Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

The venture capital ecosystem in Africa is thriving. With multiple large investor rounds and exits in the 2020s, the continent transitioned from having not a single unicorn in 2016 to seven start-ups worth over US$1 billion in less than a decade, while five unicorns were born in 2021 alone. Even though many start-ups on the continent gain traction organically, the current paradigm is no substitute for finding a competitive regional strategy that offers a sustainable flow of successful scale ups that then obtain unicorn status. There is a vast difference in institutional structure, resources and capabilities between African countries and what is found elsewhere. Africa faces different sets of challenges that require a unique approach to venture creation. Reforms capable of strengthening existing policy frameworks, skills development initiatives and a financing architecture that supports entrepreneurship along the entire value chain will be critical in the African context. This chapter situates policy innovation in the context of Africa’s bubbling venture capital ecosystem as a key contributor to unicorn emergence.

Africa is disproportionately affected by economic sanctions imposed by countries in the Global North, particularly by the US. A little-studied dimension of these sanctions programs is their humanitarian impact, particularly given that these programs are often justified as being “smart” or “targeted” and thus negating such collateral effects. This chapter argues that the opposite is true in the area of financial inclusion. It is due to the difficulty of complying with US banking regulations, which is exacerbated by these sanctions programs, resulting in a “chilling effect” whereby retail banks choose to withdraw from the African market rather than risk violating US law and incurring the crushing penalties that follow from that, including the possible debarment from the Federal Reserve System and the inability to access the US financial system. The dollar’s unrivaled status as the global reserve currency makes the risk of incurring this financial “death penalty,” as it is sometimes termed, too great to bear. This withdrawal of retail banking services severely hampers financial inclusion in Africa and has a direct, negative effect on efforts at poverty reduction and sustainable development, one which is rarely a part of policy discussions about sanctions, yet raises significant social justice issues.

Africa faces a $1.3 trillion annual funding gap to achieve the SDGs and build climate resilience, yet private investors hesitate due to perceived high risks. Despite contributing less than 4% of global carbon emissions, Africa bears disproportionate climate impacts, with over 110 million people already affected by extreme weather events.

This chapter explores how philanthropy is emerging as the most powerful de-risking tool for both sustainable development and climate finance. By absorbing early-stage risks, providing patient capital, and unlocking private investment, philanthropy is catalysing solutions in renewable energy, climate adaptation, and nature-based carbon sequestration. Through real world case studies, it reveals how blended finance, impact investing, and catalytic capital can accelerate Africa’s green transition and economic transformation.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

Traditionally, scholars have focused on how narratives of the lives of the enslaved, commonly understood as “slave narratives,” engaged with explicit claims to authenticity and authority as distinct from those of the novel genre that developed coterminously. Indeed, scholars of the slave narrative have frequently focused almost exclusively on the discursive foundations and frameworks of abolitionism. To solely focus on whether or not a narrative is “true or authentic” is to accept that narratives of the lives of the enslaved can only ever be political ethnography, as opposed to aesthetics. However, like others, enslaved and free Black narrators drew heavily upon engagements with notions of subjectivity and social action that appeared in other genres such as poetry and the novel. And so, consequently, rather than understanding the slave narrative as a genre that is focused solely on the institution of enslavement, we have instead a complex genre that is in dynamic conversation with other institutions, concepts, discourses, and genres. In addition to acknowledging how subaltern groups appropriated other forms of discourse, this chapter will examine how these inherently hybrid and complex texts participated directly and dynamically within discussions of identity, nation, and empire, as well as slavery.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.