Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
two parts. The first is concerned with thinking the history of political subjectivities through the use of what I have referred to as historical sequences of politics. The second deals explicitly with specific categories of African politics, such as class, nation, state, civil society, culture and tradition, rethinking these from the point of people rather than from the point of the state; in other words, as both excessive and expressive subjectivities deployed in various African contexts. The first part of the book consists of a debate with the discipline of history and with historians through an attempt to show that an excessive politics can be identified in popular struggles of the past, but that this excessive subjectivity is limited in time. The second part consists of a debate with sociology and, more precisely, with a view of politics reduced to the social: here an understanding of state categories from the point of popular experience is proposed. In either part alternatives are suggested in order to overcome the conceptual and political limitations of these perspectives as currently constituted. Given that emancipatory politics are rare and limited in time, it is possible to identify them with a certain degree of precision and to elucidate their rise and fall. It is through such a methodology that Lazarus (1996) identifies sequential historical modes of politics. Such subjective sequences are discontinuous, while what usually counts as historical ‘periodisation’ refers to continuous but objectively distinct sequences of state politics. The first part of the book thus consists of the development of a methodology for the identification and analysis of such sequences – in particular, emancipatory ones – in the history of Africans; the second outlines the consequences of this methodology for thinking politics today: both the socially reducible politics of the state and the identification of possible emancipatory subjectivities in the present and how they relate dialectically with the social.
NOTES
1.The only significant theorist to have drawn a parallel between South Africa and North Africa I know of was Mahmood Mamdani in Pambazuka News; see Mamdani (2011b).
2.This denial of history in Africa by Hegel took the following forms. After enunciating all sorts of fanciful accounts (mainly from travellers) regarding Africans, including cannibalism, Hegel maintains that the ‘Negro ... exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state ... there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character’ (1952: 196, 197). He concludes: ‘Africa ... is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit ... What we properly understand by Africa is the unhistorical undeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which has to be presented ... only as on the threshold of the world’s history’ (p. 199). His comments are based on the crudest racist prejudices of his times (1820s–1830s). Interestingly, Hegel dismisses Africa in a section entitled ‘Geographical Basis of History’, where he sees geographical location (place) as fundamental to the growth of ‘spirit’. This argument is thus one of the most important formal assertions of the location of subjectivity in place. He maintains that Africa’s natural state is a consequence of its ‘isolated character [and] originates ... in its geographical condition’ (p. 196); he also states that native Americans ‘gradually vanished at the breath of European activity’ and were ‘passionless’ and of a ‘crouching submissiveness ... towards a European’ (p. 190), while mentioning that they were treated with violence although not by any means illegitimately, it seems. It appears that, for Hegel, the accounts by travellers he used came in handy for his exposition, as they enabled him to illustrate what his time saw as a fanciful ‘natural condition’, which was ‘one of absolute and thorough injustice’ (p. 199). It would have been extremely useful for him to show that the ‘history of spirit’ could obviously not germinate in such peoples and therefore that a ‘civilising mission’ was clearly legitimate. He notes, for example, when he refers to Egypt that ‘this part ... must be attached to Europe; the French have lately made a successful effort in this direction’ (p. 196, emphasis in original). The reference is to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt; if that part of Africa was to be beneficially colonised by Europe, how much more could this be said to apply to the rest of the continent. Hegel was not only a ‘man of his times’ but thought like the European racist state of his times. To seek in Hegel, as Buck-Morss does, a positive assessment of the struggle for freedom against slavery in Haiti is a fanciful idea of our own times, for which the universality of humanity has been rediscovered in the form of an imperial conception of ‘human rights’, which I will assess in detail later in this book (see Buck-Morss (2000) and also Nesbitt (2008a)). For Hegel, universal freedom (which he equated with reason) was a notion which could not be applicable to ‘Negroes’, for in his eyes they did not belong to humanity, ‘for the essence of humanity is freedom’ and ‘slavery is and for itself injustice’, this being the condition of nature; yet he goes so far as to ‘conclude [that] slavery ... [was] the occasion of the increase in human feelings among the Negroes’ (p. 199, emphasis in original); in other words, European slavery and colonialism were justified by Hegel as ways of turning the inhuman and barbaric ‘Negroes’ into humans. For a good critical assessment of Buck-Morss’s argument, see Stephanson (2010); I am grateful to Peter Hallward for referring me to this last text. For those who may be tempted to believe that Hegel’s views of Africans may no longer be in vogue, I can only refer to the outrageously patronising speech which ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy of France delivered on 26 July 2007 in Dakar, Senegal, and the reactions which followed, for the details of which see Ndiaye (2008). Inter alia, he says (p. 80): ‘The drama of Africa consists in the fact that African Man did not sufficiently enter history’ (i.e. the history of humanity).
3.The seminal work of Cheikh Anta Diop (e.g. 1989, 1991) must be referred to from the outset. His genius lay in inter alia, grasping the original cultural essence of the African continent, which he saw as founded on matriarchal social systems. His work has provided the foundation for rethinking patriarchal and matriarchal subjectivities on the continent (e.g. by Ifi Amadiume (1987)) as well as for a reassessment of the origins of Western civilisation itself by Martin Bernal, who draws attention to the Afro-Asiatic influences on Ancient Greek culture; see Bernal (1987). From the perspective taken here, the limits of Diop’s analyses are the same as with all those who begin from ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’: the stress on the ‘place’ rather than on the ‘out of place’; for the distinction, see Rancière (1994).
4.In this context, it seems to me that the common reference to ‘the colonial subject’ is an oxymoron. It is largely an absurdity, as the colonial state (and indeed neo-colonialism today), to use an Althusserian expression, did not and could not ‘interpellate’ the colonised as subjects, but only as non-subjects or partial subjects (subhumans, children, victims, etc.). In the (neo-)colonial context, full subjecthood has only been acquired through opposition to such interpellation, through exceeding this subjectively, as I shall show below. More generally, as will become apparent, I follow the thinking of Badiou and Rancière in separating political subjectivity from individual consciousness.
5.Lukas Khamisi was the collective pseudonym for some participants in the Dar es Salaam debate.
6.The studies of these issues in Africa are numerous, but see, in particular, those published under the auspices of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, in the 1990s and by CODESRIA into the 21st century up to the present, which have been of high academic quality. The fact that these studies rarely questioned capitalism itself but only its neo-liberal form is probably best summed up in Mkandawire’s (2001) contention that Africa can indeed develop under capitalism (or South African president Thabo Mbeki’s assertion that Africa can and should appropriate modernity, presumably in the manner in which his own country has done so, with half of its population living in poverty). In so far as an alternative was proposed in this literature, it was one that argued for a state and a form of capitalism more responsive to the national interest and for a form of democracy that should be more inclusive. The problem to be noted here is not whether or not African economies can develop under capitalism – after all, the connection between capitalism and Europe has been definitely and permanently broken with the rise of China, India and Brazil as global economic powers – rather, the horizon of thought in these instances is unjustifiably restrictive, to say the least.
7.Writing in the early 1990s, Claude Ake contended that there were ‘several democracies vying for preferment in a struggle whose outcome is as yet uncertain’ (2003: 127); by the