Entrepreneurship in Africa: A Historical Approach

318 Pages·2018·2.89 MB·English

by  Moses E. Ochonu (ed.)

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AFRICA
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AFRICA
A Historical Approach
Edited by Moses E. Ochonu
Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ochonu, Moses E., editor.
Title: Entrepreneurship in Africa : a historical approach / edited by Moses E. Ochonu.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053534 (print) | LCCN 2017051094 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253032621 (e-book) | ISBN
9780253032607 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253034380 (pbk : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship—Africa—History. | New business Enterprises—Africa—History.
Classification: LCC HD2346.A55 (print) | LCC HD2346.A55 E583 2018 (ebook) | DDC 338.642096—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053534
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward African Entrepreneurship and Business History
Moses E. Ochonu
Part I. Mercantile and Artisanal Networks
1 Globalization and the Making of East Africa’s Asian Entrepreneurship Networks
Chambi Chachage
2 The Wangara Factor in West African Business History
Moses E. Ochonu
Part II. Female Entrepreneurs and Gendered Innovation
3 Women Entrepreneurs, Gender, Traditions, and the Negotiation of Power Relations
in Colonial Nigeria
Gloria Chuku
4 From Artisanal Brew to a Booming Industry: An Economic History of Pito Brewing
among Northern Ghanaian Migrant Women in Southern Ghana
Isidore Lobnibe
5 Interconnections between Female Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation in
the Nigerian Context
Gloria Emeagwali
Part III. Entrepreneurship as Political Initiative
6 Benin Imperialism and Entrepreneurship in Northeast Yorubaland from the
Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
Uyilawa Usuanlele
7 Taking Control: Sonatrach and the Algerian Decolonization Process
Marta Musso
Part IV. Unconventional Entrepreneurs
8 Business after Hours: The Entrepreneurial Ventures of Nigerian Working-Class
Seamen
Lynn Schler
9 Ace Boxing Promoter: “Super Human Power,” Boxing, and Sports Entrepreneurship
in Colonial Nigeria, 1945–1960
Michael J. Gennaro
10 Healing Works: Nana Kofi Dɔnkɔ and the Business of Indigenous Therapeutics
Kwasi Konadu
11 Entrepreneurs or Wage Laborers? The Elusive Homo Economicus
Ralph Callebert
Part V. African Enterprise in the Shadow of Colonization
12 The Socioeconomic Bases of the Growth of Microentrepreneurship in the Igede Area
of Central Nigeria in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Mike Odugbo Odey
13 Ethnicity, Colonial Expediency, and the Development of Retail Business in Colonial
Turkana, Northwestern Kenya, 1920–1950
Martin S. Shanguhyia
Epilogue: African Entrepreneurship, Past and Present
Moses E. Ochonu
Index
Acknowledgments
I
N THE COURSE of putting this collection together, I incurred much debt with colleagues and
friends in and outside the academy. This volume would have been impossible to produce
without the support and cooperation of my fellow authors. They responded enthusiastically
to a call for papers and followed this up with encouraging words, timely submission of
their chapters, and prompt responses to inquiries.
The foundational conversations that planted the seed of this book in me began several
years ago and with several people. As director of the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), Dr.
Wiebe Boer generously invited me to partake, along with other scholars, in a research
project designed to map the contemporary African investment and transnational
entrepreneurial landscape.
This project led to my participation in another important conversation: a scholars’
retreat in Calabar, Nigeria, organized by the foundation’s Africapitalism Institute. The
retreat was designed to formulate the outlines of an African business ethic under the rubric
of Africapitalism. There, in the company of other scholars, I reflected harder on the nature
of entrepreneurship in Africa, its character, history, and peculiarities. Subsequent
reflections produced a mental outline for this book. I am grateful to TEF and to Dr. Boer
for opening these avenues that enabled me to imagine the contours of this volume.
My conversation with Professor Kenneth Amaeshi of the University of Edinburgh
Business School, a renowned scholar of African business and entrepreneurial cultures,
reaffirmed my epistemological convictions on the topic of this volume.
Dr. Lucky Onmonya, the registrar and CEO of Nigeria’s Institute for Development
Finance and Project Management, Abuja, is one of Africa’s authoritative voices on matters
of entrepreneurial empowerment. Over the years, our conversations on the broad theme of
African entrepreneurial potentials have enriched my perspectives and given me new ways
of thinking about the subject outside my strict academic and disciplinary training.
At different stages of this book project, Scott Jossart helped with a variety of duties
ranging from editing, to formatting, to coordination. His input was instrumental in
resolving several technical challenges that arose as the volume gradually materialized.
I thank the reviewers, who not only thoroughly read the manuscript but also provided us
with specific, actionable comments that, as they will see, have helped strengthen several
aspects of the book.
Finally, I thank my wife, Margaret, and our two daughters, Ene and Agbenu, who
persevered and supported me as I labored to get this collection ready for publication.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AFRICA
Introduction
Toward African Entrepreneurship and Business History
Moses E. Ochonu
A
FRICA IS SUFFUSED in entrepreneurship talk. Local and international development and
antipoverty programs privilege entrepreneurship and recommend it as a bulwark against
economic adversity and as a foundation for economic recovery. The figure of the
entrepreneur has emerged as an organizing idiom for articulating the economic hopes and
aspirations of various African societies. Globally recognized African entrepreneurs such
as Aliko Dangote, Strive Masiyiwa, Patrice Motsepe, and Tony Elumelu are collectively
regarded as the vanguard of a new African economic and developmental order that
depends on the continuing ingenuity of entrepreneurs. These leading African
entrepreneurs may indeed occupy the cutting edge of a new African economic age
animated by entrepreneurial energies, but it is important to recognize that Dangote and his
cohort stand on the unheralded shoulders of generations of African entrepreneurs, a
tapestry of business histories and experiences that go back to precolonial and colonial
times.
While Forbes-listed African entrepreneurs continue to capture the continent’s
imagination, Africa’s rich entrepreneurial tradition calls for reflections on the role of
innovation and enterprise in African history, as well as for a recovery of the multiple
stories of entrepreneurial endeavor that foreshadowed today’s entrepreneurial practices on
the continent. This volume is a modest attempt to begin this task of recovery. Implicit in
this effort is a historicization of Africa’s intensifying fetishization of entrepreneurship as a
path to individual, group, and societal economic prosperity. The facts of this
entrepreneurship history, this volume demonstrates, should temper the entrepreneurial
hysteria that has gripped Africa, but they also should foreground and lend credibility to
ongoing conversations about the existence and contemporary utility of a distinct African
business culture.
We live in a neoliberal moment in which entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs are
celebrated as economic agents, catalysts for poverty reduction and economic growth.
Whether entrepreneurship deserves this outsize reputation in our vast economic ecosystem
or is itself a function of fundamental structural economic reconfigurations is an enduring
question, one debated but never resolved. What can historical modes of analysis and a
backward gaze into the longue durée reveal about what entrepreneurs can and cannot do?
How can we engage with this question of entrepreneurial instrumentality from the unique
perspective of African history? The latter question is the central focus of this volume.
Long monopolized by economics and its allied disciplines, entrepreneurship has
morphed into a transdisciplinary subject of inquiry, with several humanistic and social
scientific fields scrambling to contribute to our understanding of the role of
entrepreneurial innovation and entrepreneurs in economic development. Historians have
been slow to bring their methodological and analytical protocols to bear on the subject, and
Africanist historians have been slower still to grapple with a subject matter for which
Africa has increasingly become a laboratory.
This volume corrects this paucity of historical reflections, and specifically Africanist
historical reflections, on the subject of entrepreneurship. We do not merely seek to
historicize discourses and practices of entrepreneurship in Africa, although the following
chapters do so with illuminating rigor. Rather, the volume is conceptualized to expand the
field of analysis on entrepreneurship by posing expansive, even elastic, questions and
advancing examples rooted in familiar and unfamiliar African historical contexts. These
contexts are both spatial and temporal, personal and structural.
The question animating this volume is a simple one, but one with many possible
iterations: What can the social, economic, and political histories of Africa, as well as
African historical encounters, tell us about entrepreneurship as both a generic and a
culturally inflected endeavor? The chapters that follow answer this question conceptually
and empirically. The question correctly assumes the existence of a dominant theory of
entrepreneurship, one that has not reckoned with the peculiar manifestations of
entrepreneurial and innovative business endeavors in African history.
Much of today’s paradigmatic economic theories have their intellectual origins in
Western thought, even if the empirical circumstances that instantiate these theories and the
ideational genealogies of their insights are of non-Western origins. This is not a radical
statement to posit, given the fact that Western political and economic ascent and
domination have helped mainstream, some might say naturalize, the Eurocentric semiotics
of supposedly universal economic concepts such as entrepreneurship. Yet neither classical
economic theory, an ideological component of Western imperialist expansion in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that is posited as the foundation of modern
capitalism, nor the prevailing neoliberal consensus uncritically valorizes entrepreneurship
as an engine of economic development.1
The Schumpeter Effect
It was not until the early twentieth century that entrepreneurship formerly entered the
lexicon of Western economic theory. Economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter introduced to
the field of economics systematic thinking about the concept of entrepreneurship, coining
the term “entrepreneurial spirit” and positing the initial conceptual apparatuses for
understanding and debating the role of entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy.2 The
historical newness of the concept belies its epistemological and programmatic sway in our