Changing conceptions of power: elites in Africa

Africa’s elites are more numerous, variegated, and globally influential today than at any time since independence. Consider that in 2021-22 the four top international prizes in literature were won by Africans, as was the world’s top architectural prize.1 Or consider the prominence and impact of individuals such as World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus or Nobel-prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai. Yet, this increase in the number, variety, and prominence of elites from the continent since independence has gone largely unremarked upon in the field of African Studies and has been barely incorporated into our analyses.2 Indeed, these and other elite achievements rarely figure in mainstream academic approaches to the study of Africa. When elites are considered, they largely go undefined and are depicted in ways that are pejorative or narrowly conceived. The failure of the field to grapple with the full breadth and influence of elites has resulted in a distorted frame of analysis that may miss more complex, interesting realities. It contributes also to a view of the continent as always and only subject and peripheral. I argue for two interconnected approaches: first, that we utilize a more capacious, less value-laden definition of elites that opens our view of who elites are and how they generate and exercise power; and second, that we expand the realms or domains of human activity in which we understand elites to operate, beyond the current focus on economic and political elites. Taken together, these approaches allow us to glimpse the centrality of relationships to elite-ness and hence transform and enrich our understanding of elite power beyond exclusively hard forms of power. This is an apposite moment to re-examine how we define, understand, and analyse elites. Following the recovery of many African economies in the 1990s and 2000s, the associated emergence of a sizeable middle class and, more globally, the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and the digital age, Africa’s highest achievers in a wide range of fields have attained significant salience and impact. At the same time, in an increasingly populist set of global discourses, the word ‘elite’ is being weaponized in an extraordinary way. In academia too the word is frequently deployed with a disapproving tone. This has perhaps been especially true in the study of Africa, where the continent’s rich are no richer than their counterparts in any other part of the world but where the contrast between their material circumstances and those of ordinary people is perhaps more jarring. This may inform an unstated sense that somehow there ought not to be elites in Africa at all.3 Sociology and political science have been the academic disciplines most focused on the study of elites; for the most part, their gaze has been limited to political and economic elites, with some attention paid to military elites.4 Both here and in the broader field of African Studies, elites have generally been approached via one of two perspectives.5 The first approach (which also comes first chronologically, shaping the literatures of the 1960s and 1970s) is most evident in dependency theory6 and treats Africa and Africans as lacking in agency. This view depicts the politics and economies of the continent as being at the mercy of global developments and forces. Africans are presented as inherently subject, trapped by global contingencies and structures, and incapable of meaningfully shaping their own futures, let alone larger global developments. A central motif here is Africans with too little power, and much of the analysis is focused on describing the global structures that constrain and restrict African agency. Power in this structure is derivative and Africa’s incorporation into this global system can only be broken through an exit strategy theorized as ‘delinking’.7 The second approach emerged amidst economic and political decline from the 1980s. In conversation with (and sometimes as a reaction to) more radical or structural approaches, writers employing the notion of neo-patrimonialism developed and expanded dependency’s conception of Africa’s leaders as compradors. In doing so however, they also developed a distinctive view: Rather than foregrounding global economic structures, much analysis in the neo-patrimonial vein focused on the ‘big men’ of the State House, the boardroom, and the mess hall. Describing Africa as suffering in the grip of its own malign elites led them to a different analytic premise vis-a-vis elite agency, defining the problem instead as one of (select) Africans with too much power.8 For example, Bayart’s notion of ‘extraversion’9 demonstrates how African elites can benefit from the secondary status of Africa globally. In this view, elites are frequently presented in pejorative terms, as driven by corrupt or self-serving motives.10 A study by Driscoll11 on the phenomenon of the ‘Big Man’ in political science argues that since the 1980s, African Studies journals overwhelmingly have presented these figures as thieves and dictators and paid little attention to the accountability pressures that African leaders face. This depiction is not wrong, but it is radically incomplete. Part of the problem lies in the bifurcated way in which the term ‘elite’ is commonly defined. Every-day use of the word reflects at least two meanings. First, it references members of the moneyed establishment, those who occupy the upper economic and political echelons, set apart from (and in opposition to) ordinary and/or marginalized people. Second, it is used to designate a different but potentially overlapping grouping, the crème de la crème—those who are most skilled and accomplished in their field.12 This latter usage is more admiring/commendatory. Both in current popular and academic discourse—strikingly so in African Studies—the first meaning has almost completely eclipsed the second. This raises the uncomfortable question of why we are ready to recognize ‘bad’ elites in Africa but appear less interested in when and how the continent has also produced ‘the best of the best’, those who perform at the highest standards in a wide range of domains of human activity. I propose a more value-neutral definition: elites are ‘those recognized as holding the most consequential agenda-setting and decision-making power in their societies’:13 they wield significant (national, regional, and/or global) power; operate at the highest level in their field; possess expert knowledge, skills, and personal strengths that they deploy in strategic, creative, and sometimes generative ways; and are located in/across a range of domains of human activity. Moreover, elite status is profoundly relational in at least two senses: first, elite status is conferred via the recognition of others; and second, elite power depends on a network of relationships.14 I elaborate on these dimensions below. This definition allows us to move both beyond an overly restrictive understanding of ‘where’ elites operate (moving outside of a narrowly defined political sphere) and thence, to develop a more supple and subtle understanding of ‘how’. At the centre of this definition is the recognition that it is, first and foremost, the disproportionate power they wield that makes someone an elite; as Dahl puts it, elites are those whose preferences regularly prevail.15 Power is the sine qua non of elite status, central to the definition. Critically, however, the definition of elites I propose does not specify that they must be ‘card-carrying’ agents of the establishment or that they act always and only in defence of that class. Put slightly differently, it does not specify the ends to which elite power is being wielded. Neither is it prescriptive about the kind of power that is being generated and exercised. The power that elites wield can be some mix of ‘hard’ (or material) power, defined often as coercion (be that via violence—or the threat thereof—or the deployment of economic resources) and ‘soft’ (the power to set the agenda, to frame the debate, and/or to persuade others).16 Tella defines soft power as ‘an actor’s ability to influence the action, inaction, position and behaviour of other actors through [their] non-coercive capability—including [their] philosophy, culture, values, and policies—that engenders these actor’s attraction, admiration and aspirations’.17 Part of what makes elites, elites—be they in Africa or elsewhere—is their meaningful agency; they are capable of making key interventions that may shift the direction of their domain. To use Getachew’s evocative phrasing: they make worlds.18 This reframing allows us to glimpse the expertise—the expert knowledge and skills—that are part of how Africa’s elites generate and wield power.19 The dominant usage and understanding of elites almost entirely miss elites that are flourishing in other domains of human activity, including intellectuals, artists, musicians, technocrats, and many others. Broadening our consideration of elites in Africa beyond the more commonly considered political and economic domains is important for at least three reasons. First, as Fisher argues, ‘the agency of states is just one element of African agency and not always the most meaningful or impactful for African peoples and communities themselves’.20 Second, and relatedly, even elites far outside of the conventionally political domain can still exercise high levels of political power and influence. And third, by enquiring into the forms of power wielded in other domains, we can develop a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of what power is, including less obvious forms of non-material power. The people making up this wider set of elites do not necessarily look or behave like the storied ‘big men’ of Africa. As intimated above, they are more diverse and include women; at least some of them both express and act in terms of strongly egalitarian and social justice perspectives; and their elite status may be generated by the production of knowledge and the power of ideas. In practice, the range of ‘domains’ or spheres of activity in which elites emerge and lead are numerous21 and can be typologized in many ways. Here, I suggest at least six domains that we ought to consider. Elites operating in the ‘political’22 domain have arguably received the lion’s share of academic attention. This category encompasses those occupying formal political offices, including political parties and the bureaucracy of the state, as well as those situated outside of the state but whose energies are focused on the state and the deployment of political power (such as members of civil society, those heading up NGOs, and others focused on policy and political change) as well as those working in regional, continental, and international intergovernmental organizations. Those who wield ‘coercive’ power have also received a fair amount of attention. They include those heading up institutions both inside and outside of the state: in the military, security services, the police, and non-state guerrilla/militant forces.23 Elites in the ‘economic’ domain began to attract renewed attention over the last two decades.24 In this domain I include businesspeople and entrepreneurs as well as economic technocrats such as central bankers, leading economists, economic analysts, and trade specialists, and those working in regional and continental development banks and trade organizations. More recently burgeoning mass religious and spiritual movements have brought renewed focus to elites operating in the ‘religious and spiritual’ domain.25 I include here those who lead the major spiritual and religious movements and institutions on the continent. There is considerable overlap between this category and those who wield the power of ‘status or ritual’ (some might use the terms ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’ here), namely kings, queens, members of the nobility, and those in the ranks of the so-called ‘traditional’ rulers or chiefs.26 Finally, less commonly considered alongside the economic and political elites are those who wield power in the ‘aesthetic’ domain, both makers and thinkers. This large, diverse category includes creative elites in the written, visual, and musical arts, the worlds of design, architecture, and fashion,27 as well as those who effectively develop and deploy the ‘power of ideas’, the continent’s intellectual and academic elites and those involved in the media.28 Because of the way disciplinary siloes work in academia, we seldom take comprehensive stock of actors across all these varied domains, their number, nature, or cumulative impact. It might be instructive to do so. As I argue below, taken together, a consideration of the fuller panoply of the continent’s elites begins to flesh out a more multi-dimensional understanding of elite power on the continent—what it is, who wields it, and how. Elite power is often most starkly manifest in the disproportionate material, coercive, and economic resources that many elites can draw on. But power can be transformational in an epistemological sense too. This usage gestures at the importance of the ideational, of knowledge- and skills-based forms of power, and at the potency of epistemic frameworks too—in short, at the many varieties of soft power.29 The seminal work of V.Y. Mudimbe, among others, points us towards the importance of the invisible, ineffable, and symbolic in the construction of certain kinds of elites, and the need to take seriously knowledge, skills, creativity, and innovation as vital power resources, informing both the mind-set of elites and their impact in the world.30 All too often absent from our analysis of Africa’s elites is a serious consideration of the extent to which power emerges from knowledge, expertise, and creativity.31 This oversight not only informs how we (mis)understand the economic and political elites who receive the bulk of any analytic attention, but also who is out of focus in that frame. It is notable for example that, across a wide variety of domains of human activity, Africa’s elites are disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the formally educated.32 Moreover, as Fisher points out, ‘African scholars, philanthropists, and activists … shape critical international debates and global thinking but rarely feature in scholarly examinations of African agency’.33 Yet (and, again, this may not be entirely accidental) the way in which knowledge and skills undergird the achievements and power of at least a portion of Africa’s elite is seldom the object of systematic study. How much do we know, e.g. about the number of medical doctors, engineers, and other highly skilled personnel graduating each year across the continent? When asked to envision Africa’s elite, we are more likely to conjure up Mobutu Seso Seko’s ghost than the vitality of Dr Mamphela Ramphele. This is of a piece with a relative neglect of the continent’s leading thinkers and intellectuals. Wai is struck by the extent to which Africa’s theorists ‘are either ignored or seen as specifically situated, hence irrelevant outside of the specificity of their African situatedness and context’.34 We could remedy this by paying more attention to the role of education, its nature and expansion on the continent since Independence in shaping and, more the role of the leading and such as Mudimbe, and many in the and exercise of elite most and are not do they generally wield hard forms of power, so they are seldom the focus of our attention. This example points again, to the importance of being about who we when we about Africa’s elites. To much of the wider literature on elites comes from and, in often elites to be and More elites have been as those who or others than being the of such more comprehensive analysis of Africa’s elites must include the way in which and others often as have developed forms of power. This points us to the importance of our understanding of Both to take the of including in our of and the and relationships that the and exercise of elite As ‘African more political power today than in This is true in the formal political domain, but it is also true more A example here is the academic and may use of as a of political when was in for of the on a of opposition on the This too the importance of what one might a or category of elites are defined by the disproportionate power of their and via popular recognition or elites systematic analytic attention too. 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This is not to a but to an understanding of different forms of power, and of the ranks and nature of the elites who wield power. This of what power and elite status on the continent can not just how we about Africa but how we understand power

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