chieftaincy system requires deeper reforms to guard against further marginalization of non-elites and to achieve liberal peacebuilding goals.

Source: Article's abstract

Labonte, Melissa T. From patronage to peacebuilding?

This is some text inside of a div block.

This article analyses the peacebuilding implications resulting from variation in strategies to counter elite capture in decentralization. It argues that the UN's variation of this approach, which focuses on relations between elites, has yielded few positive results. A second variation, employed mainly by international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focuses on rebalancing asymmetries between elites and non-elites, and has been more effective in sensitizing non-elites to demand good governance and accountability.

Economic
Political
Religious/Spritual
Ritual

Otusanya, Julius O. 2012. "An investigation of the financial criminal practices of the elite in developing countries: Evidence from Nigeria", Journal of Financial Crime, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 175-206. https://doi.org/10.1108/13590791211220449

Contemporary literature has paid scholarly attention to financial criminal practice from a variety of competing perspectives. However, this paper seeks to encourage reflections on some questionable practices of the political and economic elite which increase their capital accumulation but harm citizens.

Source: Article abstract culled from Emerald.com

Otusanya, Julius O. 2012. An investigation of the financial criminal practices of the elite in developing countries

This is some text inside of a div block.

This paper seeks to encourage reflections on some questionable practices of the political and economic elite which increase their capital accumulation but harm citizens.

Economic
Political

Ojukwu, Chris C., and Shopeju, J. O. "Elite Corruption and The Culture of Primitive Accumulation In 21st Century Nigeria". International Journal of Peace and Development Studies. Volume 2. Page 15-24. November 2010.

Nigeria is often perceived as the ‘giant of Africa’ by most Africans, perhaps, because of its remarkable achievements in the continent in the past three decades. Today, the same country is looked upon by the rest of the world as a ‘crippled’ giant, a veritable modern wasteland, a nation where corruption is extolled as a national culture, tradition; as a nation of business scams and fraudulent investment and contractual opportunities. The paper argues that the situation became worse during Olusegun Obasanjo’s eight years administration 1999 to 2007 when his government tactically opened the floodgate of elite corruption and primitive accumulation, which subsequently brought the country to its knees.

Source: Article

Ojukwu, Chris C., Shopeju, J. O. Elite Corruption and The Culture of Primitive Accumulation In 21st Century Nigeria

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The paper looks at the trajectory of corruption in Nigeria

Economic
Political
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