Abstract

"The Great Marketplace: African Development in a Neoliberal World"

Vivien Chang, Dartmouth College (Vivien.L.Chang@dartmouth.edu)

This paper explores postcolonial Africa’s struggle to make inroads into a capitalist global market while contending with unequal economic structures and lingering (neo)colonial attitudes about race and civilization. Focusing on Ghana, it argues that the country's transition from a centrally planned to a market economy did not take place in a vacuum but rather had its roots in the immediate postcolonial period. The emphasis on foreign capital and “Made in Ghana” goods laid the groundwork for the nation’s later marketization, in spite of Kwame Nkrumah’s avowed commitment to Pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, and African Socialism. In the context of the New International Economic Order movement, as the Group of 77 lobbied for a more favorable international economic regime, simultaneous efforts for economic power were taking place outside of the formal confines of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Organization of African Unity, and the Economic Commission for Africa. Undertaken by government officials, aid and religious organizations, and private market actors, these efforts were animated by similar desires to achieve greater equity in international trade without upending global economic structures. By examining a series of international trade fairs—transnational sites of market creation—amidst a broader movement for fairer trade, this paper reveals the much earlier historical dynamics through which neoliberal ideas first became imaginable in Africa.