Money and Monetary Institutions in Africa

In academia as well as in the global economy, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated old inequalities. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by March 2020 also magnified the plethora of challenges faced by scholarly research in the humanities. Despite the postmodernist call to deprovincialize regions considered “peripheries” of the western world, only few African scholars among those based in African universities manage to stand out with their contribution to the study of African history, a scenario worsened by the advent of the pandemic. Notwithstanding these unprecedented challenges, and some new opportunities created by the pandemic, old and new questions outside of the scope of the pandemic need to be answered, and it is especially young scholars that are called to engage with this task. There is thus a desperate need for mentorship and training to refine and increase the capacity of young scholars of African economic history based on the continent. The need to create more spaces for them to learn, present their research, and receive feedback from more experienced scholars is also urgent.

The Bootcamp for Early Career Academics will present a training and mentorship platform tailored to the changing theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of African economic history in the 21st century. The inaugural bootcamp titled Money and Monetary Institutions in Africa, places money at the centre of economic and social dynamics on the continent. Money itself has manifested in different forms and shapes in the history of the African continent and of humanity at large. The definitions of “what is money” in its different shapes changed over time, according to the hegemonic discourse that produced them, from “commodity money”, to “fiat money”, to “mobile money” and cryptocurrencies. Looking at the actors that produced these definitions as well as at those involved in the management of monetary circulation at national and international levels also represents a useful vantage point for the study of the impact of monetary policies, as well as of the local practices that challenged or took advantage of those policies over time. This call for papers is for those young academics interested in contributing to unpacking the changing uses of money and the evolving roles of monetary institutions and their impact in Africa.

The organizers are accepting complete and semi-complete draft papers in any of the following themes:
i. Theories of money, monetary practices, and the role of money in Africa.
ii. State and non-state monetary institutions in Africa.
iii. Transregional and trans-imperial monetary circulation.
iv. The construction and impact of monetary policies.
v. Indigenous credit institutions and the building of formal banking institutions in Africa. vi. Challenges of institutional money management and control: smuggling, hoarding and demonetisation of currencies.
vii. Money and the transformation of labour regimes. Eligibility Criteria and Process

The bootcamp is an opportunity for young academics to revisit the changing methodological landscape in the writing of African economic history for the purposes of publication. At the same time, it provides uninterrupted time for the completion of a paper, offering detailed feedback on papers under construction. In this regard, the bootcamp will be limited to a group of 12 early career scholars – MA holders, PhD candidates/students, and PhD holders within three years of obtaining their PhD. Eligible applicants should have less than three academic publications in accredited journals or edited collections, and they should not have published a monograph by the time of their application. The participation to the bootcamp is open to non-historians, provided that the proposed paper is coherent with the general theme of the Bootcamp and it complies with historical methods. Participants must be based in institutions on the African continent.

At the end of the bootcamp each early career scholar will have a paper ready for submission for a Special Issue of the Southern Journal for Contemporary History, with Drs Geraldine Sibanda and Alessandro De Cola as the Issue’s guest editors. Mentorship at this year’s Bootcamp will be provided by Professor Ayodeji Olukoju from the University of Lagos, Professor Tinashe Nyamunda from the University of Pretoria, and the Committee of Fiscal Studies of the University of Nairobi.

Papers should be submitted to the organisers at moneyandmonetaryinstitutions@gmail.com or africa@youngscholarsinitiative.org , no later than Friday 29 July, 2022, 12pm CAT.