Investing in independence: popular shareholding on the West African stock exchange

Abstract

Abstract According to contemporary investors on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa (Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières de l’Afrique de l’Ouest or BRVM), President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s post-independence plan to privatize state-owned enterprises in Côte d’Ivoire gave birth to the region’s financial market. Yet the bourse’s original promise of ‘indigenous’ control of financial investment has long gone unrealized. In response, a West African investor advocacy organization is coordinating a regional awareness programme that introduces ‘the culture of the stock exchange’ to an audience of West Africans largely unfamiliar with financial securities. Members of this shareholders’ association share a critique of elite monetary institutions and advance in their place a more popular vision of savings, investment and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic research in Abidjan and Dakar, I analyse how these petits porteurs (small shareholders) frame the morality and politics of their investments. The petits porteurs often make good money on the market, but even when they take on ‘crisis-level’ losses they nevertheless extoll the virtues of transparency, formality and control that the stock exchange is thought to provide. In contrast to similar cases elsewhere in the world, I argue that this form of popular politics on the BRVM is far more than an instrument for the accumulation strategies of financial elites: it is a new and distinct style of political engagement in which petits porteurs are, in the name of the West African ‘people’, coupling together anti-elite and anti-colonial critiques with a set of familiar market devices. I characterize this political engagement as popular shareholding.