Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
‘traditional–modern–postmodern’ and particularly those between ‘precolonial–colonial–postcolonial’, which is the most common and seemingly the most obvious. Such periodisations stress both continuity and fundamentally objective changes; they are historicist and, as a result, force thought into specific parameters, thereby excluding different modes of thought.
It can be noted, for example, that the standard procedure of demarcating African history along the precolonial–colonial–postcolonial temporal dimension has two major consequences. Firstly, it focuses on changes in state forms and privileges European domination as the norm around which history is plotted and thought; secondly, it has had the consequence of occluding what is arguably the most important event in modern African history – the slave trade – for it cannot be contained within this view of historical change. In particular, the slave trade does not feature within histories of international migration, even though it can be seen as the first instance of ‘forced migration’ on a massive scale. Historians and economists of migration regularly fall into this obvious error, only partly because they, together with demographers, tend to understand the migratory process as a voluntary one; in fact, slavery is not thought fundamentally as a political process. For example, Adepoju (1995) uses this threefold periodisation in his discussion of the history of migration on the continent. The Atlantic slave trade simply disappears from his vision altogether. It is not seen as precolonial, as this concerns distinct African societies untrammelled by Western domination. It is not a feature of colonialism, as this concerns the political dominance of Africa by the Western powers and the construction of colonial states, beginning in the late 19th century, when the slave trade had legally ended. The result is that it simply disappears from the horizon of his inquiry altogether.
Moreover, if it is the case that African peoples were controlled, exploited and oppressed by foreign powers before the colonial period proper, which was undeniably the case, then it follows that the ‘state-colonial’ period (i.e. from the 1890s to the 1960s) is not the only time period when such foreign oppression, and hence national reaction, can be seen to have taken place. A ‘precolonial’ colonial form of domination (so to speak) also suggests a postcolonial one. It suggests that it is possible to conceive of colonialism beyond the narrow period of formal state-colonial domination; in other words, as not exclusively defined by a particular state form.5 It implies the possibility at least of various contemporary neo-colonial forms of colonial domination right into the current period of globalisation.6 The defining feature of colonialism is thus not the existence of a colonial state as such, but a set of oppressive politics enabling foreign domination, with the consequence, as I shall show in Part 2, that the people are considered by the state as its enemy.
Apart from the necessity to reject its crude linearity (the teleological unfolding of an essence), to follow such a strategy of structural periodisation is to understand African history simply in terms of continuities and changes in the world economy or world configurations determined in the West, at the level of empire. Africa is consequently thought of as a victim of (or, at best, as simply reacting to) events taking place elsewhere, so that African agency disappears from thought. In this context it should be noted that historicism does not simply consist of the simple idea of linear development. Rather, linear development presupposes historical determinism, the idea that the past determines the present. A notion of causality, of necessity, is therefore at the core of historicism, as well as the view that history is reducible to time, so that, as Marx put it, ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (Marx, 1852a: 96).
My aim in this book is rather to attempt to think history in a way that foregrounds the political subjectivity of African people and thereby makes it thinkable. It is an attempt at periodisation in terms of limits to thought and their overcoming. For this to be possible, the core of the organising principle of periodisation must be distinct sequences (of state or excessive subjectivities) along with the socially located experiences or singularities that gave birth to them. Emancipatory politics in particular can only be understood as a sequence limited in time or, as Badiou puts it, only as a ‘singular trace where the truth of a collective situation sees the light of day. But there exists no principle of linkage between this trace and those which had preceded it’ (Badiou, 1992: 234, my translation). In other words, because it is concerned with imposing regularity on time (past, present and also future), history sees time as continuous and thereby conflates the subjective with the objective, with the result that it effaces the exceptional and the irregular. History is concerned with establishing a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ and with affirming that the relation between the two is an objective one, understandable through the deployment of scientific protocols. It amounts in fact to a state mode of thinking, for this mode always ‘objectifies’ subjectivity; thus, in Lazarus’s formulation, ‘history is a thought-relation-of-the-state’ (1996: 17). On the other hand, different emancipatory modes of politics understood as singular subjectivities are only thinkable as discontinuous sequences. As Badiou puts it, if, as is usually the case, we consider history as continuous, ‘there is a history of states but there is no history of politics’ (1992: 234, my translation). In brief, what are usually said to be historical periods are continuous structural and expressive subjective historical sequences of state or imperial politics (the politics of power), whereas emancipatory politics are always discontinuous, singular and purely subjective affirmations that can only be understood in terms of themselves. Shifting from understanding historical continuities to understanding discontinuities is not an easy endeavour. In fact, Foucault (2003a: 55) warns us that ‘establishing discontinuities is not an easy task for history in general. And it is certainly even less so for the history of thought’7. What, then, are the difficulties?
The fundamental theoretical problem here concerns that posed by Hegel, who understood history in terms of subjectivity but for whom this process amounted to the unfolding of the ethical ‘Idea’ – hence his adherence to an essence or subject of history (realised in his case in the state8). A different philosophy of the Idea is necessary and it should be apparent that an Idea only exists, is only actualised, through the actions of people who affirm it; we shall see in a later chapter that this is precisely how Frantz Fanon understands the nation, for example. Badiou argues that the Idea must be understood as ‘the affirmation that a new truth is historically possible’ (2009d: 201), while simultaneously insisting on ‘the primacy of the Idea as practice’ (2013f, 14 November 2012, p. 9, my translation). A discontinuous history of politics, therefore, must be understood in terms of changing subjectivities in order to avoid collapsing into historicism, whether of the ‘materialist’ or ‘idealist’ variety. I assess below how Lazarus tries to overcome this problem through his work on time and especially his assessment of Marc Bloch. His solution to the problem posed by Hegel is to understand the historical thought of politics as not always in existence,9 as discontinuous rather than continuous, as sequential and rare, and as composed of subjective political sequences. This follows, of course, from understanding emancipatory politics as excessive to what is considered to be normal or habitual, what is referred to by sociologists as ‘culture’. In particular, Lazarus identifies historical ‘modes of politics’ that are sequential, but all sequences do not necessarily point to the existence of distinct modes.
While changes in objective conditions (of accumulation, for example) have produced important effects on political subjectivities, particularly as they have always been the object of state thought, these subjectivities were also influenced, arguably at times even more fundamentally, by changes in modes of thought and politics expressed in popular struggles of various kinds. Particularly important here are the effects of political ‘events’, in Badiou’s sense of the term, during which emancipatory politics of affirmation are able to see the light of day for shorter or longer periods. Badiou (2009a) outlines three distinct novel evental subjectivities which emanate from any event: fidelity, reaction and obscurity. These three subjective dispositions can also be used to understand the limits of sequences and will be referred to here in order to delineate some of the major sequences in African history that are clearly defined by emancipatory events. More minor sequences, not necessarily continental in their consequences, will only be noted in passing.
That emancipatory politics are always sequential and