Cultural Entrepreneurship in Africa

Ute Röschenthaler, Dorothea Schulz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138851665
• eBook ISBN: 9781317529613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Social Sciences

This book seeks to widen perspectives on entrepreneurship by drawing attention to the diverse and partly new forms of entrepreneurial practice in Africa since the 1990s. Contrary to widespread assertions, figures of success have been regularly observed in Africa since pre-colonial times. The contributions account for these historical continuities in entrepreneurship, and identify the specifically new political and economic context within which individuals currently probe and invent novel forms of enterprise. Based on ethnographically contextualized life stories and case studies of female and male entrepreneurs, the volume offers a vivid and multi-perspectival account of their strategies, visions and ventures in domains as varied as religious proselytism, politics, tourism, media, music, prostitution, funeral organization, and education. African cultural entrepreneurs have a significant economic impact, attract the attention of large groups of people, serve as role models for many youths, and contribute to the formation of new popular cultures.

1 Introduction

Forging Fortunes: New Perspectives on Entrepreneurial Activities in Africa

Ute Röschenthaler and Dorothea Schulz

What analytical perspective should we as scholars develop to think of African actors’ daily experiences, struggles, and engagements with the postcolonial state without falling into the trap of afro-pessimistic accounts, that is, without employing the terminology of African “crisis” and victimhood? In response to this question, Simon Gikandi has recently called for a new “language” that will allow us to account for the actual lived experiences of Africans, to take seriously their capacity for innovation and invention, and hence to consider them as “subject(s) already engaged in powerful and imaginative gestures of copying and survival” (2010: xvi). Although we very much agree with Gikandi’s critique of afro-pessimist accounts of Africa and Africans, we view a similar danger in overly stressing the opportunities for cultural innovation and creativity open to Africans in a historical era shaped by particular forms of globalization and neoliberalism.

The purpose of this edited volume is to move beyond the deadlock delineated by afro-pessimist and afro-positivist accounts, and instead to stress the entrepreneurial abilities shown by numerous African actors, past and present, in the face of adversity and novel opportunities. We use “entrepreneur” as a concept and a heuristic term to point to the plethora of engagements by which social actors in African societies deal with the constraints and opportunities generated by the contemporary moment, a moment shaped, although to different extents, by a neoliberal paradigm of economics and politics.

The term “cultural entrepreneurs” refers to individuals who quickly perceive the chances of the moment and seize novel opportunities to initiate new forms of generating income in the realm of cultural production. What distinguishes these entrepreneurs and their initiatives from that of other inventive individuals is that they purposefully take chances in situations of uncertainty, when failure seems to be as likely an outcome of their activities as does success. Entrepreneurs positively embrace the risk of failure. What matters to them is their strong belief that they will succeed and surmount any obstacles that will come their way.

This volume draws attention to the diverse and partly new forms of entrepreneurial practice that have emerged throughout sub-Saharan Africa since the mid-1980s, that is, in the historical period roughly associated with the times when the effects of the structural adjustment program were making themselves felt, and when, along with economic and political liberalization, the former state monopoly in the area of cultural production and media communication was weakened.

We present entrepreneurs active at the intersections between economic and cultural activities, such as entrepreneurship in media, religion, or education, illustrating that their activities encompass different trajectories of political, economic, and social success.¹ These individuals have a special nose for incipient business ventures; they generate significant economic impact, attract the attention of large groups of people, and contribute to the formation of new popular cultures. They often stand as role models for the youths aspiring to imitate their success. Because of the varied nature of these entrepreneurial activities and the paths to success they set, the entrepreneurs we portray are not necessarily representative of their country or a particular national culture. Variations in style and kinds of success may be the result of the particular historical, political, and social setting in which these entrepreneurs pursue their projects. In spite of their differences, they share an extraordinary capacity to initiate new ways of making business that have significant repercussions for their immediate surrounding or society at large, and in this sense become important actors of change and innovation.

The Concept of the Entrepreneur

The concept of the entrepreneur emerged in the context of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century. It was used against predictive and prescriptive models of human behavior that paid little attention to individual economic actors (e.g., Cantillon 1775; for a critique, see Parker 2009 and Forrest 1994). Only in the early twentieth century, Josef Schumpeter (1883–1950), inspired by the second phase of industrialization in Europe, theorized the role of the individual in economic development and growth in his Theory of Economic Development (1912/1934, see also Schumpeter 1928, 1947). Influenced by, and simultaneously critical of, the classical economist theories of Adam Smith, James Ferguson, and Karl Marx, Schumpeter sought to stress the role of individuals in bringing about change and innovation. He coined the term “entrepreneur” for individuals, who, thanks to their personal qualities and psychological attributes, were capable of changing existing economic structures and habits. Among these personal qualities was the entrepreneur’s readiness to take risks and invest his capital, his vision to recognize market niches, and his courage to create new things under conditions of uncertainty and surmount social resistance against innovation (Bude 1997: 850–855, see also McDaniel 2005). Schumpeter’s “entrepreneur” capitalized on the basic means of production and commercialization, such as land, labor, capital, and transport, and, if necessary, incurred debts to transform what other people had invented into a marketable product. While Schumpeter stressed the entrepreneur’s innovative and creative skills, he also portrayed him as a homeless figure whose readiness to self-sacrifice and to break with social conventions made him almost a social enfant terrible. Also distinctive about Schumpeter’s conception of the entrepreneur was that he placed him squarely in the context of industrial production: only an owner and founder of his company was considered an entrepreneur, in contradistinction to a farmer, a trader, or an artisan, whose activities aimed at maintaining the status quo, rather than transforming it.²

In spite of occasional attempts to refine and rework Schumpeter’s narrow conception, for decades the entrepreneur was, in William Baumol’s words, “one of the most intriguing and one of the most elusive characters in the cast that constitutes the subject of economic analysis”; as a consequence, the term “entrepreneur” has remained underspecified (1968: 64). Economics and related disciplines revived scholarly debate on entrepreneurship only in the 1990s, with respect to European economies shaped by the effects of neoliberal economic reform. Here, economists celebrated “the entrepreneur” as the person capable of initiating new business opportunities and small-scale enterprises to deal with frequent bankruptcies of companies and increasing unemployment. It seems no coincidence that roughly at the same time, when the effects of the structural adjustment programs dictated by international monetary institutions were making themselves felt throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank discovered the entrepreneur as a key figure of development. Breaking with earlier depictions of African entrepreneurs as ”deficient”, that is, as missing essential features of the ideal-type industrial entrepreneur (Gihring 1984; Greenfield and Strickon 1981; Knutsen 2003), development economists now applied the term to various economic actors, ranging from factory owners to street vendors (Spring and McDade 1998).

In Africanist scholarship, treatments of “the entrepreneur” have also suffered from a lack of conceptual precision. Numerous historical and anthropological studies documented the long-standing existence of entrepreneurial figures and initiatives, yet they did not conceive of them as instances of entrepreneurship. Still, the studies helped identify features of entrepreneurship characteristic of non-industrial economic and political settings, in which large-scale production of goods and long-distance trade constituted major sources of wealth (Reynolds 1974 for Ghana, Amos 2001 for Togo, Denzer 1994 for Nigeria; see also Dumett 1983; Forrest 1994: 88). The trade networks and also the large-scale production of goods often implicated large numbers of clients and workers (Amselle 1977; Lovejoy 1980). Women could fare extremely well in some large-scale local industries (such as cloth-dying, pottery, oil and soap production) and also as managers and brokers in trade networks (Brooks 1997; Coquery-Vidrovitch 1983, 1994, 2002; Denzer 1994). Many of these historical examples of successful entrepreneurship combined their wealth with political influence. Some of these businesses and networks were disrupted under colonial administration (Nwabughuogu 1982; Olukoju 2002); others were partly reconfigured and thrived with their increasing integration into colonial markets along with newly created ventures.³

In the first decades of post-independent politics, when the state became the principal provider of employment (MacGaffey 1987: 26)⁴ yet proved increasingly unable to provide for its citizens, numerous individuals continued to seize the opportunities of the moment and to take risks under conditions of uncertainty (e.g., Grégoire and Labazée 1993; Ellis and Fauré 1995). Many of them owed their success to their apt combination of different types of social, political, and religious capital, converting their material gains into a “wealth in people” and vice versa (Grégoire 1995).

The plethora of private entrepreneurial activities that have emerged in Africa over the last three decades have been studied particularly in the economic sector. Women and men have created manifold ventures, such as cassava processing factories, breweries, flower industries, import and export businesses, gold and diamond mining, banks, supermarkets, large-scale shoe and garment industries, and cash crop plantation enterprises, among many others (Amselle 1987; Ellis and Fauré 1995; Forrest 1994; Grégoire and Labazée 1993; Hopkins 1988; Jalloh and Falola 2002; MacGaffey 1987; Meagher 2010). All these undertakings form part of what has been described as “cultures of business in Africa” (Taylor 2012), “the capitalist path to development” (Berman and Leys 1994: 1), or “the advancement of African capital” (Forrest 1994). Entrepreneurs have also become active in the cultural sector and created numerous media enterprises, churches and religious movements, universities, funeral services, and have engaged in political undertakings and various clandestine ventures all over the continent.

These entrepreneurial figures straddle the dividing lines between economic profit and other kinds of “capital” (in Bourdieu’s sense), and also between the domains of cultural, social, political, and religious activity. We therefore need a concept of entrepreneur that, pace Schumpeter’s narrowly conceived “industrial entrepreneur”, makes room for the diverse activities initiated by African entrepreneurs, past and present, and also for the various kinds of value they generate in this process.

The Figure of the Big Man

A number of scholars, working on Melanesian, Polynesian, and African societies, have pointed to significant resemblances between the entrepreneur and the “Big Man”, first described by Marshall Sahlins in reference to the Melanesian Big Man. Sahlins characterized the Big Man as a political leader who “uses wealth to place others in his debt” (Sahlins 1972: 136; see also 1963), in the form of ceremonial giveaways that aim to outrank competitors. Because only those who generously give away are socially respected and in that sense rich and powerful, for the Big Man, material wealth is not an aim in itself but serves to generate “wealth in people” (Hennings 2007). Although the “classical” Big Man bases his power on material wealth, in some societies, his competitive advantage derives from immaterial goods or capacities, such as ritual or other restricted knowledge, oratorical skills, or skills that ensure military success (Lindstrom 1984). All these capacities enable a Big Man to gather followers and to turn them into exchange partners (1984: 294).

While some authors stress genuine similarities between the entrepreneur and the Big Man (Stewart 1990), others argue that similarities between a Big Man and an entrepreneur result from the integration of local economies, in which Big Men played a leading role, into the capitalist market economy (Hennings 2007; Martin 2013; Sykes 2007).⁵ In this process, Hennings argues, Big Men transform into (economic) profit-maximizing entrepreneurs who no longer invest in social relationships but in the production of goods and services.

In contrast to this restrictive view of the entrepreneur (and the Big Man) as an economic actor, authors working on “Big Men” in African societies stress that these figures draw on sources of power as varied as entrepreneurial skills (Forrest 1994), a combination of wealth and access to state resources (Lentz 1998), access to medico-religious or esoteric expertise (Bayart 1993; Médard 1992), and the mobilization of a large following through patronage and redistribution (Barber 2007: 126–127). In many cases, these individuals combine various political, economic, and social roles, as political leaders or opinion leaders, key players in trade networks, organizers of various wealth-generating activities, owners of the most valuable material objects, and sponsors of performance groups (Röschenthaler 2011) and artists (Schulz 2001; Waterman 1990). As successful businessmen, they act as role models for others yet also become easy targets for witchcraft accusations (Geschiere 2013; Rowlands and Warnier 1988). Similar to the Melanesian Big Men who use their wealth to secure followers and social support, these successful individuals use their wealth for social, philanthropic, and religious purposes and thereby convert it into more stable assets, such as respectability and “wealth in people” (Forrest 1994: 239–241; Socpa, this volume). The social dimension and impetus of their activities extends beyond the purely financial gain highlighted in economist debate on entrepreneurship, in Africa and beyond.

The “Figures of Success”

Banégas and Warnier (2001) have coined the term “figures of success” to argue that a new type of successful political and economic actor has emerged since the 1980s, entering into competition with the salaried civil servant who, as a consequence of structural adjustment and the attenda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Forging Fortunes: New Perspectives on Entrepreneurial Activities in Africa
• Part I Making Moral Communities
• Part II Business, Pleasure, Leisure
• Part III Media and Popular Culture
• Contributors
• Index