Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte/Journal of Business History

Special Issue: The business from within Africa

African agency in business through history

The business of entrepreneurial agency in Africa brings together a tapestry of activity, networking and economic mobility over several centuries. Historians are exploring this complex integrated web of economic activity relying on multiple disciplinary perspectives. Business people assumed agency in developing extensive exchange networks moving natural resources, agricultural products and locally manufactured goods beyond the borders of local markets. In these entrepreneurial activities women and men collaborated towards social sustainability, but also personal advancement. As the legacy of planning gradually allowed individual and collective agency in business (Natkhov & Pyle, 2022), this is the history of Africa’s entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial families, entrepreneurial corporations and business networks business historians stand to deliver.

The agency of people in enterprise all over Africa has not received systematic attention in Business History. The entrepreneurial role of all the peoples of Africa in different business structures, organisational form and even informal groups, displayed a growing engagement with international business. The collection on business in Africa edited by Falola and Jalloh (Falola T and Jalloh A, 2002) surveyed the landscape of African and African-American business, but now the innovative entrepreneurial businesses amongst all Africa’s peoples justifies a new history. The new lens is the narrative of the long dureé of business agency in Africa. Business men and women built on the deep-rooted legacy of entrepreneurial agency in developing market operations through enterprises of varying size and structure to negotiate the opportunities of Africa in the world. As state intervention in markets slowly contracts, dynamic and innovative business entered both African and global markets.

This development motivated the ZUG to dedicate a Special Issue to the history of business in Africa. This call for contributions seeks to solicit submissions exploring the history of business people and business enterprise in Africa, from earliest times through the discontinuities and complexities of the last half of the twentieth century, to global engagements in recent times. The following questions are driving the enthusiasm for this volume:

Who were the business leaders of the past and how did they infuse business capacity into the next generation of business leaders in different African contexts?
Who were the business leaders – men and women?
How have entrepreneurs adjusted to dynamically changing market trends?
How have markets in Africa interacted internally and externally with global markets?
How has the organisation of business changed in different contexts in Africa?
How have business organisations fostered/undermined business development?
Has business in Africa benefitted from privatisation?
How has state regulation impacted business development in Africa?
How does business in the MENA region align with business in SSA?

Submissions of draft manuscript outline (1000 words) with discussion of methodology and preliminary findings 30 June 2023.

The Editors of the ZUG will communicate acceptance of manuscript submissions by 15 July 2023. Final manuscripts for publication are due by 30 November 2023.

Guest editors:

Prof Grietjie Verhoef, University of Johannesburg, South Africa gverhoef@uj.ac.za.

Prof Ayodeji Olukoju, University of Lagos, Nigeria aolukoju2002@yahoo.com

References:

Akinyoade, A., Dietz T., and Uche, C. (2017). Entrepreneurship in Africa. Brill Publishers.

Falola, T. and Jalloh A. (2002). Black Business and Economic Power. Rochester University Press.

Natkhov, T., & Pyle, W. (2022). Revealed in Transition: The Political Effect of Planning’s Legacy. www.RePEc.org

Ochonu, M. (2018). Entrepreneurship in Africa: A Historical Approach. Indiana University Press.

This week my co-investigator and I are launching new blog for our research project on solar driven cold stores employing adsorption cooling technology in Rwanda. Historically, the low penetration of electricity has limited economic development because food chains and small-scale subsistence entrepreneurs did not have access to reliable cool chains. Having researched the provision of electricity in Ghana as part of the Volta River Project, it is clear that access to electricity, which is much lower in sub-Saharan African countries than elsewhere (under 30% of population have access), is a key constraint.

So I was really pleased to start talking to one of my colleagues at Aston from engineering, Dr Ahmed Rezk, who wanted to start a project with colleagues in Rwanda on providing off-grid reliable refrigeration for the agro-processing industry. Solar power is obviously plentiful in Africa, but photovoltaic panels actually become less efficient with greater heat. The technology Ahmed proposes is based largely on solar heat (for us less technically versed, think heat pumps running supermarket fridges) which is can be reliably and efficiently exploited in tropical countries.

And in another analogy to the history of development, technologies such as these are not as developed because the creators of technology and products are in countries where the climate makes this a less efficient solutions, while the potential consumers of such technology are in countries with limited technological and manufacturing capacity.

So the other side of our project, which I lead, will look at how we can design business models that will make this new technology user-friendly and affordable to consumers in Africa. Agro-processing is an important area for African countries with a large agricultural sector, for two reasons: it allows exporting and upgrading to other types of products (juices, wines etc.) and it creates more resilient food chains with less spoilage, hence more and better food available locally.

The unparalleled success of mobile phones, micro-finance and bottom of pyramid approaches to expand across sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that the right business models can lead to significant changes in terms of the products and infrastructure available to producers and consumers. We will blog about our aims and progress at Cooling for life. Any comments or suggestion are very welcome!