The Forge invites you to the launch of How the International Monetary Fund Strangles Africa, a bold new work examining the structures of debt, austerity, and underdevelopment that have
shaped Africa’s economic history since Bretton Woods.
Drawing on the tradition of national liberation Marxism, from Kwame Nkrumah to Samir Amin, Claude Ake, and Bade Onimode, the book challenges neoliberal orthodoxy and asks: will Africa remain a spectator to its own fate, or reclaim the tradition of independent economic thought?
Join the authors, alongside invited discussants, for an evening of conversation & reflection.
Date
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Thursday 6 August 2026
Time
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6pm
Author
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Grieve Chelwa is a Zambian economist focused on African economic development. He is an associate professor of political economy at the Africa Institute and coordinator of the Collective on African Political Economy (CAPE), uniting emerging African academics and social movement leaders around emancipatory political economy. He previously lectured at the University of Cape Town and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Wits. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and BBC. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cape Town.
Author
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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. Vijay is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi).
Discussant
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Dalaya Ashenafi is an Ethiopian political economist and strategist whose work critically examines structural inequality, state power, and emancipatory alternatives to development, challenging neoliberal orthodoxy and capital accumulation’s role in marginalising the Global South. A 2022 Asia Global Fellow, she studied state-owned enterprises through socialist industrialisation, and serves as deputy principal of the Ethiopian Women Researchers Network (EWNET). Her scholarship on political settlements and late industrialisation centres class struggle and pan-African solidarity.
Discussant
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Jenny Ricks is General Secretary of the Fight Inequality Alliance – a growing global movement organising to counter the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small elite. Originally from the UK, and based in Johannesburg for the last decade, Jenny has over 20 years experience of social justice campaigning on a wide range of issues alongside people from across the world.