Introduction
This debate aims to address two questions: how does the theory of racial capitalism by Cedric Robinson contribute to the analysis of capitalism in Africa and what are the limitations of Robinson’s theory? The debate begins with the debate about capitalism in Africa, and proceeds with a discussion on the theory of racial capitalism deployed by Cedric Robinson. This theory described modern capitalism as racial capitalism because of the prevalence of feudal racial habits in modern capitalism. This approach to understanding capitalism distinguishes Robinson’s perspective from alternatives.
Robinson’s assumptions and perspective have been analysed and critiqued by scholars like Agozino (2014) and Gimenez (2001). We criticise Robinson’s views regarding the effects of capitalism in Europe and the world outside it. We argue that the structure of the effects of capitalism in Africa or the world beyond Europe is an intersection of multiple structural layers of domination. Again, the neoliberal capitalist mode of accumulation has rendered the dichotomy of Europe and the rest less persuasive. The reordering of the global production structure benefits the neoliberal capitalist class irrespective of their geographical location.
Capitalism in Africa
Capitalism can be defined as an economic system that was on the rise since the sixteenth century following the decline of feudalism in the West. Capitalism had started in England. The main feature that distinguished capitalism from previous modes of production was that accumulated capital was used to enlarge productive capacity rather to invest in economically unproductive enterprises such as cathedrals (Boettke n.d.).
For Chitonge (2018), capitalism is a production system with three key socio-economic features: the exploitation of majority by the capitalist class, the concentration of power and control in the hands of corporate elites and the unequal distribution of the wealth created in society. What about capitalism in Africa? Chitonge (2018) maintains that Amin (1972) and Wallerstein (1980) look at Africa as a continent that has long been integrated into the global capitalist economy through the global division of labour. The relationship between global capitalism and capitalism in Africa is important to explore but there has been very poor attention paid to the study of these historical and contemporary relationships in mainstream literature. There has been a relative silence in the discussion of capitalism in Africa (Wiegratz 2018; Chitonge 2018; Ouma 2019).
This position contrasts the view expressed by Amaeshi (2015), who suggests that studies on rethinking capitalism in Africa were under way in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Breckenridge (2021), however, corroborates the earlier view that there is a paucity of research on capitalism in Africa. Most research on the topic, he argues, is poorly done and revolves around themes mostly associated with demography, Chinese investment, financialisation, industrial policy, dependency theory, neo-institutionalism and the ‘rising Africa’ debates (Breckenridge 2021, 10–13). Elumelu (2013) has argued that Africapitalism is a philosophy of investment to increase prosperity and social wealth in Africa. Amaeshi (2015) argues that even Africapitalism, like many new ideas, may be a liability. Hirsch (2013) and Ouma (2019) are sceptical on how Elumelu and the United Bank for Africa (UBA) group, an institution involved in supporting capitalist accumulation, will push for a philosophical pathway that negates the system it contributed to building.
Klaaren (2021) argues that capitalism manifested itself in different forms: competitive capitalism, corporate capitalism, welfare capitalism and regulated capitalism. He maintains that it is the latter that is most prevalent in Africa. It is characterised by the regulation of economic activities through independent regulatory agencies and other mechanisms of regulation that blur the differences between the private and public domains.
The theory of racial capitalism and its relevance to the study of African capitalism
The concept of racial capitalism originates in the works of South African Marxists Martin Legassick and David Henson, who framed the analysis from the theory of internal colonialism (Hudson 2018). This framework of analysis dominated the trends of debates for much of the 1970s and the 1980s on class and race in South Africa, mostly between Stuart Hall (Gramscian Marxist) and Harold Wolpe (Althusser’s brand of Marxism) (Al-Bulushi 2020, 3–4). These analyses of capitalism in South Africa focused on the racial policies and the contradictions generated by the proletarianisation of black peasants under the apartheid regime (Al-Bulushi 2020, 3). The term ‘racial capitalism’ is used in the context of South African apartheid to mean the destruction of black economic institutions, mainly land and the pre-existing relations of production, the creation and maintenance of an industrial economy and a welfare state for the white community (Leong 2012, 2152). Cedric Robinson rehistoricised and developed the concept of racial capitalism from a description of a specific system to a method for understanding the entire history of modern capitalism (Kelley 2017b).
The term racial capitalism means that ‘capitalism is racial capitalism’ (Melamed 2015, 77). It means that slave economies and a racially ordered division of labour and other forms of socio-economic differentiation breed social, ideological and intellectual resistance. One such resistance was the black radical tradition analysed by Robinson (Thomas 2013, 136). The term is mostly employed and related to white supremacist ideology including slavery, colonialism, genocide and exploitation of migrants. The concept of racial capitalism is used to define how capitalist accumulation operates by creating and reproducing inequality (Melamed 2015, 77–78). Racial capitalism in simple terms refers to the mutually constitutive entanglement of racialised and colonised exploitation within the process of capital accumulation. It was, and still is, being facilitated by slavery, colonialism, imperialism, exploitation and expropriation. The theory of racial capitalism clarifies the central place of race in profit maximisation and capital accumulation (Edwards 2021).
Kelley (2017a) argued that racial capitalism as a discourse is not primarily about skin-colour identity but is a structure of power inherent in the capitalist mode of production and accumulation. This is because the central story of race is the story of slavery, dispossession and imperialism. It is also about how capital captures the white working population and ties its identity to race and masculinity. Cedric Robinson sees race and racialism as a feudal social attitude extended to modern times. He disagreed with analyses that saw capitalism as being revolutionarily distinct from feudal mode of production. Robinson viewed capitalism as an evolution from feudalism. He maintained that feudalism was not revolutionarily different socially, ideologically and politically from capitalism. Robinson argued that:
The social, cultural, political and ideological complexes of European feudalism contributed more to capitalism than the social fetters that precipitated the bourgeoisie into the social and political revolution … indeed capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudal social order than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations. (Robinson 2000, 42–43)
Capitalism simply integrated these feudal habits into its mode of exploitation and accumulation. Second, capitalism is racial not because of any conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession but because racialism had been a familiar social process in European development history. In Robinson’s view, the myth of European aristocracy as having ‘blue blood’ and emerging from the ancestry of the Trojan heroes, ancient citizenship and the medieval slave heritage are basic racial formations.
Racialising workers has been a colonial process and not essentially a skin-colour-defined process. Robinson (2000) argued that the first European proletariat were racial subjects: they were Jews, Irish, Slavs and Gypsies. They were victims of enclosure, slavery and imperialism in Europe. These racial subjects were framed in the same way the Tartars were framed in the Italian cities in medieval times. Race and the idea of Herrenvolk (the rule by ethnic majority), English Anglo-Saxons and French Celticism were, therefore, abstracted from the delusion of medieval citizenship, even though they are related but different. Race in the seventeenth century became largely a rationalising tool for the domination and extermination of non-Europeans including the Slavs and Jews (Robinson 2000, 60–61). And Robinson (2000, 43–44) argued that from the outset European civilisation contained substantial racial, tribal, linguistic and regional particularities that were constructed on antagonistic differences. Prior to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the term ‘barbarian’ was a function of exclusion rather than consolidation. To this extent, capitalism did not intend to homogenise political, social and economic structures; rather, it intended to divide and exaggerate regional and subcultural differences and transform them into racial categories (Robinson 2000, 59; Kelley 2017a). Oriji (2020) corroborates that these dialectical, racial and subcultural divisions are inextricably linked to the integration of the Caribbean, the Americas and Africa into the entire capitalist network, beginning with slavery, to colonial and post-colonial eras.
Robinson identified four stages in the history of racial ordering. The first is the initial racial ordering through blood; second is the Islamic domination of the Mediterranean Europe; third, the incorporation of Africa, Asia and the new world into the world system; and, finally, the periods of colonialism, plantocratic slavery and the formation of modern industrial labour (Robinson 2000, 10; Thomas 2013, 137). The African economy was particularly integrated into the capitalist mode of production and accumulation systematically through the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism and its labour appropriated in the same way that Irish labour was integrated into the same capitalist system. This highlighted that racialism had less to do with skin-colour difference. Arguably, both imperial domination and racial processes are essential features of the capitalist economy. The development, organisation and expansion of the capitalist system and its ideological components assumed a racial dimension (Robinson 2000, 35). The colonial politics of exclusion in Africa, therefore, were built on the construction of legal and social categories that identified who was white, who was indigenous (native) and also who will become a citizen rather than a subject, who were indigenous and non-indigenous to a location (Stoler 1989, 635). These categories constituted the basis which subsequent production of identities are hinged upon and reproduced in the dynamics of capitalist logic of accumulation in Africa. This perspective of seeing racialism through Robinson’s understanding is a new way of looking at differences and their instrumentalisation in African political economy.
Racialism and racism had not primarily been about skin-colour identity. White and black skin-colour identity categories are constructed as forms of racial identification. The transatlantic slave trade formed the basis for the cultural framing of African blackness (Pierre 2013). Blackness is the reduction of a part of the human community to thinghood, or objective existence (Saldanha 2020, 23). The racialisation of blackness into the entire gamut of capitalist mode of accumulation began only in the 1660s, when the English restructured their laws around the economy of difference, and race (black and white) became the mark of difference, hence, white became the colour of accumulation, which is bolstered by popular culture (Thomas 2013, 146). This form of racialism found relevance and state support even in the twentieth century. In 1923, the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared that Bhagat Singh Thinh (an upper caste Indian Sikh) was not white (McCarthy 2016, 4): this was in spite of his ‘white skin’. This is precisely the making of race.
Racialisation in Robison’s analysis is not fundamentally a colour-defined process as exemplified by the blue-bloodedness of European aristocracies, the Tartars in the Italian city-states and, the Irish, Jews, Slavs and Gypsies in the late feudal time and early stage of capitalist development. Rather, it refers to colonial and neocolonial processes that commenced in the feudal era and continued during the capitalist development.
Robinson’s framework for understanding race and racialism enriches the analytical landscape of the discourse of racialism. This has made the analysis of race, racism and racialism possible in socio-economic formations, where capitalism operates through forms of differences other than white or black identity categories. Cháirez-Garza et al. (2022, 194) argue that racism and racialism in India operate at the intersection of caste supremacy, Brahminism, coloniality, Islamophobia and Hindu fundamentalism. Vora and Le Renard (2021), cited in Cháirez-Garza et al. (2022, 208), maintain that in the Arab gulf states the term ‘Indian’, even though a national identity, connotes racialisation of migrant workers, who in spite of their long relations of culture and economic engagement with the Middle East region are still being segregated, sexualised, criminalised and denied belonging. This practice ensures their easy exploitation by both the state and capital through the promotion of essentialised identity of ‘Arabness’.
The exploitation of Indonesian workers in the Dubai deserts and other Asian workers in the Middle East and the exploitation of Palestinian workers in Israel are a continuation of the racialisation of workers (Saldanha 2020, 22). In Africa, indigene/settler dichotomy, majority/minority codes and regional differences (north/south dichotomy in Nigeria) have implications for access to resources, employment opportunities and for social and political power. These differentiated and heterogenous relations provide the forms of difference required by capitalism to foment tension and obstruct social solidarity in order to enhance effective exploitation and accumulation.
The second dimension of Robinson’s engagement with Marx is on the role of culture and slave agency in a capitalist economy. To Robinson, Marx did not give enough attention to the role of culture and the lived experiences of people of colour. He argued that the shared past of Africans who came to the new world is important not only in itself but precisely because such history and culture are the bases of their consciousness, the means of knowing and the essence of their being. This shared past contains philosophy, theories of history and social prescription native to it. It is a construct processing its ways and imposing its own truths (Robinson 2000, 33). The culture the slaves from Africa brought with them helped them to survive. The culture was the essence of their being and the means through which slaves organised revolts (Robinson 2000, 157). According to Robinson, Marx saw the slave trade and slavery as abhorrent but did not identify the revolutionary potential of the slave in a capitalist economy. Marx explained that slaves have no role in the capitalist economy. Slaves, Marx argued, are the remains of the pre-capitalist mode of production. For Robinson, Marx disqualified slaves as having historical and political agency in the capitalist economy (Robinson 2000, 28). Contrary to this, Robinson argues that the transatlantic slave trade and the slavery of the new world were integral to the modern world economy. Marx identifies slave labour as the basis of primitive accumulation, but it was erroneous, argues Robinson, to confine the relationship to those moments alone or to define slave labour as a pre-capitalist stage of labour (Robinson 2000, 39).
Robinson asserted that slave revolt began in Africa in castles, onboard slave ships and later in colonial settlements. In the study of Haitian revolution, James (1989) identified slave agency. According to Robinson (2000), Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ doctrine related to Franco-Haitian slave owners who fled to Louisiana, Virginia and the Carolinas with many slaves. This transported the Haitian revolution to the new world. These impacts were visible in the Gabriel-led revolution in 1800 at Virginia, the Louisiana Pointe Coupée Conspiracy of 1795 and the Denmark Vesey rebellion of 1822 outside Charleston (Robinson 2000, 29, 31). The role of culture in the Haitian revolution, where slaves used the African cultural voodoo as a source of inspiration, instruction and direction during the liberation struggles, was evidence of the slave agency in a capitalist system (James 1989, 86).
The slave and colonial economies are co-constitutive of the modern capitalist economy. These are racialised exploitative economic regimes which invested in the modern industrial capitalism, establishing significant ideological reflection in it. Racialism here has less to do with skin-colour identification or differences, but rather has more to do with subcultural, ethnic and other forms of dialectical differences, which are instrumentalised to support the capitalist mode of exploitation, expropriation and accumulation. Racial capitalism is modern capitalism.
The study of capitalism in Africa could benefit from Robinson’s perspective because it strips racialism from its skin-colour characterisation and recharacterises it as a structure of power or a means of structuring power through difference. It situates culture as a tool for liberation from the structures of domination. This could be used effectively to resist capitalist oppression, expropriation and exploitation, as capitalism continues to instrumentalise or racialise several forms of difference, thus structuring exploitation and expropriation. In so doing, capitalism facilitates its modes of accumulation in Africa. The utilisation of these different forms – like minority, majority, ethnic, subcultural, linguistic and religious – could be identified in capitalist relations with the African political economy. What then constitute the limitations of this approach?
The limitations of Robinson’s critique of Marxist literature
Robinson made a significant contribution and has added a layer of clarification about the enduring character of race in the modern capitalist system. Myers (2012, 50) clarifies that ‘Black Marxism’ analysed how black people articulated and executed resistance. The evolution of capitalism from the womb of the old feudal order and Robinson’s presentation of racialism is a great insight.
The use of the concept of racial capitalism has political implications. South African scholars like Nupen (1972) and Walzer (2020) refuse to accept that racism and capitalism are intertwined. And if they are, it then implies that first, anti-racist struggles are equivalent to anti-capitalist struggles and vice versa. Second, the end of racism would then be synonymous with the end of capitalism, which is not necessarily so. These, they argue, must be thought out instead as separate struggles (Go 2021, 40).
Agozino (2014, 174) criticises Robinson for basing his critique by citing only a letter by Marx. A closer look into Marx’s works show clearly his recognition of the enslavement of Africans and how it was of crucial importance for the explanation of the initial capitalist development. Agozino suggests that Robinson did not make detailed studies of this particular history, especially Capital, Volume I and other major works of Marx.
Gimenez (2001) also laments how it is fashionable in contemporary studies of inequality to criticise the inadequacy of Marxist contributions. Today’s scholars tend to forget that the political and theoretical priorities of Marx and Engels differed considerably from contemporary concerns. Marx and Engels could not have written everything about inequality in a capitalist system. Neither Marx nor Engels committed their time to in-depth research on gender, race or other structures of oppression in a capitalist system that could have satisfied today’s critics of Marxism. Race and class as structures of domination intersect, with the possibility of the oppressed people experiencing both class and racial oppression (Ibid., 24). Gimenez (Ibid., 26), however, argues that race, like other structures of oppression, cannot be understood adequately if it is analysed outside class or in isolation from the realities of class exploitation. These structures intersect each other. Intersectionality is a description of the micro-level process, where systems of oppression determine how each individual and group occupies its own social place within the interlocking structures of oppression (Collins 1993). The intersection of class with race offers a nuanced understanding how oppressed people are subjected to exploitation and expropriation in a capitalist economy (Gimenez 2001, 28). Building on Gimenez’s notion of intersectionality, we argue that the effect of capitalism is not only diverse but that the structures of domination as a consequence of capitalist history are diverse and intersect.
Robinson and the effects of capitalism
The extension of slavery and racism to non-European people as an organising structure in the development of capitalism from the fourteenth century retained many racialised social conventions. The English bourgeoisie integrated African labour in exactly the same way and on the same terms that they integrated Irish labour (Robinson 2000, 101). Robinson noted that:
Eventually, however, the old instruments gave way to newer ones, not because they were old but because of the ending of feudalism and the expansion of capitalism and its world system – that is, the increasingly uneven character of development among European people themselves and between Europe and the world beyond. (Robinson 2000, 60)
These new changes and oppositions in Europe destroyed the last remains of the unified Christendom. In England, the changes caused conflicts between the agrarian capitalists and landowners.
Robinson assumed that capitalism created uneven development and the two worlds of Europe and the world beyond it. This is an interpretation that could be modelled as Europe versus the rest of the world, a binary perspective. This was criticised by Breckenridge (2021, 11) as binary, and blanket categorisations tend to lump countries in Latin America, India and Africa into a single fictitious space. This categorisation obscured the specific experiences and features that are particular to Africa or the respective African countries. The idea of Africa described as a single socio-economic formation is misleading, or what Hountondji (1983, 161) and Breckenridge (2021, 17) characterise as ‘the deceptive singular’. Rather, we argue that the impact of capitalism is not along this binary analysis but that it creates the intersections of numerous layers and structures of oppression in African political economy. This is because of the diverse ideologies that shaped the colonisation processes among the leading colonising powers of Europe (England, France and Germany). We focus here on the example of the British colonial enterprise.
Ideologies for exploitation and expropriation: the British colonial approach
The British colonial structure was built on the notion of the cultural superiority of the white man’s values and the inferiority of native cultural values. Racialism became deeply entrenched in Africa during colonial rule through this process of nativity. The indigenous people were identified by their ethnicities. Ethnic differences were used to categorise the indigenous population (Pierre 2013; Oriji 2020). Africa was also devalued as a non-historic continent. For example, Grosfoguel (cited in Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2014, 189) maintained that Africans were defined in the sixteenth century as people without letters, in the eighteenth century as people without history, in the twentieth century as under-developed or people without development, and in the twenty-first century as people without democracy. Colonisation according to Magubane (1971) cannot take place without eroding the structural features (social, political and economic) of the indigenous host societies. This is an aspect of valuation and devaluation of human groups.
Robinson (2000) argued that nationalism and colonialism were used in exporting capitalism to the world beyond Europe. Despite this, the European nation-states were not influenced by universal nationalist feelings. Robinson (2000, 60) identifies diverse philosophies that shaped the leading European colonising powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He argued that the creation of European secondary myths to deepen racialism and consolidate the pyramid of social power in Europe was evident – the German Teutonism, the French Celticism and the English Anglo-Saxonism – yet he presented the effects of capitalism on the world beyond Europe as a monolithic category. It was presented as though the activities of the English, French or Germans would be psychologically and materially felt in similar ways across Africa and other colonial enclaves around the world.
The colonisation of the largest British possession in Africa, Nigeria, was founded first on unequal delineation of the three regions (north, southwest and southeast) and, second, it was founded on majority/minority identity categories. These were constructed in each of the three regions for ease of administrative control and to aid the effective exploitation of resources. Many ethnic nationalities existed in the north. The Hausa ethnic group, however, were coalesced with the Fulani ethnic group to form the Hausa–Fulani ethno-religious identity. Despite the Hausa (a very diverse ethnic group spread across some parts of modern northern Nigeria) and Fulani (a nomadic ethnic group spread across West Africa) being two distinct ethnic nationalities with radically different languages, cultures, mythologies, histories and ancestries. The diversity of the Hausa people is seen clearly for instance, in the Kanawa (the ethnic group in Kano) and Katsinawa (the ethnic group in Katsina) (Okolie 2003, 78). What was common to these groups was their faith in Islam. Osaghae (1998) argues that the Hausa–Fulani (the new colonially created majority identity in the northern region) gained a new tool to consolidate their previous attempts to impose Islam on the non-Muslim areas that had resisted Jihadist incursion for several decades before colonialism.
In the southwest, the diverse nationalities were welded together into a monolithic Yoruba identity. This development was similar in southeast Nigeria, where the colonial administration aimed to construct majority identity from the hitherto diverse Igbo groups that developed political leadership only up to the village level. The different Igbo groups were welded together to create one Igbo majority group in the southeast region. Okolie (2003) argues that identities like Igbo, Efik and Yoruba were created under British rule (Nnoli 1995, cited in Okolie 2003, 70).
These majorities became the beneficiaries of the colonial structure in post-colonial times, whereas minority ethnic nationalities continued in victimhood. These majority and minority identity categories created significant social distance between people who hitherto saw themselves as socially related. Ukiwo (2005, 11) and Osaghae (1998) argue that prior to colonial administration, the diverse ethnicities in Nigeria cooperated on a wide range of social, political and economic issues. Wars and violent conflicts existed, but such conflicts were for economic and political gains and not because of differences in social identity.
In Nigeria, majority groups succeeded the coloniser and the minority ethnic nationalities remained and maintained the status of the indigenous (natives). In post-colonial apartheid South Africa, the British upon disengagement from colonial adventure in South Africa privileged the white minority over the black majority. In the United States of America, another former British colony, the colonial structures gave privilege to the constructed majority white groups (of different national, ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds) over minority people of colour. The plantocratic and industrial capitalism constructed and reconstructed Africans as a homogenous black group. It also facilitated the rise of the social structures of gender and sexuality in the USA (Issar 2021). These groups experienced and reacted to capitalism differently.
It is evident that within the same British colonial empire, different social and identity categories were created and different effects were felt; these were produced by the capitalist system and exported through colonialism (minority domination, majority domination, class domination, ethnic domination). The capitalist system exerts oppression, domination, exploitation and the expropriation of people and resources in Africa through the intersection of numerous structures (race, class, majority, minority, region) that facilitate accumulation.
The capitalist dynamics and its effects in the post-colonial and neoliberal era
The consequences of neoliberal capitalism defied the spatial categorisation of Europe versus the rest. Edwards (2020, 156) asserts that neoliberalism as a phenomenon bears a distinct racial pattern. The binary lenses employed by Robinson of the effects of capitalism as producing a world of ‘Europe and the rest’ left the events of the neoliberal era outside such analysis.
In the aftermath of the 1974–05 and 1980–82 global recessions, the capitalist ruling class engaged in the spatial restructuring of the manufacturing industries that had great impacts on the working-class and the global production structure. McNally (2009, 45) argues that this neoliberal approach, which aimed at profitability, led to global wage compression and the restructuring of global production. This produced new centres of accumulation mainly in China, Taiwan, South Korea and some countries in Southeast Asia – a form of activity hitherto the exclusive preserve of Europe and her partners, the USA, Canada, Australia and Japan. This threatens jobs and weakens labour’s collective bargaining power. Frey and Osborne (2017, 260, 269) argue that in the next 20 years technical advances threaten to wipe out 50% of the jobs available today in the USA and Europe. The cumulative consequences of these technical innovations and the restructuring of the global production structure harmonises capitalist elites around the world in a new value chain that benefits them all, irrespective of their geographical location. The effects of capitalism are better analysed at the intersection of numerous structures (class, race, majority identity, minority identity and gender difference) rather than through the geographical category of Europe and the rest.
Conclusion
This debate has reflected on the relative silence of the discussion of capitalism in Africa. It has asked whether the theory of racial capitalism by Cedric Robinson could contribute to the analysis of capitalism in Africa. Robinson’s theory describes modern capitalism as racial capitalism. Robinson challenged the Marxist notion that the capitalist mode of production is a revolutionary opposite of feudalism. According to Robinson, there is a continuity, not a rupture between feudalism and capitalism. This is because social relations that defined feudalism continued even after the transition to capitalism. The most significant aspect of these social relations is what he defined as racialism. Racialism does not have to imply a discrimination based on skin colour. Rather, it refers to the practice of initiating a division on the basis of regional, subcultural and dialectical differences, transforming them into racial categories. According to Robinson, racial capitalism emphasised the racialised and colonised exploitation within the process of capital accumulation and focused on how differences are instrumentalised to support the capitalist mode of exploitation, expropriation and accumulation.
We underlined that a discussion of capitalism in Africa could benefit from Robinson’s perspective because it strips racialism from its skin-colour characterisation and recharacterises it as a structure of power or a means of structuring power through difference. Nevertheless, even though Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism made a significant contribution to our understanding of capitalism, it is also marked by some shortcomings. The most significant problem inherent in Robinson’s framework is his assumption that capitalism led to uneven development and created a binary perspective that included Europe versus the rest of the world. By drawing on the arguments of authors such as Breckenridge, which criticised binary categories like north/south, Europe and the rest, or centre/periphery, which clustered together different countries in the African and Latin American continents, we emphasised that the structures of discipline and domination established during colonialism is diverse. To this end, Africa cannot be defined as a single socio-economic formation, but different countries in Africa experienced colonialism in different ways due to diverse ideologies that shaped the leading colonising powers of Europe. Hence, the effects of capitalism beyond Europe cannot be captured by a binary analysis: rather, one should take into consideration the numerous layers and structures of oppression created by colonialism as a vehicle in service of capitalism.