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Africa Ambushed: Sociological Images of Capitalist Benevolence and Brigandage

ABSTRACT Writing decades ago about Africa’s experience of “international” trade during the 16th to 20th centuries, the great African historian, Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917–1983), made a sociologically poignant remark about what he termed the “ingrained instincts of piracy” – instincts he believed were the constant amidst the mutating contents, contours and stratagems of capitalist enterprise. Dike made two grim interrelated diagnoses about capitalism on account of these instincts. One, it is these instincts that ultimately frustrated all efforts by governments and society in crafting a code of conduct to regulate commerce. Two, every regulation designed to imbue capitalism with a modicum of humaneness has ultimately been rendered unworkable because of these same instincts. In this article, “pirate capitalism” is put forward not only as a didactic tool for dissecting the antinomical impulses of historical capitalism, but also as a distinct social form whose present-day pathological character in Africa is amply displayed in a hideous balance of benevolence and brigandage. The article submits that with pirate capitalism now a dominant index of business-government and business-society relations, Africa remains ambushed, with much of capitalism's claimed benevolence being, at best, a tragedy of good intentions, and at worst, a debilitating series of phoney gestures.