Investing in independence: popular shareholding on the West African stock exchange
| Autor: | James Christopher Mizes |
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| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Africa. 92:644-662 |
| ISSN: | 1750-0184 0001-9720 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/s0001972022000365 |
| Popis: | According to contemporary investors on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa (Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières de l’Afrique de l’Ouest or BRVM), President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s post-independence plan to privatize state-owned enterprises in Côte d’Ivoire gave birth to the region’s financial market. Yet the bourse’s original promise of ‘indigenous’ control of financial investment has long gone unrealized. In response, a West African investor advocacy organization is coordinating a regional awareness programme that introduces ‘the culture of the stock exchange’ to an audience of West Africans largely unfamiliar with financial securities. Members of this shareholders’ association share a critique of elite monetary institutions and advance in their place a more popular vision of savings, investment and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic research in Abidjan and Dakar, I analyse how thesepetits porteurs(small shareholders) frame the morality and politics of their investments. Thepetits porteursoften make good money on the market, but even when they take on ‘crisis-level’ losses they nevertheless extoll the virtues of transparency, formality and control that the stock exchange is thought to provide. In contrast to similar cases elsewhere in the world, I argue that this form of popular politics on the BRVM is far more than an instrument for the accumulation strategies of financial elites: it is a new and distinct style of political engagement in whichpetits porteursare, in the name of the West African ‘people’, coupling together anti-elite and anti-colonial critiques with a set of familiar market devices. I characterize this political engagement as popular shareholding. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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