Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos

      Foreword

      This is a very important book. It deals with a crucial issue of our times of political crisis, namely: is emancipatory politics still possible today and does it have historical references? Or put differently: can we think anew a politics of universal human emancipation? The Marxist political vision has collapsed; attempts to recalibrate it are in difficulty as they lack historical references. The recourse to neo-liberal ideology has made it difficult to even conceptualise the universality of humanity. In fact, due to deep economic crises such as the aggravation of human inequality, neo-liberalism has given rise to fascistic tendencies in thought throughout the world.

      Politics, when it has been thought, has failed to detach itself from the determination of locality and the identity of the subject. In addition, the fact that present dominant forms of capitalist legitimation include religious or spiritual figures (Islamic and other fundamentalisms) generates even more difficulties and uncertainties. Wars are being fought under religious flags. The Arab Spring which generated tremendous hope, as a ‘new beginning of history’, has either failed – given rise to a military dictatorship in Egypt – has run into an unfinished terrorist crisis in Libya, or has faded into a variant of Western democracy in Tunisia.

      The book is also a real event in the knowing and thinking of the politics of emancipation through the study of the global history of African peoples’ struggles for liberation – liberty, equality, freedom, independence and dignity – that is African peoples’ historical contribution to universal emancipatory politics. This area of study has been often marginalised if not silenced altogether, partly because thinking has often been denied to African people. And these people, due to deep alienation, have often simply adopted models thought elsewhere. This, of course, does not mean that there have been no experiences of emancipatory politics by African people. The author does bring into focus some new ways of looking at African history, no longer making colonial history the ‘pivot’ of such history and giving voice to the ‘wretched of the earth’.

      The author uses some of the most creative and inspiring ideas or categories produced in the contemporary theoretical conjuncture; those particularly found in the conceptual philosophy of Alain Badiou and the nominal anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. The idea that ‘people think and thinking is a relationship of reality’ – or put slightly differently that ‘thinking is real and all people think’ – this idea makes it possible for the thought of silenced categories of people – the damned of the world – to be studied. The concepts of ‘situation’, ‘event’, and their relationships, to mention but a few categories are very helpful in this regard. A true event emerges within a situation. It appears as something completely new in that situation; in that sense, it is an exception to the situation. Ideas of emancipatory politics arise through an emancipatory event. The elaboration of those ideas by militants of the event may give rise to new institutions sustaining the aimed for emancipation. Such creative conceptual developments which begin to constitute a theory of emancipatory politics are proposed in this book. The central focus of the theory elaborated in the book is that emancipatory politics is a politics in excess of place, of the social. It is a politics which is not closely linked or identified with locality, subject or culture, even if those elements do constitute its emerging environment. From that concept of emancipatory politics, the book examines throughout African peoples’ global contributions to world history through specific historical references. The book identifies the Mande Hunters’ Oath or Charter (1222), an idea of politics asserting the universality of humanity in the struggle to resist the rise of Arab slavery. Other historical references include: important ideas of politics of liberty, equality and independence, which arose in the slave revolutionary movement in Saint-Domingue; ideas of politics of restorative healing of society (and the family) through ‘Lembaism’ in Kongo society devastated by Portuguese colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, and the politics of the revolutionary liberation movements. Details can be found in the book.

      A least two considerations are left with few hints as to their solution, due to their difficulty: can an emancipatory event be prepared for or must it just be awaited? Why is it that in many instances, the elaboration of emancipatory ideas has ultimately resorted to reproducing subjectively existing structures and institutions? These have made it difficult for a concrete case of emancipatory politics to be sustained.

      The book comes at a time when the process of emancipation of African people is at its lowest level. People’s enthusiasm for the achieved independence or victories of the national liberation movements has faded away. Postcolonial states have become increasingly unresponsive to the demands, needs and aspirations of the large masses of people they have to serve.

      The celebrants of high rates of growth and the availability of natural resources sought by all kinds of transnational corporations searching for easy profits, corrupt rulers and the whole so-called ‘looting machine’ networks are not able to hide the fact that freedom and emancipation that African people struggled for are nowhere manifest today. While colonialism in Africa was justified by the danger posed by the enduring slave trade and the colonial ‘civilising mission’, a new ‘scramble for Africa’, in terms of struggles over direct access to African natural resources by various powers, is today being justified by the danger posed by terrorism and the need for a ‘democratising mission’. In the remote past, local rulers under threat by colonialists, were made to sign contracts they did not read nor know the meaning of. Today, would-be rulers, through corruption, greed and threats, are also made to sign, especially in the mining sector, flagrantly unjust contracts. While a minority of people are enriching themselves by all available means, the majority of people, entertained by the lies of a coming ‘modernity’ and ‘emergence’ from stagnation, are increasingly relegated to an abject poverty. Thinking, in the absence of a real inspiring political vision, has been reduced to numerical quantification (rates of growth, levels of poverty, levels of inflation, etc.). Rambling models – socialism, democracy, Marxism, pan-Africanism, nationalism – which used to be ‘adopted’ (rather than thought through) as guides to action, are increasingly reduced to mythological status. Freedom, independence, equality even dignity have become just dreams. Is there a qualitative way out? Ideas of an ‘African Renaissance’ have been tossed about. Microstates claiming to embark on a path of African renaissance have proven to be as oppressive and corrupt as any postcolonial ones. This is the context requiring a vigorous intervention such as this and the theory produced here helps us to explain the reasons for such failures.

      I have known Michael Neocosmos for some years now. We have met on a number of occasions; we have had, in addition, on-going theoretical exchanges regarding many of the issues