African Studies has a significant problem to engage collectively, explicitly, and critically with the thing that is ever more a point of discussion around the world: capitalism, more specifically with capitalism as a social phenomenon, topic and concept. There is a significant shortage at the heart (and top) of the African Studies community in Western Europe, and arguably across the entire Global North, of an explicit, focused, sustained, large-scale collective exploration, about the many, multifaceted features of contemporary capitalism on the continent, and about characteristics of African societies as capitalist societies.

I first made the argument about the under-utilization of capitalism as an analytical category in 2016. I subsequently organized a roundtable titled “African capitalist society” at that year’s African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) annual conference, and started a blog series on the Review of African Political Economy’s blog titled Capitalism in Africa (CiA) a few weeks later.

Here, I want to continue this line of enquiry and basically to make two points. The first is to present some actual data concerning conference titles of major African Studies conferences in the Global North. The second point is to make an argument in favor of one of the positions that is at the heart of the CiA series on roape.net: that many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such. In other words, that a number of social phenomena in several African countries can be seen to be typical of a capitalist society, and thus are comparable to similar phenomena in other capitalist countries, across the world, including the Global North.

For example, in countries such as Uganda and Kenya, and especially in their major cities, one can find plenty of social phenomena that are typical of contemporary capitalist society across the world. Whether they occur in the Global North–London, Berlin, Paris–or in Africa–Pretoria, Nairobi, Kampala–the mix and type of similar phenomena is striking: social media (Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, influencers, followers, twitter shit storm; fake news debates); dating apps (Tinder); marketing and advertisement; the entertainment industry (comedy; music; lotteries; commercial TV including shows with a focus on investment, property, jackpots, dating, cultural competitions [best voice, comedian etc.], and formats such as reality TV [e.g. Big Brother] or we-change-your-life-in-an-instant [e.g. house improvements in poor neighbourhoods]); urban transport (Uber, Taxify); international commercial sports events, especially European football, broadcasted in bars, clubs, hotels,  restaurants and gyms; shopping arcades; corporate sponsorship of social events and initiatives (education, health, culture, sports); books present/advertised about individual success, wealth, happiness, turn-around-your-life and thinking-like-the-successful; privatizations and public-private partnerships; commercialized education and health sectors; the presence of powerful TNCs (in banking, business consulting, communication, security, transport and logistics, tourism, real estate, food & beverages, hospitality, etc.); gated communities; evictions; gig/night/24-7-moneyneversleeps economy; jobless growth; precarity; under-/unemployment; poverty wages; fraud and corruption; economic inequality; luxury and opulence; 4×4; VIPs and celebrities; sugar daddies; betting; loan offers (via TV, radio, newspapers, billboards); personal indebtedness; mental illnesses; protesters vs. riot police battles; surveillance technology, public debates about an economic, political and moral crisis, etcetera. In short, to the question can some African countries be regarded as capitalist countries from the point of view of observable social phenomena in everyday life, in the big cities, then the answer I would give is an emphatic yes, of course. What else do you think these examples point to: pre-capitalist, feudal? But I will get to this second point later.

First, some statistics: an incident earlier this year made me curious about the usage of the word “capitalism” in titles of European African Studies conferences. I started my search with the titles of past European Conferences on African Studies (ECAS) and guess what? Nothing. Not a single reference to capitalism or imperialism. However, I realized I needed to get more data to see if ECAS was the norm or an outlier. So, I asked my long-term research collaborator, Nataliya Mykhalchenko, to extend the search to include other major Northern conferences from the last decade. This sort of ad-hoc, rough, time-pressed analysis of the conference titles of some of the major African Studies gatherings in the Global North gives clear—yet what some might all “anecdotal”—evidence of a very peculiar relationship of the discipline with Capitalism-as-social phenomenon and Capitalism-as-analytical-frame. At the minimum, the overview of conference titles shows that the term has hardly ever made it into any main- or sub-title of an African Studies conference for years.

So, we compiled the conference titles for the following (the tables can be viewed in an earlier, longer version of this post, here): ECAS (2005-19; 8 entries), African Studies Association Germany (VAD, 2008-18, 6), Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS, 2009-2018, 10), African Studies Association (ASA in the United States of America) (called annual meetings; 2008-18, 11) and African Studies in Italy (ASAI, 2010-18, 4 entries with titles). Out of 39 entries then, exactly 1 entry (or 2.56%) had capitalism in the conference title. The VAD 2016 Berlin had the title “Africa in a capitalist world”; though note that for various reasons, this 2016 gathering was an unusual, shortened mini-VAD conference, with only one main conference day, instead of the usual three. If we include in the sample other regular major African studies gatherings in Western Europe–the Nordic Africa Day (2007-18, 8 entries), and the gatherings organized by the Netherlands Association for Africa Studies (NVAS; lately called NVAS Africa Day) (2006-18, 13 entries)–the ratio goes up to 1/60 (1.67%). We have also checked the titles for the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP, 2008-2018, 11 entries) given that Australia is regarded to be part of the Global North and seems to be major if not dominant actor in the Association. Nothing, still. So, ECAS was not an outlier after all, quite the opposite.