Abstract

The earliest literature on economic thought on Africa was not by Africans. The economic experience of West Africa was surveyed and analyzed first by writers from colonizing countries (e.g. Lady Flora Lugard 1905; Allan McPhee 1926; Margery Perham, ed. 1946–48a, b), often associated with colonial administration (see Barbara Ingham 1992). Africans had no chance to tell their own story until centuries after the onset of European economic contact with sub-Saharan Africa, toward the demise of colonialism. Two such scholars in the African diaspora are Howard University’s George W. Brown, a pioneer with Economic History of Liberia penned as his 1938 LSE PhD dissertation and published in 1941, and Politics in West Africa as the most eminent example by Nobel laureate W. Arthur Lewis in 1965. Even later are contributions by African men working at African universities (e.g. R. Olufemi Ekundare 1973, at the University of Ife). ¹