Chapter 4 Poverty and fundamentalism in Africa Oliver Mtapuri Mtapuri, Oliver (2017). Poverty and fundamentalism in Africa, In Artwell Nhemachena and Munyaradzi Mawere (Eds), Africa at the Crossroads: Theorising Fundamentalism in the 21 st Century. Langaa Research and Publishing CIG, Bameda p 107-129. This chapter looks at poverty from a perspective which argues that the conscious and deliberate perpetuation of poverty is a form of fundamentalism with its associated principles and values. There are people who are parasitic and are incessantly feeding off and on the sweat of the ‘povertised’ of society. The chapter explores how poverty prevents the fulfilment and enjoyment of human rights and results in the deferral and postponement, abandonment and foregoing of the destination of people as happiness, freedom, self-and collective affirmation, and self-actualisation. It explains why poverty, as a form of fundamentalism, affects many Africans relative to other groups from different continents. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which what I call appropriates are complicit in the perpetuation of poverty and the fundamentalism associated with it. It also examines how the measurement of poverty speaks to the ‘fundamentalisation’ of poverty. This is evident in the manner in which poverty statistics are derived and interpreted to express the primacy of the exclusivity of the rich and a system of neoliberalism in which the ‘trickle-down effect’ – a hollow hypothesis - that should benefit the so-called poor has yet to materialise for inclusivity. The first part of this chapter discusses the povertisation of the masses through the processes of appropriation. The term ‘povertised’ is deliberately used to show that the povertisation of the masses is a deliberate outcome of a process of making people poor – a form of poverty production. Poverty is neither accidental nor inevitable. Povertisation gives this notion the elements of a process as opposed to being an event; it systematises poverty, and makes it