
Africa’s incorporation into global capitalism has never been neutral. From the Atlantic slave trade through colonial rule and into the post-independence era, the continent has been structurally positioned as a source of value for others rather than a site of autonomous accumulation. What is often misunderstood is not whether this extractive logic has ended, but how it has changed. In the twenty-first century, data, digital labor, and algorithmic infrastructures have emerged as new vectors of accumulation. In this piece, Prince Ifoh argues that re-reading Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, and Achille Mbembe allows us to see how digital capitalism reconfigures rather than break with Africa’s history of underdevelopment.
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