Introduction

The current age of resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century has led to the reopening of basic epistemological questions and the need to look into historical, systemic, structural, institutional and agential forces behind the making and remaking of the modern world from a decolonial perspective. Consequently, the tasks of locating Africa historically in the macro-histories of the unfolding of Euromodernity and the evolving capitalist world economy and explicating how Africa was integrated into the evolving modern world capitalist system, the nationalist and decolonial initiatives of remaking the world after empire, and the re-disciplining and re-adjustment of African lives and economies in the service of hyper-globalisation, has gained new impetus. This intervention also challenges the most resilient fallacy not only in the modern history, but also across dominant intellectual and theoretical perspectives on the rise of the current Eurocentric modern world system which attribute its rise to unique endogenous European development while ignoring the various structural adjustments of African lives and economies in the service of the coloniser’s world model (Bhambra, 2020; French, 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, 2020).

It was this fallacy that provoked the rise of what Cedric J. Robinson (2000) called the ‘Black Radical Tradition’ which formed the basis of today’s resurgent and insurgent decolonisation otherwise known as decoloniality. This highlighted how African lives and economies were structurally adjusted in the service of Euromodernity in general and colonial modernity in particular. The earliest inquiry into the role of Africa in the making of the modern world was advanced by William E. B. Du Bois (1946) where he challenged the imperial and colonial historiographical attempts to write Africa out of the history of the rise of the modern world system. Howard W. French (2021) has empirically demonstrated the centrality of the role of Africa and Africans in the making of the modern world. On the other hand, theorists such as Julian Go (2016) have highlighted how the intellectual tendencies of ignoring colonialism and empire in the study of Euromodernity and the making of the modern world has resulted in a problematic bifurcation of postcolonial thought. This highlights the miscognitions of the modern world, wrought by refusal of Eurocentric social theory to take seriously how race, colonialism, and empire laid the foundation for an unequal world of developed and underdeveloped realities, due to its origin within narrow European experiences. The same point is pushed forward by Bhambra and Holmwood (2021), who lament the absence of colonialism and empire in the discussion of modern social theory and understanding of the contemporary modern world. The consequence of all this has been a deliberate attempt to ignore the role of Africa and Africans in the making of modernity and modern society, and more importantly how African lives and economies underwent structural adjustments of various kinds to be of service to the coloniser’s world model.

To correct this resilient fallacy, there is urgent need to re-articulate the macro-history of the early modern world since the fifteenth century to understand and explain the position of Africa in the modern world system and its global orders. Without a return to this macro-history of the modern world system and the making of the world capitalist economy, the elusiveness of development in Africa will remain mysterious. This chapter builds on the work of Amin (1972), Rodney (1972), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2016), Bhambra (2020) and many others. It identifies four structural adjustments of African lives and economies in the service of a rising Europe and North America.

The concept of structural adjustments is expanded and stretched beyond its common usage to refer only to the Washington Consensus-driven neoliberal interventions in African economies and lives that began in the 1970s. The encounter between Europe and Africa has been characterized by imposed structural adjustments of African lives and economies as Africa was dragged into the evolving nexus of the modern world system, its shifting global orders and expanding capitalist world economy, resisting and fighting across epochs. The chapter begins with an outline of the four major structural adjustments of African economies and African lives within an unfolding modernity.

The Five Phases of Structural Adjustments of Africa in the Longue Dureé

The structural adjustments of African economies and African lives were mainly driven by what Wa Thiong’o (2016) termed the journeys of capital. The first major structural adjustment of African lives and economies took place during the mercantile period. The discovery paradigm and mercantilist order began to envelop Africa in 1415 when Portugal invaded the port of Ceuta in North Africa (Newitt, 2010). Ceuta formed a bridgehead for further Portuguese imperial expansion that challenged Muslim dominance in North Africa and the broader Mediterranean region, which was in place since the seventh century. Africans were hunted like animals and subjected to racial enslavement. This mercantile period, unfolded from the fifteenth century and became dominant up to the eighteenth century, marking the beginning of how Africa gradually lost control over its economic and human resources. It was from this mercantile intervention and extractivism that such scholars as Rodney (1972) and Amin (1972) traced the underdevelopment of Africa and its contribution to the Industrial Revolution in Europe. African people found themselves at the mercy of enslavers and their collaborators. They were shipped like cargo across the Atlantic oceans to work as slaves in the plantation colonies of what became known as the ‘New World’.

The discovery paradigm and the mercantilist order inaugurated a commercial shift from the Mediterranean-centred to the Atlantic-centred economy, linking western Africa, the eastern coasts of North Africa and South America as well as the Atlantic coastline of Europe and North Africa (Newitt, 2010, p. 1). While the Spanish Atlantic sphere was being extended to the Pacific, the Philippines and China, the Portuguese were creating the Indian Ocean sphere that was extending to the East Indies. Eventually Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas were linked together through economic activities, migrations of people and selling of human beings as slaves.

What dominated the mercantile order were merchant companies such as the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602; the British Company of Royal Adventurers Trading in Africa, formed in 1660; the French West Indies Company/Senegal Company, formed in 1664; the British Royal Africa Company, formed in 1672, among others. These chartered companies were granted extensive powers that included enslaving, conquest and colonisation. By 1650, Amsterdam had become the centre of the world having emerged from the ‘mercantilist wars of the seventeenth century remarkably successful’ (Terreblanche, 2014, p. 216). At the centre of their empire was the Dutch East India Company (in Dutch, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) formed in 1602 as a chartered company. Terreblanche (2014, p. 218) argued that ‘VOC can be regarded as one of the first [multinational corporations]. It was a real “octopus”, with tentacles in international trade, piracy, the slave trade and colonialism’. Jan Nijman (1994, p. 215) also argued that the VOC was the ‘one of the primary agencies in the expanding world-economy in its time’ and elaborated that ‘it contributed to the geographic expansion of trade between Europe and Asia’ and concluding that ‘the firm itself constituted an institutional innovation in several ways, which would be replicated by others’. In short, VOC conquered the world for the Dutch until it collapsed in 1799 due to bankruptcy. The reasons for its fall into bankruptcy is not the concern of this chapter.

The next empire-building process was British-led (1775–1945). Looting of Global South resources is what produced the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution gave Britain primacy over others. Just like the Dutch, the British formed the British East India Company and it survived for almost 300 years (1600–1874). The ‘age of sovereignty’ tried to put to rest the paradigm of war that dominated during the mercantile period:

If the period between 1492 and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), including the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), can be characterised as the age of banditry in relation to chattel slavery, the period between the Peace of Westphalia and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 can be characterized as the age of sovereignty. (Nimako & Willemsen, 2011, p. 20)

The rise of the ‘Westphalian order’ is credited for laying the foundation of the modern idea of the sovereign nation-state system. The people of Africa were not considered worth of national sovereignty that was introduced at Westphalia. This made them vulnerable to conquest and colonisation. The decision to only bestow national sovereignty to emerging European states and to exclude Africa portended the scramble and partitioning of Africa in the nineteenth century. To Nimako and Willemsen (2011, p. 20), for ‘the “outside world,” the importance of the Peace of Westphalia lay not in the reciprocal recognition of the sovereignty of the signatories, but rather in the non-recognition of the sovereignty of others’.

The second major phase of structural adjustment of African lives and economies was that of the shift from mercantile capital to industrial capital. This period is sometimes distorted into what is known as the shift from ‘illegitimate trade to legitimate trade’ (Law, 1995). There is even emphasis on what became known as ‘abolition of slavery’ and there is a tendency to ignore two facts. The first clarification comes from Hartman (1997, p. 10), who states that racial slavery was transformed and never abolished. The thesis of ‘transition from slavery to free labour’ is also challenged by Lowe (2015) who is very critical of liberal claims of progress. The second flaw is that there was a shift from plantation to colony. Africa and Africans had to be structurally adjusted to this capitalist driven shift in the modern system and its global order. It is here that the concept of racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000) helps in making sense of the inventions of slaves, coolies, bonded labourers and contracted cheap labourers—framed by racial capitalism as the animating spirit of colonialism and racialisation as the infrastructure of capitalism (Manjapra, 2020, p. 8).

The signature event for the de-structuring and re-structuring of Africa was the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference. Adebajo (2010) calls it ‘the curse of Berlin’ because it legitimised and galvanised the scramble for Africa and heightened its conquest, as well as enabling the partitioning, dismemberment and fragmentation of Africa into various colonies. Today Africa finds itself entrapped within boundaries drawn by colonisers in Berlin. The ‘Berlin consensus’ portended the physical empire and its colonial governmentality. Africans were fighting in the form of what Ranger (1968) depicted as primary and secondary resistance. Primary resistance referred to the earliest form of African armed resistance to encroachment of colonialism and was led by pre-colonial kings, chiefs and queens. Across the continent such forms of resistance such as the Ndebele-Shona Uprising of 1896–1897 against British colonisation, did not succeed in stopping colonialism. By 1914, Africa was plunged into the age of colonial governmentality. Colonial brutality and exploitation provoked what Ranger (1968) termed ‘secondary resistance’, taking the modernist forms of organising the colonized into ‘mass nationalism’ led by African educated elite. What provoked this was the practical colonial processes of implementation of dispossession, production of unique African colonial subjectivity of rightless people devoid of privileges, and establishment of direct and indirect colonial administrations. These direct forms of colonial administrations became known by different names such as Concessionaire/Company Rule, Assimilation/Association, Lusotropicalism, Indirect/Direct Rule and Apartheid (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, 2015). For Mamdani (2013), the DNA of colonial governmentality was the practice of ‘defining’ the colonised for purposes of ‘ruling’ over them.

It was during this period that African economies were bifurcated into what Amin (1972, p. 504) termed the three ‘macro-regions’ with West Africa turned into a ‘colonial trade economy’ that was sub-divided into ‘the coastal zone’, ‘the hinterland’ and ‘the Sudan’. The second colonial ‘macro-region’ was Central Africa, dominated by ‘Africa of the concession-owning companies’ (Amin, 1972, p. 504). At the centre of this ‘macro-region’ was what was known as the ‘Congo Free State’. This was a personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium under a violent primitive accumulation of rubber, abusing African labour and subjecting Africans to worse than enslavement conditions (Hochschid, 1999). The third ‘macro-region’ mapped by Amin (1972, p. 504) is Eastern and Southern Africa, which he termed the ‘Africa of the labour reserves’. The southern African region in particular became dominated by white settler colonies of South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa) and Namibia (South West Africa), which were characterised by massive dispossessions of land and displacements of Africans to make way for white settlers.

While Amin’s mapping of ‘macro-regions’ might not be precise, it is very useful in demonstrating how African economies were structurally adjusted in the service of Europe and how African economies were turned into colonial economies, which were outward looking in orientation. However, it was not only through bifurcation of African economies into ‘macro-regions’ that Africa experienced structural adjustment. As Adebajo (2010, p. 16) suggests, ‘Berlin and its aftermath were akin to armed robbers forcibly breaking into a house and sharing out its possessions while the owners of the house—who had been tied up with thick ropes—were wide awake but were powerless to prevent the burglary’. The continued outward orientation of African economies, being driven from outside of Africa even after the dismantlement of the physical colonial empire in the 1960s, prompted Nkrumah (1965) to coin the concept of ‘neo-colonialism’ to describe African economies at service of Europe and North America.

The third major phase of structural adjustment of African economies and lives was the shift from empire to modern nation-states. While African people sacrificed energy and lives in struggles for decolonisation, the modern world system was rebooting itself in the face of anti-systemic forces and the rise of two superpowers. On the one hand, there were efforts by African leaders to articulate national projects with development as a central leitmotif. On the other, the Truman version of development had imperial designs at its centre. Perhaps Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967 can be seen as the signature of African national projects that attempted to reinvent colonial economies. This entailed efforts to reverse their outside-looking colonial orientation whereby the economy was of service to Europe and North America rather than to Africa (Shivji, 2017). Of course, the Arusha Declaration had no chance of success in a post-1945 world dominated by Cold War neo-coloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). Nandita Sharma (2020, pp. 14–15) correctly posited that ‘Postcolonialism, far from ending the violent practices and relationships of colonialism, marks the ascendency of the colonial form of state power and its reliance on nationalist subjectivities, national forms of exclusion, and kinds of violence that nation-states carry out’. Withdrawal of physical empires opened the way for non-territorial commercial empires led by the United States of America. US capital dominated the world during the nation-states organised modern world system.

The newly ‘independent’ African States were all invited into what could be called a ‘United Nations decolonisation normative order’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015, p. 30). It was a moment of great hope for those people emerging from the domination of empires. Hence this post-1945 form of entrapment was and is often celebrated by Africans as a form of decolonisation and attainment of ‘political independence’. Signified by symbolic accommodation of Africa into lowest echelons of the modern world system through membership in the United Nations, this entrapment might appear progressive and even liberatory. Hobson (2012, p. 185) noted that what emerged after 1945 was a ‘subliminal Eurocentric institutionalism’ within which scientific racism was de-escalated but never expunged from the modern world system. Binaries of civilized/barbarian and even whites/blacks were allowed to strategically recede from public and international discourse. All this reshuffling of old imperial cards to some extent deliberately confused the peripherised people into thinking that after 1945 they entered a new ‘postcolonial’ and even ‘post-racial’ age. Grosfoguel (2007) correctly noted that the major change that took place was from ‘direct colonialism’ to ‘global coloniality’ rather than from ‘colonialism’ to ‘postcolonialism’. Chakrabarty (2019, p. 45) tried to bring into conversation the three discourses of anticolonialism, postcolonialism and decolonisation. Anticolonialism emphasised the urge ‘to get rid of the colonizer in every possible way’; postcolonialism ‘emphasized how the colonial situation produced forms of hybridity or mimicry that necessarily escaped the Manichean logic of the colonial encounter’; and decolonisation emphasized the economic, cultural and intellectual changes even after the end of the physical empire.

The post-1945 dispensation was not only entangled in politics of fake political decolonisation (flag and anthem independence framed by neo-colonialism) but with what is here termed ‘Cold War coloniality’ that polarised Africans ideologically and reduced the continent to a theatre of proxy hot wars (wars induced by the contending superpowers but fought in Africa pitting Africans against each other because of Cold War ideological differences). This is another important epoch within the broader third phase that witnessed an Africa that was entrapped in a global ideological warfare that decimated any of the African authentic political and economic formulations and creations. Cold War coloniality was as dirty as all other forms of global coloniality. It countered all the initiatives of what Prashad (2007) termed ‘the darker nations’ that had emerged from empire and were busy constructing the third world project. Through this, (formerly) colonised peoples and their leaders tried to pace a third space between the hegemonic East led by the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) and the equally hegemonic West led by the United States. The Bandung Conference of 1955 was a launchpad for re-worlding from the periphery. In the words of Prashad (2019, p. xi), ‘Bandung is no longer only the name of a city. It is the name of a set of dreams’—grand dreams of decolonisation, development and freedom. The demand of a New International Economic Order and the making of federations of the (formerly) colonised peoples signified what Getachew (2019, p. 3) termed ‘worldmaking after empire’.

Chakrabarty (2019, pp. 46–47) highlighted three interventions framing the attempts to remake the world after the empire. The first he termed the ‘developmental side of decolonisation (…) whereby anticolonial thinkers came to accept different versions of modernization theory that in turn made the West into a model for everyone to follow’. Indeed, the demand for a New International Economic Order and the discourses of ‘catching-up’ were informed by this thinking. The second intervention is ‘pedagogical’ decolonisation in which ‘the very performance of politics re-enacted civilizational or cultural hierarchies between nations, between classes, or between the leaders and the masses’ (ibid.). This reality witnessed anticolonial leaders assuming the positionality of ‘teachers’ who were always giving lessons on how to remake the world in favour of the dominated. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania beat all of them in pedagogical decolonisation and indeed pedagogical nationalism and consequently became known as Mwalimu (the teacher). Then there was ‘dialogical’ decolonisation characterised by devotion of ‘a great deal of time to the question of whether or how a global conversation of humanity could genuinely acknowledge cultural diversity without distributing such diversity over a hierarchical scale of civilisation—that is to say, an urge towards cross-cultural dialogue without the baggage of imperialism’ (ibid.). The United Nations was turned into a stage for these versions of decolonisation and a space for ventilation of visions and dreams, while at the same time it was a major cog of the modern world system and its global order.

The fourth phase is that of Washington Consensus-neoliberal-driven structural adjustments of African economies and lives. At the centre of this structural adjustment was an elaborate global financial republic (Gildea, 2019). It is made up of Euro-North American-dominated multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Thus, while the African nationalists tried to take advantage of the shift from empire to modern nation-states to advance the African national revolution including demands for a New International Economic Order in 1974, the advent of the Washington Consensus reversed everything. The structural adjustments of African economies and African lives of the late 1970s targeted the policy domain. Policy direction was hijacked and external conditionalities were imposed on African governments that were desperate for external financial aid. Once again, African economies were forced to look outside. Here was born what wa Thiong’o (2016) termed debt slavery. Mkandawire and Soludo (1998) compiled the most important and comprehensive study of this fourth phase, which is mistakenly taken as the first example of structural adjustment. Their study highlighted how structural adjustment programmes did not respond to Africa’s fundamental needs.

There was a deliberate ploy to reverse the attempts and initiatives taken by African leaders in the 1960s to try and reorient the inherited colonial economies and transform them into inward looking African economies in the service of African people. It was during this phase that the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) led by Adebayo Adedeji produced a comprehensive document in response to the imposed conditionalities. It emphasised the need for democratisation of global economic structures of power (UNECA, 1990). It also demanded human-centred development. Expectedly, this initiative failed. Imposed conditionalities of deregulation and privatisation of the economies of Africa and withdrawal of the state to allow market forces to determine everything was basically about making Africa open for the unfettered march of global capital.

The post-Cold War triumphalism of neoliberal order, which Fukuyama (2006) wrongly articulated as the end of history, is another important epoch within the fourth phase in the structural adjustments of African lives and economies in the service of global capitalism, driven by Europe and North America (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, 2015). The Washington Consensus was an important lever of global coloniality that de-structured what was remaining of African policy space and sovereignty through the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programmes and political conditionalities. The state in Africa which has been actively involved in developmentalism was soon depicted as the source of African economic and political problems. It had to be rolled back to open the space for unregulated and faceless market forces.

As though this was not enough trouble for Africa and Africans, the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001 inaugurated another shift towards an ‘anti-terrorist order’ under which the paradigm of war gained a new lease of life and a securitisation order emerged. Africa used to be depicted as an underdeveloped context since the Truman Speech of 1949, but was now immediately re-defined as a terrain of weak and failed states that were potential abodes of ‘terrorists’. The signature of the moment was the establishment of American military bases on the continent and legitimation of military interventions by the United States and its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The military invasion of Libya and the assassination of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi is a key reminder of this securitisation discourse.

The fifth phase is that of hyper-globalisation accompanied by the rise of China and its activities in Africa. Two contrasting discourses have emerged about Africa within this fifth phase. The first is the discourse of African rising which is justified using economic growth rates recorded by some African economies after the year 2000 (Taylor, 2014a). Taylor (2014b, p. 156) dismissed the discourse of Africa, noting that ‘in this tale, where growth for growth’s sake is cast as a manifestation of development and progress, the agenda of industrialisation and moving Africa up the global production chain has been abandoned’. The second is the discourse of the third scramble for Africa, which is meant to capture the increased demands for African natural resources by emerging powers from the Global South as well as developed countries from the Global North especially after the global financial crisis (Southall & Melber, 2009).

What connects the two discourses is the reality of ‘high commodity prices’ (Taylor, 2014a, p. 143). This connection is explained by Onuoha (2016, p. 282):

The notion of a resurgent Africa is literally intertwined with the scramble for Africa. While some see the current interest in Africa as novel, others hold the view that there is nothing new in the process, but that it is the latest version in the exploitation of Africa.

Again, Africa is servicing the world capitalist economy within a context where ‘There is no evidence thus far that Africa’s structural profile is improving, which should alert us to the dangers of being dazzled by numbers’ (Taylor, 2014b, p. 144).

Theory-Praxis Dialectic in Understanding Elusive Development in Africa

Wa Thiong’o (2016) highlighted four journeys of capital: slave trade, slave plantation system, colonialism and global debt slavery. This framework helps ground the four phases of structural adjustment of African economies, linking the theoretical and the empirical. What emerges clearly in the various entrapments of evolving global capital, is the undercutting of anti-systemic resistance and extra-structural agency of the African people. Wa Thiong’o’s analysis directly responds to Frederick Cooper’s (2014, p. 9) question: how did the relationship between Africa and Europe came to be so asymmetrical?

Another important image is that of Africa ensnared by a spider web of coloniality. Mignolo (2018, p. 97) defined the colonial matrices of power as ‘a complex structure of management and control composed of domains, levels and flows’ and as a ‘theoretical concept that helps make visible what is invisible to the naked (or rather the non-theoretical) eye’. The theoretical concept begins by revealing that coloniality is constitutive of modernity (there is no modernity without coloniality). This means that the positive rhetoric of modernity is always hiding the negative called global coloniality (ibid., p. 98). The colonial matrix of power unfolded in terms of control of economy, authority, subjectivity and knowledge (Mignolo, 2007, p. 155). The colonial matrices of power were initially framed by theo-politics, then ego-politics (philosophy) and racist science. Today mainstream media sustain these matrices by disseminating the rhetoric of modernity and its salvationist pretensions.

The unfolding of modern history some five hundred years ago, unleashed colonialities of space (cartography and settlement), time (cutting into linear pre-modern and modern conceptions), human species/being (social classification and racial hierarchisation), nature (turning it into a natural resource), knowledge (theft of history, epistemicides and linguicides) and power/authority (asymmetrical configurations and legal codification of difference). Human history itself acquired a new definition and meaning. In the analysis of Galeano (1997, pp. 2–3) human history became understood in imperial categories of competition, rivalry and survival of the fittest. This re-definition of history announced the arrival of Euro-North American hegemonic aspirations predicated on the paradigms of difference and war. The paradigms of difference and war were used to legitimize enslaving, pillaging, colonizing, as well as entrapping some human beings in grand imperial designs of the emerging Euro-North American-centric world system.

Paget Henry (2000, p. 4) elaborated on how human history assumed the character of ‘a Faustian/imperial struggle to subdue all nature and history. This was an insurrectionary rupture with the established cosmic order of things that inaugurated a new era in the relations between the European ego and the world’. He described this radical shift as the globalization of ‘the European project of existence’, which ‘weakened the powers of the gods, relocated Europeans at the centre of this new world’ and reinvented the rest of the non-European world ‘into one of its subordinate peripheries’ (ibid.).

Peripherisation is a technology of coloniality. It is a form of reinvention into a subaltern position. At the political level, entrapment entailed lodgement into coloniality of power (Cox, 1948; Ekeh, 1983; Fanon, 1968; Quijano, 2000; Robinson, 2000). Entrapment in coloniality of power began with physical conquest and dragging of the colonized into the nexus of modern racial global asymmetrical power relations. This entrapment continues to disadvantage Africa and the rest of the Global South today.

At the epistemological level, entrapment entailed epistemicides, linguicides, cultural imperialism, appropriations and theft of history (Goody, 1996) resulting in coloniality of knowledge. At the intersubjective level, entrapment involved tweaking with ontology itself resulting in what became known as coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Wynter, 2003). This form of entrapment materialised through social classification of human species in accordance with assumed differential ontological densities and racial hierarchisation of humanity. At the material level, a world capitalist economy that survives on exploitation of natural and human resources has been fishing in Africa and the Global South in general for cheap labour, cheap raw materials and open markets.

As subjects of the periphery, Africans are entrapped in global coloniality. Mamdani (1996) delved deeper into the colonial technologies of reproduction of ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’—technologies and processes that also determined the consciousness of the colonized and forms/formats/grammars of resistance. He posited that to ‘come to grips with the specific nature of power through which the population of subjects excluded from civil society was actually ruled’ entails understanding ‘how the subject population was incorporated into—and not excluded from—the arena of colonial power’ (Mamdani, 1996, p. 15). His key thesis is that ‘every movement against decentralised despotism bore the institutional imprint of the mode of rule’ and that ‘movement of resistance was shaped by the very structure of power against which it rebelled’ (Mamdani, 1996, p. 24).

Karl Marx set the tone on the entrapment of the Global South in colonial/racial capitalism when he categorically stated that the ‘rosy’ dawn of the era of capitalism was predicated on four specific events and processes: the first was the discovery of gold and silver in America; the second was ‘the uprooting, enslavement and entombment in the mines of aboriginal population’; the third was ‘the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies’; and the last was ‘the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercialised hunting of black skins’ (Marx quoted in Tucker, 1978, pp. 476–477).

No one captured the processes of disruption, dispossession and entrapment as eloquently as Aime Césaire (2000). In a poetic language, Césaire articulated four modes of disruptions and entrapment. The first related to draining of the essence of colonized societies through trampling over their cultures, undermining their institutions, confiscating their land, smashing their religions, destroying their ‘magnificent artistic creations’ and wiping out their ‘extraordinary possibilities’ (Césaire, 2000, p. 43). What was imposed after these dehumanising processes is economic, ontological and epistemological extractivism (Grosfoguel, 2016).

The second disruption entailed the tearing and severing of the colonised ‘from their gods, their land, their habits, their life—from life, from the dance, from wisdom’ (Césaire, 2000, p. 43). This process amounted to alienation as a form of entrapment. The third as colonial intervention entailed instilling fear on the colonized ‘who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys’. The last colonial device described by Césaire (ibid.) is that of ‘natural economies that have been disrupted — harmonious and viable economies adapted to the Indigenous population — about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely towards the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, looting of raw materials’.

Mazrui (1986) added his voice to the important issue of entrapment of Africa in global coloniality. He identified six forms of entrapment of Africa in global coloniality. The forcible incorporation of Africa into the world capitalist economy according to Mazrui (1986, p. 12) began with the enslavement of black people ‘which dragged African labour itself into the emerging international capitalist system’. This constitutes the first layer of entrapment. The slave labour from Africa contributed immensely to the making of the transatlantic economic nerve centre and the rise of Europe and North America into the most developed nations of the world. The second entrapment took the form of exclusion of Africa from the developing and new nation-state sovereignty system that emerged in 1648 making the continent available for partitioning in 1884–1885. As Mazrui (1986, p. 12) noted, Africa was only incorporated into the world system of nation-states after 1945 with the rise of the United Nations’ global governance principle of sovereign states. But even the post-1945 incorporation of Africa into the world system entailed entrapment in the lowest echelons of asymmetrical global power relations.

Mazrui (1986, p. 13) identified linguistic entrapment as another major challenge, similar to wa Thiong’o (1986, p. 5) who depicted Africa as suffering from a ‘linguistic encirclement’ in a continent and a people who defined ‘themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking, or Portuguese-speaking African countries’. There are six modern imperial languages that have been imposed on Africa and the Global South: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and German. At a fourth level, to Mazrui (1986, p. 12) Africa was incorporated into a heavily skewed Western-centric ‘international law’ that constituted another enduring entrapment. The fifth layer of entrapment is that of incorporation of Africa into ‘the modern technological age’ which entailed being ‘swallowed by the global system of dissemination of information’. Finally, to Mazrui (1986, p. 12) Africa has been dragged into and entrapped in a Western-centric moral order predicated on Christianity as a hegemonic world religion. Building on this analysis, he concluded that ‘what Africa knows about itself, what different parts of Africa know about each other, have been profoundly influenced by the West’ (Mazrui, 1986, p. 13).

Grosfoguel (2007, p. 216) deepened our understanding of entrapment when he distilled nine interrelated and overlapping heterarchies of power. The first lever of coloniality of power entailed the making of ‘a particular global class formation’ serviced by ‘diverse forms of labour’ including ‘slavery, semi-serfdom, wage-labour, petty-commodity production’ and entangled with the functioning practice of how ‘capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market’. The ‘international division of labour of core and periphery where capital organised labour in the periphery’ through coercion and deployment of other authoritarian means is another important layer of coloniality of power. The third invention is that of ordering the modern world into an ‘inter-state system of proto-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalised in colonial administrations’. The fourth discernible aspect of coloniality of power manifested itself in the form of a ‘global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people’ together with a ‘global gender hierarchy that privileges males over female and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations’ (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 216).

In the social domain, a ‘sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians’ and a ‘spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christians/non-Western spiritualities institutionalised in the globalisation of the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church’, are also discernible as inventions of modernity/coloniality in Grosfoguel’s analysis. In the epistemic and linguistic domain he identified ‘an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system’ and a ‘linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternised the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not knowledge/theory’ (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 216).

The political economy of Africa is fundamentally a tale of how the continent and its people were dragged into the evolving and unfolding global coloniality through such processes as enslavement, mercantilism, colonialism and capitalism. This entrapment captures the paradoxical situation of the continent—that of ‘simultaneous involvement and marginalisation’ in the modern world system, global order, knowledge and world economy (Austen, 1987, p. 10). What emerged from this is an invidious position not just of being pushed to the periphery but also of being insiders who have been pushed outside of the very human ecumene (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). This takes us to the current conjuncture of rule of coloniality in markets under globalization, which is conducive to African development.

Conclusion: Coloniality of Markets and Market Fundamentalism

Africa has not been subjected to one phase of structural adjustments, but to five. If one considers the rendition of the history and phases of how Africa was and is being structurally adjusted across epochs, making it of service to the external capitalist world economy rather than itself, the elusiveness of development becomes less mysterious. The present epoch has seen modern capitalism mutating into ‘a religious system, with the market as the mediating deity in the conflicting claims of its adherents. The market is the supreme deity guarded by a band of armed angels, apostles and priests who assign Hell for the unrepentant sinner, Purgatory for those showing signs of repentance and Paradise for the saved’ (wa Thiong’o, 2016, p. 24).

Coloniality of markets is also meant to capture the current triumphalism of capital involving intensified identification of new sites of accumulation and investment over and above the popular human demands for better life and material security. They are driving the new scramble for African natural resources at a time when there is also an increasing Afro-enthusiastic discourse of an Africa that is ‘rising’, which celebrates increasing demands for African raw materials as a sign of economic growth instead of deepening coloniality. A development based on intensification of resource extraction by diverse partners rather than industrialization is nothing but a manifestation of coloniality of markets.

Today, the Global South is in its entirety trapped by coloniality of markets with capitalism assuming a fundamentalist character of insisting that there is no other way of organizing human reality. Wa Thiong’o (2016, p. 23) dramatized the ubiquity of coloniality of markets in this revealing manner:

There is only one God, his name is market, and the West is his only guardian. Enter ye and throw your fate at the tender mercies of the market. […]. The voices of those who might see the writing on the wall are drowned by the calls for the worship of the market, literally, with the common credo of privatisation, reducible to a maxim: Privatise or Perish.

Africa, together with the rest of the Global South, needs to draw lessons from its long history of contact and entrapment in global coloniality to intensify the unfinished decolonisation struggles. As defined by wa Thiong’o (1993), decolonisation must result in the movement of the centre towards decoloniality which emphasises delinking from colonial matrices of power and entrapment. What must radically change are the logics of capital as well as ‘assumptions, presuppositions, praxis of living’ introduced by global coloniality (Mignolo, 2018, p. 105).

This might be possible now because capitalism is in a terminal crisis. Eurocentric knowledge under the colonial matrices of power is exhausted. Europe and North America have lost the high ground of offering solutions to the world. The post-Cold War crafted neoliberal international order is in crisis. A possible polycentric international order might give Africa room to chart its own trajectory building on a tradition of resistance and the spirit of pan-Africanism.