Empirecrafting or Statecrafting Africa? Beyond Banal “Traditional” Witchery and Towards Rebuilding the Moral Economy

Abstract

This chapter theorises that colonialism destroyed precolonial African moral economies on the continent. It argues that corruption in Africa includes financial, monetary or even economic arenas (in the narrow sense), and more broadly, the destruction of cultures/social mores and values that otherwise historically held African people together that guaranteed African collective conscience and precolonial moral economies. The moral economy is premised on elements of culture, customs, beliefs, practices and relations of premodern economies that involved legitimation of secular hierarchies. Such moral economies established a framework of social trust that is the stability of mutual expectations among social actors that permits the structured patterns of action ensuring social reproduction. Although the United Nation pronounced the sustainable development goals, we argue that sustainable development has to be contextualised within the neo-imperial political-economics of unsustainability that is evidenced by neoliberal economic reforms. Such political-economics of unsustainability are by extension politics of disposability or dispensability—the idea was to dispose or dispense with the sovereignty and autonomy of the newly independent African states. The political-economics of unsustainability is a feature of centuries-old empire-crafting over African states. Unsustainability has its foundation in slavery and colonialism—as such, the political-economics of unsustainability create conditions for perpetual dependence of (African) nations on outsiders. Crises that are witnessed in Africa are not necessarily rooted in post-independence political economies but the crises are rooted in centuries-old colonial/imperial political-economics of unsustainability.