Africa (2022), 92, 540–560
doi:10.1017/S0001972022000444
INTRODUCTION
Capitalizing Africa: high finance from below James Christopher Mizes1 and Kevin P. Donovan2 1 Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales, Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France and 2Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Emails: james-christopher.mizes@dauphine.psl.eu, kevin.donovan@ed.ac.uk
In 2016, the city of Cape Town hosted the fourteenth annual meeting of the African Capital Markets Conference. Each year, the conference assembles ‘African sovereigns, corporates, regulators, local and international investors, and financial service providers with interest in fostering the diversity of investment and funding options via local capital markets’ (IMN 2016). The conference began in 2002 and, at the time, limited its geographic focus to capital markets in South Africa. But in 2012, the conference shifted its approach to ‘include all of Africa’ and to emphasize a ‘particular focus on emerging markets in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (ibid.). Indeed, its expanding geographic focus accompanied an important transformation in African capital at the time: a growing number of stock exchanges and private equity firms were springing up across the continent, and a growing number of African investors, governments and firms were starting to use them. The rise of African capital markets is an important feature of global finance in the new millennium. Although Euro-American development institutions continue to offer financial products across the continent, these institutions have transformed how they understand the problem of economic development and are now proposing a new generation of solutions to it. In the past twenty years, international aid organizations have increasingly turned towards African stock markets, ratings agencies and commercial banks to finance projects across sectors. But the continent’s private sector has been more forcefully leading this expansion by introducing new ways to measure risk, new debt instruments, and new roles for government in the regulation of an emerging financial industry. This shift has been similarly encouraged by African investors’ increasing openness to financial assets denominated in local currencies and issued by African governments and firms. From futures markets to Bitcoin, sovereign bonds to credit scores, the continent – and especially its leading cities such as Abidjan, Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg – is home to a proliferation of such financial devices. But the precise causes and consequences of this transformation are not yet clear. For critics, the growth of capital investment across the continent is another instance of a global form of financialization in which Euro-American capital is once again forcing African states into debt dependency (Kvangraven et al. 2021). From this perspective, the expansion of sovereign bond issuances on European and American © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972022000444 Published online by Cambridge University Press