1

Invisible Hand, Invisible ContinentA Historiography of Neoliberalism in Africa

Thomas Friedman believes the earth is flat—or at any rate

the title of his 2005 book proclaims this to be the case.1

Widely regarded as one of the most accessible explanations of

neoliberal globalization, the name of the best-selling manuscript

is an allusion to the supposed leveling effects created by

international free-trade agreements and the proliferation of

market-driven policy reforms. According to Friedman,

globalization is an irrepressible equalizer that places all

nations on a level or “flat” playing field. The absence of trade

barriers promoted by the World Trade Organization, it is argued,

allows each country to efficiently market what it can best

produce, while simultaneously providing access to cheap imported

goods too costly to manufacture domestically. With the ever-

increasing connectivity of all nations, everyone—rich and poor

alike—can reap the benefits of a competitive global market which

respects all players as coterminous entrepreneurs.

1 Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (New York: Picador, 2005)

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Despite the utopian characterization drawn by Friedman’s

text, the book’s title is probably more accurate than the author

intended. Globalization certainly does have a flattening effect

on the world: just like the foot of an elephant has a flattening

effect on a watermelon—or a human skull.2 As an extensive body

of scholarship and a spate of criticism has made clear,

neoliberal globalization is indeed very effective at leveling

everything that stands in its path: social services, wages, and

environmental protections to name but a few.

Yet even as many of these critiques have become well-known,

the full portent of neoliberalism is still in need of academic

investigation—particularly in regards to Africa. The continent,

it seems, has not shared in the glorious fruits of Friedman’s

version of globalization. Yet, there is a conspicuous silence

about this state of affairs—a silence which also applies to

opponents of market liberalization. In fact, discussions of

neoliberal globalization frequently render Africa as invisible as

the proverbial hand that guides market forces.3

2 For a discussion of elephants and globalization (but no skull/watermelon crushing) see William K. Tabb, The Amoral Elephant (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001)3 Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2010; Mbembe 2001.

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As the following historiography will attempt to make clear,

the advent of economic liberalization in Africa has indeed

brought many of the familiar trappings of neoliberalism, but with

them significant divergences and novel characteristics. In many

respects the first group of authors discussed in this

historiography has argued that Africa, in its marked tendency

towards virulent instability and paucity, represents the vanguard

of neoliberalism rather than an anomalistic departure from it.

While acknowledging these detrimental effects, the second group

of scholars discussed has tended to focus less on political

economy and more on the historic ethnography of neoliberalism—

particularly in regard to its production of neoteric religious

movements and cultural commodities.

Achille Mbembe was among the first to consider the unique

form taken by neoliberalism in Africa. The author’s speculative—

frequently esoteric—theoretical musings provide a seminal

foundation to ideas further developed by several authors

discussed in this historiography. Mbembe’s On the Post Colony, for

example, begins with the assertion that Africa is primarily a

rhetorical construction largely conceptualized in derisive terms.

4

The continent is exceptional in that it is usually described as a

problem or “understood through a negative interpretation4”—often

manifesting as the definitive example of alterity. Others in

citing Mbembe’s work have also noted the propensity to describe

Africa as lacking in certain essential qualities or as

characterized by absence, darkness, and dereliction.5 This

characterization frequently works to reinforce a sense of African

marginalization from progress—that Africa has somehow been left

out of the global loop or removed from the process of

globalization. Paradoxically, however, these observations are

components of a discourse in which the world is increasingly seen

as intertwined.

When the continent is incorporated into assessments of

globalization its inclusion is precarious. These discussions

tend to depict Africa—again—as a failure or as an anomalistic

exception to the free market’s beneficent auspices. As Harrison

describes it this dualistic conceptualization which attempts to

separate Africa from globalization is part of an effort to defend

4 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 15 Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2010; Simone 2004

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neoliberalism by compartmentalizing and disassembling its most

pernicious elements. It is part of a sanitizing narrative “in

which many of the most damaging, regressive and ugly aspects of

globalization are (dis)placed into Africa in order to represent

them as manifestations of recidivism, anachronism and deviance.”6

While there are undoubtedly many distinctive features to

neoliberalism in Africa, these distinctions have very little to

do with the continent’s supposedly atavistic tendencies. What is

perhaps most unique about African globalization is its nearly

total actualization of the neoliberal project. The inequality

and crippling poverty which invariably accompanied market reforms

in Africa are not rooted in African backwardness, but rather in

the continent’s roll as the vanguard of laissez-faire policy.7

What then does the future hold? What shape would unfettered

capitalism take if given reign? With the implementation of free-

market nostrums in Africa, there is much to be gleaned from a

growing urban crisis. As rural areas atrophied after the onset

of neoliberal policies, city populations mushroomed without the

6 Graham Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2010), p. 67 Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2010; Mbembe 2001

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ability to feed their swelling ranks. The all too familiar

contradictions of globalization abounded as manufacturing

declines accompanied an increasing reliance upon cheap foreign

imports. Steep job losses led to shrinking government revenues

and anemic or non-existent social programs. Globalization, it

seems, has failed to generate appreciable benefits in many

African cities and has instead only exacerbated existing

problems.8

Although some of these complaints are well-known, recent

scholarship points to specific problems which are seemingly

unique to Africa. While exploring the significant attempts at

urbanization made by small African cities, Simone highlights

dissonance between the imposition of neoliberal development

models and the needs of metropolitan populations. Urban

squatting, for example, is commonplace and the main source of

livelihood for nearly 75 percent of African city dwellers is

garnered within the informal economy9. In fact, this vast sector

accounted for about 42 percent of Africa’s GDP in 1999-2000. As

Cooper describes it, the informal economy “refers to a domain

8 Simone 2004; Cooper 20029 Cooper has the number at 60% only two years earlier (Cooper 2002)

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outside state regulation, a world of small often transitory

workshops, of traders working in the streets, of illegal

activities.” 10 Neoliberal models for urban development, however,

have intentionally endeavored to marginalize illicit markets by

creating economic spaces which attempt to circumvent their

presence. Simone describes this as the reemergence of

colonialism’s desire to push “residents off the map.” 11

Rather than depicting the informal economy as deleterious,

Simone renders it as a component of ongoing resistance and a

“protracted struggle over the legitimacy of self-employment and

the right to survive in the city.”12 Dovetailing other authors

which note deteriorating governments and nebulous boundaries

between the state and civil society, Simone argues that illicit

markets are part of “a coherent urban culture and urban

citizenship [which attempts to]… put together the provision of a

vast domain of foodstuffs, services, shelter, consumables,

transportation, health care, and education outside of the

institutions, frameworks, practices, and policies sanctioned by10 Fredrick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002), p. 10911 Abdou Maliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 17612 Ibid, p. 169

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the state.” 13 As Cooper points out there are many practical

benefits in the workings of the informal economy, most notably

its ability to provide services at a low cost and to function

with greater reliability than the often corrupt legal economic

apparatuses.14 On the other hand, one could also claim that the

existence of these tax-exempt, self-regulating economies, are in

some respects a perfectly libertarian and advanced actualization

of neoliberal policy. 15 Ostensibly working without the

inefficient and cumbersome mechanisms of a regulatory state, the

vast informal sector is arguably a dystopian, yet logical

response to the perpetual state of emergency brought on by free-

market supremacy.

Yet the causes underlying urban problems are manifold,

complex, and diverge from conventional depictions. Ferguson and

Harrison, for example, both contend that Africa defies the

typical globalization metanarrative proffered by scholars on the

left and right. While leftwing critics have correctly assessed

13 Ibid, p. 169-7014 Fredrick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002)15 Admittedly, this may be a stretch as both Cooper and Simone describe the informal economy as having collectivist elements which contradict the neoliberal imperative towards uninhibited self-interest.

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the confluence of corporate power and neoliberal policies,

several prominent scholars have asserted that Africa is by and

large exempt from the wide scale predatory deprivations of

multinational capitalism.16 Cities are efflorescent with illicit

economies, not because of a proliferation of corporate

domination, but precisely the opposite. Barring highly selective

and segmented incursions into mineral-rich environments, the

problem for much of Africa is not hyper-exploitation, but a lack

of significant investment. This is not to say the continent is

untouched by corporate power or that exploitation does not occur.

Rather a modified paradigm is necessary for understanding these

phenomena. Crucially, these authors maintain that the

exploitative reach of capital does indeed crisscross the globe,

but does not encompass it. Recent scholarship, therefore,

disputes a totalizing view of neoliberalism in which the entire

world is blanketed under the auspices of an all-inclusive market.

Instead, the economic effects of neoliberalism have produced a

varied topography of economic dynamism and desolation.

16 Reno 1998; Mbembe 2001; Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2010

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Contrary to what proponents of economic liberalization

contend, capital is not merely drawn to stable, democratic

regimes governed by rule of law. Instead, corporate investment

in Africa often gravitates toward highly unstable milieus. In

what has sometimes been called, “extractive neoliberalism”

capital has readily flocked to the most dangerous, politically

insecure locales in pursuit of lucrative natural resources.

Operating costs are comparatively low and companies can avoid

reciprocal state entanglements by providing their own private

armies and essential infrastructure. Inside these veritable

anarcho-capitalist utopias, deregulation is taken to an extreme

as corporations are able to establish micro-scale, privatized,

sovereign territories where they can operate with impunity.17

Regional economic benefits are, however, practically non-

existent. As Harrison points out, “most of the flows of

investment into Africa tend to focus on very specific and often

spatially fixed opportunities in which the primary aim is the

quick and efficient evacuation of a commodity rather than any

broader engagement with national manufacturers, suppliers or

17 Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2010; Reno 1998; Mbembe 2001

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consumer markets”.18 Local employment opportunities are scarce

(perhaps some security positions) as companies typically utilize

foreign workers who live in self-contained communities with

little to no outside interaction. These employees are usually

physically barred—with razor wire—from spending their money at

local businesses and when the job is finished they are airlifted

home. Because of the highly retrenched nature of this enclave

style extraction, foreign investment does not result in

beneficial economic effects for the community at large. It does

not, therefore, make sense to view Africa as wholly dominated by

corporate power. Globalization has not blanketed all of Africa,

but has instead selectively dismembered it into profitable

corporate enclaves.

What is important to emphasize, therefore, is not that

Africa is removed from globalization, but the problematic

conditions under which globalization takes place.19 A great deal

of recent scholarship explores the contradictions of resource

economies in which expansion occurs without the attendant

18 Graham Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2010), p. 919 Ibid, p. 22

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trappings of development.20 Nigeria, for example, is perhaps a

particularly noteworthy illustration of a selective globalization

in which the financial boons of one sector do not lift the others

in alignment with neoliberal idioms.

In the 1970s, Nigeria was a booming economy reveling in

freshly tapped oil wealth that seemed to usher the country into

an era of unprecedented prosperity. Apter, for example,

describes how Nigeria attempted to use its newfound affluence to

create a new national identity based on cultural vibrancy. Yet

nearly twenty years later the country had descended into poverty

and corruption. Despite ambitious attempts at constructing

parastatal institutions such as hospitals, schools and the like,

Nigeria’s wealth was never productively absorbed. These oil

profits merely “reproduced and expanded the means of distribution

rather than the means of production within the national

economy.”21 In fact, the vast output of oil ironically

overshadowed the country’s other domestic industries—particularly

agriculture—creating a severe decline in their economic

20 Apter 2005; Harrison 2010; Reno 1998; Ferguson 2006; Mbembe 200121 Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 44

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importance and output. When revenues dropped precipitously

because of price fluctuations and other factors Nigerian civil

society experienced a similar halt. In its place Apter suggests

a new national culture of ‘financial fraud and trickery’ emerged.

Today Nigeria is usually not associated with vibrant traditions,

but rather it is known for its infamous 419 email scams. As

Harrison points out, “the region has remained unstable and the

oil companies effectively ‘gated communities’ of installations

and expatriate personnel.”22 Because of the precarious manner in

which profit was directed (which Apter describes as blood through

the national body) Nigerian oil proved in many ways to be more of

a curse than a blessing.23

Correspondingly, Ferguson demonstrates that economic and

political liberalization does not guarantee foreign investment or

financial success. Countries which embrace democratic reforms

and follow IMF prescriptions to the letter may still be

ostracized by capital, while spectacularly illiberal governments

(as previously mentioned) draw massive investments. In fact, the

22 Graham Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2010), p. 1023 This motif of blood into money has appeared in several of the readings we have encountered in class and deserves more attention than I can provide here.

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fiction of nation-state status often functions to provide legal

sanction to the violently extractive methodologies corporations

employ in these destabilized regions. Paper states which do not

provide services or security to the populace—and do not exercise

sovereignty in any meaningful sense—can still grant transnational

corporations legal contracts which imbue their presence and

abhorrent practices with an aura of legitimacy.

For these and other reasons, several authors make a

concerted effort to devalue or reconfigure the centrality of the

nation-state in politico-economic discourse. Suggesting that no

country is truly independent, Ferguson posits that each state is

instead (selectively and precariously) incorporated within a

global economic hierarchy in which market imperatives,

international trade organizations, and other transnational bodies

override or severely constrain national sovereignty. The

imposition of structural adjustment programs, for example, often

entail highly prescriptive measures—such as privatization of

national industries and drastic cuts to social services—over

which local governments have little or no control. Instead these

economic policies are dictated by transnational organizations

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located in the United States and Europe. Employing an analysis

which privileges the nation-state, therefore, obscures pecuniary

relations which effectively negate meaningful sovereignty.

Because these countries are putatively assumed to be in charge,

however, they are paradoxically held accountable for the

imposition of these highly unpopular austerity measures. As a

result, ostensibly democratic political structures can serve to

legitimate what is essential proxy rule via neoliberal

mechanisms.24

This attenuation of state authority in Africa is not the

result of stochastic and indecipherable forces, but rather is

intrinsically linked to the neoliberal penchant for less

government. The consequences of this ideology are cogently

rendered by Reno as he forcefully contends that, “less government

has not contributed to better government but rather to warlord

politics25.” Reno suggests that many rulers increasingly

maintain their grip on power through a “warlord” paradigm in

which they opportunistically utilize a combination of force as

24 Reno 1999; Mbembe 2001; Ferguson 2006; Harrison 201025 William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. 1

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well as licit and illicit economic means to ensure control.

Drawing upon non-governmental organizations (NGOs), financial

investors, and illegal trade networks, Reno asserts that the

traditional markings of a strong state—that of a well-developed

bureaucratic apparatus and robust military—are purposefully

allowed to wither. Already diminished by IMF nostrums, these

state mechanisms are intentionally weakened in many dictatorships

because they serve as potential counterweights to the power of

individual rulers. “Liberalization of markets” Reno contends, “is

a major external factor affecting weak-state rulers’ pursuit of

authority.”26 Thus, warlords have emerged as a result of the

rational calculus established by market incentives, not an

African proclivity for despotism.

These emaciated states have created a novel set of dynamics

in which the concept of serving in the public interest has been

replaced by patronage and nepotism. Essential services in many

countries have completely ground to a halt or been entirely

supplanted by NGOs.27 Even fundamental notions of territorial

sovereignty have tended to evaporate as Reno, for example,

26 Ibid, p. 427 Reno 1999; Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2010; Mbembe 2001

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describes how warlords frequently establish networks of power

which transcend state boundaries in order to solidify their rule.

Much as other authors have pointed out, Reno asserts that these

new configurations may well place Africa in the vanguard of a

global series of developments. The author ends, for example, by

noting similar processes at work in places as far away as Latin

America.

In contrast to analyses which privilege the state, there has

been a countervailing tendency to assert the primacy of civil

society. Much of recent historiography, however, has attempted

to problematize a clean distinction between the state and civil

society, instead examining the ways in which government, society,

and economy influence each other. Power for Mbembe exists on

multiple levels—within the public and private sphere as well as

within the state and social institutions. With the rise of

neoliberalism distinctions between public and private began to

collapse creating new forms of governmentality in the process.

The net effect of structural adjustment programs and other

market-based reforms have “created the conditions for a

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privatization of sovereignty.”28 Given the confluence of corporate power

associated with neoliberalism, this is far from hyperbole. With

the proliferation of private security forces such as South

Africa’s Executive Outcomes, even the state’s monopoly on violence

is subject to market liberalization. While acknowledging this

privatization has by no means been fully actualized, Mbemebe

nonetheless describes a kind of indirect private government which has

emerged. Others have also noted the overlap between the state

and civil society in which government functions are increasingly

carried out by non-state actors.

According to neoliberal ideology, government is the central

repository of all social ills and an incubator for inefficiency,

despotism, and tyranny. Crippling the state and providing room

for a robust civil society will, therefore, lend itself to

overwhelmingly salutary effects. As Ferguson maintains, however,

civil society in Africa is composed in large measure of

international organizations which are frequently less accountable

than local governments. An expanded civil society merely opens

the door to other corridors of power—either in the form of

28 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 78

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corporations (which are wholly totalitarian) or distantly

governed transnational NGOs. Drawing upon the theoretical

insights of Gramsci, Ferguson demonstrates how these NGOs can

function as a bludgeon against the state, controlling or

supplanting it, while vesting their actions with an aura of

grassroots29 democracy. Because these organizations often supply

basic services and effectuate order, certain regions are

paradoxically governed by non-governmental organizations. As

these NGOs are sometimes bank owned, one could make the case—as

Mbembe does—that this does not signify the reduction or

evisceration of the state, but rather its privatization.30

It is important to point out that not all scholars cast

disdain upon the roll of NGOs in Africa—notably Hodgson. Much as

with Ferguson, discussions of civil society figure prominently in

her text Being Maasai, yet Hodgson is perhaps softer in her

appraisal of NGOs and their role in Africa. Whereas Ferguson and

others emphasizes the often dominant position of transnational

organizations, Hodgson insists the process is closer to multi-

29 Corporate-bankrolled “grassroots” organizations are more commonly known as “astroturf.”30 Bank Owned Non-Governmental Organizations or BONGOs are my personal favorite.

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tiered negotiation. “In contrast to the current sport of ‘NGO-

bashing,’” Hodgson writes, “I offer a more nuanced analysis that

explores (rather than assumes) their motivations, imaginings, and

reflections in order to understand how the dynamics of agency,

structure, and power at once enable and limit their political

agency in a world shaped ever more forcefully by ‘neoliberal

governmentality’.” 31 While nonetheless acknowledging the pressure

asserted by NGOs, Being Maasai accords more agency to the state

than Ferguson and others. With her employment of “Nodal

Ethnography”, Hodgson explores multiple sources of power

including “NGOs, the state, donors, constituencies, and

transnational social movements.”32 Although NGOs are one node

capable of exerting pressure, policies Hodgson insists, are

ultimately enacted by the state who, in any case, have the last

say.33 Given this proliferation of “nodes of power” Hodgson

seems to characterize the neoliberal political landscape as a

shifting terrain equally full of possibilities and limitations.

31 Dorothy Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 1232 Ibid, p. 1733 Though frequently with little choice.

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Finally, a second group of scholars, while acknowledging the

political and economic effects of neoliberalism, has instead

tended to focus on the historic ethnography of neoliberalism—

particularly its religious implications. The faith in neoliberal

tenants exemplified by Friedman’s curiously medieval flat earth

underscore an almost inherent religiosity which accompanies

neoliberal ideology. As several authors have noted neoliberalism

is, in fact, frequently embraced with the fanaticism of a

religious cult. As the Comaroffs suggest, the economic system

exemplifies a comparably supernatural epistemology. The

machinations of the free market, for example, are frequently

rendered in discursive terms which parallel the enigmatic, yet

unquestionable logic of the Almighty. Much as the Judeo-

Christian deity works in mysterious ways, so too does the Godlike

“invisible hand” as it shepherds its entrepreneurial flock

through the benevolent auspices of the unfathomable market. This

abiding faith in the divine logic of neoliberal capitalism (along

with the material imperatives of crippling debt), has justified

painful austerity measures in the messianic hope of achieving

redemption through economic salvation.

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All the while neoliberalism has sought to commodify

everything in its wake, including religious and spiritual

practices. The fact that completely ephemeral and intangible

cultural components are subject to the quantifying imperatives of

market forces is a testament to the relentless purchase of

neoliberal modalities. Consequently, the resulting penetration

of market liberalization has posed a profound threat to spiritual

and moral values around the world.34 Wamue-Ngare, for example,

sees new religious movements in Africa as symptomatic of a

neoliberal economic context of “pervasive hopelessness arising

from poverty caused by landlessness and joblessness.”35 Yet, the

extent to which these new movements represent “the soul of

soulless conditions” is perhaps quite novel.36 For the Comaroffs

neoliberalism has manifested as “the second coming of capitalism”

and “a gospel of salvation37”—an economic doctrine with

34 Morris, Povinelli, and Weller in Jean and John L. Comaroff (eds). Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001)35 James Howard Smith and Rosalind I. J. Hackett, ed., Displacing the State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 10636 Karl Marx, Collected Works, v. 3: Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 15637 Jean and John Comaroff, “Privatizing the Millennium”, Africa Spectrum, Vol. 35,no. 3 (2000), p. 296

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millenarian portent. This, they argue, has given rise to a spate

of neoteric religious sects which have created a grand corporate

merger between the service orientated ethos of Christianity and

the service oriented actuality of the new economy. Combining

entertainment, self-help, and spiritual deliverance these market

influenced religious doctrines promise immediate economic

enrichment through supernatural means. Eschewing antiquated

prohibitions against the simultaneous attainment of sacred and

secular gains “the instant accumulation of wealth” has become

“synonymous with the unmediated power of God… not a Jesus who

saves, but one who pays dividends38.” The eschatology of a

worldly Christ, however, is in many ways more lucrative than

ludicrous, and as Privatizing the Millennium reveals is based on an

underlying logic of rational irrationality.

Neoliberalism’s penchant for displacing production to

evermore distant and invisible locales has resulted in the

seemingly magical and immaterial creation of wealth.39 The

inexplicable, almost mystical processes overriding global fiscal

38 Ibid, p. 30539 Does this constitute a postmodern Immaculate Conception or simple commodityfetishism? The Comaroffs do not say.

24

apparatuses (to say nothing of the proliferation of Ponzi

schemes, currency speculation, complex derivatives, pyramid

scams, etc…) have sparked an almost sensible interest in

paranormal monetary strategies. Apter notes a similar process

wherein a single “magical” barrel of oil is shown to yield “one

thousand-plus commodities” whose value ostensibly fluctuates

without rhyme or reason.40 In many cases it would appear quite

reasonable, therefore, to assume these esoteric financial

mechanisms are guided by the same stochastic principles which

govern the occult. As Cooper suggests, “Men and women alike are

facing forces that seem more difficult than ever to control, and

the fragmentation of religious and spiritual life is indicative

of a situation where people’s needs are great, their means

compromised, and the solutions far from obvious.”41 Nonetheless,

Africans have created new or adapted existing epistemological

frameworks to negotiate these political and economic

transformations. As a result, the Comaroffs submit that cultural

production in neoliberal Africa can best be described as

40 Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2441 Fredrick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002), p. 120

25

“retroduction42”—a Schumpeterian modality of “creative

destruction” in which deterioration and decomposition clear the

way for new forms of cultural reinvention. Thus, the strange and

recent coupling of witchcraft, Neoprotestantism, and

neoliberalism arises from a collective sense that the production

of wealth must now be understood and achieved through alternative

epistemological understandings and practices.

In conclusion, it is apparent that globalization has

certainly occurred within Africa, but it has not manifested on

the equal playing field described by Friedman and other

proponents of globalization. Social instability, economic

inequality, and a lack of security are common traits throughout

the continent. The painful irony is that these problems are

intrinsically linked to a neoliberal system which, it was

promised, would create stability within a globally reciprocal

milieu. Africa, however, has little influence over the shifting

fortunes of the world economy and yet that world economy

profoundly impacts the continent. Similarly, the initiation of

structural adjustment programs over which African nations

42 Brad Weiss, ed., Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (Leiden: Brill, 2004, p. 187

26

typically have very little say takes place in a highly unequal

manner. As Cooper describes it, “Africans have been told by the

most expert of the experts, what to do… They have not been in an

equivalent position to tell rich countries what to do…”43 With

terms essentially dictated to credit strapped governments,

Africa’s incorporation into a worldwide system of debt peonage is

hardly a mark of economic parity and global equity. While it is

true neoliberal globalization may have flattened a great deal in

its wake, much of the world now seems closer to flat-lining than

flat.

Bibliography

Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

43 Fredrick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002), p. 101

27

Jean and John L. Comaroff, “Privatizing the Millennium”, Africa

Spectrum, Vol. 35, no. 3 (2000)

Jean and John L. Comaroff (eds). Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of

Neoliberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001)

Fredrick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002)

James Ferguson, Global Shadows (Durham and London: Duke University

Press, 2006)

Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (New York: Picador, 2005)

Graham Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering

(London: Zed Books, 2010)

Dorothy Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2011)

James Howard Smith and Rosalind I. J. Hackett, ed., Displacing the

State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2012)

Karl Marx, Collected Works, v. 3: Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York: International Publishers,

1976)

28

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2001)

William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: University of

Colorado Press, Lynne Rienner, 1998)

Abdou Maliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)

William K. Tabb, The Amoral Elephant (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 2001)

Brad Weiss, ed., Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a

Neoliberal Age (Leiden: Brill, 2004)