The Elite Africa Project is a global network of scholars working to shift how Africa and its elites are understood.

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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to The Elite Africa Project

Watch a video introduction to the project and database.

Featured Posts

Introducing: The Elite Africa Project Database

Learn more about the Elite Africa Project and our Online Database!

Dafe Oputu

Scholar Spotlight: Jeanne-Marie Jackson - Part 2

Part 2 of our interview with Professor of English Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Elite Africa Roundup - 20 August 2025

Funeral stalemate in Zambia, Jude Dibia on queerness in African lit

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Elite Africa Roundup - 2 August 2025

WAFCON 24, Cairo event honours displaced Sudanese entrepreneurs

Domains of Elite Power

The mechanics of how power—the essential condition of elite status—is meaningfully generated and exercised

Economic

Economic and business elites

Coercive

Military elites and those in security agencies

Ritual

Royalty, nobles, “traditional” rulers

Aesthetic

Art, literature, music- and media-based elites including new online influencers, clothing designers, architects, etc.

Religious

Religious and spiritual leaders, and intellectual/academic elites

Political

State-based or state-focused elites including international techno/bureaucrats

The Elite Africa Project

is a Canadian-based global network of scholars working to challenge predominant understandings of Africa and its elites.

Both in academia and in wider public discourse, African elites have either been ignored or depicted as grasping and self-interested. This framing perpetuates negative depictions of the continent and its peoples and draws on a simplistic understanding of what power is and how it is wielded. Our work aims to counter these perceptions by initiating global conversations about “who leads” in Africa and how they do so.

We seek to disrupt and renew both academic and public discussions of African leadership, refocusing attention on a wider, qualitatively different set of elites from those that have predominated in the past (such as the parasitic “Big Men” of neo-patrimonial politics).

Burna Boy, Nigerian musician, rapper and songwriter; in 2021, his album Twice as Tall won the Best World Music Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, and he enjoyed back to back Grammy award nominations in 2019 and 2020.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigerian economist, fair trade leader, environmental sustainability advocate, human welfare champion, sustainable finance maven and global development expert. Since March 2021, Okonjo-Iweala has been serving as Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

This project focuses on Africa’s elites, defined as those who operate at the highest level across a range of domains, wield significant power, and possess expert knowledge, skills, and personal strengths that are deployed in strategic, creative, and generative ways. While elites are those who possess the most consequential and powerful agenda-setting and decision-making capacity, Africa’s elites have either been sidelined in many of our analyses or rendered monotonal. When we switch frames to consider the continent as embodying and projecting new, generative forms of power, it changes our view of Africa. It may also change how we understand power itself.

We look at six domains of elite power, from the political to the aesthetic, and ask how we might shift how we think about and study Africa, and how this shift would impact our conceptualization of power and its exercise. Our goal is to contribute to popular conversations about Africa and to highlight the achievements of the astonishing new generation of leaders for a broader public audience.

This website will serve as a hub for collaborative activity by scholars, activists, and practitioners working on Elite Africa and house a searchable database of primary and secondary materials on African elites.

Kofi Annan (1938-2018), Ghanaian-born diplomat, trained in economics, international relations and management; was the first UNSG to be elected from within the ranks of the UN staff itself and served in various key roles before becoming Secretary General.

Namwali Serpell, Zambia award-winning novelist and writer; Recognised early on with the Caine prize, her numerous subsequent awards include the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, one of the world’s richest literary prizes.

Mohammed "Mo" Ibrahim, Sudanese billionaire businessman. He worked for several telecommunications companies, before founding Celtel, which when sold had over 24 million mobile phone subscribers in 14 African countries.

The Elite Africa Project

is a Canadian-based global network of scholars working to challenge predominant understandings of Africa and its elites.

Both in academia and in wider public discourse, African elites have either been ignored or depicted as grasping and self-interested. This framing perpetuates negative depictions of the continent and its peoples and draws on a simplistic understanding of what power is and how it is wielded. Our work aims to counter these perceptions by initiating global conversations about “who leads” in Africa and how they do so.

We seek to disrupt and renew both academic and public discussions of African leadership, refocusing attention on a wider, qualitatively different set of elites from those that have predominated in the past (such as the parasitic “Big Men” of neo-patrimonial politics).

This project focuses on Africa’s elites — those who operate at the highest level across a range of domains, wield significant power, and possess expert knowledge, skills, and personal strengths that are deployed in strategic, creative, and generative ways. When we switch frames to consider the continent as embodying and projecting new, generative forms of power, it changes our view of Africa. It may also change how we understand power itself.

This website is the hub for collaborative activity by scholars, activists, and practitioners working on Elite Africa and will house a searchable database of primary and secondary materials on African elites.

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ELITE AFRICA PROJECT DATABASE

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Harrow, Kenneth W. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Highlighting what is melodramatic, flashy, low, and gritty in the characters, images, and plots of African cinema, Kenneth W. Harrow uses trash as the unlikely metaphor to show how these films have depicted the globalized world. Rather than focusing on topics such as national liberation and postcolonialism, he employs the disruptive notion of trash to propose a destabilizing aesthetics of African cinema. Harrow argues that the spread of commodity capitalism has bred a culture of materiality and waste that now pervades African film. He posits that a view from below permits a way to understand the tropes of trash present in African cinematic imagery.

[Source: Indiana University Press].

Harrow, Kenneth W. Trash: African Cinema from Below

Harrow, Kenneth W.
This is some text inside of a div block.

Highlighting what is melodramatic, flashy, low, and gritty in the characters, images, and plots of African cinema, Kenneth W. Harrow uses trash as the unlikely metaphor to show how these films have depicted the globalized world.

Aesthetic

Harrow, Kenneth W. African Filmmaking: Five Formations. African Humanities and the Arts. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017.

This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema - that is, five “formations” of African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance- each in its own way. The history of South Africa, heavily marked by apartheid and its struggles, differs considerably from that of Egypt, which early on developed its own “Hollywood on the Nile.” The history of French colonialism impacted the three countries of the Maghreb - Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—differently than those in sub-Saharan Africa, where Senegal and Sembène had their own great effect on the Sahelian region. Anglophone Africa, particularly the films of Ghana and Nigeria, has dramatically altered the ways people have perceived African cinema for decades. History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre. This volume provides essential information for all those interested in the vital worlds of cinema in Africa since the time of the Lumière brothers.

[Source: Google Books].

Harrow, Kenneth W. African Filmmaking

Harrow, Kenneth W.
This is some text inside of a div block.

This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema - that is, five “formations” of African cinema.

Aesthetic

Gauch, Suzanne. Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press, 2016.

This book analyzes nine key films and film cycles from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia made in the twenty-five years leading up to the Arab Spring. This study shows how each film draws on diverse cinematic and socio political legacies to prefigure and capture the shifts of perception and relation that so stunned onlookers worldwide when nonideological protests in Tunisia overthrewthe long-standing autocratic government. These films, directed by Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir, Nabil Ayouch, Lyès Salem, Nadia ElFani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaidi, and Nejib Belkadhi, reimagine the politics of film as well as political cinema as they move away from the social realism characteristic of early post independence cinema. Examining how they translate precinematic cultures into new kinds of popular film that unsettle hierarchies of modernity and tradition, reimagine global generic forms as embedded in the local, and position the Maghreb at the center of cinematic history and innovation, this book argues that all challenge the expectations attached to national and global cinemas. At the same time, the book demonstrates how, in their thematic and stylistic choices, all reflect a commitment to mobility that exacts equally mobile perspectives of their audiences.

[Source: Oxford University Press].

Gauch, Suzanne. Maghrebs in Motion

Gauch, Suzanne
This is some text inside of a div block.

This book analyzes nine key films and film cycles from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia made in the twenty-five years leading up to the Arab Spring.

Aesthetic
Political

Garritano, Carmela. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History. Athens, OH: Center for International Studies Ohio University, 2013.

African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, African video movies narrate the desires and anxieties created by Africa’s incorporation into the global cultural economy. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research conducted in Ghana over a ten-year period, as well as close readings of a number of individual movies, this book brings the insights of historical context as well as literary and film analysis to bear on a range of movies and the industry as a whole. Garritano makes a significant contribution to the examination of gender norms and the ideologies these movies produce. African Video Movies and Global Desires is a historically and theoretically informed cultural history of an African visual genre that will only continue to grow in size and influence.

Source: Book Description

Garritano, Carmela. African Video Movies and Global Desires

Garritano, Carmela
This is some text inside of a div block.

African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production.

Aesthetic

Garritano, Carmela, and Kenneth W. Harrow, eds. A Companion to African Cinema. Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019.

A Companion to African Cinema offers an overview of critical approaches to African cinema. With contributions from an international panel of experts, the Companion approaches the topic through the lens of cultural studies, contemporary transformations in the world order, the rise of globalization, film production, distribution, and exhibition. This volume represents a new approach to African cinema criticism that once stressed the sociological and sociopolitical aspects of a film. The text explores a wide range of broad topics including: cinematic economics, video movies, life in cinematic urban Africa, reframing human rights, as well as more targeted topics such as the linguistic domestication of Indian films in the Hausa language and the importance of female African filmmakers and their successes in overcoming limitations caused by gender inequality. The book also highlights a comparative perspective of African videos capes of Southern Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire and explores the rise of Nairobi-based Female Filmmakers.

[Source: Wiley].

Garritano, Carmela, and Kenneth W. Harrow, eds. A Companion to African Cinema

Garritano, Carmela, and Kenneth W. Harrow
This is some text inside of a div block.

A Companion to African Cinema offers an overview of critical approaches to African cinema. With contributions from an international panel of experts, the Companion approaches the topic through the lens of cultural studies, contemporary transformations in the world order, the rise of globalization, film production, distribution, and exhibition

Aesthetic

Fronty, François. Dix films d’Afrique. Images plurielles, scène et écrans [Ten Movies from Africa: Plural Images, Scenes, and Screens]. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019.

With a diversity of styles and approaches, the authors suggest that African movies question cinema through reversing their gaze: it no longer goes from global cinema to so-called African cinema but reflects on contemporary African cinema from an Africa “that is becoming”.

[Source: L’Harmattan, adapted and translated from French].

Fronty, François. Dix films d’Afrique.

Fronty, François
This is some text inside of a div block.

With a diversity of styles and approaches, the authors suggest that African movies question cinema through reversing their gaze: it no longer goes from global cinema to so-called African cinema but reflects on contemporary African cinema from an Africa “that is becoming”.

Aesthetic
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