Battling intellectual relegation: African political economic thinkers and the crisis of relevance to economic thought
Abstract
Economic ideas and models of early African thinkers to emancipate Africa from economic and political malaise have been intellectually relegated and marginalised. The west had theoretically marginalised and devalued African thinkers and thinking by default. African thinkers and nations were identified with economic failures- irresponsible policies, and insurmountable challenges. Amidst these intellectual relegation and domination were un-imported intriguing Afrocentric political economic thought and models by African thinkers; and the rejection of orthodox free-market economics detached from western modeling. These was guided by moral and cultural ideology, which paved way to strong African style of governance and prosperity.
The article provides a very important contribution to the history of economic thought: the place of African economists and economic scholars in the history of economic thought. This is an important issue, because the chances of an author being based in Africa being published in history of economic thought journals is quite small. There are some initiatives, such as from Gerardo Serra, but there should be ways to incorporate African economists in wider discussions of the history of economic thought, and how there are vivid discussions on economics that central countries might not be aware of.
That being said, the article needs to undergo through several revisions. The writing quality needs to be improved and, as a result, I find some arguments difficult to follow. Also, I’m’ not sure how you group sections: is the section “African anarchism” composed of two authors or does it include others, like Alunko? Are the authors after “African socialism” part of its section or independent sections?
As a student of Brazilian economic thought, I must say that the section on Brazilian developmentalism needs to be improved. It should be noted “developmentalism” was both a set of economic thought and policy doctrines that belongs to a wider Latin American structuralism tradition – I recommend some works to better illuminate this section (Fiori, 1992; Bielschowksy, Mussi, 2022, Fajardo, 2022). These links are important, because Milton Santos, although a geographer, was deeply associated with CEPAL and has influenced African thought (see the time was visiting professor in Tanzania, Jesus Neto, 2025)
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About “African anarchism”, could you please elaborate more? Because “anarchism”, in Western contexts, mean self-determination movements that see the State as an oppressive institution, captured by greedy elites, and are always looking to alternatives, to summarize. Many of the authors analyzed in this section do not seem anarchists in the “usual” sense. It is something you briefly explain, but I‘d appreciate if you explored more the origin of the term and how different it is from the usual sense. That also goes for African socialism and free-market liberal (with Ayittey, which, given your description, I can compare to Eugenio Gudin, a free-market liberal that opposed Simonsen).
Brief biographical info about each scholar (date of birth and death and formation) would greatly improve the reading of the article as well, since you pick many different authors from different epochs, contexts and diverging ideological views.
References
Bielschowsky, Ricardo; Mussi, Carlos. Brazilian economic thought in the “developmentalist era”: 1930–1980. In A history of Brazilian economic thought, Routledge, 2022.
Fajardo, Margarita. The World That Latin America Created. HUP, 2022.
Fiori, José Luis. The political economy of the developmentalist State in Brazil. Cepal Review, 1992.
Jesus Neto, Antonio Gomes. South–South Theoretical Dialogues: The Tanzanian Experience (1974–76) in Milton Santos’ Spatial Theory. Antipode, 2025.