Abstract
Africa has historically occupied, and remains almost fixed at, the fringes of global knowledge production. Its battle to recover itself amid the stacks of epistemic injustices heaped on it, especially by its encounters with slavery and colonialism, rages on. Despite this grim picture, this article shows that, more recently, African Psychology has somewhat claimed its rightful place as an academic field within some leading universities in Africa. The absence of a deliberate and active disciplinary push or sustained contestations in economics on the continent is the key lacuna spotlighted in this article. However, I recognise that deciding whether African Economics is necessary must involve the mobilisation of the grit and talents of all academic economists on the continent as well as other geographies. This notwithstanding, and to foreshadow likelihoods, I imagine via this article what an erstwhile elusive African Economics might comprise. I do this by outlining and discussing eleven precepts that might serve as pointers to herald it. These precepts have multifarious implications for training and research in economics, especially in African universities, which are briskly expounded.
Introduction
The global knowledge production ecosystem has inarguably been a site of tensions and contestations with some tacit unanimity on the notion that such a collision of alternative perspectives is both necessary and functional vis-à-vis extending the boundaries of knowledge within and across disciplines. In other words, avoiding the tendency towards herd thinking is what guarantees disciplinary growth. The absence of dispute suggesting homogeneity in disciplines is what Santos (2014) aptly labels as cognitive injustice(s) – the extreme manifestation being epistemicide. Epistemicide, according to Santos, describes the death or extinction of certain ideas under the crushing weight of the dominant/hegemonic paradigms within specific disciplines.
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In the words of Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020: 5): The best definition of the cognitive empire is provided by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who explained that the cognitive empire operated through [the] detonation of a “cultural bomb” at the centre of victim societies, causing various dissonances and alienations.
Africa has historically occupied and remains almost fixed at the fringes of global knowledge production. For the social sciences, in particular, Alatas (2003) aptly describes this worldwide picture of the geography of knowledge in terms of the age-old economic – in this instance, academic – idea of division of labour. Put simply, the countries in the so-called Global North are designated as the authentic sites for both theory-building and methodological innovations, while their counterparts in the so-called Global South are classified as spaces where these exogenously derived theories and methods are tested and validated. To buttress this perspective, according to Mignolo (2009), “Africans are seen as generators of data or as data.” This penchant for leaning on largely Western epistemic traditions was aptly characterised as extraversion by Beninois philosopher Paulin Hountondji. As Hountondji (2009: 121) specifically averred, African scholars in African studies and in all other disciplines should understand that they have been doing so far a kind of research that was massively extraverted, i.e., externally oriented, intended first and foremost to meet the theoretical and practical needs of Northern societies.
Of all the social science fields, economics appears to be the sphere in which the least progress has been made. This assertion is borne out by the observation that within universities in Africa, there are discussions and debates about “Africanising” – the emplacing of Africa and African realities at the centre of – disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, among others, whereas there appears to be far less intensity with equivalent discourses in economics. There is a clear absence of any serious disciplinary consciousness and contestations about the (ir)relevance of an “African Economics.” This article contends that this omission must be addressed. It posits that an economic approach that centres the lived economic realities of Africans and Africa should be developed. This approach would constitute African Economics.
The central argument I intend to push in this article is that the field of economics in Africa needs to be more deliberate about paying sufficient attention to the lived realities on the continent and of its people. In other words, there is an imperative for the discipline's “Africanising.” To foreground the possibilities embedded in the pursuit of this enterprise, I use the kindred social science field of psychology as an exemplar. The emerging field of African Psychology on the continent has curated a rich archive of debates and counter-debates from which I believe economics can take a cue, as it reflexively ponders its own much-needed “Africanising.” While the kernel of the approach here is not to comparatively juxtapose economics and psychology in Africa, it could be helpful to highlight some appealing features of African Psychology which economics can replicate to its advantage on the continent. The first of these features is that discourse in the field is not monolithic: there are multiple and discordant voices, which ensures that the space for herd behaviour is as minimal as possible. Second, there is an intergenerational dimension to participation in the ongoing discussions, meaning that the thoughts and opinions of both young and experienced psychologists on the continent are considered. Ingrained in this conversation structure are the necessary ingredients for the sustainability of the discourses and, ultimately, the discipline. Third, there is inclusivity, especially in terms of gender. This contrasts sharply with economics where, also in the Global North, women are continually marginalised in the discipline. Fourth, African Psychology is evolving with a rich and healthy blend of academic (theory and research) and practical (clinical engagements, especially therapy) aspects.
In the balance of this article, I document a review of relevant literature on issues around the disciplinary practices and burgeoning dissent in economics. Subsequently, I use African Psychology as a reference for the possibilities for disciplinary transformation on the continent. In what follows I deploy “what African Economics should not be” as a route to non-prescriptively mapping the contours of its ideal minimum attributes. In other words, one key intent of the article is to offer some normative intervention around the plausible direction(s) of economics, especially as it concerns the African continent. The article closes with brief remarks on the imperatives of forging a field of economics that is fit for and serves the endogenously defined purposes of Africa.
Brief Literature Review
This concise literature review section is not designed to document the vast and ongoing literature on the field of economics and arguments for (and against) substantively reforming it. Nonetheless, I do touch upon the aspects that speak precisely to rethinking its teaching, research, and policy aspects, both globally and continentally. This section wraps up with a brief introduction to African Psychology, which is the preoccupation of the next section.
At this juncture, I want to acknowledge the fascinating work done by Kvangraven and Kesar (2022) on the important theme of decolonising economics teaching. These authors undertook a detailed survey of academic economists across various departments and raised three key questions with them: (i) What are the challenges associated with teaching economics? (ii) How are the calls for decolonising economics understood? (iii) What ideas are plausible for the reform of teaching in the field? Overall, they reported variations in the responses to these leading questions according to departmental orientation. Economists in mainstream economics departments (regardless of geographical location) were generally attuned to preserving the status quo. The opinions of economists in the other two kinds of departments (heterodox/pluralist economics departments and non-economics departments) were expectedly at variance with the aforementioned position. What I pursue in this article is, however, markedly different in several ways.
First, my focus, though implicitly encompassing economics teaching, is much broader as it adds to the empirical and policy aspects, which are complementary and essential for the overarching project of Africanising economics. Second, I am deliberate in my avoidance of accentuating the term “decolonisation” in this article. Beyond the tendency for it to detract and distract my attention from my main interest – explicating an Africanising narrative – my reading of most of what is out there leaves healthy scepticism in my mind on both the meaning(s) of the term and the credibility of alternatives (which are hardly articulated clearly). I therefore have elected to run with Africanising to better reflect my pointed interest in Africa and African lived experiences. It is this consciousness, I am persuaded, that should occupy the centre of thinking and knowledge production in and on the continent.
Appreciable intellectual labour has been devoted to pushing for disciplinary reforms within economics more broadly, especially in the aftermath of the 2008/2009 global financial crisis. Movements such as Rethinking Economics and Rethinking Economics for Africa are prominent players in this emerging field of standing up to mainstream hegemony in the field. On the global level, and in terms of rethinking economics, notable economists such as Ha-Joon Chang, Jayati Ghosh, Robert Skidelsky, and Thomas Piketty, among a host of others, have elaborately documented the urgency of shifting economic thinking away from the monolithic methodological individualism that underpins most ideas in the dominant neoclassical school (Fischer et al., 2018; Stilwell, 2019; Ambler et al., 2022 can be looked into for extensive discussions on the subject of rethinking economics).
On the continental level, the epochal #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements in South Africa undoubtedly spawned a burgeoning body of work attempting to put reforms, especially on the teaching of economics, on the front burner within the South African academy (see Aboobaker, 2016; Bassier, 2016; Muller, 2017; Craig, 2018 for telling narratives on issues such as intersectionality in economics, curriculum crisis, economic pluralism in South Africa, among other themes).
Having made these crucial acknowledgements, I hasten to reiterate here that the train of thought and consciousness I intend to spotlight goes beyond the foregoing scholars’ emphasis on teaching economics in Africa. It transcends the boundaries of teaching to cover complementary domains such as empirical work and policymaking. In what ensues, I therefore delve into the distinctiveness of the present study.
Elsewhere, I have painstakingly demonstrated that there is no such recognisable academic field as “African Economics” (Adeniyi, 2023). To convey a sense of the extensive arguments pursued and presented in arriving at this submission, I attempt an abridged portrayal in what follows. First, Africa does not feature in the assumptions and principles that underpin theories about the behaviour of economic agents. As I (Adeniyi, 2023: 18) specifically argue, the ideal-type (homo economicus), which typically is a representative agent (individual, firm, government, etc.), is constructed almost entirely based on the Western understandings of humans as self-serving and completely independent beings. It is, therefore, according to this methodological individualism mega-narrative, in the conscious pursuits of self-actualisation that these representative agents somehow unconsciously work to produce the desired good for society. This broad frame of reference in terms of principles, however, misses entirely aspects of human behaviour and other ways of thinking and knowing in settings where people's decision-making processes are inextricably adjoined with the social relations within which they themselves are embedded.
There is, however, another aspect to the poverty of the economics scholarship on Africa that has received little attention in formal academic circles.
African scholars are virtually absent from the debates that ultimately shape development scholarship and policy about the continent. A cursory look at a list of theories that attempt to explain the problem of development in Africa shows the dominance of scholars from the Global North.
Third, and finally, for the sake of brevity, the policymaking environment in Africa has historically been characterised by the dominance of external voices. This has produced policy failures of varying magnitudes across the continent. To cite a given instance with specific reference to higher education in Africa, Mkandawire (2011: 15) states: The coup de grace against higher education was made by the World Bank in 1986 when it announced that the social returns for higher education were too low compared to those of pre-primary education. This was followed by advice and conditionalities to reduce state expenditures on higher education. Many donors followed this advice. And, indeed, in one case, the local government embraced it to close down the only institution of higher education the country had.
Against the foregoing backdrop, therefore, I submit that Africa's seeming absence across the three important domains of theory, empirics, and policy in the field of economics should be accorded an elevated status in the training and research activities undertaken in universities located on the continent. While this might appear a tough ask, I intend to show at least two aspects that should invigorate hope in the balance of this article. One is deploying the successes of the kindred social science field of psychology and its ongoing engagements with Africanising, especially as pioneered and led by South African universities. Two is offering sketches of the nature, features, and scope of a possible and recognisable African Economics. More precisely, in this article, I have attempted to do this via reverse logic – namely, by portraying what African Economics could potentially be by outlining in some detail what I think it should not be.
I begin by showing, with the field of psychology as a basis, that other social science disciplines in universities on the continent have been invested in the deliberative and intentional project of defining and nurturing an authentic African form as is the case with, for example, African Psychology. I engage to some degree of detail in the debates within which African Psychology has evolved to flag at least two germane points. The first is that disciplinary disputations are necessary and could produce positive consensuses that guarantee disciplinary expansion and growth. The second is that the process of evolving this African identity in psychology remains an ongoing one. In other words, Africanising psychology has been and is an iterative endeavour with constant negotiations and renegotiations of both the form and substantive aspects of the academic field. In effect, it is within the perpetually heated crucible of the diversity of perspectives that an authentic African Psychology – both in theory and practice – has been forged on the one hand and continues to morph in response to changing contextual realities on the other hand.
Disciplinary Tensions and Contentions: African Psychology in Focus
The African continent has a remarkably long history of contestations over the “Africanness” of the knowledge produced and disseminated within its confines – and these tensions have occurred within the boundaries of several academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities and less so in the social sciences. For illustrative purposes, the focus in this article will be on psychology. I opt for psychology because, in my encounters with the social sciences, it is the discipline in which the liveliest debates have ensued on the continent about its essence and structure, and I think other fields, including economics, could learn a thing or two from these debates, which have produced a distinctive African Psychology.
With a specific focus on psychology, Nwoye (2015) critically laid out several foundational drivers for the evolution of a psychology that is fit-for-purpose – namely, which centres lived experiences in Africa and of Africans, their cultures, and worldview: indeed, an authentic African Psychology. First, there is a need to retrieve and reclaim the humanity of the African against the subtle, sometimes blatant, and widely held Eurocentric assumptions. In the exact words of Nwoye (2015: 98): indeed one of the reasons for its emergence is to serve as a protest psychology aimed at engaging in African image reconstructions […] and to advance the incomprehensible determination of the African to recover from disturbance. (emphasis in original)
A third point is exemplified by Nwoye's (2015) intent argument for the functionality of the notion of roundedness, meaning prioritising deep contextual understanding (both historical and cultural dimensions) and then building additional insights from Western traditions on top of that. This becomes a double advantage (Obiechina, 1992) and facilitates the wider and much more tedious process of decolonisation.
However, despite the intermingling of these key factors, the emergence of African Psychology suffered temporal hiccups which were thus rationalised aptly by Nwoye (2015: 101): Most [African universities] started in the 1960s and 1970s after each of the countries gained political independence from their erstwhile colonial masters […]. […S]ome of them, like the Universities of Ibadan (Nigeria), Ghana (Ghana), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Makerere (Uganda), and Nairobi (Kenya) originally started as offshore Colleges of the University of London, with each initially flying the flag of their “mother university” in London, and offering courses, such as psychology, that were developed abroad and imported to Africa.
uncritical approach to acceptance of the Western canon in psychology,
co-existence and appreciation of both African and Western paradigms: partiality and relativity of human knowledge,
selective accommodation of traditions: individual-centric bias and the composite nature of contextual lifeworlds, and
moving beyond “inheritance”: centring Africa in the study of its people's psychology.
Nwoye (2015) surmises therefore that African Psychology encompasses the critical study of the real (ordinary) and the miraculous (extraordinary) in the lived experiences of African people in their dual consciousness – that is, as individuals and relative to community. This kind of psychology, he claimed, would then be “a Psychology for something, rather than for its own sake.” Such Africa(n)-centred psychology is one in, of, for, from, on, and by Africans (Ratele, 2017a, 2017b). In other words, the pivotal thinking that these six prepositions reflect should necessarily be an acknowledgement of Africa as a site of psychological theory-building and, by extension, of Africans as legitimate builders. The overt concord in principles between these two eminent African psychologists does not preclude dissenting points by Ratele (2017a: 314): However, there are crucial disagreements between how I conceive of African psychology (or rather psychologies) and Nwoye's (2015) conceptualization. The main disagreement is that I see African psychology as less monochromatic and more assorted than does Nwoye. As a result, a different problematic, a counter-question, one that further problematizes how we think of African psychology, lies at the centre of the present contribution. That question is: Why is all of psychology in African countries not African psychology? (emphasis added)
It is pertinent to note that the debates outlined to this point do not completely exhaust the spectrum of thoughts on African Psychology. To be clear, there are scholars such as Wahbie Long who have advanced profound critiques of the essence(s) and implication(s) of pursuing the Africanising of psychology. Long (2016), for instance, suggests that “there is an essentialising bent at the heart of many writings on African Psychology.” He further argues that such a posture will not guarantee the thriving of the enterprise, since according to him (Long, 2016: 2), if African Psychology is to prosper, it will have to submit itself – in contemporary parlance – to a thoroughgoing process of “decolonisation.” It is somewhat ironic that African Psychology – by defining itself in cultural opposition to “Eurocentric” Psychology – has ended up colonising itself.
And of course, all psychologies are indigenous psychologies […and] indigenous psychology contributes to global psychology by enriching our understanding of human behaviour from multiple perspectives.
To him, this makes the pursuit of African Psychology worthwhile as it fosters an expanding view of understanding human nature. Expanding here, of course, is reflective of the perpetually ongoing task which following such a route entails.
I have gone to some length in cataloguing these debates in African Psychology to point to the existence, vibrancy, and continuity of these discourses about and on Africa within the African academic space. More importantly, efforts have been made to carve out the “Africanness” of the field, unlike the case vis-à-vis economics. The diverse shades of opinions and analytic perspectives have enriched the transformative potential of African Psychology, especially in the aspect of fostering and enlivening understandings of the African materiality and the situatedness of Africa and Africans in the world. Contradistinctively, there appears to be little or no recognition for (or recognisable attempt at) muting and espousing tenets or principles for the study of economics that reflect and centre African views, norms, values, traditions, spiritualities, conceptions, and worldviews. This foundational acknowledgement of the absence of and the need for critical thinking about an economics that is fit for the African purpose is the sine qua non for much more grounded epistemologies and the flourishing of a diversity of opinions on the why's and how's of an economics that has Africa and African interests at its core. It is therefore the perceived and palpable absence of these debates about economics and the economy in our classrooms, professional gatherings (workshops, conferences, etc.), public policy discourses, and other knowledge production, as well as dissemination platforms on the continent that incentivise my ensuing focus in this article. As the popular English adage suggests, silence may imply consent, and I would like to add that discussing the (ir)relevance of African Economics is much more desirable and dignifying than intellectual resignation, as indicated by absolute silence. I will now offer a view of how a recognisable African Economics might be imagined.
“African Economics”: Imaginaries of a Realisable Utopia?
I begin with a few remarks on utopianism as a powerful means of educating minds. Turner (1972, cited in Melber, 2014: xv) made a profound submission in the dark days of apartheid South Africa that remains instructive for the entire continent even today: Unless we think in Utopian terms about South African society we will not really come to understand how it works today. […] Nor will we be able to evaluate the society adequately.
However, in deploying utopianism as both what it is – namely, thinking – and as a method, I have elected to be guided here by the awareness of the complexity that uncertainty brings to bear on outcomes, especially how successful the project of Africanising economics is likely to be. With this as a backdrop, therefore, I base my short intervention on the subject matter in this article on what “African Economics” should not be. My intention here is to make this approach functional on at least two fronts. First, coming at the seriously complex issue this way secures my positionality as a firm adherent of the idea that humility about both claims and consequences is healthy academic practice, as is often reflected in the maxim that the hallmark of knowing is the knowledge of not knowing. Second, beneath the precepts around the “negatives” (what “African Economics” should not be) are embedded the seeds I want to believe are requisite for pushing forward the positive project of advancing what it should look like in form and substance. Nonetheless, I reiterate that the by far more difficult task of unpacking and strictly defining what it should be exceeds – as I am persuaded to admit here – the remit of my minuscule intellectual forte. Such a daunting task can only be meaningfully engaged communally through social action by the wider pool of Africa-based and Africanist economists. Of course, this will happen if – and only if – a consensus is reached, somehow, on the need to venture along that route for potential gains.
To round off here, albeit tentatively, it is equally important to acknowledge that feminist scholars in economics have expounded on quite a number of the precepts that I will be highlighting here. Nelson (1995) captures these efforts and underscores the need to persist with the questioning and re-interrogation of principles and practices in economics. Nelson (1995: 132) eloquently depicts the task thus: Feminist theory raises questions about the adequacy of economic practice not because economics is in general too objective, but because it is not objective enough. Various value-laden and partial – and, in particular, masculine-gendered – perspectives on subject, model, method, and pedagogy have heretofore been mistakenly perceived as value-free and impartial in economics, as in other scientific disciplines. Traditionally, male activities have taken center stage as subject matter, while models and methods have reflected a historically and psychologically masculine pattern of valuing autonomy and detachment over dependence and connection.
Nelson (1995) briskly surmises nevertheless that the project of challenging the patriarchal hegemony in mainstream economics is not one targeted at outright replacement (that is, substitutability) but the deliberate promotion of some complementarity of approaches. To this end, Nelson (1995: 132) states,
The alternative suggested here is not, however, a “feminine” economics in which masculine biases are replaced by feminine ones, nor a “female” economics in which economics by or about women is done differently than economics by or about men. The alternative described in this article is an improvement of all of economics, whether done by female or male practitioners.
Nelson aptly summarises the preceding, and rich, intellectual tradition of feminist critique within the field of economics (1995; see footnote 1 on page 131 and the references cited therein for details). All of that said, I now turn to brief sketches of my eleven precepts:
(i) African Economics should not be a social field that abhors discursive approaches to both theory-building and methodology. By this, I suggest that theories and the models they spawn need not be solely based on formalism through mathematical representations. This renewed emphasis will track back to the origins of economic thinking as grounded in domains such as moral philosophy, economic anthropology, political economy, and so on. Its prime focus will be on observing, understanding, and explaining economic phenomena as they are encountered and encoded in African lived realities. This paradigm shift, of course, is not a call to utterly redesignate and condemn mathematical (and econometric) modelling as arms-length endeavours; rather, it is to intentionally view them as what they truly are: tools – and, therefore, complementary. At best, they assist understanding by further illuminating what is already observed and understood intuitively – here, an African-centred intuition. We, as Africa-based economists, have a duty to our continent that requires that we engage cautiously with the over-mathematicisation of our field. Despite being a prominent figure in the promulgation of the core tenets of what became neoliberalism, in his prize lecture in 1974, Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek expressed immense reservations about the excessive reliance on formalism in economic analyses. He advanced the argument by stating, “It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely related to its propensity to imitate the procedures of the physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error.” (ii) African Economics should not be a monolithic field. African Economics must open itself up to perpetual examination and re-examination. In other words, the dynamic feature of reflexivity should be located at its core. The dominance of the neoclassical school of economic thought has meant that several alternative schools have been either confined to the fringes of the discipline or made almost extinct. African economists must be deliberate about allowing the blooming of a thousand flowers (ideas). The internal contestations and diversity of perspectives that typically drive disciplinary growth should be favoured to narrow the scope for potentially debilitating groupthink (Fischer et al. 2018 contain exhaustive details on the value of pluralism of economic perspectives). (iii) African Economics should not be wholly fixated on quantitative methodologies. The preponderance of work done in empirical economics particularly relies on analytical techniques requiring the manipulation and/or mining of quantitative data. The advent of and advances in information and communication technologies have also birthed knowledge fields such as big data analytics – for instance, through machine learning – which big corporations deploy overtly for their business purposes and subtly as a means of behavioural control. So, it is apparent that quantitative economics is going nowhere soon. The route that is envisaged for the economics that will be better suited to Africa's needs is the adoption of qualitative evidence in a symbiotic mixed-methods framework. Describing the economics research landscape in South Africa, Posel (2017: 119) submits,This quantification of economics should not be at the expense of exchanges with qualitative data that fail the criterion of being representative, or with other disciplines that are less quantitative. With South Africa's complex history, persistent inequality and considerable cultural diversity, economics has much to gain from interdisciplinary collaboration and mixed-methods research (emphasis added).
This quantification fetish is driven by the age-long aspiration of economics to be perceived as a science. However, Hayek objected to thinking of economics as a science in order not to fuel what he referred to as “the pretense of knowledge,” which is the notion that anyone can be so knowledgeable as to manage (using heuristics such as engineering) society successfully. Many decades after Hayek, we inhabit an economics field that has undeniably become ever so sophisticated in its fanciful propositions and models, although its capacity to deliver on its most important task – to understand and explain economic phenomena in time and space – has been called into question repeatedly. The economics that will cater to the needs of Africa – African Economics – therefore should not be one that uncritically dismisses unconventional sources of theoretical insights and data generation. This means that literature (both oral and textual), folklore, music, community elders (sages), and other narrative genres on Africa may have to be carefully engaged with a view to attaining a corpus of discursive economics which is consistent with lived experiences on the continent. Mathematical tools may be used to support this exercise where necessary.
Put together, African Economics stands to benefit from this implied variety in the composition of its toolkits.
(iv) African Economics should not be shy in borrowing from mainstream economics, kindred social sciences, and other fields. To zero in on one instance of what is possible, I refer to the excellent paper by Lodewijks (1994), in which he raises the question of how “economics [can] benefit from anthropology.” He highlights, for instance, the very deep connections between the work of anthropologists and what development economists do. The extension of the scope of economic analysis beyond the diktat of markets and associated mechanisms to incorporate reciprocity, conviviality, and other community-founded behavioural manifestations should offer exciting prospects to development economists in Lodewijks’ view. Understanding the complex ways in which economic actions and activities are derivative of sociality is much needed given the specificities of Africa as a lived space and ongoing reality for its mass of people. I will hasten to add, though – despite the subtle optimism – that the nature and process of the suggested borrowing must necessarily be respectful and transparent, respectively. African Economics may do itself a world of good by refraining from the sort of economic imperialism that its mainstream counterpart has been acclaimed to embody in its incursions into other fields.
Fine (2000: 12) aptly describes economic imperialism as “broadening the scope of application of economic principles in order to encroach upon the subject matter of the other social sciences.” This application of economics to non-economic themes is not in itself injurious, but the obtrusive invasion of neoclassical economics into other fields becomes rather unsettling when, for instance, children are construed in its new household economics as “durable consumer goods” à la Gary Becker (see, in particular, Becker and Tomes, 1976). African Economics, while inextricably resting on borrowings from multiple others must tread respectfully by acknowledging incompleteness “as the normal order of things” (Nyamnjoh, 2017: 253). As Nyamnjoh potently argues, conviviality invites us to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate the delusions of grandeur that come with ambitions and claims of completeness. Conviviality encourages frontier Africans to reach out, encounter and explore ways of enhancing or complementing themselves with the added possibilities of potency brought their way by the incompleteness of others, never as a ploy to becoming complete, but to make them more efficacious in their relationships and sociality (emphasis added).
(v) African Economics should not be antagonistic towards collaboration. It is apparent from the sheer magnitude of thinking, rethinking, and priority-setting work required to evolve an economics that centres and serves the interests of Africa that “silo-type scholarship” will not engender any appreciable progress. To truly observe, know, and apply itself to the intended context, African Economics naturally should embrace multi-, cross-, and inter-disciplinarity. This outlook would be effectual against the backdrop of the idea of borrowing that was discussed in my preceding point. Nonetheless, the implied processes cannot be thought of in simplistic terms, especially because there are formidable barriers to achieving success, some of which are institutional tensions.
To illustrate one important dimension of such tensions, institutional practices around appointments and promotions within some African universities are configured in a manner that works at cross purposes, hence the tensions. The system upon which promotions are typically determined is punitive in the presence of collaboration. What it incentivises is the individual pursuit of the maximum required points. Thus, to amass the points quickly, it pays not to work with anyone else. To further penalise collaboration in some universities, the assessment typically requires each author's percentage contribution to the publications (books, journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, monographs, etc.) being graded to compute a weighted score for a particular author.
While there is an obvious scientific rationale for such computational exercises, as someone trained in a largely quantitative tradition I have always been bewildered by this practice. For instance, if a contribution of 60 per cent is assigned to a specific author, what does this mean? How do we assign weights to different parts of a paper? Who determines such weights? How do we treat aggregation? What exactly are we attempting to measure? How much does this 60 per cent approximate that? On the flip side, sole-authored papers automatically mean a share of 100 per cent. Here again, what does this mean? How do we think about or value the ideas of colleagues, conference participants, journal reviewers, and editorial boards that more often than not shape the eventual research output? Do we say their input amounts to 0 per cent? What are the ethical dimensions of such subjectivity? To add to this assemblage of questions, how do we gauge the contributions of the usually many authors that were read and cited in a typical published paper?
While this assessment system may have somewhat served its purpose in some of these universities, it is still in the remit of our academic calling to reinterrogate such established practices, especially in a rapidly globalising world and on account of the “wicked” problems the African continent contends with.
(vi) African Economics should not be a provincialisation of African economic reality. In other words, this call to consciousness is not a migration back in time to nativism. Its intention is not to project African realities about the economy as acutely exceptional. Exceptionalism obscures the latitude for forging fruitful synergies and creates an unhelpful sense of detachment from global affairs, which despite my recourse to utopianism, I see as limiting and destructive in the extreme. This train of thought is similar to what Blanco (2020a, 2020b) describes in his review of Ndlovu-Gatsheni's important 2018 book Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialisation and Decolonisation. In the exact words of Blanco (2020a, 2020b: 1423),Ndlovu-Gatsheni privileges African thinkers and scholars from the global South while avoiding an epistemic xenophobia or any other centrism which could be counterproductive.
However, scholars such as Vivek Chibber have criticised decolonial proponents such as Ndlovu-Gatsheni as embracers of relativism, which might inadvertently offer legitimacy to the position of some far-right political movements (for an elaborate criticism of postcolonial theorising, Chibber, 2013 offers an engaging entry point).
Nonetheless, the mobilisation I imagine here for the recovery of authentic African reality in the economic sphere is not precisely synonymous with outright ethnicisation either of African Economics or of economics in Africa. This also does not suggest we should be oblivious to the functionality of the “ethno-” prefix in economic or other phenomena. Obono (2022) comprehensively articulates the features and feats of such inquiry, specifically illustrating it with his “ethno-demography” while also more broadly calling attention to the radically transformative potential of thinking “ethno-” across fields.
(vii) African Economics should not be delimited by linguistic boundaries. In its voyage into the archives of African experiences and lived economic realities, this economics must reach across “phone” lines. In essence, the rich literature on these cross-cutting issues written in the other colonial languages – Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish – would have to be included in what may become the cannon. This, of course, will open up more spaces for translation efforts and thereby strengthen its ontological foundations. This is likely to birth some unintended but beneficial outcomes. For example, the penchant for claiming that “no other study” has ever been done on a particular subject matter will be moderated by the modesty that exposure to Francophone or Lusophone literature will ensure. More importantly, African languages themselves have potency in terms of recovery of economic concepts from poetry, proverbs, images, and other forms of text. On this language issue, Segalo (2017: 29 sets out the crux of his paper's pursuit this way:This paper argues for the need to take the role of languages (indigenous) earnestly if we are to imagine a psychology (African) that takes local contexts within which it is practised and taught seriously.
Segalo goes on to suggest that such deliberate deployment of indigenous languages in psychology in Africa will be a high-productivity endeavour. According to Segalo, “We believe that by putting Indigenous languages at the centre we would be digging deep to ignored knowledge systems that have always shaped the well-being of African people” (Segalo, 2017: 35). Dlamini (2020) makes a similar point but emphasises specifically the connections between the choice of language in psychology training and remediation of what he referred to as “the marginalisation of Black lifeworlds in professional psychology.”
(viii) African Economics should not be exclusive. In the face of ubiquitous income and wealth inequality on a global scale as well as worsening living conditions in most countries – especially in urban spaces such as cities – some are clamouring for alternative frameworks outside of neoclassical economics. Theories of what “inclusive economy,” “well-being economy,” or “sharing economy” are, are developing and offering explanations for knotty socio-economic issues. Van Niekerk (2019) underscores this theoretical recalibration as one way of responding to the growing frustrations with the failings of the extant neoliberal capitalist model around the globe. Thus, new frameworks that obviate the flaws of conventional economic wisdom are in high demand, and African Economics has to be positioned to be a formidable supply destination for such innovative thinking. Another important dimension of inclusivity is bringing the ideas and complementary energies of genuine Africanists on board. Finally, as in Akiwowo's (1983) “variations in the theme of sociation,” it is equally feasible to trace the contours of some kind of “asuwada economy” in which caring and sharing for the self and multiple others (including animals and the environment) is pursued with notions such as reciprocity and conviviality at the heart of economic and social interactions (extensive discussions on these ideas can be found in Akiwowo (1984, 1986, 1988) and in Ani (2014)).
(ix) African Economics should not be puffy but self-effacing. In terms of how it values its content and influence on African lifeworlds, a deeper understanding of uncertainty in human actions and the unpredictability it forces on the behaviour of the economy should readily make humility the baseline. Humility is in short supply among economists, largely owing to delusions of grandeur, and those practising in Africa appear to have hopped on the train. The pretension of economics as it has sought to posture as a science field is in part responsible for this inclination. This manifests, for instance, in the disdain openly expressed by some mainstream economists, who believe that “dead men tell no tales” and show aversion to the history of economic thought. Also, in keeping with this scientistic view of the economic world, there is essentially an obsession with quantitative methods. Some authors have labelled this “physics envy.”
In an interesting essay on the subject, Mirowski (1992: 61) illustrates this: If they (that is, economists) are closeted together with various physicists with the intention of producing some joint theoretical innovations, such as recently happened at the Santa Fe Institute, much time is frittered away invidiously comparing whom should be regarded as the more mathematically rigorous. Tentatively, we like to suggest that it will be sufficient to defer to the history of economics, and to the history of science in general to reveal that the source of many of these quirks that beset economists are rooted in pervasive physics envy. (emphasis added)
However, there remains a lot to learn from the hard sciences (such as physics, chemistry, and medicine), which economics has worked assiduously to imitate for so long. For instance, these real scientists – since their prizes are in the original will of Alfred Nobel – despite their mind-boggling capacity to control both the environment for and outcomes of their experiments remain circumspect when engaging in their science communication. African Economics will thrive if such intellectual humility is ingrained as a disciplinary culture.
(x) African Economics should not infantilise the state/public sector. The often misleading mantras such as “government has no business in business,” “the private sector is the engine of growth,” and “government should facilitate by creating an enabling environment,” among others, work to actively decimate the capacity of governments to make the critically needed investments in improving their internal processes and systems (for instance, better procurement rules, socially responsive budgeting, etc.). These governments being infantile are therefore not able to mature into the kind of developmental states that scholars including Chang (1999) and Mkandawire (2011) have eloquently demonstrated to be required and effective in poorer climes such as Africa.
(xi) African Economics should not be uncritically fixated on economic efficiency. There has to be a serious rethinking of the persistent emphasis on economic efficiency when studying economics that is orientated towards clarifying the nature of economic interactions of and by continental (and diaspora) Africans. As a collective, our reflections should encapsulate issues around economic resilience and economic justice. The recent COVID-19 episode exposed the magnitude of unpreparedness even in the most advanced economies. Since future pandemics and other natural disasters are inevitable, modes of caring for nature beyond contemporary efficiency-driven solutions such as the “polluter pays principle” must be put in place. The adverse effects of climate change will be more devastating for the African continent if economic systems with built-in resilience are not, as a matter of urgency, imagined and realised.
Closing Remarks
The battles to recover African identity/personhood amid the stacks of epistemic injustices done to it by its encounters with slavery and colonialism rages on. Generally, Africa is not codified as a space for the making of theoretical and methodological knowledge(s). Despite this grim state of affairs, I show clearly that in recent times African Psychology has claimed its rightful place as an academic field in universities in Africa and, albeit less so, elsewhere. The absence of such a disciplinary push or contestations in economics on the continent is the key lacuna on which I cast the spotlight in this article. Admittedly, however, I recognise that the opinion on the (ir)relevance of an African Economics is beyond the pursuit of this article and ideally must involve the mobilisation of the grit and talents of academic economists on the continent and genuine Africanist scholars where applicable. This notwithstanding, and to foreshadow likelihoods, in this article, I paint imaginary pictures on the canvas of future time about what an erstwhile elusive African Economics might look like. The viewpoint expressed in this article has a multiplicity of implications for training and research in Economics domiciled in African institutions, especially universities. To wrap up, I briskly itemise at least three such implications. First, this might imply a holistic overhaul of economics curricula in African universities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to make what is taught approximate lived African realities. Second, agenda-setting on the research angle might take on an entirely different form in which what are deemed relevant topics to pursue will be endogenously delineated. Third, public policies and their design and implementation might more aptly follow a bottom-up approach rather than extant top-down mechanisms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks, without implicating, colleagues at the University of Ibadan, especially professors Festus Egwaikhide, Babajide Fowowe, Mutiu Oyinlola, and Oludayo Tade for excellent feedback on earlier drafts of the work. Also, Drs. Tolu Osayomi and Samuel Orekoya are appreciated for pointing out gaps as the manuscript developed. Insightful theoretical perspectives were equally gleaned through incisive conversations with Drs. Adewale Owoseni and Peter Ikhane. All participants at the African Political Economy Association (APEA) Conference in December 2023 are also gratefully acknowledged, particularly professors Dele Omosegbon, Akpan Ekpo, and Juliet Elu. Finally, the two anonymous reviewers are thanked for their critical and excellent suggestions. All remaining errors and omissions are, of course, the responsibility of the author.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.