Solar Power Capitalism

This book demonstrates how Africa’s celebrated green-energy transition rests on hidden structures of exploitation and inequality. Drawing on over 300 interviews across Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and Cameroon, the book illustrates how solar power expands through what the author terms insertion: the patterned incorporation of people, ecologies, and institutions into infrastructures of accumulation, and depletion, the bodily, ecological, and temporal exhaustion through which those infrastructures are sustained. Beginning with colonial electrification schemes that privileged mines and settlers, the book follows the engineering of global solar energy markets, the rise of pay-as-you-go household finance, and the toxic afterlives of solar waste. Later chapters reveal how women’s labor, time, and credit become the unacknowledged infrastructure of solar power capitalism, and how communities navigate enclosure, debt, and ecological harm. The book redefines what a just energy transition means in the twenty-first century.