Assessing the Implications of Racial Capitalism for Africa

The debate on race, racism and ethnic divisions has been a topical issue that has polarized populations since the slavery days. However, from a biological perspective, humans cannot be put into racial categories because scientific evidence shows that humans across the globe share 99% DNA (Saini, 2019). For this reason, it is argued that race is merely a political construction that is mischievously exploited to divide people into factions of ‘them and us’, and ‘superior and inferior’. This study aims to assess the ontology of race through a critical examination of the theories of race and ethnicity with a view to establish the epistemological cogency of claims that maintain that racial categories are real, despite biology suggesting to the contrary. In political and economic aspects, race functions as a convenient avenue to justify discrimination of any person seen to be different from a what is described as a white category. A prime example is the global markets today that have largely been turned into raced markets where the supposed superior race, the white race, takes advantage of the superiority label to dominate, and direct global capital, labor, commerce, trade, and investments. This situation means that Africa’s economic role in global markets has not only been hijacked by raced markets but more crucially, has also being stigmatized and stagnated. For example, Africa’s current contribution to the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated to be less than 4% (Songwe, 2025). Thus, the connection between race and economic development, i.e., the influence of race on growth is a reality that cannot simply be cast aside as idle speculation. However, this study also identifies bad governance practices that are common place in Africa as contributory impediments to the continents’ growth agenda. Africa needs to be more proactive in the implementation of its reform programs because merely blaming colonialists, imperialists and racists will not help improve Africa’s growth prospects. The study concludes by pointing out that the ignorance that surrounds the aspect of racial and superiority categories can only be debunked through a thorough study of biology, sociology, history and anthropology. It is only through this route that Black people would be liberated from a long-standing inferiority complex, and for white people to be liberated from their centuries-long superiority complex. Fundamentally, Africa needs to reinvent itself through innovation and reliance on home-grown solutions that align with local emancipatory needs if it is to achieve sustainable growth; for there can be no polity that can grow sustainably using foreign solutions to fix local problems. Data supporting the themes and findings of this study were collected and synthesized through document analysis of literature on the theories of racial categories, and raced markets from academic journals, books, and online sources.