Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
was dominated by Africans (slaves born in Africa) who equated freedom not only with the legal abolition of slavery, but also with popular access to independent peasant land-parcels. The struggle itself can be divided into a number of political sequences and carries over in a different form altogether in post-independence Haiti. The second set of sequences consists of those revolving around the struggles for national liberation on the African continent broadly speaking, limited by the years 1945 and 1975. Here freedom is identified principally with the attainment of independent statehood, yet the state is also thought of as the provider of the material conditions for greater equality within the nation. The third is a new subjective political sequence inaugurated by the struggle for liberation in South Africa in the mid-1980s, in which freedom is equated subjectively with increased forms of control over daily life by people themselves; this, I argue, forms a new politics of emancipation for the 21st century.
Chapter 2 is concerned to expand on the idea that people think by uncovering the political subjectivities of Africans in their struggle against slavery in Saint-Domingue. I deal specifically with the political agency of Africans in making world history through their emancipatory struggles in Saint-Domingue and Haiti. These struggles are of fundamental universal significance, for they affirmed the truth of a universal humanity for the first time during the modern period, something which the French and American revolutions did not do. I suggest that, at least during the period 1791–6, a specific subjective mode of politics can be identified during these struggles, which could be named the Human Freedom mode of politics. I argue that while ‘universal human rights’ were fought for in this struggle for the first time, these cannot be equated with the contemporary use of this expression, as they were founded on a notion of ‘natural right’, which is absent today. I also show that after achieving their legal freedom, the ex-slaves fought for a prescriptive understanding of economic independence from the state, which they eventually won after Haitian independence in 1804. The formation of an egalitarian system on peasant parcels, regulated through a culture of equality derived from African precepts, lasted, broadly speaking, until the 1960s.
In chapter 3, I move to an analysis of the question of a historical explanation of emancipation, in the 20th century in particular but by no means exclusively. This question is broached through an assessment of the literature on the Mau Mau (itungati) rebellion or insurrection in Kenya in the 1950s, particularly that which attempts an understanding of the subjectivity of the rebels. It expands this discussion by means of a critical engagement with the work of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies School in India, which deals with the epistemological issues of attempting to understand anti-colonial subaltern political subjectivity in greater depth. I conclude that the discipline of history in its current form is limited by its epistemic reason, which is reflected in its inability to conceptualise adequately the thought of popular rebellions in their own terms. The result is therefore a fundamental inability to see people as rational beings.
Chapter 4 introduces some of the problems associated with the understanding of freedom and emancipation through the struggle for national liberation. In particular it is concerned in the first part to understand the idea of the nation as a political affirmation and emancipatory vision, and in the second part to deal in greater depth with the subjectivity of what I term the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa between, say, 1945 and 1975. The first part looks explicitly at Fanon’s thought in his famous chapter of The Wretched of the Earth on the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’. It stresses the exceptionally inventive thinking that characterises Fanon, who sees ‘national consciousness’ as a pure affirmation, and also traces the limits of his thought in the stress he puts on the party form of organisation. The second part of the chapter extends the analysis beyond Fanon to outline the characteristics of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics more fully. This mode of politics was characterised by equating the nation with the people, while simultaneously thinking freedom in terms of a new state form. This somewhat contradictory subjectivity combined emancipatory politics at a distance from state thinking with the vision of a new state providing freedom to the people. It was meant to be embodied in a party or organised ‘national liberation movement’ which was said to represent the nation and which saw freedom as achievable primarily through military means. The argument uncovers both the excessive and the expressive sides to this mode, thus exposing its subjective limits.
Chapter 5 goes on to show how the popular struggle during the 1980s in South Africa exceeded the limitations of the National Liberation Struggle mode and invented a popularly grounded way of thinking politics, whose subjectivity was founded on the daily lives of ordinary people. In this sense it constituted a radical break from the national liberation struggle way of thinking politics. This new mode of politics was not focused subjectively on attaining state power and was therefore in a position to invent new political subjectivities for a short period. These, I argue, went on to define a new mode of politics which I name the People’s Power mode of politics. It had a limited existence from September 1984 to mid-1986 and was present in a limited number of sites. The originality of this mode was the fact that it showed that political emancipation could be thought outside the party form of organisation and its guerrilla army, and through the collectively developed subjectivities of a mass movement for freedom. This mode of politics was arguably replicated in several respects in the North African rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, which is why it can be said to constitute a new 21st-century mode. However, its limits were reached by its deferring to the exiled party, the African National Congress (ANC), as the legitimate inheritor of state power.
Chapter 6 examines the collapse of this emancipatory national vision into national chauvinism in South Africa between 1973 and 2013. It therefore takes a longer view of political subjectivity in South Africa, starting from the affirmation of anti-racialism invented by the Black Consciousness intellectual movement, of which Steve Biko was the main thinker, right up to the near present. Its objective is to outline the subjective transformation of emancipatory nationalist thought from an affirmative and thus emancipatory understanding of the people-nation into the national chauvinism prevalent today in South Africa. The process is accounted for in terms of the depoliticisation of the idea of the nation and its replacement by a state conception founded on indigeneity. The idea is to outline the reactive and obscure subjectivities present within the post-apartheid state. The changing sequences of state subjectivities after 1990 are followed up to a sequence dominated by a state subjectivity of national chauvinism and rising violence.
Chapter 7 critically examines the currently dominant ways of understanding militancy or activism through the notions of civil society, parties, social movements, citizenship and human rights. It argues that these notions are in themselves inadequate for thinking a politics of emancipation, for they operate strictly within state modes of thought. Parties refer to organised interests in political society (the state itself); NGOs and social movements refer to organised interests of citizens within a civil society that provides the domain within which such interests are deployed and which is legitimised by the state. Politics cannot be reduced to agency in social history for example. Moreover, citizens, whether passive or active, are deemed to possess rights within civil society according to neo-liberal thought, a notion that only partially conforms to reality on the continent, for many people do not have the right to rights.
I conclude Part 1 with two short case studies, assessing the existence of different modes of politics in two different social movements in South Africa during the post-apartheid period: one operating within the realm of civil society and another maintaining itself firmly beyond civil society and transcending those subjective limits. I suggest that it is with respect to the latter that a fidelity to the event of 1984–6 is clearly apparent. I show that the movement operating within the confines of civil society (the Treatment Action Campaign) thinks its politics in terms of state subjectivities, while the one operating beyond the limits of civil society (Abahlali base-Mjondolo) is able to