Capital, Class, and Belonging in Africa

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1950’s, independent African states like other ex-colonized societies in the rest of the Third World, embarked on state-led social provisioning to mitigate the systematic deprivation wrought by colonialism and to meet what Paul Zeleza calls the triple promise of independence – decolonization, democracy and development. With varying degree, the immediate post-colonial state in Africa took on the provision of education, healthcare, water, public transportation and employment through the establishment of import substitution industries (ISIs). The ISIs were established and or capitalized with loans from International Finance institutions (IFIs) - principally the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A host of structural inequalities - from unequal terms of trade to lopsided international and local power arrangements meant that many of the ISIs were in crisis by the middle of the 1970’s. Having incurred large amounts of debt and larger debt servicing costs, many African states again turned to the IFIs for further loans. In return, they were forced to undergo severe cuts to crucial public services like education and healthcare and privatize strategic state owned enterprises and parastatals. The cumulative social outcome was mass impoverishment and the reversals of gains against preventable diseases and illiteracy. Consequently, the informal sector experienced a boom as a source of livelihood. Migration to neighbouring countries and those far afield became commonplace. In the context of state withdrawal from social provisioning, those in power increasingly adopted a posture of help relative to ordinary people. Prior-existing and new lines of social demarcations were heightened in order to entrench the new power relations. Traditions of eternal difference were invented to gain and consolidate (in the case of the powerful), and cope with the effect of power (on the part of ordinary people). Drawing on instances from Nigeria and South Africa this paper traces the role of capital in social differentiation in Nigeria and South Africa and the implications of such demarcations on class formation and class relations and the instrumentalization of identity and belonging in contestations over resources. The paper is situated at the intersection of the movement of global capital and the ordering of society, polity and culture. It identifies potentials for counter movement in formations solidarity of ordinary people involved in contradictory struggles for livelihood, security and cultural integrity.