Changing conceptions of power: elites in Africa
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. 2Indeed, 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
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it