25/07/2026
We are honoured to host the Zambian launch of How the International Monetary Fund Strangles Africa, authored by Professor Grieve Chelwa and Professor Vijay Prashad.
We are proud that one of the book's authors, Professor Grieve Chelwa, is an active Core Board Member of the Lusaka Contemporary Art Centre.
Hosting this launch is especially meaningful as we celebrate the scholarship, leadership, and commitment that Professor Grieve brings not only to this significant publication but also to our Centre's work in advancing critical dialogue and African-led solutions.
This timely publication offers a rigorous and unflinching examination of the structures that have kept African nations trapped in cycles of debt, austerity, and underdevelopment since the founding of the modern international monetary system at Bretton Woods in 1944. Drawing on the rich tradition of national liberation Marxism, from Kwame Nkrumah’s foundational critique of neocolonialism to the scholarship of Samir Amin, Claude Ake, and Bade Onimode, the authors refuse the sanitised vocabulary of neoliberalism and instead name what these structures are: the continuation of colonial theft by other means.
Through close readings of IMF documents, a dismantling of Transparency International’s narrow conception of corruption, and a recovery of forgotten institutional histories such as the African Centre for Monetary Studies, the book traces how the tools of so-called stabilisation, debt servicing, structural adjustment, austerity, have functioned not to develop African economies but to suppress them.
At its heart is a question first posed at the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 by Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Jaja Wachuku: will the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America remain spectators while others determine their fate?
This book insists the answer need not be yes. It does not stop at critique; it charts alternatives, recovers buried ideas, and reopens a tradition of African economic thought that remains urgently, defiantly relevant. It is both a scholarly intervention and an invitation to dialogue.
Join us as we launch this landmark contribution to African scholarship.
