ABSTRACT
This chapter explains as meticulously as possible both why what Giovanni Arrighi calls the "US-led capitalist counter-offensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s" is chiefly responsible for the prevalence and durability of dictatorship in postcolonial Africa, and how African novels about dictatorship draw our attention to this fact. In the late 1970s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) changed its role from a provider of credit to countries with a short-term current account deficit to what Vijay Prashad has called "a weapon to demand structural economic changes" in the postcolonial world. The endemic debt crises of African and Latin American economies in the 1980s and 1990s were also a means of redistributing assets on a massive global scale and of feeding the reckless financialisation of first-world economies. The international financial institutions are "demoralizing," to use the anthropologist James Ferguson's word; they replace a moral and political with a technocratic rhetoric for thinking about the actions of African governments.
