Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos

      Preface

      This natural disposition to think ... is the real meaning of humanity.

      – Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 1377

      Homo cogitat – Man thinks.

      – Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, 1677

      At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.

      – Aimé Césaire, letter to Maurice Thorez, 24 October 1956

      I do not identify with my origin, nor do I deny it, but my trajectory as a subject pushes me elsewhere.

      – Frantz Fanon, cited by Alice Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait

      How are we to begin to think human emancipation in Africa today after the collapse of the Marxist, the Third World nationalist as well as the neo-liberal visions of freedom? How are we to conceptualise an emancipatory future governed by a fidelity to the idea of a universal humanity in a context where humanity no longer features within our ambit of thought and when previous ways of thinking emancipation have become obsolete? In the formulation made famous by Frantz Fanon on the last page of The Wretched of the Earth, how are we to ‘work out new concepts’ for a new humanism? This book seeks answers to these questions in the light of what has become apparent, namely the absence of a thought of politics within all three of these conceptions of universal history today. This may seem paradoxical, but if we are to understand politics as a collective thought-practice – as that which constitutes human collective agency – then it should be clear that all three have substituted, in one way or another, the idea of power, that of the state, for human agency itself. The state may have been understood as the main agent of social change; however, it is not the agent of universal history. Only the people themselves can fulfil that role.

      These kinds of questions have become particularly urgent for the simple reason that millions of people worldwide, a large proportion of whom live on the African continent, are simply condemned to being unable to acquire the basic necessities of life, disconnected as they are from (formal) market relations, whether as buyers and consumers or as sellers of their labour power. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 75 million young people worldwide were unemployed in 2015,¹ although, of course, employment in itself does not guarantee escape from poverty and is frequently overestimated in the Global South, where so-called informal economic activities are prevalent. It is important to reiterate the well-known point that, for the foreseeable future, large numbers of these young people will go through life without ever experiencing employment and will consequently have to survive the most intense economic frustrations throughout their lives. Denied the opportunity to be exploited in the labour process, they remain the mere waste of an inhumane capitalist system. Under such conditions, of course, and in the absence of an emancipatory vision for humanity, the recourse to nihilistic, self-immolating and scapegoating political practices is unfortunately predictable. The acquisition of self-worth requires, inter alia, the capacity to feel oneself capable of agency but such agency is constantly frustrated by the unforgiving, crushing weight of liberal capitalism, which produces more crises, more wars and the condemnation of greater and greater numbers to permanent exclusion. It remains not only to recognise this system for what it is, but also to begin to think ways of overcoming it in a manner appropriate to our times.

      Until the 1980s it had been Marxism that provided a vision of some kind of alternative to the appalling inequalities, exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism. The decline of Marxist analysis and its replacement in intellectual thinking by what has been called the ‘language turn’ in the social sciences and humanities has been intimately connected to the worldwide disintegration of Marxism’s alternative emancipatory vision, due in no small measure to its embodiment in frequently criminal states. At the same time, no political vision has been provided by its ostensible replacement other than a simple ideological return to liberal neo-colonial precepts in somewhat new forms. Moreover, postcolonial theory, which posited itself as an intellectual alternative to academic Marxism, as Hallward (2001: 64) observes, proved itself unable to provide ‘a specific political position with respect to global trends’; as a result, it has remained exclusively of academic interest. In addition, the monopoly over the vision of emancipation which neo-liberalism had subsequently been able to achieve in Africa after a brief period of popular upsurge in the 1980s (notably illustrated by Francis Fukuyama’s arrogant and hasty assertion of the end of history) has itself been slowly eroding in recent years, most obviously due to economic crises (particularly but not exclusively in the West), and also to a serious loss of legitimacy, as evidenced by worldwide popular revolts. These revolts have also drawn attention to the limits of an authoritarian form of liberal democracy that appears to be biased against the majority, as it regularly excludes popular voices. The most notable of these rebellions have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East and have extended to southern and other parts of Europe and the Americas, while the continuous unrest in communities throughout South Africa can also be seen to form part of this worldwide reaction. This occurs particularly as capital attempts to make ordinary people pay for its financial profligacy, while, at the same time, supposedly democratic states appear to be governed increasingly by a culture of demophobia. Since neo-liberal capitalism has obviously shown itself unable to provide an emancipatory vision for all but a small oligarchy of wealthy rulers, and its Marxist historical alternative has been tainted by its past association with authoritarian states, there seems to be little in terms of an egalitarian alternative available. Uhuru is proving elusive if not unattainable.

      Related points could be made in relation to the African nationalist project in its universally applied statist form. Influenced in no small measure by Marxism from the 1950s to the 1970s, by 1980 state nationalism had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and external pressures; the replacement of the Organisation of African Unity by the African Union was one indication of this collapse and of its continued statism in a neo-liberal form. South Africa has been following this trend with a time lag of approximately two decades. While the ruling party and the state here have been plagued by the corrupting influences of capitalism and power, the vision of greater equality and freedom which had galvanised large numbers during the popular emancipatory upsurge of the 1980s has been heavily compromised, to the extent that ideas of the ‘public good’ or the ‘common good’ central to any notion of national freedom appear today to have vanished altogether from public discourse. A universal vision of an emancipatory future has been so eaten up