Africa Rising? Afro-Optimism and Uncivil Society in an Era of Economic Volatility

Abstract

The myth that Africa is rising has become widespread as a result of the commodity boom that began in 2002 (although with interruptions in 2008 and 2013). But, the context is a long (40-year) global economic slump in which stagnation tendencies were only temporarily displaced through finance and globalization. Indeed, in Africa, a far-reaching resource curse still ensures unequal ecological exchange drains, of far more wealth each year than is earned in income measures based upon standard gross domestic product (GDP) accounting. This means that the kind of brief, Keynesian-based credit-driven recoveries in many African economies after 2008–2009 were not durable; nor were the much-hyped strategies that were reliant upon cellular technology. As a result, the beginnings of a Polanyian double-movement stirred in Africa, starting in three North African countries. This was also evident south of the Sahara, including in South Africa’s platinum mines, where the Marikana massacre of August 2012 resulted. To end the next stage of dispossession (which is increasingly focused upon Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa’s new scramble for Africa) the civil society would be required to become less civilized and the uncivil society would require to become more organized. The central challenge is for the nascent economic justice movements to take the Latin American road, in which International Monetary Fund (IMF) Riots during the 1980s paved the way for more sustained far-left activism and, also, changes in the government.