Africa: How African Thinkers of the 1980s Fed Into Today’s Inequality Debates

Inequality is an issue that arises everywhere in the world today.

Recent studies by economists such as Branko Milanovic and Thomas Piketty have looked at trends in economic inequality on a global scale. Social movements – such as Rhodes Must Fall, Black Lives Matter and Me Too – as well as the COVID pandemic, have emphasised inequalities along lines of institutionalised racism, gender, wealth and health. All these highlight the unequal global power relations that continuously shape the world.

But how have the world’s intellectuals historically thought about inequality? By examining the ideas of earlier thinkers, we can gain perspective which might help us understand why today’s world remains unequal.

This is why a research project, at Aarhus University in Denmark, is exploring the intellectual history of global inequality. As part of the research team, I have been studying how…