Paper short abstract:

Using a multi-ethnography (West Africa and South Afric), I will show how the Lions Club is in the footsteps of historical leaders Du Bois and Booker T Washington to create an entrepreneurial elite. Lions Club's freedom of association can be seen as a counter-point to the professional dependence.

Paper long abstract:

W. E. B Du Bois said in The Souls of Black Folks, 1903: "Is it possible that nine million men can make real economic progress if they are deprived of political rights, if they are reduced to a servile caste? For twenty years, the African branch of the Lions Club has been fighting this situation by recruiting African members to create the exclusive group of 30,000 Lions of Africa. These are very talented industrialists who are becoming pan-African political players, to "restore pride to the continent".

The multi-sited ethnography in West ans South Africa will offer a look at the pan-African ethos of the possessing. I will show how the Lions Club follows in the footsteps of historical leaders Du Bois and Booker T Washington to create an entrepreneurial elite. From a critical point of view, freedom of association can be seen as a counterpoint to the professional dependence suffered by individual members. The associative struggle is a prelude to a desire to win back the economy, and the club is a collective offering black empowerment (Tangri and Southal 2008). The wealthy members would forget for a moment to take advantage of their extraversion (Bayart 1999) as industrialists to practise an intra version, an opposite principle.

They show that a liberal dynamic cannot be built in a globalised context, which is always asymmetrical for the South. The continental autochthony they practise at the Lions Club shows that all entrepreneurs must first and foremost be political and therefore pan-African.