Socio-Economic Dominance of Ethnic and Racial Groups

This paper is one of many contributions commissioned by the UNDP’s HDR report office. The objective of the paper is to examine the nature and extent of socio-economic dominance and exclusion in Africa, including efforts to redress inequities. The specific objectives are to develop a conceptual framework examining ethnic and racial socio-economic dominance in Africa; identify the historical and specifically colonial roots of ethnicity and socio-economic disparities; assess contemporary empirical patterns of socio-economic disparities along ethnic and racial lines, based upon key selected variables; analyze the strategies used to mobilize ethnicity and race towards the accumulation of power and economic resources; and to examine public policies and civic strategies aimed at redressing ethnic and racial resource imbalances. The study is based upon an assessment of existing secondary sources of empirical data and the literature on ethnic and racial economic dominance in Africa. It does not attempt to do primary empirical research. To examine the relationship between ethnic and racial identity, and socio-economic dominance, the second and third section of the paper identify existing ethnic and racial population groupings in Africa, both in terms of their historical (and colonial) construction and of their contemporary articulation. Although currently documented ethnographic categorizations are contested and changing in form, the study uses them with caution, bearing in mind that many ethnic categories were contrived in colonial and recent times, and that the ethnicisation of identity is a maturing phenomenon.