Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
to continental problems. In at least one clear case, that of Somalia, it has simply followed US policy, which has been totally inimical to the interests of the people of that country (Samatar, 2007). Nowhere in his book does Mamdani attempt to move beyond thinking in terms of statist solutions to investigate the possibility that there may be alternative popular solutions to what amounts after all to a major catastrophe for the people involved. The idea is simply to turn to state power(s) in order to find solutions for problems which state politics in whatever form have themselves largely initiated. After all, it could be important to ask: how are the appropriate social forces within the country to be identified and ‘mobilised’ to sustain a reconciliation process which is brokered exclusively from the outside and to which internal forces are only marginally committed at best? Such a sustained mobilisation would imply the commitment of substantial sectors of the population to a politics of peace and hence to an alternative set of political prescriptions, which would not simply concern an ‘adequate’ management of power interests (dare one say ‘good governance’?) in the interests of a (reconstituted) oligarchy. Given the lack of legitimacy of African states among their own people, such solutions, developed among sectors of the oligarchy, will always be suspect. Mamdani’s search for solutions beyond interest leads him to look in the wrong place because of his reduction of politics to power and the state.
Mamdani is primarily interested in analysing the colonial origins of the political in Africa today, the way in which the state exercises its rule, rather than in thinking politics as subjective practice.16 His concerns since the publication of Citizen and Subject (1996) have focused on (particularly ethnic) identity state politics and their institutional conditions of existence, while his normative arguments concern the imagining of a truly liberal state form. His liberal conception of the political means, however, that he cannot provide a way to thinking militancy and, in particular, a subjective politics of emancipation through which a universal politics of equality, rather than a particularistic conception of communitarianism, could be imagined. Emancipation in Africa is not a matter of tinkering with institutions of power under ‘expert’ advice, assuming this would be possible, or of waiting for a philosopher-king to achieve power or, for that matter, of relying on supra-national state institutions, for these simply reproduce the problem of state power, which is by its very nature antithetical to freedom, justice, dignity and equality. For a truly ‘democratic state’ to be established – one that is responsive to popular needs and that is thus forced to confront its own ‘oxymoronic’ character – a universal egalitarian politics must be continuously affirmed. Thus, we need to move beyond an understanding of state forms of politics, liberalism included, if we are to begin to think an emancipatory way forward. In sum, Mamdani’s concerns are with the political, the anatomy of power, so to speak, whereas what I maintain is required today, given the need to enable emancipatory thought in a post-classist period, is a concern with politics as subjectivity, as a thought-practice, more specifically a subjectivity that transcends interest. This is a distinction I maintain rigorously throughout this book: the political concerns power, it is captured and structured by interests; on the other hand, politics in its real sense – in other words, in the sense that it enables agency and emancipatory change – concerns thought, it is lived, it is affirmed. Moreover, if this is so, popular politics cannot be reduced to the ‘politics of civil society’, as this is understood as the domain where organised interests are upheld by rights-bearing citizens.
Mbembe’s perspective is also problematic, for he does not seem to be concerned with an analysis of what an emancipatory subjectivity could look like, other than referring to the politics of civil society. Reviewing the experience of Africa after 50 years of independence, Mbembe (2010b) laments the absence of a democratic project as well as the absence of a basis for social revolution on the continent, while stressing the ‘irrepressible desire of hundreds of millions to live anywhere else but at home’ and the emergence of a ‘culture of racketeering’ (p. 3, my translation throughout). Thus bemoaning the absence of any Idea, as both people and governments seem to have been ‘de-classed’ or ‘lumpenised’, the author resurrects old names in the form of some kind of ‘New Deal’ to be ‘negotiated between African states and international powers’, in terms of which the question of democracy in Africa is to be ‘internationalised’ so that ‘rogue states’ can be ‘legitimately deposed by the use of force and the authors of these political crimes arraigned before international courts of justice’ (p. 11). For Mbembe, ‘the democratisation of Africa is indeed firstly an African question. It clearly must pass by the constitution of social forces which are capable of giving birth to it, to carry it and to defend it. But it is equally an international affair’ (Mbembe, 2010a: 28, my translation). Of course, the whole idea of solidarity in any democratic and egalitarian struggle is crucially important, yet if this solidarity is not thought independently of the state and its subjectivities, we are likely to fall back into the well-worn paternalistic theme of Africa as a ‘basket case’, which is said to be incapable of sorting out its own problems and which should therefore be recolonised in one form or another by the West.17 Given the current prevalence of colonial political subjectivities, these types of ‘solutions’, however humanitarian and democratic they may abstractly seem to be, are in essence simply neo-colonial. This became evident in Libya in 2012, when, after having supported the Libyan ruler Colonel Qaddafi for many years, the so-called international community decided to remove him from power by military means under the pretext of his authoritarianism. Moreover, international courts would have greater legitimacy if only they could also put out arrest warrants for Western leaders (such as Henry Kissinger or Tony Blair) for crimes against humanity, but this, of course, is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future (see Žižek, 2002: 265).
Thus a dead end has been reached in thinking emancipation simply because the thinking of freedom is not radically divorced from that of power, of the state. Mbembe wishes for some form of Western regulation of African politics; Mamdani opposes such a position and appeals to the AU instead. Multinational state solutions – African or Western – are seen as the core prescriptions and the only way out of the crisis of African state politics, much as in the early 1960s, when Patrice Lumumba had thought that the problems of the Republic of Congo could be resolved by appealing to the United Nations (UN).18 The result of this deference to the West, reproduced to various extents by African leaders and academic discourse ever since, has been perennial crisis in the Congo, where there is still today a UN military presence. There will be no solution to the crisis of the African state unless people themselves – people from all walks of life – are allowed and encouraged to discover the truth of their situation and not to rely on the powerful, whether local or foreign, to solve their problems on their behalf. There can be no progress unless people19 are able to become again the subjects of their own history rather than its victims. The result of the current poverty of intellectual thought is that ultimately it is the dominant powers of the world (or of the continent) that are simply allowed and encouraged to act in Africa in their own narrow interests; such interventions have a history of being, and indeed they continue to be, totally contemptuous of the working people of the continent. The outcomes of such ‘solutions’ have been there for all to see in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, yet this failure of the imagination is allowed to continue uncontested simply because popularly founded solutions are no longer considered relevant or, more accurately, do not even enter within the parameters of thought. The core problem with both Mbembe’s and Mamdani’s recent work, whatever their specific arguments and the undoubted value of their theoretical innovations, concerns the orientation of their thought. For Mbembe, intellectual thought, and therefore the thought of any emancipatory experiment, is unable to distance itself clearly from conceiving change in state terms despite its Fanonian humanist influences;20 while, for Mamdani, it is clearly focused on thinking changes to the state in Africa. In both cases we remain within the habitual account of power and hence we have difficulty in overcoming the fundamental obstacles to a new thought of emancipation. In this book I focus on explicating a politics ‘at a distance’ from the state and attempt to open a space for thinking the exceptional rather than the habitual precisely in order to make emancipation thinkable again in Africa.
The predominant effect of this crisis in thought has often been the uncritical absorption of neo-liberal and historicist notions such as those of ‘civil society’, ‘human rights’, ‘(post)modernity’