Accumulation

Representative:

Stefan Ouma Stefan.Ouma@uni-bayreuth.de

PI Members:

Susan Arndt, Joël Glasman, Stefan Ouma, Alexander Stroh-Steckelberg (University of Bayreuth), Enocent Msindo (Rhodes University)

Overview

Wealth inequalities have moved to the centre of global societal debates over the past years, complementing more established debates on income inequalities (Chancel et al., 2022). While income remains an important dimension of inequality, wealth raises deeper economic and political issues, as it can produce income (e.g., rent); it materialises as a concrete asset whose ownership rests on the exclusion of others; and, over time, allows for the transfer of economic and often political power, via inheritance mechanisms. While many African economies have experienced strong growth patterns since the 2000s, they have likewise seen rising inequalities related to ownership of, and access to the means that constitute wealth e.g. natural resources, land, housing, financial assets, etc. (Obeng-Odoom, 2015). Countries in Africa are not alone in having become highly unequal. However, their historical experiences of extractivist models of accumulation that serve only a few, be they colonial or postcolonial elites; the globally significant dependence, in much of Africa, on land as a source of livelihood; and the sheer size of the populations that have not benefited from economic dynamics of the recent past make the more equitable distribution of wealth, power and life chances on the continent an issue of high political and scholarly importance.

Our RS intends to scrutinise the accumulation–inequality nexus from a transdisciplinary perspective, applying intersectional methodologies drawn from the disciplines of History, Geography, Urban Planning, Political Science, Economics, Anthropology and Literary Studies. Looking beyond the more established focus on income inequalities, we will focus on the acquisition and gathering of wealth by organisations and individuals in Africa and its diasporas: at the local, national and global scale, and in given interplays with different forms of power and authority. Processes of accumulation are aided and constrained by political structures, markets, values, ideologies and religions, and their respective forms of power. Each of these shapes who can access opportunities for accumulation and who is excluded.

Inequalities in Africa have deep colonial roots (Arndt, 2021; Koddenbrock et al., 2022) overwritten by novel redistributive dynamics. As in most parts of the world, the recalibration of wealth inequalities in Africa since the 2000s has been the result of historically shifting relations between states, businesses, civil societies and households. Diverse processes have played into this, such as politically mediated forms of enclosure and commodification, the deregulation of markets, taxation regimes that benefit the wealthy or planning models that serve elite interests. While scholars have called for the study of material inequalities from a Global South perspective (Francis et al., 2020), there is an urgent need in African Studies to deepen our asyet-sparse engagements with the accumulation–inequality nexus in African economies, its entanglement with wider global processes, and the diverse forms of political resistance levelled at highly socially skewed accumulation processes. We posit that the ways value is produced, distributed and transformed into wealth rest on concrete practices of world-making ontological practices that are central to accumulation processes. Thus-conceiving of these practices allows us to connect pasts, presents and futures of accumulation, helping us to situate the articulations of contemporary capitalism in Africa within a larger historical frame (Breckenridge, 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2023a; Ouma, 2017) and to acknowledge other forms of imagining and enliving the world (Enns & Bersaglio, 2024; Getachew, 2019) that are often crowded out by particular forms of accumulation.