Special issue: Capitalizing Africa – High finance from below

Africa, vol. 92 no. 4 (2022).
Edited by James Christopher Mizes and Kevin P. Donovan.


With contributions from the editors, Anna-Riikka Kauppinen, Rundong Ning, Christina Tekie Collins, and more.

In this issue, we place the geography of African finance today in a different frame: our approach links the flow of African financial expertise to the flow of money in, out and across the continent … flows that together constitute – and can potentially reconfigure – Africa’s role in the ‘world system’. We analyse how African professionals are translating financial devices from outside the continent to fit the moral dilemmas, political styles and economic practices found within it … Many of these professionals are claiming to harness capital to meet African needs and oppose Western control of Africa’s future. They often explicitly frame these claims in the idiom of pan-African commerce. As a result, the moral vision of a unitary ‘Africa’ is once again emerging as a way to frame efforts at promoting intra-African exchange and reversing the global flow of wealth out of the continent. At stake in this reversal is the relocation of ‘command and control’ centres from London and New York to the emerging financial centres in Africa’s cities.

 

(Mizes and Donovan, 2022: 542)