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ABSTRACT
More powerful and influential than some smaller nations, multinational corporations exert a tremendous influence on the functioning of contemporary global society. From as far back as the dawn of capitalist modernity, proto-corporations furthered the ends of empire, bringing massive foreign populations and swathes of territory under economic and political control. This essay analyzes how recent works of sub-Saharan African fiction have conceptualized the corporation as functioning in a fundamentally imperialistic manner within the global system of neoliberal capitalism. In analyzing the novels How Beautiful We Were and Congo Inc., it considers to what extent these works see the operations of corporations within Africa as part of a long line of imperialistic exploitation of labor and resources stretching back to the days of the large European colonial empires, and to what extent these works see the machinations of the corporation as a novel socioeconomic phenomenon of our age of frenetic transnational flows of capital and information. In doing so it also asks how these novels envision possibilities of local-level resistance to these forms of corporate economic predation that threaten to stir up military conflict and despoil local ecosystems.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman, following historian Philip Stern, refer to these early corporations that were “both engines of imperialism and engines of capitalism” as “company-states,” thus emphasizing how they were chartered private companies that took on some of the roles assigned exclusively to the state, including warfare and diplomacy, in the later modern world (Citation2020, 1). I refer to them as “proto-corporations” to emphasize the lines of continuity, in terms of legal/organizational structure and imperialist geopolitical functioning, between them and contemporary corporations, as well as their lack of certain features of contemporary corporations, such as potential perpetual existence.
2 “[T]he United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations spent its energy for three decades defining a code of conduct for transnational firms. It was substantially dissolved in 1992, and became a fixer for corporations rather than a regulator of their business practices” (Prashad Citation2014, 5).
3 “US Companies, US Foreign Subsidiaries or US Distributors Located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” US Embassies, 2016, https://cd.usembassy.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/160/2016/11/List-of-American-Companies-in-DRC.pdf.
4 One might also consider, as textual forebear or intertext of Congo Inc., the Mwindo Epic of the Nyanga people, with its irrepressible pygmy hero and episodic structure of a journey out into the world followed by a return to one’s home village.
5 “Under Leopold II’s sharecropping, they had hastily developed it so they could supply the whole world with rubber from the equator, without which the industrial era wouldn’t have expanded as rapidly … The involvement of Congo Inc. in the Second World War proved decisive. The final point had come with the concept of putting the uranium of Shinkolobwe at the disposal of the United States of America … [Later i]t contributed vastly to the devastation of Vietnam by allowing the Bell UH1-Huey helicopters, sides gaping wide, to spit millions of sprays of copper from Likasi and Kolwezi from high in the sky over towns and countryside from Danang to Hanoi … Loyal to Bismarck’s testament, Congo Inc. more recently had been appointed as the accredited supplier of internationalism, responsible for the delivery of strategic minerals for the conquest of space, the manufacturing of sophisticated armaments, the oil industry, and the production of high-tech telecommunications material” (Bofane Citation2018, 174–175).
6 One in five people worldwide now makes their home in the slums of the large cities of the global South (Prashad Citation2014, 61).
7 Another point of context worth considering, one not discussed in Mbue’s epitextual public interviews about the novel, is her status as a member of Cameroon’s historically marginalized and oppressed Anglophone minority. In the half-decade leading up to the publication of How Beautiful We Were, this conflict, calls for secession and the formation of an independent state out of the Anglophone northwestern and southwestern regions of the country escalated, and this mounting conflict has extended to the question of control of fossil fuel resources. In 2018, the British-based New Age African Global Energy Company, financially backed by the US hedge fund Och-Ziff, signed a deal, seen as financially shoring up Paul Biya’s dictatorial regime, to begin extracting natural gas from the Etinde fields off the coast of disputed southwest Cameroon (Burton Citation2018). In 2022, the Anglo-French oil and gas company Perenco took over New Age’s 37.5 percent stake of the natural gas deal and looks with its partners, the Russian-based Lukoil (37.5 percent) and UK-based Bowleven (25 percent), to begin exporting natural gas to a Europe starved of access to it in the wake of its embargo against fossil fuel imports from Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine (African Energy Chamber Citation2022).