African political economy

The epic journey of capital across space and time since the fifteenth century resulted in the entrapment of Africa in the spider’s web of colonial matrices of power, resulting in enduring dependence and underdevelopment. What is brought into the debates on African political economy is the fundamental issue of knowledge, resulting in a critique of economic theory and economic thought which tends to create the false idea of an economy that is not entangled in the colonial matrices and other complex hetararchies of power constitutive of the modern world system. Building on the epistemic question, this chapter proceeds to subject to critical analysis those anti-colonial initiatives aimed at liberating Africa from the bonds of capitalist entrapment and the concomitant development pathways that were chosen. What emerges poignantly is the poverty of epistemology which produced very weak responses to the Eurocentric world system and weak initiatives haunted by what Fanon termed ‘repetition without change.’ The key thesis of the chapter is that what appears as the problem of political economy and a ‘development impasse’ is in reality an epistemic crisis. The debates on African economic liberation are extended to the current issues of creating the African market zone, the adoption of ECO as a pan-African currency for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the struggles of Francophone Africa to liberate itself from Communaute Financiere Africaine/Financial Community of Africa (CFA) monetary imperialism. The way forward is to rethink thinking itself so as to build a future beyond the straitjacket of developmentalism. That France continues to intervene in West African affairs, hijacking its initiatives, indicates the urgent necessity for deimperialization and decolonization.