Corporate influence and indigenous resistance : a postcolonial analysis of development projects in Africa

Abstract

This article examines the relationships between socio-economic inequalities of power, race, and wealth engendered by corporate structure and domination in postcolonial Africa. In Africa, the drive toward infrastructural development and economic growth has increasingly led to the displacement of local populations by TNCs. This intractable challenge confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism. However, corporate power and structure—the weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, and the financial institutions that operationalize it—continues to sever indigenous peoples from their properties, including land, water, rivers, and natural resources. The colonial practice of displacing locals from their ancestral land, which recasts Black indigenous people as Black bodies for biopolitical disposal, continues post-colonially in a nuanced being recreated in form of development induced displacement. This article proceeds on the basis that conversion of land into property for corporate domination in the pretext of development-induced displacement, and of people into targets of subjection, continues to mutate. Projects such as dams, urban highways, extraction of resources, and urban renewal were initiated in several countries as monuments of economic hope. In some cases, these projects were greatly eulogized. Over the years, issues of inadequate compensation, improper resettlement, cosmetic consultations, and coercion have significantly precipitated counterhegemonic resistance to development projects. At the core of this resistance is the fact that displaced minorities are necessary sacrifices for development—a feature of colonial heritage.