Live as African : On the Relevance of Thomas Sankara’s Agenda for Economic Liberation
Abstract
- Abstract
- en "We must accept to live as African – that is the only way to live free and dignified", said the late Thomas Sankara in his famous 1987 speech at the Organization of African Unity. "Live as African", beyond summarizing Sankara's political and ethical vision, draws an agenda for economic liberation articulated around the ideal of self-sufficiency understood both as freedom from external domination and as capacity to self-determination through reliance first and foremost on one’s own resources. In this article, I argue that this agenda is the only one sustainable both for African peoples and for the Planet once it is realized that peoples from the periphery as a whole will never be able to achieve the same consumption/waste levels as peoples in the center, as global South thinkers Celso Furtado and Samir Amin demonstrated some decades ago. Since then, a growing literature has shown why the Western development “model”, due to its ecological exceptionalism, is simply not reproducible elsewhere and why the promise of economic catch-up is illusory. Building on these findings and on the importance and implications of monetary sovereignty, I will elaborate on the principles of a Sankara-inspired economic model that could deliver a free and dignified life to all.
- fr "Nous devons accepter de vivre africain - c'est la seule façon de vivre libre et digne", avait déclaré feu Thomas Sankara dans son célèbre discours de 1987 à l'Organisation de l'Unité Africaine. "Vivre Africain", au-delà de résumer la vision politique et éthique de Sankara, dessine un agenda de libération économique articulé autour de l'idéal de l'autosuffisance, comprise à la fois comme la liberté vis-à-vis de la domination extérieure et comme la capacité à s'autodéterminer en comptant d'abord et avant tout sur ses propres ressources. Dans cet article, je soutiens que cet agenda est le seul qui soit durable à la fois pour les peuples africains et pour la planète, une fois que l'on a réalisé que les peuples de la périphérie pris collectivement ne seront jamais capables d'atteindre les mêmes niveaux de consommation/gaspillage que les peuples du centre, comme les penseurs du Sud global Celso Furtado et Samir Amin l'ont démontré il y a quelques décennies. Depuis lors, une littérature croissante a montré pourquoi le "modèle" de développement occidental, en raison de son exceptionnalisme écologique, n'est tout simplement pas reproductible ailleurs et pourquoi la promesse d'un rattrapage économique est illusoire. Partant de ces résultats et de l'importance et des implications de la souveraineté monétaire, je vais esquisser les principes d'un modèle économique inspiré de Sankara qui pourrait offrir à tous une vie libre et digne.
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33
University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Live as African
On the Relevance of Thomas Sankara‘s
Agenda for Economic Liberation
Ndongo Samba Sylla, 2022
33
University of Bayreuth
African Studies
WORKING PAPERS
Live as African
On the Relevance of Thomas
Sankara’s Agenda for Economic
Liberation
Ndongo Samba Sylla, 2022
CC BY 4.0
Live as African
iii
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
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An Agenda of Liberation
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Live as African
v
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
About the Author
Ndongo Samba Sylla (PhD) is a Senegalese Development Economist. He is currently a Senior
Research and Program Manager at the West Africa office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
(Dakar).
Abstract English / French
"We must accept to live as African – that is the only way to live free and dignified", said the late
Thomas Sankara in his famous 1987 speech at the Organization of African Unity. "Live as African",
beyond summarizing Sankara's political and ethical vision, draws an agenda for economic
liberation articulated around the ideal of self-sufficiency understood both as freedom from
external domination and as capacity to self-determination through reliance first and foremost on
one’s own resources. In this article, I argue that this agenda is the only one sustainable both for
African peoples and for the Planet once it is realized that peoples from the periphery as a whole
will never be able to achieve the same consumption/waste levels as peoples in the center, as global
South thinkers Celso Furtado and Samir Amin demonstrated some decades ago. Since then, a
growing literature has shown why the Western development “model”, due to its ecological
exceptionalism, is simply not reproducible elsewhere and why the promise of economic catch-up
is illusory. Building on these findings and on the importance and implications of monetary
sovereignty, I will elaborate on the principles of a Sankara-inspired economic model that could
deliver a free and dignified life to all.
"Nous devons accepter de vivre africain - c'est la seule façon de vivre libre et digne", avait déclaré
feu Thomas Sankara dans son célèbre discours de 1987 à l'Organisation de l'Unité Africaine.
"Vivre Africain", au-delà de résumer la vision politique et éthique de Sankara, dessine un agenda
de libération économique articulé autour de l'idéal de l'autosuffisance, comprise à la fois comme
la liberté vis-à-vis de la domination extérieure et comme la capacité à s'autodéterminer en
comptant d'abord et avant tout sur ses propres ressources. Dans cet article, je soutiens que cet
agenda est le seul qui soit durable à la fois pour les peuples africains et pour la planète, une fois
que l'on a réalisé que les peuples de la périphérie pris collectivement ne seront jamais capables
d'atteindre les mêmes niveaux de consommation/gaspillage que les peuples du centre, comme les
penseurs du Sud global Celso Furtado et Samir Amin l'ont démontré il y a quelques décennies.
Depuis lors, une littérature croissante a montré pourquoi le "modèle" de développement
occidental, en raison de son exceptionnalisme écologique, n'est tout simplement pas
reproductible ailleurs et pourquoi la promesse d'un rattrapage économique est illusoire. Partant
de ces résultats et de l'importance et des implications de la souveraineté monétaire, je vais
esquisser les principes d'un modèle économique inspiré de Sankara qui pourrait offrir à tous une
vie libre et digne.
Keywords / Mots clés
Economic Development, Delinking, External Debt, Unequal Ecological Exchange, Monetary
Sovereignty. / Développement Economique, Déconnexion, Dette Extérieure, Echange Ecologique
Inégal, Souveraineté Monétaire.
vi
An Agenda of Liberation
Contents
Institute of African Studies (IAS)
iii
Africa Multiple connects
iv
About the Author
v
Abstract English/French
v
Live as African: On the Relevance of Thomas Sankara’s Agenda for
Economic Liberation
1 An Agenda of Liberation
3
2 The Myth of Economic Development
4
3 Western Development, Surplus Labor, and Emigration
7
4 Unequal Ecological Exchange
8
5 Delinking and Self-centered Development
11
6 An Example of Domestic Resource Mobilization
13
7 Conclusion
15
8 References
16
9 Latest Publications in the Africa Multiple connects Working Paper Series
19
Live as African
vii
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
List of figures
Figure 1: Evolution of the average real GDP growth and the external debt/GDP ratio for sub-
Saharan Africa (1960-2019) - in percentage
10
Live as African
On the Relevance of Thomas Sankara’s Agenda for Economic
Liberation1
Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla
Captain Thomas Sankara, born in 1949, came to power in 1983 following a military coup
organized by his companions-in-arms. He renamed Upper Volta, the name given to his country by
France, its colonizer, to Burkina Faso, which means "land of men of integrity." During his four
years in power, Sankara tried to transform a poor and landlocked country under the yoke of
French imperialist rule. The image he left to younger generations is that of a sober and honest
pan-Africanist political leader. Despite his status as head of state, he kept his captain's salary,
which was lower than that of his wife, then a civil servant working in the transportation sector. In
order to assume their duty, members of his government were obliged to publicly declare their
assets from 1986 on, 27 years before the same measure was implemented in France.
In retrospect, Sankara can be considered as a pioneering alter-globalist activist. He was concerned
with ecological sustainability and was a sincere advocate of women's rights. He also advocated for
the abolition of Third World countries’ debt, namely in his most famous speech delivered on July
29, 1987 at the Organization of African Unity (OAU). On that day, with eloquence, humor, and
passion, Sankara pleaded urgently for African peoples to unite to face their common challenges.
In particular, he called on his African peers to collectively repudiate the continent's external debt.
He argued that this debt is illegitimate owing to its colonial origins and should not be paid. One
additional reason for its repudiation was that Europe owed Africa a blood debt which had not yet
1 The author would like to thank Dr. Kai Koddenbrock and Prof. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni for their valuable comments
on a previous version, held during a master class, financed by the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University
of Bayreuth (funded by the German Research Foundation under Germany‘s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 –
390713894). Eventual errors are mine.
2
An Agenda of Liberation
given rise to reparations. However, as Sankara tragically warned in his speech from 29 July 1987,
“[I]f Burkina Faso stands alone in refusing to pay, I will not be here for the next conference!”
A few months later, on October 15, 1987, he was assassinated by a commando under the orders
of his comrade-in-arms Blaise Compaoré, who would succeed him in power. Compaoré, with the
support of France, ruled Burkina Faso with an iron fist until his overthrow by a popular movement
in 2014. He was exfiltrated in extremis by France to Côte d'Ivoire. After 35 years, at a long-awaited
trial, the Burkinabe justice system was recently able to shed light on the circumstances of
Sankara's death. It sentenced the absentee Compaoré and his accomplices to life imprisonment.
This judgment has been a hard-fought victory for Sankara’s family and the activists who
campaigned for more than three decades for the organization of a trial.
Sankara articulated important views about African development, and more generally about
economic liberation, that we can build on in our current efforts to create sustainable prosperity
for 1.3 billion Africans in a context marked by climate change and growing environmental stress.
My objective is not to give an economic assessment of Burkina Faso under Sankara’s rule, but
rather to reflect on the relevance and current potential of the agenda of economic liberation he
advocated.
I will elaborate on his 1987 speech at the OAU. In my opinion, it is among the most important
speeches ever delivered by an African leader in addition to the one by Patrice Lumumba at the
ceremony of the proclamation of Congo’s independence on June 30, 1960 (Lumumba 1961: 44–
47). The Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda was the chair of the 1987 OAU Summit. Kaunda was
truly impressed by Sankara’s performance, charisma, boldness, and generous pan-African vision.
It is said that he told him on that day: “I want you as the President of my country” (Sylla 2012:
225). This was not a cheap compliment from a head of state 21 years older than him. These words
reflected genuinely a deep sense of admiration, trust, and hope.
Indeed, that day, before his African peers, Sankara urged African peoples to trust their
inventiveness. He promoted the slogan “produce in Africa, transform in Africa, consume in Africa,”
as a way to spur local production, enlarge domestic demand for domestic products, and reduce
unnecessary imports. He proposed drastically reducing prestige and sumptuary spending. He
opposed military spending aimed at arming Africans against each other and encouraged his peers
to discuss Africa's problems within the framework of the OAU in place of the platforms established
by the former colonial metropoles. He had in mind, for example, the France-Africa summits.
Sankara ended his speech with very significant and far-reaching words: “I would simply say that
we must accept to live as African – that is the only way to live free and dignified.”
In my opinion, the motto "Live as African," beyond summarizing Sankara's political and ethical
vision, draws an agenda for economic liberation. I would go even further: no development strategy
for the African continent worthy of its name can do without the "Live as African" program that
Sankara called for.
To defend this thesis, I will put Sankara in conversation with the late Brazilian economist Celso
Furtado and the late Franco-Egyptian economist Samir Amin. These two Global South thinkers
Live as African
3
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
provided the theoretical underpinnings for a Sankara-style economic liberation agenda. In
particular, they challenged the still dominant view that countries of the South could replicate
Western development trajectory. Furtado and Amin concluded that people in the South will never
be able to catch up with the average standard of living in the North. Since then, some empirical
studies dealing with the phenomenon of unequal ecological exchange have confirmed their
prognosis and thus insisted, as Sankara did in his time, on the need for the countries of the South
to find an alternative to the unstainable Western development path. Based on these
considerations, I will briefly elaborate in the conclusion on what policy content could be given
nowadays to the program "Live as African."
1 An Agenda of Liberation
The motto “Live as African," as articulated by Sankara, is not racist or xenophobic. Nor is it a plea
for autarky or isolationism. Sankara was truly an internationalist. In the same speech at the OAU,
he declared: "The popular masses of Europe are not opposed to the popular masses in Africa.
Those who want to exploit Africa are those who exploit Europe, too. We have a common enemy.”
Sankara had a conception of “Africanness” that reminds us of the Constitution of the first Haitian
Republic. When Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Haitian citizenship was not defined in a
racialized way. Rather, anyone who fought to liberate Haiti from the shackles of colonial
domination was considered Haitian (Manji 2019). Even the much-celebrated 1789 French
Revolution did not go as far as Haiti, as the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrated in his
wonderful book entitled Silencing the Past.
“Live as African” is an agenda for liberation. Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel, who wrote
extensively on the philosophy and ethics of liberation, introduced the concept of critical or
negative ethics (Dussel 1985, 2008, 2013). According to him, the first principle of critical ethics
suggests that we must oppose “every ethical system that entails the production of certain victims”
(Eduardo Mendieta in the foreword of Dussel 2008: X). This stance requires ethical systems to be
assessed from the location of their specific victims (ibid.). An agenda of economic liberation must
by definition be articulated from the perspective of the victims of the current global economic
system. It aims to resist the existing global economic order and possibly transcend it in favor of
an alternative way of organizing economic and political life that would empower the considerable
number of victims that must be produced as long as the status quo prevails.
The “Live as African" motto starts from the acknowledgment that African popular masses have
been and are dominated and that they must end this situation themselves. The liberation of the
continent will not come from outside. Africans will have to liberate themselves from the legacies
of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. However, this will only be possible if African peoples
regain trust in themselves, unite their forces, and promote their material and cultural resources.
To that extent, any project of liberation must have epistemic and educational underpinnings
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020).2
2 For Sankara, transforming society away from colonial legacies and some oppressive “traditions” required political
education. Leadership by example was paramount, as well as raising peoples’ awareness and sense of solidarity through
the practice of subaltern experiences (for example, inducing men to perform tasks ordinarily reserved for women or
introducing urban people to rural life). More generally, as Fidèle Toé, Sankara’s childhood friend, remembered: "For
4
The Myth of Economic Development
“Live as African” is a powerful expression for the ideal of self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency being
understood both as freedom from external domination and as capacity to self-determination. It
points to the urgent need to delink from an oppressive and exploitative world economic system
as a first step towards self-determination and the building of more prosperous and egalitarian
polities.
“Live as African” was not a catchphrase for Sankara. During his four years as the head of the
Burkina Faso state, he did his best, in very adverse circumstances, to implement a policy of
economic self-sufficiency based on the mobilization of domestic resources, and the fight against
corruption and economic and financial waste. Although a number of policy errors were made,
significant socio-economic achievements have been recorded (Sylla 2012; Peterson 2021).
I would like to argue here that the path delineated by Sankara is the only one that is sustainable
for both Africa and the planet Earth. To make this argument, I will rely on two Global South
thinkers who showed why the Western development path cannot be successfully emulated in the
Global South and why, therefore, peripheral countries must by necessity find their own way to
create a sustainable prosperity for their inhabitants. Those two thinkers are Furtado and Amin. I
would say that Furtado and Amin provided intellectual justifications for the Live as African type
of approach while Sankara provided their scholarly views with a policy agenda, the limits of which
we can learn from.
2 The Myth of Economic Development3
Furtado is one of the most prominent intellectuals of his generation. Influenced by great thinkers
such as Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Raúl Prebisch, he was a pioneer
of development economics and a leading figure of structuralism in Latin America. Furtado wrote
more than 30 books published in some 15 languages. He worked at the Economic Commission for
Latin America (1949-1957), and he was the first Brazilian Minister of Planning (1962-1963).
Between 1986 and 1988, he was the Minister of Culture. Before his death in 2004, he was
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics.
As a scholar, Furtado provided the kind of theoretical arguments that back and strengthen the
agenda of economic liberation advocated by the practical man of action that Sankara was. In 1974,
Furtado published in Portuguese a small and relatively ignored book called The Myth of Economic
Development. The English edition was published only in 2020, at the occasion of the 100th
anniversary of his birth.
Sankara, the question of education is fundamental. I think that we did not let him go to the end of his thought. His action
did not really go to the end of his thought […] Thomas would have liked us to do something like what they did in Cuba:
to take three or four years to launch a literacy campaign to eradicate illiteracy, to put all children and young people in
school. As a result, the trained human capital could have been properly put to good effect. The population would have
had materials to raise their intellectual level: everyone could read newspapers, books and participate in debates, write,
etc. However, he built schools. That's all he did. A school for him is not the big sophisticated building […] Under Sankara,
schooling has made a spectacular leap.” (interview in Sylla 2012: 214; my translation).
3 This section relies heavily on Sylla (2020b).
Live as African
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
The Myth of Economic Development is a prescient book that discusses from a Global South
perspective The Limits to Growth, a landmark report by the Club of Rome, and a best-seller in the
environmentalist literature (Meadows et al. 1972) and a source of inspiration for the current
Degrowth movement (Schmelzer et al. 2022). The Limits to Growth has been translated into 30
languages since its publication. It analyzed and projected the interrelationships and behavior
between 1900 and 2100 of five main factors: population, industrial production, agricultural
production, natural resources, and pollution. The main conclusions of The Limits to Growth are the
following:
First, economic growth is not the solution to the most pressing issues humanity is facing. It’s
rather the big problem: “That which all the world sees as the solution to its problems is in fact a
cause of those problems” (Meadows 2007: 193).
Second, the idea of endless economic growth in a finite world is absurd. Sooner or later, limits will
be reached. On the one hand, regarding “sources,” not all resources that allow for exponential
growth of capital, population, industry, and agriculture are renewable. On the other hand,
regarding “sinks,” the industrial system has irreversible consequences on the physical environment
- including the atmosphere - which compromise the planet's ability to withstand the increased
pressure it imposed on it.
Third, the pursuit of economic growth will lead to the overshoot and collapse of industrial
civilization, if the global trends observed in terms of population growth, industrialization, food
production, pollution, and resource depletion are to continue. If nothing is done to invert the
trends, limits will be reached during the 21st century. Currently, this is the message from the
reports regularly published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United
Nations.
Last but not least, technological progress will not help push the limits to growth. Only a radical
change in the “value system” – production/consumption behaviors – can help prevent
civilizational collapse.
As a major recommendation, the authors of The Limits to Growth proposed a global strategy to
achieve what they called “global equilibrium” or a “non-growth state” (which is a state that can
allow every habitant of the planet to live well). They stressed that developed countries should
radically adjust their lifestyles and should help developing countries towards achieving global
equilibrium.
Furtado saw three merits in The Limits to Growth. First, it modelled the world economy as a closed
system. Until then, the dominant approach had been to start from individual countries and assume
that non-renewable resources were unlimited in the "outside world," i.e., the rest of the world.
Second, The Limits to Growth addressed an overarching issue largely ignored by economists,
namely the consequences of capital accumulation on the physical environment. Third, it showed
the ecologically unsustainable character of “industrial capitalism.”
6
The Myth of Economic Development
That said, according to Furtado, The Limits to Growth suffered two limitations from a Global South
perspective:
•
First, it obscured the great dependence of core countries (the developed/Western
countries) on the natural resources of the peripheral countries (the Global South).
•
Second, it also betrayed an ignorance of the specificity of underdevelopment. Indeed, The
Limits to Growth made projections based on the questionable assumption that “as the rest
of the world develops economically, it will follow basically the US pattern of consumption”
(Meadows et al. 1972: 109).
This last assumption sums up what Furtado called “the myth of economic development” – the
belief that the poorest citizens in the Global South will one day enjoy the same living standards as
the average citizen in the Global North. The myth of economic development is the belief in
“economic catch-up.”
In his discussion of The Limits to Growth, Furtado reached three major conclusions:
First, the pressure on natural resources in the future will be much less than that projected by The
Limits to Growth, since the consumption pattern of the core countries concerns only a minority of
the world's population and can never be generalized to the whole planet. In other words, pressure
on global resources are attenuated by the functioning of the global economic system which
prevents populations in the Global South achieving the same consumption patterns as in the
Global North:
“The predominant evolutionary tendency is to exclude nine out of ten people from the
principal benefits of development; and, if we observe the group of peripheral countries in
particular, we realize that there the tendency is to exclude nineteen out of twenty. This
growing mass of the excluded—in absolute and relative terms—that is concentrated in
peripheral countries constitutes in itself a heavy factor in the evolution of the system”
(Furtado and Furtado 2020: 61).
His second conclusion is that the generalization of the “Western way of life” must lead to the
collapse of civilization:
The Limits to Growth “provides a thorough demonstration that the lifestyle created by
industrial capitalism will always be the privilege of a minority. The cost of this lifestyle, in
terms of the degradation of the physical world, is so high that any attempt to generalize it
would inevitably lead to the collapse of an entire civilization, putting the survival of the
human species at risk. We have then thorough evidence that economic
development—the idea that the poor peoples can one day enjoy the lifestyles of the
currently rich peoples—is simply unattainable. We now know incontrovertibly that
peripheral economies will never be developed, in the sense of being similar to the
economies that currently make up the center of the capitalist system” (Furtado and
Furtado 2020: 62).
Live as African
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
His third conclusion has a more programmatic aspect: the impossibility of “economic catch-up”
does not imply that the citizens of the Global South are condemned to suffer from poverty and
inequality. It only implies that:
•
capitalism has nothing to offer as a prospect of a decent life for the vast majority of
humanity;
•
an alternative orientation of development should be devised that is more egalitarian and
more economical in resource-use. To that end, priority should be given to a wide social
dissemination of consumer products whose production escapes the modernist cult of
planned obsolescence.
3 Western Development, Surplus Labor, and Emigration
Furtado was not alone among Global South thinkers in the rejection of the economic catch-up
view. Amin reached similar conclusions via a different theoretical road. The former director of the
Third World Forum and prolific author observed that the secular destruction of the peasantry in
the Global North went hand in hand with an important growth in agricultural productivity (Amin
2017). In 19th century Europe, in particular, industrialization made it possible to employ
productively a large part of the labor force released by the agriculture and crafts sectors. But that
was not enough to absorb the surplus labor force. Emigration, especially to the Americas, provided
the main outlet. Britain, the leading economic hegemon at that time, is probably the most eloquent
example of this pattern. As Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik wrote in their book, A Theory of
Imperialism, “Between 1821 and 1915, over 16 million persons migrated permanently out of
Britain […], a number larger than Britain’s 1821 population. British emigration alone made up 36
percent of all emigration from Europe during this period. The average number of persons
migrating every year from Britain over this period works out to nearly half the annual increase in
population.” (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017: 56-57).
However, if the countries of the Global South are to follow the same development trajectory as the
West, this must lead to a large dispossession of peasants and thus to the creation of a huge surplus
labor force. However, this surplus labor force will not be absorbed by the “modern” sector due to
the absence of industries or to the capital-intensive nature of the technologies used. In contrast to
Western Europe during its 19th century industrialization phase, there is no place on the planet
where the Global South could export its surplus labor, let’s say its army of informal sector workers.
Despite the Western media frenzy about so-called “migrants,” the fact is that the Global North is
rather closed to workers from the Global South, especially low-skilled ones. Indeed, one of the
main features of the current world system is that there is very little movement of labor, especially
from the South to the North. At current emigration rates, if we were to relocate 10% of the poor
population from the South to the North, it would take two hundred years, according to economist
Branko Milanovic (2010: 124).
8
Unequal Ecological Exchange
As the Global South cannot tap new “Americas” somewhere on the planet, disparity in living
conditions between the North and South and within the South must remain the norm, as is
currently the case. Nowadays, as Amin argued,
"The demands that industries in the peripheries should be “competitive” on world markets
justify the use of modern technologies which reduce the level of labour-intensive work. At
the same time, there are no new Americas to open for mass migrations from Asia or Africa.
In such conditions, the pursuit of a model based on historical capitalism produces nothing
other than migration from devastated countrysides to squalid urban slums” (Amin 2017:
3).
In a nutshell, the limited opportunities for large-scale emigration to newer “Americas” is another
important reason why the countries of the Global South cannot collectively replicate the
development trajectory of the West and why, therefore, they must find a path of their own.
4 Unequal Ecological Exchange
In favor of the Furtado and Amin views on the impossibility for the Global South to economically
catch up with the Global North, a growing literature has shown that the Western development
trajectory during the last two centuries had been based on an ecological “exceptionalism,” or
better, on an “ecological imperialism,” resting first on the net appropriation of the resources of
the Global South and second on the externalization to the Global South of the ecological costs of
capitalist expansion. These two patterns combined render “economic catch-up” impossible for the
Global South as a whole.
If economic catch-up were to happen, Global South citizens would have to achieve the same levels
of consumption and waste as the average citizen in the Global North. Yet, we know that if all the
inhabitants of the earth had the same ecological footprint as the average resident of the European
Union, 2.8 planets would be needed while we only have one. The European Union represents only
7% of the world's population, yet it uses 20% of the planet's biocapacity (WWF 2019). In other
words, the planet could not afford the universalization of the unsustainable European way of life.
In January 2021, the journal Ecological Economics published an article coauthored by Christian
Dorninger and nine of his colleagues. Titled Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange:
Implications for sustainability in the 21st century, this article has made particularly salient three
empirical results of the literature on unequal ecological exchange (see Dorninger et al. 2021; see
also Hickel et al. 2021; Hickel et al. 2022).
First, developing countries lose both on flows of biophysical resources and on monetary flows:
“[High income] nations accomplish a net appropriation of materials, energy, land, and labor, while
simultaneously generating a monetary surplus from those net appropriations” (Dorninger et al
2021: 10).
Second, economic growth in developed countries depends on unequal ecological exchange: “The
economic growth of wealthier regions is achieved through high mass throughput and concurrent
environmental burden shifting to poorer regions” (Dorninger et al 2021: 10).
Live as African
9
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
Third, economic catch-up for the Global South is impossible:
“Because the economic growth model of industrialization requires the appropriation of
resources from poorer regions, it seems illusory for all poorer nations to be able to ‘catch-
up’ by – among other things – accessing even poorer regions from which to appropriate
resources. Industrialization as experienced by the world’s wealthiest countries, and some
emerging economies like China, cannot become universal” (Dorninger et al 2021: 10).
The situation of “unequal ecological exchange” implies that the Global South loses on two
accounts: net transfer of biophysical resources and net monetary transfers to the Global North.
The question we may ask here is: how is it possible that the Global South loses both on net
biophysical resource flows and on net financial flows?
For this situation to exist, the Global South must be structurally in a position of financial
indebtedness to the Global North. This begs another question: How can the debt in hard currency
be repaid to the Global North? The answer is: permanent austerity for the majority in the Global
South and the selling-off (and privatization) of national assets. The enforcement of so-called
creditors and investors’ rights is ordinarily the province of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and the World Bank. As a matter of fact, their objective role is to facilitate the drain accruing to
the Global North through unequal exchange.
Sadly, unequal ecological exchange has been the story of post-independence Africa. Due to the
nature of the economic specialization they inherited from colonialism, most African countries are
subject to an alternation between “growth” cycles stimulated by improved prices for commodities
and “austerity” cycles marked by declining terms of trade and debt distress.
For example, the 1960s were a decade of relatively high economic growth on average for sub-
Saharan Africa. In the following decade, the average rate of growth declined due namely to
deteriorating terms of trade. But the foreign currency debt, as a ratio of GDP, increased. Issuance
of foreign currency debt tends to increase with investors’ confidence in brighter growth
prospects. Unfortunately, worsening terms of trade and higher borrowing costs paved the way for
a debt crisis that the IMF and World Bank managed from a creditor perspective. The results were
that many African countries experienced lost decades in terms of real GDP per capita growth. Yet,
their foreign currency debt/GDP ratio continued to increase: A clear sign that austerity policies
are not designed to help countries recover economically and be in a better financial position.
Rather, austerity policies are designed to punish countries and put them at the mercy of their
creditors. The foreign currency debt/GDP ratio declined only with the partial cancellation of
bilateral and multilateral debts from the first decade of the 2000s. Growth resumed, even if it was
jobless. Thanks to more peaceful political settings and improved terms of trade, sub-Saharan
Africa recorded its best decadal performance, prompting the so-called “Africa rising” narrative.
Investors’ confidence was back. However, with the end of the super commodity boom cycle in the
beginning of the 2010s, economic growth slowed down. It was sustained mostly through onerous
infrastructure projects sometimes financed with the issuance of debts in foreign currency. The
foreign currency debt stock had been gradually reconstituted (see Figure 1). The COVID-19
pandemic would just expose further the unsustainable foreign debt trajectory of a number of
10
Unequal Ecological Exchange
African countries. The pandemic did not create the debt distress. It just accelerated it, given that
all the debt sustainability indicators have been deteriorating from 2008.
Figure 1: Evolution of the average real GDP growth and the external debt/GDP ratio for sub-Saharan Africa (1960-2019) -
in percentage4
Figure 1: in blue, right scale, we have the average real GDP growth per decade; the line, left scale,
corresponds to the external debt/GDP ratio at the beginning of each decade. The graph contains
data for 30 countries for which data are complete for the whole period. Average real GDP growth
by decade is provided for the period from 1970.
One thing Sankara understood, and which is not clear yet to most progressive intellectuals and
movements, is that cancelling the existing foreign currency public debt stock is far from enough.
All the discussions about the need to find an international and functional mechanism for sovereign
debt restructuring are probably as well-meant as the campaigns for debt cancellation or debt
jubilee. Although the discussions have become very technical, they often miss the elephant in the
room. Sankara knew that the system of unequal ecological exchange is what was to be abolished
first of all. Though important, the repudiation or cancellation of the outstanding foreign debt stock
would not be enough. Even if it were cancelled, the foreign debt stock would be quickly
reconstituted, as the case of sub-Saharan Africa between 2000 and now made clear. So, as long as
foreign debt cancellation or repudiation does not intervene as a foundation for another
development path, its benefits risk being temporary and pyrrhic (Sylla 2023a). Between 2000 and
2016, for 28 countries representing 85% of sub-Saharan Africa GDP, interests paid on external
debt amounted to 100 billion USD. Though very significant, this was five times less than the
income accruing to foreign direct investment during the same period and sample of countries
(Kvangraven et al. 2021128; Sylla 2023a). Yet, there is no campaign asking to cancel the
4 World Bank Development Indicators accessed on July 2022.
4
1.2
2.1
5.6
3.4
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
1960
1970-80
1980-90
1990-2000
2000-2010
2010-2019
Real GDP growth
External debt/GDP
Live as African
11
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
repatriation of these huge amounts of profits and dividends, which ultimately contribute to the
reconstitution of the foreign debt stock of the continent.
In sum, there is logically no sustainable development for Africa and the Global South in a world of
unequal ecological exchange. Even the highly commendable sustainable development goals of the
United Nations are not sustainable in practice. They still cling to the economic catch-up view and
to that extent do not acknowledge the reality of unequal ecological exchange.
5 Delinking and Self-centered Development
Once it is realized that economic catch-up is an illusion for the Global South, something else must
be tried. Another development path must be experimented by necessity. This logical conclusion is
the basis of the delinking strategy advocated by Amin.
Far from being synonymous with autarky, a delinking strategy rather implies prioritizing the
domestic needs of the peripheral countries over the demands of the global economic system. In
practical terms, it means implementing policies that lead to a greater local control over (i) the
reproduction of the labor force, (ii) the domestic market, (iii) natural resources, (iv) technology,
and (v) the "centralization of the economic surplus" – that is, the control over the financial system
and flows and the ability to direct domestic investment (Amin 1990).
While Amin theorized delinking, Sankara was obliged by the circumstances faced by his country
to experiment with a form of forced delinking. Sankara invited Amin to come to Burkina Faso in
order to discuss the country’s economic challenges. At his arrival, Sankara said to him: “You have
told us that we must have the courage to de-connect [delink]. Before we could gather that courage,
the French have taken the lead and de-connected [delinked] us. What shall we do?” As Amin
recollected some years later: “I had not imagined that the question of de-connection [delinking]
would first arise in a country as poor as Burkina Faso” (see Mamdani 2018).
Retrospectively, there were some objective limitations to the agenda of economic liberation
advocated by Sankara. One was the lack of a supportive regional integration framework. A
landlocked country such as Burkina Faso must leverage trade and financial ties with its neighbors.
Not to mention that political leaders in the region, except for the Ghanaian President Jerry
Rawlings, were not especially enthusiastic about the Burkinabe revolution and its young and
unconventional leader (Sylla 2012; Peterson 2021).
Another limitation was the lack of monetary sovereignty by Burkina Faso and the related lack of
understanding of the cardinal importance of money and finance. Burkina Faso is still a member of
the franc zone, the last colonial monetary zone in Africa (Pigeaud and Sylla 2021; Koddenbrock
and Sylla 2019). The strategy of domestic resource mobilization promoted by Sankara would have
much more economic impact and popular support with the appropriate monetary and financial
instruments. Given the little financial help received from outside, the Burkinabe revolution
happened in a context of severe self-imposed austerity that was resented by what could be
considered as the middle classes at the time. Sankara himself acknowledged that it’s very tough
to deeply transform an underdeveloped country when the state budget is as little as 58 billion CFA
12
Delinking and Self-centered Development
francs, with 72% of it devoted to pay the debt and the salaries of 30,000 civil servants (Sylla 2012:
302).
One major lesson from the Burkinabe revolution is that a strategy of domestic resource
mobilization requires a minimum in terms of monetary sovereignty to be successful over the
medium and long run. Burkina Faso, under Sankara, was heavily money-constrained and this
limited the scope of popular support for the Burkinabe Revolution over a long-term basis.
Yet, as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) shows, money can never be an absolute constraint.
Governments that issue their own fiat currency can never lack their own currency (Mosler 2010,
Wray 2015, Mitchell et al. 2019). In principle, they will always be able to finance in their own
currency any project that relies essentially on real resources available locally or that can be
developed locally. In contrast to financial resources, real resources refer to land, labor, equipment,
intermediary inputs, etc. (Sylla 2020a, Sylla 2023b).
The paradigmatic revolution introduced by MMT opens up a developmental space that has been
hardly explored. In contrast to the current extraverted development path that makes African
countries economically vulnerable and highly dependent on foreign trade, technology, and
finance, it is possible to create a sustainable prosperity that reduces external dependency in its
various facets. In the spirit of the “Live as African” motto, this path consists in mobilizing domestic
resources in an institutional framework of monetary sovereignty.
By an institutional framework of monetary sovereignty, I mean an intellectual and policy
framework where the following facts are acknowledged: First, a government issuing a sovereign
currency can never lack “money” and its spending is not limited by its fiscal receipts; second,
investment is not constrained by available savings; and three, real resources constraints are the
ones that matter most of all. From the 1960s to date, most calls for African self-reliance have been
unaware of the point of view of monetary sovereignty, as they subscribe to the view that money
is a scarce “resource,” and relatedly that taxes finance public spending and that savings constraint
investment.5
5 The absence of a monetary sovereignty perspective can be seen for example in the celebrated Arusha
Declaration. The author, the late Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, wrote:
“When it is said that Government has no money, what does this mean? It means that the people of
Tanzania have insufficient money. The people pay taxes out of the very little wealth they have; it is
from these taxes that the Government meets its recurrent and development expenditure. When we
call on the Government to spend more money on development projects, we are asking the
Government to use more money and if the Government does not have any more, the only way it can
do this is to increase its revenue through extra taxation.
If one calls on the Government to spend more, one is in effect calling on the Government to increase
taxes. Calling on the Government to spend more without raising taxes is like demanding that the
Government should perform miracles; it is equivalent to asking for more milk from a cow while
insisting that the cow should not be milked again. But our refusal to admit the calling on the
Government to spend more is the same as calling on the Government to raise taxes shows that we
fully realize the difficulties of increasing taxes. We realize that the cow has no more milk – that is,
that the people find it difficult to pay more taxes. We know that the cow would like to have more
milk herself, so that her calves could drink it, or that she would like more milk which could be sold
Live as African
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University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
My thesis is that by uniting Sankara’s approach to MMT’s description of the operational realities
of the monetary system, we can delineate a promising approach to economic development able to
deliver the basics of decent life to anyone while reducing African nations’ external dependency.
To be provocative, I would say that the challenge is MMT-ing Sankara or if we prefer Sankara-ing
MMT.
6 An Example of Domestic Resource Mobilization
To illustrate this point, let us take a concrete example coming from the revolutionary work being
done by Diébédo Francis Kéré, a Berlin-based architect born in Burkina Faso. He recently won the
prestigious Pritzker Prize 2022, which is considered the Nobel Prize for Architecture. Kéré’s work
epitomizes perfectly the “Live as African” approach. As a pioneer of sustainable construction, he
built schools in Burkina Faso, namely in his native village, using essentially local materials. In
March 2022, following the announcement of the Pritzker Prize, he was interviewed by a French
TV channel. Here are some edited excerpts (see Kéré 2022) (all translations are mine):
To the question “What inspired you to build schools using local materials?” he replied:
"I always resented the fact that children are sitting in classrooms where it's very hot,
where there's no light, in a country where there is the sunlight during all the day. I said to
myself, we must use what is abundant to create classrooms that provide comfort for
teachers and students but also classrooms that are inspirational [...] I wanted to bring
beauty to the neediest. In doing so, the techniques came. That is, how to create passive
ventilation, how to create a roof that supports passive ventilation and at the same time
protects the building from the weather. That's how I did it by modernizing the earth, that
is, by adding aggregates to it....I didn't just stop there. In Burkina Faso, there is laterite. I
used it by cutting it to make facades that give the feeling of modernity that inspires. I also
used local wood... to create facades to protect the walls from the sun and thus create a
shaded and welcoming space for the users. That's my way of doing it."
To the question “Why don't Africans use local materials, so-called traditional materials?” his reply
was:
"The West, by its way of doing or its way of saying that what we have is primitive and has
no value, we end up rejecting what we have. This leads to saying, for example, that building
with the earth is synonymous with poverty. I did not want to accept this. I wanted to
improve the earth and create buildings that inspire [...] We have to convince people. We
must not let ourselves be stopped but we must prove that what we have can be the basis
for the development of our country. I did this by using earth to build my first school."
to provide more comfort for herself or her calves. But knowing all the things which could be done
with more milk does not alter the fact that the cow has no more milk!”
14
An Example of Domestic Resource Mobilization
To the question: “Why should Africans go back to these materials?” he replied:
"If you continue to use materials that don't come from home, the resources will disappear.
If you use what you have and you take advantage of it to improve local skills, you make
people proud and add recognition to what we have. That's what's going to move us
forward."
From this rich and dense interview, I derive three major lessons. First, cultural alienation has
worked to diminish Africans’ sense of self-esteem. Worse, it led us to devalue what we are and
what we possess. Second, cultural alienation coupled with the imposition of development agendas
from abroad have prevented African peoples from exploring an endogenous development path
that could deliver sustainable prosperity, self-esteem, and recognition. This lack of self-
determination has until now produced unnecessary suffering and hardships. Third, the quest to
ground African development in domestic resources stimulates itself a process of creativity and
innovation. At the same time there is already enough creativity to start with within the continent.
Indeed, the good news is that throughout the continent and its Diaspora there exists people,
unknown to most of us, who are achieving in their field of expertise what Kéré has achieved in the
domain of architecture.
What creative minds like Kéré, and policymakers must know is that whatever is feasible locally
from a technical and material point of view can be in principle financed in the domestic unit of
account of the sovereign issuer of the currency. Sankara-ing MMT or MMT-ing Sankara consists of
connecting the strategy of mobilizing domestic real resources with the possibilities associated
with monetary sovereignty. In other words, it consists of implementing projects based on
domestic real resources and financed essentially in the national currency. This development path
creates prosperity for the majority while reducing external dependency. It could be further
leveraged provided that regional or continental integration is also designed according to the
“Living as African” approach.
None of this implies that African countries do not need foreign technology or finance or
international solidarity. Rather, the argument is that international cooperation and solidarity
should stop being a deus ex machina. It should be tailored to meet the specific needs and
constraints arising from African countries’ strategies to mobilize their domestic resources. In that
perspective, the real test for international cooperation and solidarity is to demonstrate whether
it helps increase African self-reliance. For example, in place of a collaboration that creates
technological dependency, a “Live as African” approach to international solidarity would promote
cooperation to develop liberation techniques, i.e., techniques, tools, and methods that allow the
continent and its inhabitants to increase their capacity to mobilize their domestic resources and
lessen the reliance on foreign resources.
Live as African
15
University of Bayreuth African Studies Working Papers (XXXIII)
7 Conclusion
As Sankara (1987) rightly said: "We must accept to live as African - that is the only way to live free
and dignified.” It is also the only way out of the current dead-end. Humanly and ecologically
sustainable development must be based on the mobilization of resources available locally or on
those that could be developed locally.
The good news is that everything that is technically feasible locally can, in principle, be financed
in the domestic currency. This is the liberating message of the monetary sovereignty perspective.
As Sankara (1987) also observed: "We have enough intellectual capacity to create or at the very
least use technology and science wherever we find it.”
To the question “What can an agenda of economic liberation for Africa à la Sankara look like
nowadays?” I would argue that this agenda could revolve around the following idea: the basic
elements constitutive of a dignified life should be de-commodified and, wherever possible and
desirable, should tend to be free of charge. By the basic elements constitutive of a dignified life, I
mean for example food, safe water and environment, shelter, education, local transportation, etc.
The principle should be that oligopolistic market actors must not decide the fate of peoples and
nations.
This agenda should be implemented by focusing on the ecologically sustainable mobilization of
domestic/regional/continental resources. To be successful, it requires renewed forms of
democratic and collective leadership, pan-African solidarity, and international solidarity.
This agenda for economic liberation is not a utopian vision. There is enough human, cultural, and
material wealth potential in the African continent to make it happen.
16
References
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9 Latest Publications in the Africa Multiple connects Working Paper
Series
Title
Editor(s)
Year
of
Publication
Issue
Live as African: On the Relevance of
Thomas
Sankara’s
Agenda
for
Economic Liberation
Ndongo Samba Sylla
2022
33(5)
beaucoup
de
peur
et
de
questionnement:
Une
étude
comparative des discours sur le
Covid-19 en Côte d'Ivoire et au
Cameroun
Martina Drescher, Oumarou
Boukari, and Carline Liliane
Ngawa Mbaho
2022
29(4)
COVID-19 and (Im)mobilities in
West Africa
Andras
Breuer,
Martin
Doevenspeck,
Kamal
Donko,
and
Ouedraogo
Serge
2021
26(3)
African Studies and the Question of
Diasporas
John Ayotunde (Tunde) Isol
Bewaji
2021
25(2)
Figuring out how to Reconfigure
African Studies
Rüdiger Seesemann
2020
24(1)
Sylla, Ndongo Samba. 2022. Live as African: On the Relevance of Thomas Sankara’s
Agenda for Economic Liberation. University of Bayreuth
African Studies Working Papers 33, Africa Multiple connects 5. Bayreuth: Institute of
African Studies.
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- Series
- Africa Multiple connects ; 5
- Date
- December 7, 2022
- Number in series
- 33
- pages
- VII, 19
- Number of pages
- 19
Identifiers & sources
- Source ID (eref-/epub-)
- eref-73198
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