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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Frindéthié, Martial K. Francophone African Cinema: History, Culture,Politics and Theory. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2009.

Setting the stage for a critical encounter between Francophone African cinema and Continental European critical theory, this book offers a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of 16 Francophone African films, including Bassek Ba Kobhio’s The Great White Man of Lambarene, Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s Guimba the Tyrant, and Amadou Seck’s Saaraba. The author invites readers to study these films in the context of transnational conversations between African filmmakers and the conventional theorists whose works are more readily available in academia. The book examines black French filmmakers’ treatments of a number of cross-cultural themes, including intercontinental encounters and reciprocity, ideology and subjective freedom, governance and moral responsibility, sexuality and social order, and globalization. Throughout the work, the presentation of literary theory is accessible by both beginning and advanced students of film and culture.

[Source: Google Books].

Frindéthié, Martial K. Francophone African Cinema

Frindéthié, Martial K.
This is some text inside of a div block.

Setting the stage for a critical encounter between Francophone African cinema and Continental European critical theory, this book offers a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of 16 Francophone African films, including Bassek Ba Kobhio’s The Great White Man of Lambarene, Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s Guimba the Tyrant, and Amadou Seck’s Saaraba.

Aesthetic

Dovey, Lindiwe. African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen. Film and Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Analyzing a range of South African and West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, Lindiwe Dovey identifies a specific trend in contemporary African filmmaking - one in which filmmakers are using the embodied audiovisual medium of film to offer a critique of physical and psychological violence. Against a detailed history of the medium’s savage introduction and exploitation by colonial powers in two very different African contexts, Dovey examines the complex ways in which African filmmakers are preserving, mediating, and critiquing their own cultures while seeking a united vision of the future. More than merely representing socio-cultural realities in Africa, these films engage with issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, "updating" both the history and the literature they adapt to address contemporary audiences in Africa and elsewhere. Through this deliberate and radical re-historicization of texts and realities, Dovey argues that African filmmakers have developed a method of filmmaking that is altogether distinct from European and American forms of adaptation.

[Source: Columbia University Press].

Dovey, Lindiwe. African Film and Literature

Dovey, Lindiwe
This is some text inside of a div block.

Analyzing a range of South African and West African films inspired by African and non-African literature, Lindiwe Dovey identifies a specific trend in contemporary African filmmaking - one in which filmmakers are using the embodied audiovisual medium of film to offer a critique of physical and psychological violence.

Aesthetic

Dovey, Lindiwe. Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals. Framing Film Festivals. New York, N.Y: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137404145.

Tracing the history of Africa’s relationship to film festivals and exploring the festivals’ impact on the various types of people who attend festivals (the festival experts, the ordinary festival audiences, and the filmmakers), Dovey reveals what turns something called a "festival" into a "festival experience" for these groups.

[Source: Springer].

Dovey, Lindiwe. Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals

Dovey, Lindiwe
This is some text inside of a div block.

Tracing the history of Africa’s relationship to film festivals and exploring the festivals’ impact on the various types of people who attend festivals (the festival experts, the ordinary festival audiences, and the filmmakers), Dovey reveals what turns something called a "festival" into a "festival experience" for these groups.

Aesthetic

Dipio, Dominica. Gender Terrains in African Cinema. African Humanities Series. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2014.

Gender Terrains in African Cinema reflects on a body of canonical African filmmakers who address a trajectory of pertinent social issues. Dipio analyses gender relations around three categories of female characters - the girl child, the young woman and the elderly woman and their male counterparts. Although gender remains the focal point in this lucid and fascinating text, Dipio engages attention in her discussion of African feminism in relation to Western feminism. With its broad appeal to African humanities, Gender Terrains in African Cinema stands as a unique and radical contribution to the field of (African) film studies, which until now, has suffered from a paucity of scholarship.

[Source: Amazon].

Dipio, Dominica. Gender Terrains in African Cinema

Dipio, Dominica
This is some text inside of a div block.

Dipio analyses gender relations around three categories of female characters - the girl child, the young woman and the elderly woman and their male counterparts.

Aesthetic

Diop, Samba. African Francophone Cinema. New Orleans, LA: University Press of the South, 2004.

The major contemporary African Francophone filmmakers and their films are treated here. This short encyclopedic book discusses a certain number of themes as they are featured in African Francophone Cinema: History; Oral Traditions and Literatures; Myth, Religion, and Cosmogony; Gender, Homosexuality, and New Aesthetics; Image and Film Production; and, finally, the themes of Modernity and Post-colonialism. The interface between cinematographic language and image is also studied. This study reflects the vibrancy of the emergent field of African cinema. Furthermore, the reading and interpretation of the aforementioned themes is a testimony toward the commitment of African filmmakers who re-visit and update a certain number of topics as well as explore new avenues, thus pushing further and further outward the boundaries of filmmaking in Africa.

[Source: University Press of the South].

Diop, Samba. African Francophone Cinema.

Diop, Samba
This is some text inside of a div block.

This short encyclopedic book discusses a certain number of themes as they are featured in African Francophone Cinema: History; Oral Traditions and Literatures; Myth, Religion, and Cosmogony; Gender, Homosexuality, and New Aesthetics; Image and Film Production; and, finally, the themes of Modernity and Post-colonialism.

Aesthetic
Religious/Spritual

Diawara, Manthia. African Cinema: Politics & Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Manthia Diawara provides an insider’s account of the history and current status of African cinema. African Cinema: Politics and Culture is the first extended study in English of Sub-Saharan cinema. Employing an interdisciplinary approach which draws on history, political science, economics, and cultural studies, Diawara discusses such issues as film production and distribution, and film aesthetics from the colonial period to the present. The book traces the growth of African cinema through the efforts of pioneer filmmakers such as Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Oumarou Ganda, Jean-René Débrix, Jean Rouch, and Ousmane Sembène, the Pan-African Filmmakers’ Organization(FEPACI), and the Ougadougou Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO). Diwara focuses on the production and distribution histories of key films such as Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl and Mandabi (1968) and Souleymane Cissé’s Fine(1982). He also examines the role of missionary films in Africa, Débrix’s ideas concerning ‘magic, ‘the links between Yoruba theater and Nigerian cinema, and the parallels between Hindu mythologicals in India and the Yoruba-theater -inflected films in Nigeria. Diawara also looks at film and nationalism, film and popular culture, and the importance of FESPACO. African Cinema: Politics and Culture makes a major contribution to the expanding discussion of Eurocentrism, the canon, and multi-culturalism.

[Source: Google Books].

Diawara, Manthia. African Cinema

Diawara, Manthia
This is some text inside of a div block.

Manthia Diawara provides an insider’s account of the history and current status of African cinema.

Aesthetic
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