Elite Africa: Changing Conceptions of Power

• In Event: Elite Politics in Africa (Panel II)

Abstract

Elites are often curiously unexamined in Africanist literature. Where they are considered – most often in the political and economic spheres – the analysis has often focused on storied “Big Men,” presenting a sometimes-one-dimensional view of the continent’s elites as uniquely self-serving, corrupt and extraverted. This ignores a great deal. This paper proposes a more subtle, gendered, dynamic and multi-dimensional notion both of power itself and of the continental elites who have generated and wielded it in post-Independence Africa. The paper challenges us to consider the ways in which elite power in Africa is profoundly relational: both in the sense that the status of being an elite is one that is accorded by others rather than by the subject to themselves, as well as a status that is often profoundly dependent on social and familial networks as well as the skill with which one builds constituencies, allies and coalitions.

Author

• Antoinette Handley, University of Toronto