Prologue to capitalism, free enterprise and black entrepreneurship: A comparative history of black business in the United States and South Africa

Abstract

The agency of blacks in forging their own economic liberation through entrepreneurship and business enterprise has been generally ignored in the historical literature. In this two-part paper, my purpose is a comparative recovery of the history of black business in the United States and South Africa. Part One, "a new problematic," establishes "categories of comparison" and a contextual and methodological frame for the study of black business in these two countries. Part Two, "in search of a usable past," urges deconstruction of the Eurocentric focus that shapes current assessments of South African and American black economic activity within the context of a fourphase chronological overview in which selected topics in the comparative history of black business in these two countries are presented for analysis. Presentism propels this study, a response to the emergence of the New South Africa and the deteriorating economic position African Americans, much the same as comparative studies in the United States and South Africa in the 1980s represented intellectual responses to black American activism in the 1960s and the rising tide of opposition to apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s.