After all, Africa’s resistance to Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade paid off only when various
machines took over manual labour on the plantations. But with this development also
came colonialism of occupation, and in some cases, settler colonialism, which rather than
diminish the depredation of the continent advanced it. The post-independence
manipulation of African leadership and economy has shown the capitalist efficacy of neo-
colonialism. Needless to say, globalization in its latest form merely advances the
strategies of capital flight. So, whether in terms of the transformations from the agrarian
economy to an industrial and manufacturing-driven economy, or the currently idea-
knowledge-driven economy in which there is a fetishization of service delivery
legitimized through the sophistication of information technology in the post-Fordist era,
African capital in all forms has always been driven into flight to the West. This may do
well to reinforce Brennan’s argument that “mobile capital is a very problematic idea...
[precisely because] there are continuities concealed within proclamations of a radical
break” (1997:6) with the past of capital mobility, which for Africa is nothing but capital
flight. The unidirectional route of capital from Africa to the West and the imbalance
between flow and what trickles back to Africa should therefore be a source of worry. The
basis for worry becomes all the more founded when one realizes that the current
obsession of a number of Africans with the practice of cosmopolitanism emanates in
reality from the need to become beneficiaries of the accumulation and constellation of
Africa’s capital in the West.
Besides the question of capital flight and the exilic and cosmopolitan response it
engenders, the question of the city also arises. Therefore, where African cities have been
mismanaged and milked of the capital they should retain, the dystopian condition created
in these cities ingest a search for the “mobile capital” in the global cities of the North.
The utopia created by the thought of fulfilling dreams of good living, and further fortified
by the desirability of such cities as projected by media practice, propels desires of
intimate experience for which there is an initial implication of denigration of the sense of
community that comes with cities of homeland. But to what extent are such dreams
fulfilled in the global cities of the North, especially when “what is most revealing [about