Building the Eurafrica of tomorrow: Mohamed Tiékoura Diawara, the Club de Dakar, and transcontinental capital, 1974-88

This article revisits debates surrounding a New International Economic Order in the 1970s from the perspective of a forgotten transcontinental network of elites, the Club de Dakar. By examining the origins and evolution of the Club, it argues that the critiques of the global economy emerging from the Third World during a time of crisis were not necessarily opposed to foreign capital. Under the leadership of the Ivorian politician Mohamed Tiékoura Diawara, the Club’s members argued for the resurrection of Eurafrican cooperation, redeploying European industrial capital in Africa for mutually beneficial economic growth. Whereas voices from elsewhere in the Third World identified multinational firms and international finance as the face of neocolonialism, the Club de Dakar sought to channel this private capital towards investment in Africa. As the scope for these projects narrowed in the early 1980s, the article concludes by exploring how Diawara cultivated his own portfolio of commercial activities, which ultimately led to his corruption trial and the Club’s dissolution.