Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
more theological notion of the ‘miracle’ are not altogether far removed from Badiou’s conception. However, Badiou (1988) is the only one who has theorised this concept in great detail and has located it materially in modern philosophy. As he stresses himself: ‘there is nothing theological or metaphysical in my conception of an event’ (Badiou, 2011e: 14, my translation). See Arendt (2006) and Althusser (1994). For an introduction to the idea of the event, see Žižek (2014).
29.In particular for my specific concerns, one cannot refer, for example, to a ‘colonial subject’ as produced by the colonial state but only in relation to an excessive event such as a national liberation struggle during which such a subject overcomes its colonial condition. The notion of the ‘colonial subject’ is thus an oxymoron. Whether in fact colonial domination could be seen as an event or as the simulacrum of an event for the precolonial world is another question, which can only be adequately addressed elsewhere.
30.See Badiou (2005a: ch. 9) for a discussion of his notion of ‘Thermidorian’ and Badiou (2006a: Part 3, ch. 2) for his detailed assessment of the Cultural Revolution in China.
31.It should be stressed that the core operation here concerns politics and not memory; the latter is a function of the former.
32.I am grateful to Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba for reminding me of this point. For discussions of some important issues in Badiou’s typology of evental subjectivities, see Žižek (2007) and Power and Toscano (2009).
33.‘The real is simultaneously in its place and in excess of this place’ (Badiou et al., 1972: 229, my translation).
34.One recent attempt to account explicitly for the manifestations or absences of political agency in terms of psychological perspectives is to be found in Cohen (2001).
35.Moses Finley cites Pericles (from Thucydides) as saying: ‘we consider anyone who does not share in the life of the citizen not as minding his own business but as useless’ (1985: 30), a remark which illustrates clearly the Greek conception of politics as agency. Fanon’s equivalent was: ‘every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor’ (1990: 161).
Chapter 2
From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
It is not a circumstantial freedom given as a concession to us alone which we require, but the adoption of the absolute principle that any man born red, black or white cannot be the property of his fellow man.
– Toussaint Louverture, 1796 (my translation)
A free man prefers poverty to humiliation.
– Antoine-Louis de Saint-Just, 1791
THE HUMAN FREEDOM MODE OF POLITICS, 1791–1796
Popular struggles against slavery by Africans have a long history. One of the earliest statements against slavery on the continent itself dates (as far as can be established) from 1222 and is known as The Hunters’ Oath of the Manden or the Mandé Charter.1 This affirmation is based on the oral traditions of the Mandinka hunters in the area covering parts of modern Mali, Senegal and Guinea and is said to date back to the reign of King Sunjata of the Mandinka. Statements from the charter read like an 18th-century European human rights document and are replete with the recognition of the truth of the universal nature of humanity. For example:
The hunters declare that ... war will no longer destroy villages for the capture of slaves ... from now on no one will place the bit in the mouth of his fellow man in order to sell him ... The hunters declare that the essence of slavery is abolished from this day forth from one wall to the other, from one frontier to the other of the Mandé ... The hunters declare that each person is free to use his own person as he sees fit, each person is free and responsible for his own actions, each person is free to dispose of the fruits of his own labour (Cissé and Kamissoko, 1991: 39, my translation).
Interestingly, this is not a statement emanating from a state and it seems to have inaugurated an event for a world in which slavery was then an accepted practice. The political subjectivity of this document is framed as a pure affirmation and, although firmly located within culture, its language is not that of power but operates around a central category of ‘life’. Life is universal, it maintains; all lives are of equal value. Life here is stressed in opposition to hunger and famine, which lead both to death and to the selling of people into slavery. The opposition of life and death is at the core of the idea of universal humanity proclaimed by the hunters’ oath.
By 1236, another Mandinka document, much more clearly of state origin, had rubbed out all traces of human equality and freedom and replaced it with a statement regarding the hierarchical stratification of society and the rights and duties of each social group.2 It states, inter alia ‘Do not ill-treat slaves. You should allow them to rest one day per week and to end their working day at a reasonable time. We are the master of the slave but not of the bag he carries’ (article 20). Apart from the fact that Africans had been thinking along the lines of a universal conception of humanity long before it occurred to Europeans to do so, it seems important to note that the singularity of the subjective affirmation of the Mandé Charter evidently asserted a universal and eternal truth. That this episode has been occluded in the history books does not lessen this truth. At the same time, it should be noted that the second statement amounted to a subjective reaction by power to the first, as it recognised and legitimised the practice of slavery, thus adapting and moderating the new situation arising from the effects of the universal singularity – and hence the truth – of the Mandé Charter by simply ensuring and reasserting that slavery should continue, but now in a ‘reasonable way’ for ‘reasonable’ slave-owners. We now have a new world in which the consequences of the truth of the universality of humanity are undermined and extinguished but in which the slave system is apparently ‘moderated’. Following Badiou, this constitutes a clear example of the essence of reactive reformist state subjectivity faced with the revolutionising effects of a truth. Ironically, it is this later document that is seen today as an authentic expression of African culture. The Oath of the Manden, on the other hand, being an obviously excessive affirmation, has quite simply been effaced from the history books.
When the Atlantic slave trade became established as part of the West and Central African political landscape in the 17th and 18th centuries, its devastating effects were resisted. Resistance took a number of forms. One of great importance was the healing spiritual cult known as Lemba among the BaKongo in the area of Lower Congo (Bas Congo). The significance of this institution is twofold. Firstly, it constituted one of the most successful and long-lasting ‘drums of affliction’ (ngoma) on the continent, and played an important role in governing the population through controlling markets and in healing individuals, families and communities from the ravages of the slave trade in particular. The main academic study of Lemba, by John Janzen, speaks of it euphemistically in universalistic terms as a ‘seventeenth century “cure for capitalism” created by insightful Congo coast people who perceived that the great trade was destroying their society’ (Janzen, 1982: xiii). Secondly, as with other beliefs and secret cults, Lemba migrated to the Americas and was prevalent in Saint-Domingue/Haiti during the successful fight against slavery there. African migrants (though slaves were coerced, they were still migrants) did not suddenly abandon their African cosmology when they landed in the New World. Lemba was clearly adapted to their new situation and the struggles they had to engage in to assert their humanity against overwhelming odds. Lemba is also important in that it combined political subjectivities with spiritual ones, curative beliefs with conceptions regarding the nature of society. It offers an important insight into how African cosmology could provide one of the foundations for a singularity of universal humanity. In resisting the slave trade, Lemba developed a politics at a distance from the state.
According to Janzen, ‘Lemba, a major historic cult of healing, trade and marriage relations, came into being in the seventeenth century in a triangular region extending from the Atlantic coast to Malebo Pool between today’s cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and from the Congo river northward to the Kwilu-Niari river valley’ (1982: 3). ‘In effect, although couched in the mold of a drum of affliction [a healing cult], Lemba was