African societies did not begin with colonialism, and colonialism did not arrive on a continent without hierarchy, dynasties, inherited authority or accumulated wealth. We had royal families, merchant lineages, titled households, religious scholars, landholding groups and political institutions through which status passed from one generation to another. That much is not in dispute. But many people became so concerned with proving the literal existence of wealthy African families that they never reached the question I was trying to ask.

I was not really asking whether an African family had ever possessed wealth for more than one generation. I was asking how wealth becomes legitimacy. How does material advantage become social authority? Through which institutions does a family’s position begin to look established, respectable and natural? At what point does wealth stop appearing as something historically accumulated and begin to look like evidence that its possessors simply belong above everyone else?

That is what I understand “old money” to describe in the sense in which I am using it here. Old money is not merely money that has existed for a long time. It is wealth that has been converted into culture, institutions, social codes and authority. It is wealth that no longer needs to announce itself as wealth because it speaks through schools, accents, professions, foundations, museums, boards, neighbourhoods, marriage networks and inherited confidence. It is money whose origins have been partially forgotten because the social world around it has been organised to present its beneficiaries as naturally suited to power.

The Rockefeller family offers a useful example. Their wealth was not ancient. John D. Rockefeller did not descend from a medieval aristocratic house. His fortune emerged from nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and the expansion of Standard Oil. It was once unmistakably new money: aggressive, commercial and controversial.

But the Rockefellers did not merely preserve that money and divide it among their descendants. Their wealth entered universities, foundations, museums, medical research, philanthropy, public policy and corporate networks. It helped construct institutions that did more than confer prestige upon the family. Those institutions participated in defining what intelligence, refinement, leadership, expertise and public virtue were supposed to look like.

The fortune acquired an institutional life beyond the original business. That is the important conversion. Economic capital became cultural capital and symbolic authority. A family associated with monopoly capitalism became associated with education, medicine, art, science and public service. The money had not simply survived. It had helped shape the social world that determined what legitimate elite status meant.

This is why old money cannot be reduced to land, even though land was historically central to the European aristocracy. Land was one mechanism through which wealth, authority and ancestry became fused. But it was not the only possible mechanism. Industrial families, banking dynasties and commercial fortunes could also become old money once they embedded themselves within institutions capable of reproducing their status.

And this is where the discussion of old money in Africa becomes more complicated. Some people responded to my argument by insisting that old money had always existed in Africa because titled families owned land. But this claim, presented as a decolonised correction, often reproduces a remarkably European understanding of wealth. It assumes that hereditary elite status must ultimately rest upon landed property, as though every African chief were a feudal landlord and every ancestral territory were a privately owned European estate.

Land was central to many African societies, but it did not mean the same thing everywhere. It could be ancestry, belonging, sovereignty, livelihood, political jurisdiction or spiritual responsibility. Rights over the same territory could be shared among a community, lineage, household, political office and individual cultivators. In parts of precolonial Cameroon, for example, chiefs and family heads could act as custodians of village land, allocating it for settlement and cultivation without possessing the unrestricted individual right to dispose of it as private property. A chief’s authority over land did not therefore necessarily make him a landlord in the European sense. A lineage’s ancestral connection to a territory was not automatically equivalent to a family estate.

In some societies, land was abundant relative to labour. Possessing more territory meant little if one could not mobilise people to cultivate, defend and inhabit it. Wealth therefore existed partly in people: relatives, clients, dependants, spouses, craftspeople, soldiers, traders and, in many systems, enslaved people. Scholarship on precolonial Equatorial Africa, including southern Cameroon, complicates this even further [1]. People were valuable not simply as generic labour or followers but as repositories of different kinds of knowledge. Leadership could depend upon the ability to bring different people and forms of expertise together. Elsewhere, cattle, commerce, scholarship, ritual authority or proximity to the royal court could matter as much as — or more than — private landholding.

None of this means that Africans lacked private wealth. Individuals and households accumulated livestock, gold, houses, trading stock, tools, crops and other possessions. African societies could contain severe hierarchy and exploitation. But the forms through which power was organised were historically specific. They should not be flattened into a single continental model simply because the phrase “old money” encourages us to search for an African imitation of European aristocracy.

The irony is that some people use the language of decoloniality to defend this flattening. An argument is described as Western or colonial, and the label is treated as though it has already disproved the argument. But calling something Western is not analysis. It tells us nothing about whether the claim is true, false, useful or inadequate. Decoloniality should sharpen our ability to understand power. It should not become a form of moral policing that allows people to avoid uncomfortable questions by declaring them culturally impure.

We absolutely need intellectual frameworks that do not treat Europe as the universal measure of human history. But we also live in postcolonial societies. Colonialism did not merely change the language through which Africans described themselves. It transformed landholding, education, administration, borders, law, labour, commerce, state power and class formation. It altered physical and social reality.

To analyse contemporary Africa through postcolonial institutions is therefore not a betrayal of African autonomy. It is to take colonialism’s material consequences seriously.

As many noted in the comment section, colonial systems did not always destroy pre-existing elites. They frequently selected, reorganised and empowered them. Some royal and chiefly families retained influence by entering colonial administrative structures. Other families gained authority through missionary education, clerical positions, military service, trade, land grants or proximity to colonial government. New elites emerged, while older elites learned to translate their status into the language of the new order.

A family could remain powerful while the basis of its legitimacy changed. This is crucial because continuity of family prominence does not necessarily mean continuity of social structure. A lineage may have possessed authority before colonialism, but its descendants might later reproduce their position through private property law, foreign education, administrative office, multinational business and access to the postcolonial state. The family remains African. Its history remains real. But the institutions through which its position is now recognised are hybrid products of indigenous history, colonial restructuring and global capitalism.

A genuinely decolonised analysis should not begin by asking which African families can be made to resemble European nobility. It should ask how particular African societies understood belonging, ownership, obligation, inheritance, authority and wealth. But recognising these differences does not mean that Africans lacked powerful systems of elite reproduction. Nor does it mean that African networks became irrelevant once colonialism began.

As several people noted, the Dantata family is a useful example here.

Alhassan Dantata built one of the most important commercial organisations in colonial northern Nigeria. His position did not rest simply on owning land. It depended upon his ability to organise trade across distance: maintaining networks of agents, moving goods, extending and receiving credit, working through family relationships and Kano’s political order, and dealing with the European companies increasingly involved in the colonial groundnut economy. He became one of the major African suppliers and commercial intermediaries in that economy.

This was an African commercial network operating within a colonial system. It drew upon older Hausa traditions of long-distance trade, kinship, trust, Islamic commercial relationships and local political authority while simultaneously adapting to railways, British trading companies and colonial export markets [2]. The Dantatas therefore complicate any neat division between an authentic African economy and an imposed European one. African agency and colonial restructuring became entangled.

More importantly for my argument, the fortune did not survive simply as a pile of money divided between descendants. Later generations inherited a commercial name, knowledge, capital, relationships, credibility and a position within an existing business world. Aliko Dangote, Alhassan Dantata’s great-grandson, was raised in the commercial environment of his maternal grandfather Sanusi Dantata and later began his own trading business with family financial support before building an industrial empire far larger than what he began with.

Acknowledging that platform does not mean that Dangote simply inherited his present empire. Dynastic advantage does not eliminate individual ability. But it changes the conditions under which ability is exercised. Someone who begins with capital, commercial credibility, experienced relatives and access to established networks is not beginning from the same position as someone whose intelligence and ambition have never been recognised by a bank, government official or potential trading partner.

This is how elite networks reproduce themselves. What passes between generations is not only an asset but a position within a field of relationships.

The Dantatas are therefore an important example of African elite formation rooted in Africa. Their influence cannot be explained entirely through Oxford, Harvard, London society or European cultural institutions. It was produced through commerce in Kano, northern Nigerian political relationships, family organisation, regional trade and indigenous forms of social trust.

African elites do not require Western permission to possess material power. But material power and legitimate prestige are not precisely the same thing.

A family may control companies, land, political offices or commercial networks within Africa while still looking towards institutions outside the continent to certify its children as educated, cosmopolitan and appropriately prepared to inherit power. A substantial part of elite legitimacy in the postcolony is still produced — or at least ratified — in former imperial centres. The distinction is important.

African elites are not merely puppets manufactured in Europe. They have their own histories, constituencies, cultural identities and networks. But many of the institutions with the greatest power to make someone internationally legible as elite remain disproportionately concentrated in the West.

The degree comes from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford or Sciences Po. The boarding-school education comes from Britain, Switzerland or France. Financial credibility is strengthened through London, New York or Paris. Cultural refinement is often demonstrated through fluency in colonial languages, ease in Western social environments and familiarity with institutions that remain globally dominant.

Research on contemporary Nigerian class reproduction shows that foreign degrees, English proficiency, and foreign citizenship function as forms of "Western capital" accumulated for domestic and international advantage [3]. Similarly, in an article aptly titled "'We are not concerned about good grades,'" Pere Ayling and Derron Wallace demonstrate that elite Nigerian families use British private schooling not merely for academic instruction, but to reproduce distinct notions of elite social status [4].

The extraordinary proliferation of international schools across African cities makes this asymmetry almost absurdly visible. A Kenyan education in Nairobi can apparently become more prestigious when delivered through an elite institution like the Braeburn School [5], even though Kenya’s own educational infrastructure was already profoundly shaped by British colonial history. Similar American, British, and French institutions exist across major African cities. Crucially, these schools operate as highly lucrative corporate enterprises, commodifying Western prestige for an elite market.

Some of these schools have even formed international sporting leagues across the continent. Children fly between African capitals to play basketball, football, or volleyball against pupils from other international schools [6]. There is something almost too perfect about the image: an African tournament, taking place across African countries, populated largely by children with access to extraordinarily expensive forms of education, whose institutional identities remain American, British, or otherwise international. The geography is African. The prestige structure is something more complicated.

Universities remain particularly important because they do more than transfer knowledge. They create networks and confer institutional recognition. Overseas education and transnational university relationships have long played a role in producing political and professional elites in postcolonial African societies.

This does not mean that African universities produce no cultural capital, or that every African elite child is educated in the West. Institutions such as Makerere, Ibadan, Legon, Fourah Bay, Fort Hare and many others have their own histories of producing political, professional and intellectual elites. The point is the asymmetry. A degree from an elite Western institution can travel into an African society carrying much of its prestige intact. An African degree often does not travel into the West with equivalent symbolic force. Prestige moves across the postcolonial world, but it does not move equally in every direction.

An African elite can therefore be materially powerful through networks embedded on the continent while remaining partly symbolically dependent on institutions elsewhere to certify sophistication, expertise and global belonging.

The Dantatas show that African elite power can be generated through African networks. My own life showed me how much cultural legitimacy can still be conferred from outside. But elite formation in the abstract is not what led me to this question.

Growing up in a middle-class Cameroonian family, elites appeared to me as a fundamentally different category of person. I do not mean that I simply admired them, or that I mistook wealth for celebrity. Their material possibilities were genuinely different from mine.

My parents had done what respectable people are told to do. They worked, raised their children carefully and placed enormous faith in education. Yet they could not know whether their academically gifted child would eventually find work that paid enough to sustain a decent life in an economy weakened by political and economic corruption.

The children of powerful families seemed to inhabit another reality. They could decide whether they wanted to study in Britain, France or America. They could imagine travel, discovery, experimentation and expansive careers. Their futures did not appear to narrow under the same pressure.

They looked like people who were allowed to dream.

That phrase is not intended as a complete sociological definition of class, but it describes how class felt to me as a child. Elite status appeared almost sacred because elite children possessed opportunities that seemed inseparable from who they were. The freedom surrounding them made their position look natural. Their confidence could be mistaken for inherent superiority because the social conditions producing that confidence remained hidden.

My parents eventually moved us to Britain when I was eleven. After doing everything they had been told should produce security, they reached the conclusion that the state in which they lived could not reliably offer their children the future for which they had prepared us. We settled in a white working-class area of Cardiff. Later, the overachiever in me applied to Oxford to study engineering science because it was one of the strongest options on UCAS. I was not executing a sophisticated class strategy. I was simply making the kind of decision I had been trained to make: work hard, choose the strongest academic option available and hope that achievement opens a door.

That decision transformed my life.

Oxford gave me access to intellectual, professional and social spaces I would probably never otherwise have entered. It gave me a credential whose symbolic force travelled far beyond Britain. Along the way, I also acquired a British-sounding accent — almost accidentally, through growing up and being educated in the UK from the age of eleven.

An Oxford degree and British accent, acquired outside any established Cameroonian elite lineage, reduced some of the symbolic distance between me and the elite children who had once seemed almost incomprehensibly removed from my life. I had not inherited their wealth. I did not possess their political connections, family businesses or protection from economic precarity. I had not become one of them. But I had acquired some of the cultural markers through which elite status was recognised.

This was deeply unsettling.

I knew that nothing essential about my human worth had changed. A foreign university had not made me more deserving of dignity. An accent had not made me more intelligent, moral or capable of dreaming than the people with whom I had grown up. Yet people could interpret these markers as evidence that I belonged to a more important category. The instability of that status demystified it.

Once prestige could be assigned to me through credentials and speech, I could no longer experience elite distinction as something natural. I could see the machinery more clearly. I could see that institutions produce authority, that accents carry histories of power, and that educational credentials do not merely record achievement, they organise social recognition.

Let me be clear, this does not mean Oxford gave me nothing real. It gave me education, access, relationships, confidence and possibilities. Cultural capital is not imaginary merely because it is socially constructed. Money is socially constructed too, but it can still determine who eats. The point is that cultural capital translates into material consequences. The respect attached to my degree could affect who listened to me, which rooms admitted me and which assumptions people made about my competence. For members of established elites, these symbolic advantages often coexist with inherited economic capital, political relationships and insulation from institutional failure. Cultural prestige does not replace material privilege. It helps justify it.

So the argument cannot remain a playful dispute over whether Africa has old money. The question becomes urgent when elite distinction exists alongside deprivation.

It matters when politically connected families can educate their children abroad while public schools deteriorate. It matters when business dynasties can accumulate extraordinary wealth in societies where workers struggle to meet basic needs. It matters when royal and political families present themselves as custodians of national tradition while ordinary people lack functioning hospitals, secure employment or reliable electricity.

I am not interested in proving that African elites are insufficiently authentic. I am interested in asking why any elite class should possess such disproportionate authority over the futures available to everyone else.

The moral problem is not that African elites resemble European elites too closely. The moral problem is that extreme concentrations of wealth, power and possibility coexist with preventable suffering — and that culture is recruited to make this arrangement appear deserved.

This is also why decolonial language can become politically dangerous when used carelessly. The fact that an institution is indigenous does not make it just. The fact that a hierarchy predates colonialism does not place it beyond criticism. Africans were capable of producing political complexity before European conquest. We were also capable of producing exploitation, exclusion and domination. Recognising African agency means recognising the full range of African human action, not romanticising everything that can be described as traditional.

A decolonial politics that exists only to defend African authenticity can easily become a defence of African elites.

When someone responds to criticism of inherited privilege by declaring that land is ancestrally African, they may be answering a historical question while evading a political one. Even where a family’s authority has deep indigenous roots, we can still ask what that authority does today. Does it widen human possibility, or does it monopolise it? Does it protect collective resources, or convert them into private power? Does it create obligations to the community, or merely provide cultural language through which accumulation is legitimised?

The Africanness of an elite does not resolve the justice of its power.

My own position is complicated because I now possess forms of cultural capital that can grant me access. I can enter certain spaces, speak a particular language and invoke an institution whose name carries authority. I cannot pretend to stand entirely outside the structures I am criticising.

That creates a choice.

When people from outside established elite lineages acquire recognised markers of prestige, do we make elite legitimacy more contestable by exposing its constructed nature? Or do we simply become new recruits into the same hierarchy?

Cultural capital can be used to secure individual mobility. There is nothing inherently shameful in wanting safety, intellectual freedom or a good life. My parents did not uproot themselves so that I could romanticise deprivation. But individual ascent becomes politically empty when it ends with gratitude for being admitted into rooms whose doors remain closed to everyone else.

I do not want to argue that no one should enter elite institutions. I want us to stop confusing entry with liberation. My Oxford degree cannot abolish inequality. My accent cannot redistribute wealth. Demystifying elite status will not, by itself, build public schools, create employment or dismantle corrupt states. Material systems require material transformation. But symbolic power still matters because domination survives partly through belief.

A society in which people regard elite children as naturally entitled to expansive lives will struggle to recognise the violence involved in restricting everyone else’s imagination. A society that confuses inherited opportunity with merit will interpret inequality as evidence of differences in human value. A society that treats foreign credentials, accents and institutions as proof of superior personhood will continue to reproduce colonial hierarchies even while speaking the language of African pride.

The task, then, is not merely to make elite cultural capital available to more people. It is to expose the arbitrary relationship between those markers and human worth.

I now possess some of the cultural markers that once made elite people appear almost inherently different to me: a certain education, a certain accent, familiarity with certain spaces and institutions. But acquiring them has made their relationship to human worth feel more fragile, not more convincing. They can alter how a person is read without altering anything essential about the person themselves. They can open doors, confer authority and shape assumptions about intelligence or competence, but none of that means they have accurately measured anyone’s value.

If anything, possessing them has made it harder for me to believe in the mystique that surrounds them.

There may be old wealth in Africa. There are certainly old families, inherited hierarchies and long histories of political authority. But the more important question is not how old their money is. It is how their power is reproduced, which institutions legitimise it, what suffering it coexists with and why the rest of society is expected to experience elite possibility as natural.

My original statement was too absolute. The discomfort behind it was not. I had grown up believing that some people belonged to a category of human beings who were permitted to imagine more expansive lives. Then I acquired some of the symbols associated with that category and discovered how quickly they could alter the way I was seen.

That made it impossible for me to experience elite legitimacy as natural or inherently deserved — whether it reproduces itself in Africa, Europe, America or anywhere else.

REFERENCES

[1] Guyer, Jane I., and Samuel M. Eno Belinga. "Wealth in people as wealth in knowledge: Accumulation and composition in Equatorial Africa." The Journal of African History 36.1 (1995): 91-120.

[2] Asabe, Abdulkarim Umar Dan. "Kano and Long Distance Trade in the 19th and 20th Centuries." KANO IN THE SECOND MILLENNIUM (2010): 368.

[3] Ayling, Pere. "International education and the pursuit of ‘Western’ capitals: Middle-class Nigerian fathers’ strategies of class reproduction." British Journal of Sociology of Education 42.4 (2021): 460-474.

[4] Ayling, Pere, and Derron Wallace. "‘We are not concerned about good grades’: elite Nigerian parents’ consumption of high-quality education as a form distinction." International studies in sociology of education 34.1 (2025): 115-134.

[5] Braeburn Schools. Braeburn School Nairobi, braeburnschool.braeburn.com/. Accessed Aug. 2026.

[6] West Africa International Schools Activities League (WAISAL). Member Schools and Tournaments, waisal.org/. Accessed Aug. 2026.