ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Creating 'African‘ economic subjects: Manpower development in Nigeria, 1960-1990

• In Event: Making Economies: Planning and Economic Knowledge, 1930 - 1980

English Abstract

When Nigeria gained independence in 1960 numerous actors in the Nigerian elite as well as in international development agencies invested in developing Nigeria’s business landscape. While scholarship in postcolonial development history has mainly focused on large-scale development schemes like modernization theory, state-led economic planning or infrastructure projects such activities on the microlevel of the economy remain understudied. The paper will therefore focus on practices of economic intervention in the field of manpower development in Nigerian business enterprises from the 1960s through the 1980s. A developmental regime that strove for industrialization and the ‘modernization’ of society needed industrial workers. It also needed foremen and managers to guide these workers, especially after indigenization laws put mounting pressure on international corporations to replace expatriate staff with Nigerian personnel in the 1970s. Starting from scholarly managerial literature produced in Nigeria, the paper will analyze how different economic subjects were produced and debated in this context: the African worker, the African manager and the African business enterprise. It will show that there was a continuous trope from colonial times that portrayed ‘African’ as something traditional and backward. But the paper will also unveil a discourse of empowerment and ownership that turned ‘African’ into an asset. A growing elite of Nigerian managers and businessmen formed networks around the Nigerian Institute of Management which developed an explicitly non-Western approach to organize economic life in the country. It was based on ‘traditional’ village and family values. The paper will discuss the material and discursive environment that made the emergence of the idea of specifically ‘African’ economic subjects possible (e.g. conferences, aptitude testing, anthropological surveys).

Author

• Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, University of Cologne