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Paper short abstract:

We analyse histories of accumulation, and its relation to political power in Africa. Who controlled land and wealth. Of what economic import was the King's court? What role did the spiritual play in economic and in disaster mitigation? And of middle men in trade?

Paper long abstract:

The 1970s saw a flurry of studies seeking to understand the making of African political order and colonial African economic conditions. This developed since the 1980s into increased interest in detailing the social conditions of poor rural and urban Africans. With the collapse of communism as an ideology that was supposedly pitted against capitalism, African studies focussed largely on African social conditions. Thus arose agrarian studies, NGOs and studies of vulnerability, agency, and resilience among the poor. In these studies lay fundamental assumptions about the African condition – the notion of victimhood, the politics of a permanent crisis, with strong Afro-pessimist flair that filters sometimes subtly, and sometimes virulently. TSome of these studies were dominated by economists; political scientists; sociologists, and anthropologists. They were very presentist in their approach and did not examine economic continuities and discontinuities that could have unravelled the extent to which Africans have accumulated wealth and power even when conditions did not enable them. We do not seek to focus on the colonial ills, but on the ways in which African entrepreneurship developed. We offer tentative thoughts on land and its control, departing from assumptions that control over people was more than the control over land (Donald Wright, 1999). We examine the role of moral and political capital and its economic ramifications – for instance, the King’s court not only as political space, but as a site for negotiating contracts to control resources, to trade and to mine; the office of the spirit men and women (traditional healers, nángas, spirit mediums, etc) as protecting the people from shangwa (disasters) that could potentially wipe away their wealth, for instance, cattle wealth. We evaluate too, the rise of middle men in facilitating trade in Africa and abroad since the middle ages and how that built wealthy dynasties, so was the control of banana plantation agriculture (Itandala) and monopoly over cattle and how that impacted relations with those who had none. We believe that Africans had a history of accumulation that predated colonialism and the ills that such a colonial model created. there is potential to argue for a different model of economic development for Africa.