Paper short abstract:

This paper examines attitudes and beliefs of petty traders during the height of Equatorial Guineas’ oil-boom. It addresses the ‘moral economy’ as a concept through which to understand how Guineans articulate moral values and obligations with material provisioning and accumulation (Narotzky 2015).

Paper long abstract:

The growth of the Guinean economy due to the extraction of off-shore oil resulted in staggering inequalities. Despite the optimistic macro-indicators, ordinary petty traders complained that the country was experiencing 'an economic crisis just like the one Europeans and Americans were suffering'. They explained the crisis not out of a decrease in populations' consumption capacity resulting in a lack of demand for their wares, but rather out of an unprecedented increase of access to commodities by the elite, which by-passed petty traders. They accused the privileged of economic wrongdoing, but their argument differed from that found in the West (cf. Carrier 2014, Narotzky 2016). The wrongdoing was not about corruption or profiteering, nor did they argue that 'good money' could only be the result of work, as Nigerians had argued during their earlier Oil-Boom (Barber 1982). What Guineans asserted as economic wrongdoing was rooted in a way of understanding legitimate wealth as a process of rent management rather than a process of surplus value extraction. What was considered morally challenging, was the take-over of certain activities by an elite that had access to plenty other strategies of rent seeking.

This economic crisis was thus a moral crisis. The paper addresses the notions of economic wrongdoing and that of crisis on the basis of my ethnographic data. I will explore how the understanding of these notions draw on a moral economy that underlies the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea (Appel 2012).