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 - 26 August 2025

Understanding the war in Sudan, street art celebrated in Ghana

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Elite Africa Roundup - 20 August 2025

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

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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Chernoff, John Miller. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. University of Chicago Press; Revised Edition, 1981.

Chernoff develops a brilliant and penetrating musicological essay that is, at the same time, an intensely personal and even touching account of musical and cultural discovery that anyone with an interest in Africa can and should read. . .. No other writing comes close to approaching Chernoff's ability to convey a feeling of how African music 'works'.

Source: James Koetting, Africana Journal as culled from https://press.uchicago.edu

Chernoff, John Miller. African Rhythm and African Sensibility

Chernoff, John Miller
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No other writing comes close to approaching Chernoff's ability to convey a feeling of how African music 'works'.

Aesthetic

Marshall, Katherine. “Sister Agatha: A Nigerian Peacemaker at Work”. October 28, 2017, published by the Berkeley Center for Religion and Peace, Georgetown University. https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/sister-agatha-a-nigerian-peacemaker-at-work

Sister Agatha is one of the religious sisters who are pillars of many key institutions in Nigeria, above all schools and clinics. She has many admirers because of her forthright and intelligent stance, her clear discipline and ample love, and her commitment to help “the least among us”. But she exemplifies larger, important realities: the vital but still often obscured roles that women play in both peace and development, their courage and resilience, and how often they are motivated by their religious faith. It’s avital part of the linked efforts to shift the focus from “countering” violence and extremism to “building” and sustaining decent, caring, and peaceful societies.

(Source: Excerpt from article culled from Georgetown University Website).

Katherine Marshall. 2017. “Sister Agatha: A Nigerian Peacemaker at Work”.

Katherine Marshall
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This piece takes a look at the contribution of Sister Agatha, a religious sister, to her community in Nigeria.

Religious/Spritual

Bediako, Kwame. “Understanding African Theology in the 20thCentury”. 1993.

It has become well known that two distinct trends have emerged in African Christian thought in the post-independent and post-missionary era, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. One has been the theological dimension to the struggle for the social and political transformation of the conditions of inequality and oppression in South Africa. This is what produced Black Theology, a theology of liberation in the African setting, in response to the particular circumstances of southern Africa. The other has been the theological exploration into the indigenous cultures of African peoples, with particular stress on their pre-Christian (and also pre-Islamic) religious traditions. This trend has been more closely associated with the rest of tropical Africa, where political independence seemed to have taken away a direct regular experience of the kind of socio-political pressures which produced Black Theology in South Africa. In this second trend, the broad aim has been to achieve some integration between the African pre-Christian religious experience and African Christian commitment in ways that would ensure the integrity of African Christian identity and selfhood. This article will focus on the second of these ‘trends’, which is what is generally meant by the designation ‘African Theology’. It needs to be pointed out, though, that the two are by no means to be regarded as mutually exclusive. Rather, they may be described as ‘a series of concentric circles of which Black Theology is the inner and smaller circle’. Nonetheless it will be more helpful to make ‘Black Theology’ the subject of a separate discussion.

(Source: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org).

Bediako, Kwame. “Understanding African Theology in the 20th Century”.

Bediako, Kwame
This is some text inside of a div block.

It has become well known that two distinct trends have emerged in African Christian thought in the post-independent and post-missionary era, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s.

Religious/Spritual

Marshall, Katherine. Faith and Development in Focus: Nigeria. Berkeley Center at Georgetown University, 2018.

Nigeria’s vibrant and dynamic religious landscape plays many roles in the nation’s life and development. It is also a factor, albeit a complex one, in conflicts and violence that many see as linked to religious divides. Religious institutions have deep historic roots and are unquestionably a vital part of communities at all levels. They have shaped Nigerian social and political approaches, notably in health and education, and play significant political and economic roles, both within Nigeria and internationally. Nigerians look to religious leaders for moral direction and practical support. Religious actors are significant for virtually every development challenge facing Nigeria, from governance structures to gender relations, regional balance to community resilience, and educational curricula to climate change. This report provides an overview of Nigeria’s religious landscape in relation to major development issues. Supported by the International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), the report is part of a broad effort to explore these questions in the context of five countries.

(Source: excerpt from article accessed from https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu).

Marshall, Katherine. Faith and Development in Focus

Marshall, Katherine
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This report provides an overview of Nigeria’s religious landscape in relation to major development issues.

Religious/Spritual
Economic

Wright, Marcia. “African History in the 1960’s: Religion.” African Studies Review 14, no. 3 (1971):439–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/523775.

Of all the “subfields” of African history, religion is in the most preliminary condition. It is also, in all probability, the most difficult to treat in an orderly fashion, owing to the constant spillover in toother areas generally regarded to be more pre-emptive in modern historiography. Our task in isolating religion as a subfield entails in part an operation of retrieval from political, social, and intellectual sectors of the discipline. Problems of definition must also be tackled. Are we primarily concerned with religion in history or the history of religion? Where is the cut-off mark in considering myth, ritual, and other phenomena that are related, but not at all times central, to religion?

(Source: Extract of article culled from https://www.cambridge.org)

Wright, Marcia. “African History in the 1960’s: Religion.”

Wright, Marcia
This is some text inside of a div block.

Are we primarily concerned with religion in history or the history of religion? Where is the cut-off mark in considering myth, ritual, and other phenomena that are related, but not at all times central, to religion?

Religious/Spritual

Tarusarira, Joram. “African Religion, Climate Change, and Knowledge Systems”. The Ecumenical review, Vol.69 (3), (2017); 398-410; Geneva: World Council of Churches

This article argues that as humanity is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate that is very exceptional on the geological time scale, resulting in global warming, humans must deal with climate change holistically, including the often-overlooked religion factor. Human-caused climate change has resulted primarily from changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but also from changes in small particles (aerosols), as well as from changes in land use. In Africa, the entire relationship between humans and nature, including activities such as land use, has deep religious and spiritual underpinnings. In general, religion is central to many of the decisions people make about their own communities’ development. Hence, this contribution examines religion as a factor that can be tapped into to mitigate negative effects of climate change, discussing climate change and religion in the context of development practice. It argues that some of the difficulties encountered in development, including efforts to reverse global warming in Africa, directly speak to the relegation of African cosmovision and conversely of the need to adopt new epistemologies, concepts, and models that take religion into consideration.

(Source: Article abstract).

Tarusarira, Joram. “African Religion, Climate Change, and Knowledge Systems”.

Tarusarira, Joram
This is some text inside of a div block.

This article argues that as humanity is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate that is very exceptional on the geological time scale, resulting in global warming, humans must deal with climate change holistically, including the often-overlooked religion factor.

Religious/Spritual
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