About this Site

The Capital Composition Papers are essays on one question. What does capital do once it gets to Africa?

Almost everything written about Africa and capital is about quantity. How much came. How much did not. How to attract more. These papers are about composition. Africa does not receive too little money. It receives, overwhelmingly, one kind of money, and that kind earns its return whether or not Africa becomes more productive. I call it disinterested capital: a capital relationship whose provider can secure its return without the receiving economy becoming more productive. Foreign aid is disinterested capital. Remittances are disinterested capital. Much of what the statistics file under investment is disinterested capital with an attached financial return. My grandmother, Kuhu Cecilia Mukimba, kept two kinds of money: money for eating and money for business. She never confused them. The world’s capital accounts confuse them every year.

That is the claim. Every Essay or Paper on this site puts it to a particular case.

How to read the papers

Essays are shorter than Papers. Both rely on words you already think you know. Capital. Aid. Investment. Remittance. Development. These words were settled so long ago that nobody reads the definitions any more. We count the thing and move on. Marx defined capital as a relation between people, not a sum of money. Most of us nod at that and return to counting the sum. The papers take the definition seriously. They ask what relation the money arriving in Africa sets up, who is bound to whom, and what each side must do for the money to keep coming.

So read them slowly, and read them against what you already believe. When a paper contradicts something you have accepted for twenty years, do not assume the paper is wrong. Do not assume it is right either. Go to the definition and check it. The definitions are stated in the first essay, and I hold to them in every paper after it. If I have broken one, write and tell me.

Where to start

Start with the first essay. It carries my book's title, Why Global Capitalists Remain Disinterested in Africa, and states the whole claim in under a thousand words. After that, the papers stand alone and can be read in any order. Each takes one case- foreign aid, a country’s wealth, its judges, its borrowing- and asks the same question of it. The book page describes the longer work from which all of this is drawn.

Who is writing

I am Dennis Matanda. I advise a regional development bank, a regional trade bloc and various governments on capital and trade. I have sat on both sides of the ledger: the desk that lends the money and the desk that asks what it became. The papers are written from the second desk. The views are mine and not those of any institution I serve.

Argue with the papers. That is what they are for.