Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
(2001).
8.The discipline of anthropology was not considered in this context, being anathema to radical nationalist intellectual discourse, given its erstwhile association with colonialism, especially in Anglophone Africa.
9.Mamdani’s work has concentrated overwhelmingly on the state construction of ethnic identities, which he sees as structurally determined, while popular struggles are seen as reacting within that existing determination; see, for example, his analysis of the problems of the DRC in Pambazuka News (Mamdani, 2011a). More recently, since his return to Uganda, his writing has arguably been less overtly structuralist and seemingly more located and sensitive to the need for popular struggles which eschew the taking of state power; see Mamdani (2012), for example.
10.See Comaroff and Comaroff (2006), who mention the controlling function of bureaucracy through the medium of human rights discourse, but put this down to ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘postcoloniality’ rather than to democracy as such.
11.It is important to note that in our current world historical sequence there is no ‘relative autonomy’ to speak of between class interests and the state. The fact that banks get millions pumped into them even though they are the originators of a world crisis is one example; others are that private accumulation is said to be in the national interest, and the boundary between economic interest and state position is often impossible to ascertain within so-called democratic states in Africa and elsewhere. This point has been made by Balibar (1996) amoung others.
12.Marx puts this point as follows in his analysis of the Paris Commune: ‘The Commune ... was to serve as a lever for the uprooting of the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute’ (Marx, 1871: 72).
13.In fact, in South Africa the main reason why urban social movements are so popular on the left of the political spectrum has arguably been because they are seen as ‘working-class’ movements, an untheorised, intellectually lazy appellation which is simply equated with movements of ‘the urban poor’. In this way a vulgar form of ‘classism’ still lingers on in thought as activists and academics adhere to a crude sociological rendition of Marx’s political economy, which has been systematically emptied of any political content as a substitute for serious thought. It is also social class (with its clear ‘progressive’ ideological attributes) whose absence is invoked by Mbembe’s ubiquitous use of the term ‘lumpen’ as a descriptor to illustrate the currently ‘de-classed’ character of the African continent at all social levels (Mbembe, 2010b).
14.Rancière prefers to talk in terms of a ‘supplement’ rather than of an ‘excess’, but the basic idea is the same. For Rancière, politics only exists when such a supplement – the equality of speaking beings – is effectuated; it enables a particular ‘distribution of the sensible’, i.e. a specific way of framing a sensory space, which is radically distinct from that structured by what he calls ‘the police’ – broadly speaking, the state. See Rancière (1999), in particular.
15.See, in this context, Etienne Balibar’s La Crainte des masses (1996), which tries to deal with the insufficiencies of the Marxist theory of ideology in understanding political subjectivity in life.
16.I discuss Mahmood Mamdani’s work in some detail in chapter 12 below.
17.What is particularly disconcerting is that, even though Mbembe gestures to the centrality of local forces in democratising the continent, these are seen as currently absent or bereft of an Idea, and therefore the need to rely on Western solidarity arises (2010a: 27). At the same time, central to discussions among critical intellectuals in Europe in general and in France in particular has been precisely the crisis of political thought, the absence of an Idea and the problematic character of democracy itself in its present form. See, in particular, the collective volume on democracy (Agamben et al., 2009) to which all contributors provide a critical input; this includes not only Badiou and Rancière but also Agamben, Nancy, Žižek and many others. In current French philosophical thought, democracy in fact refers to two radically different notions: to a form of state as well as to a practice of popular affirmation of egalitarian alternatives. The latter notion is that proposed in particular by Rancière. He argues that, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a democratic state, as ‘all states are oligarchies’ by their very nature (Rancière, 2005: 79). It is the fact of not distinguishing state liberal democracy from alternative conceptions which accounts for Mbembe’s position, as he had previously very eloquently critiqued the infamous neo-colonial speech by French president Nicolas Sarkozy on his official visit to Senegal on 26 July 2007. For the controversy surrounding Sarkozy’s speech as well as Mbembe’s rightfully indignant response, see Ndiaye (2008).
18.For which he was heavily criticised by his friend Fanon; see Fanon (1967: 194–5).
19.Here I mean ‘people’ (les gens, la gente, abantu) as opposed to ‘the people’ (le peuple, el pueblo, il popolo).
20.There is evidence that recently Mbembe’s thinking on Africa has been changing, as in his recent work (e.g. Mbembe, 2013) it is African intellectuals’ mimetic relationship to the West which is criticised. His commentary on Fanon has also led him to stress a process of becoming and the idea of ‘indifference to difference’ particularly in relation to race and racism, although this is understood as a future ideal to be attained rather than a current practice.
21.References are too numerous to cite here. It will suffice to note the scholarly work on social movements emanating from the democratic struggles of the 1980s on the continent, such as Mamdani et al. (1995); Ake (2003); Chole and Ibrahim (1995).
22.It may be worth recalling here in the context of class identities that, considered as a political subject, the ‘other’ of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie but the state and the whole political edifice of capitalism. This was, it will be remembered, the core of Lenin’s argument in What Is to Be Done?
23.Again, the list of references is a long one, but one can refer to the works of Appiah, Mudimbe and many others.
24.The idea of ‘African personality’ has been associated with Senghor. In this regard, it is interesting to peruse the collection of nationalist writings edited in the mid-1970s by Mutiso and Rohio (1975). For a sophisticated account of Senghor’s view of African art as ‘vitalist’ philosophy, see Diagne (2011).
25.See note 2.
26.One such attempt constrained by a classist framework was provided by Temu and Swai (1981).
27.This process has begun: see, especially, Badiou (2011b).
28.The extensive rise of social movements of ‘civil society’ in South Africa has, in Gillian Hart’s (2010: 90) accurate words, ‘pulled masses of researchers along in [its] wake’, much as the rise of independent trade unions in the early 1970s did to a previous generation of academics. These researchers have been concerned not with understanding people’s own political thought but with what they see a priori as people’s responses to various dimensions of their structural poverty and to neo-liberal economic policies. As people are poor, it follows for this logic that their protests must be demanding government provisioning, or ‘delivery’, in South African state parlance. For a recent example of this thinking, see Alexander (2010).
29.This was particularly the case with the student and workers’ movements of May ’68; see Ross (2002).
30.See Badiou (2009, 2011b, 2012c).
31.The notion of dignity was central to the popular upsurge in Tunisia in late 2010 (see Khiari (2011)); it is perhaps the most prevalent name for freedom today.
32.In particular, Abahlali have insisted on their thought of politics being governed by an axiom of equality; they have maintained their organisational autonomy, insisting on running their own affairs as well as founding their politics on what they call a ‘living communism’, which detaches itself from state ways of conceiving politics. See www.abahlali.org.