Middle Classes in Africa

Changing Lives and Conceptual Challenges

Lena Kroeker, David O'Kane, Tabea Scharrer, Lena Kroeker, David O'Kane, Tabea Scharrer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319621487
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

?This volume challenges the concept of the 'new African middle class' with new theoretical and empirical insights into the changing lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. Diverse middle classes are on the rise, but models of class based on experiences from other regions of the world cannot be easily transferred to the African continent. Empirical contributions, drawn from a diverse range of contexts, address both African histories of class formation and the political roles of the continent's middle classes, and also examine the important interdependencies that cut across inter-generational, urban-rural and class divides. This thought-provoking book argues emphatically for a revision of common notions of the 'middle class', and for the inclusion of insights 'from the South' into the global debate on class. Middle Classes in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, as well as NGOs and policy makers with an interest in African societies.

© The Author(s) 2018

Lena Kroeker, David O'Kane and Tabea Scharrer (eds.)Middle Classes in AfricaFrontiers of Globalizationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62148-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Africa’s Middle Classes in Critical Perspective

Tabea Scharrer¹ , David O’Kane¹ and Lena Kroeker²

(1)

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany

(2)

Bayreuth University, Bayreuth, Germany

Tabea Scharrer (Corresponding author)

David O’Kane

Lena Kroeker

Abstract

In this introductory chapter, the editors dissect the growing interest in the rise of middle classes in Africa. The apparently healthier rates of economic growth that are associated with these (reputed) classes seem to be an omen of a brighter economic and political future in Africa. For the editors of this volume, the middle class in Africa is an ‘overloaded’ class, overloaded with inflated expectations and unexamined assumptions. The editors question these assumptions in three dimensions: the political, the economic, and the dimension of lifestyle, the latter focusing on urbanization, education, and demographic change. They argue that in the continent today there is not one single ‘African middle class’ but rather a plurality of ‘middle classes’. The four sections of this volume (‘Rethinking Concepts of Middle Classes in Africa’, ‘the Recurring Rise and Return of Middle Classes in Africa’, ‘The Political Consequences of the Middle Classes’, and ‘the Formation of Interconnections and Interdependencies’) are introduced, and their contributions to an improved understanding of Africa’s diverse middle classes are outlined.

Tabea Scharrer

is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle). Previously she held positions at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO, Berlin) and the Free University (Berlin). She has conducted research in Tanzania and Kenya on Islamic missionary movements as well as on migration-related issues in refugee camps as well as in urban areas. Her publications include the monograph Narrative islamischer Konversion: Biographische Erzählungen konvertierter Muslime in Ostafrika (Transcript, 2013).

David O’Kane

is a Teaching Fellow at Durham University and an Associate of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, and of the MPI research group ‘Integration and Conflict Along the Upper Guinea Coast’. He conducted research on private tertiary education in Sierra Leone between 2011 and 2012.

Lena Kroeker

is a research fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies at Bayreuth University and an MA from J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt/M. Kroeker has conducted research in western, southern, and eastern Africa on medical anthropology, anthropology of kinship, and on the African middle classes. Her current research focuses on social security of the Kenyan middle class.

End Abstract

Headlines such as ‘Africa’s growing middle class—Pleased to be bourgeois’ (The Economist 2011) were part of an international chorus that, just a few years ago, hailed the emergence of a ‘new African middle class’, one seen as the medium of positive changes in African economic growth , social structure , and political behaviour. In June 2015, however, the Nestlé Corporation announced that it planned to cut 15 per cent of its workforce in Africa, because the middle class, the market Nestlé had targeted, had not grown to the extent predicted. ‘We thought this would be the next Asia , but we have realized the middle class here in the region is extremely small and it is not really growing,’ stated a chief executive for Nestlé’s equatorial Africa region in an interview with the Financial Times (Manson 2015). Were the claims of a new African middle class, and all the hopes invested in them, just an enormous misunderstanding?

The rise of ‘middle classes’ has been hailed by those who see the most recent episode of economic growth in Africa as the opening of a new and positive phase in African history, in which the continent will finally overcome its endemic problems of poverty, dependency, and political conflict. We, the editors of this volume, are not convinced by this hyperbole, but we do agree that something new is happening in Africa. This can be seen not only in economic growth rates (figures which must be handled with care) but also in processes of urbanization, increasing school enrolment, migration, rapid social change, and the emergence of social groups that may qualify as middle classes.

We take these developments as a starting point to reflect on the state of the middle classes in Africa. We believe, first of all, that African middle classes do exist, and that these classes have emerged out of various sorts of economic change. We insist, however, that both the emergence of these classes and the wider processes that made it possible are far more complex than much of the recent discussion around the ‘New African Middle Class’ assumes. We believe, therefore, that it is necessary to clarify what the concept of the ‘middle class’ actually means in the African context. Models developed in one world region cannot easily or simply be transferred elsewhere. Such transposition can rather result in the production of unreliable assumptions and expectations. The discussion about ‘middle class’ in Africa already contains implicit, misleading assumptions which remain unexplored and uncritically accepted. Nestlé’s confidence stemmed from the unjustified expectation that middle classes develop everywhere in the same way. Nestlé’s disappointment demonstrates, in turn, the practical outcomes of relying on such assumptions.

In this book, therefore, we are concerned with the following:

1. 1.
   To outline the underlying assumptions that are implied in recent portrayals of middle classes in Africa, in popular and academic publications, and to demonstrate why these assumptions are misleading.
2. 2.
   To emphasize the necessity of a conceptual framing of ‘middle classes’ in Africa that deals with the complexity of this issue in the contemporary context. We cannot offer a comprehensive reconceptualization of middle classes in Africa, but we can, and do, point out the central questions in the debate, and offer new approaches to those questions. With these new approaches, it will be possible to grasp the specific features of middle classes in Africa.
3. 3.
   To present our thesis that there is no single ‘African middle class’ encompassing all African societies. Therefore, we believe, it is better to speak of a plurality of ‘middle classes’ in Africa.

In short, we see these as the vital, necessary, and indispensable questions: What is specifically ‘African’ about the continent’s middle classes? What specific forms of middle-classness are identifiable among these groups in Africa? And to what extent are these middle classes ‘new’?

The Debate about the ‘New Middle Class’ in Africa and Its Shortcomings

Since the beginning of the millennium, parallel debates have addressed the rise of ‘middle classes’ in emerging and developing countries—not only in Africa—from both global and regional perspectives. In general, income is taken as the key criterion for judging the appearance and character of a middle class, and it is income that is seen to demarcate boundaries between classes. And, it is rising national incomes that are taken as the decisive evidence of new class formation . Headlines and phrases like ‘the Rise and Rise of the African Middle Class’ (Deloitte 2012), ‘Afrika vor dem grossen Sprung’ (‘Africa on the Verge of a Great Leap’) (Johnson 2011), ‘the African Lions’ (in analogy to the ‘Asian Tigers’), or ‘the Middle of the Pyramid’ (African Development Bank (AfDB) 2011) have all evoked Africa’s rapid economic growth.

Since about 2010, double-digit economic growth rates have been observed across Africa. This growth is partly due to rising international commodity prices, and partly due to internal economic structural changes (Leke et al. 2010).¹ According to the AfDB report cited above, Gabon , Botswana , Ghana , Ivory Coast , South Africa , and Kenya have all developed significant middle-income classes, the size, social weight, and importance of which can no longer be ignored (2011, 23). The UHY business network, a UK-based global network of independent accounting and consulting companies, applauds the apparent fact that:

Over the last decade, six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the last 10 years, Africa’s lion states have grown faster than the Asian tigers. The fastest-growing economy in the world in 2011 (at 13%) was Ghana . As a result, Africa now has the fastest-growing middle class in the world. (UHY Business Network 2015)

But is it correct to connect economic growth and class formation ? It is true that there are some good reasons for doing so: in particular, rapid economic growth has been key to the emergence of middle classes elsewhere. In the 1960s and 1970s, South Korea achieved a doubling of national income per head in just over a decade (1966–77; see Green 1997, 45), enhancing the growth of the middle class (Arita 2003, 203–204). Such a doubling was achieved in eighteenth-century Britain, but only after nearly six decades (Green 1997, 45). Though no African state has yet doubled its per capita income , some observers are convinced that the high growth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Africa’s Middle Classes in Critical Perspective
• Part I. Part I
• Part II. Part II
• Part 3. Part III
• Part IV. Part IV
• Back Matter