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This article seeks to unravel the meanings attributed by African political and military elites to international investment in their children’s education. The ethnographic analysis is based on the life stories of a group of financial professionals of African descent, occupying middle and senior management positions in transnational corporations in Johannesburg at the time of the 2004 financial bubble. The paper argues that investment in transnational education is a reproduction mechanism of the elite identity. One consequence of the identity and professional paths followed by these young professionals has been a weakening of family ties and a passive reluctance to start a family in its classic form. The article concludes by analyzing the significance of these discontinuities and dislocations in their family life as a way to reassert their identity, and as a quest for legitimacy among the contemporary African elite.