Paper short abstract:

The paper explores Africa’s distinctive “culturalist” path to engage the international political economy, and reveals ways that Africapitalism and Ubuntu economics are hybrid international political-economic models that draw from local, national, and regional African contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Africapitalism calls for the empowerment of Africans with the view that Africa can only be developed by Africans themselves and not through aid and handouts from developed nations. Ubuntu Business asserts that humans' very beings derive from each other's. Both business and economic philosophies draw from African humanist economic principles and invoke African culture to be a key driver of change in the continent. Are Africapitalism and Ubuntu Business alternative, hybrid, international political economics (IPE's) that Africans are forging in response to contemporary globalization? Which is likely to enhance, contradict, undermine, or complicate the pan-African project, and how does each engage with neoliberal Africa Rising and Pan Africanist worldviews? Answering these questions, the paper explores Africa's distinctive "culturalist" path to engage the international political economy, and reveals ways that Africapitalism and Ubuntu economics are hybrid international political-economic models that draw from local, national, and regional African contexts. This customized approach to African international political economy dovetails the models of China's "market-socialism" or Latin America's "21st C Socialism" to reveal ways that political economies are derived from the perspectives and subject conditions of the peoples and communities that are the object of the political-economic practice and policies. Using Nigeria's Africapitalism and South Africa's Ubuntu Business as case studies, the paper objective serves to reconcile this tension between neoliberal Africa Rising economic policy narratives and Pan African economics presenting their convergence as a viable Third Way route both of which engages the international political economy as well as contributes to global development.