Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
of politics founded on affirming the universality of humanity. The fact that it took a successful struggle against slavery to instil in thought the truth of the universality of humanity with no exceptions whatsoever constitutes a major gift by Africans to humanity, which should be the object of celebration. Unfortunately this has not been the case.
Of course, for the dominant knowledge of the time, slaves simply could not possibly be understood to successfully affirm their freedom and humanity, for they were not (fully) human, being African; in fact, a ‘free native’ was a contradiction in terms, as Africans were by definition unfree, irrespective of whether they were slaves or not. One could not be both a ‘man’ and a ‘native’; the two were mutually exclusive. Yet for writers such as Nesbitt, Haiti was simply the culmination of the subjectivity of what he calls the ‘Radical Enlightenment’: ‘It was the Saint-Domingue Revolution of 1791–1804 that carried forward the new logic of universal equality under a single imperative: no humans can be enslaved’ (Nesbitt, 2009: 97). There was for him no fundamental invention, destruction and reordering of thought; after all, the French state itself was thinking through Enlightenment categories – it was just a matter presumably of ‘radicalising’ these.
To reason in this manner is not only to understate the revolutionary character and extraordinary achievements of the Saint-Domingue and Haiti events, but it also enables Nesbitt to suggest that, as human rights were pushed to their ultimate then, so they can constitute the basis of an emancipatory project today.21 He recognises the current imperial character of human rights discourse but asserts: ‘beyond any – necessary – critique of its ideological misuse in the era of the UN as an arm of empire, the question of human rights must be rethought from below; they are not a problem to be left to nation-states and their mouthpieces’ (Nesbitt, 2009: 101, emphasis in original). The problem here is, of course, the idea of ‘rethinking from below’ discourses and politics that are those of the state and empire, as these notions are said to have been somehow ‘misused’ and needing to be ‘rethought’. Presumably such ‘rethinking from below’ could apply to all sorts of universal categories, from the market to democracy, freedom, equality and the state, all having been radically ‘misused’ by power over the centuries. ‘Rethinking from below’, even if we were to know clearly what it means, is not a serious emancipatory conception, for it ultimately attempts to think emancipation from within state categories; one cannot think emancipation from within and from beyond state categories simultaneously: a thorough break from state subjectivity is necessary. In this context, Badiou (2012c) notes quite rightly that ‘one cannot oppose a thought perspective by sharing its axioms’.
Moreover, to assert such a ‘thinking from below’ is to forget that it is no longer possible to affirm the universality of humanity through a human rights language today, as the whole idea of ‘natural right’ on which the 18th-century universal conception was founded is no longer in existence and the ‘right to property’ reigns supreme (Gauthier, 1992). The language of universal human rights of the Human Freedom mode has been fundamentally altered today into something quite different. Gauthier’s work shows how during the French Revolution an extensive struggle occurred between, on the one hand, the idea of a fundamental and overriding notion of ‘natural right’, which was seen (following Locke) to be universal (and which Toussaint stressed), and, on the other hand, the primacy of the rights of property owners – the rights of Man ‘in society’ – which subordinated rights to a given social division of labour and hierarchy and which has constituted the dominant conception of ‘universal human rights’ ever since Thermidor.22 Césaire’s comment on this understanding of human rights is still accurate today, unfortunately: ‘the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has cherished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been – and is – narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist’ (1972: 15).
To orient one’s politics around human rights discourse today is to think within state politics, as I shall show in detail in later chapters. In Saint-Domingue in the 18th century, human rights could develop into an emancipatory politics precisely because the political situation or world in question was a colonial one and hence was unable to sustain a universal conception of the human, however much this may have been a hegemonic state discourse in the French metropolis.23 In the 20th century, the idea of national self-determination could only be held consistently against colonial power, as we shall see; it could not be comprehended from the perspective of the colonial state or the coloniser, as a number of militant writers of national freedom made clear. In either case the Idea of universal humanity or freedom-through-the-nation could not be a state conception exclusively, for it was only realisable through politics at a distance from the state. Any attempt to think it exclusively through the state only became indicative of its collapse.
Today, as Chatterjee (2004: 100) rightly observes, at a time when the ‘protection of human rights is a function of empire’, human rights can no longer be the basis of any emancipatory politics in the neo-colonies. Human rights discourse in Haiti in the 18th century constituted a politics at a distance from the state, and thus could be emancipatory. Today, human rights discourse orients the politics of the reactive and obscure subjects and, as a result, can only be opposed to emancipation. Finally, it should perhaps be noted that Badiou’s idea of ‘resurrection’, which one could possibly appeal to in this context, brings to light only the names of the ‘egalitarian’ or ‘communist’ invariants of every sequence, and not the names and categories through which they are acted out; these can only be the categories of specific sequences which by their very nature are singular (Badiou, 2009a: 76).
APPENDIX
Mandé Charter or Oath of the Manden, 1222
Source: Youssouf Tata Cissé and Wâ Kamissoko, La Grande Geste du Mali, vol. 2, Soundjata ou la gloire du Mali, Paris: Karthala-Arsan, 1991, p. 39, my translation.
1.The hunters declare:
Every (human) life is a life.
It is true that a life comes into existence before another life,
But no life is more ‘ancient’, more respectable than any other,
In the same way no one life is superior to any other.
2.The hunters declare:
As each life is a life,
Any wrong done unto a life requires reparation.
Consequently,
No one should gratuitously attack his neighbour,
No one should wrong his neighbour,
No one should torment his fellow man.
3.The hunters declare:
That each person should watch over their neighbour,
That each person should venerate their progenitors,
That each person should educate their children as it should be done,
That each person should provide
For the needs of their family.
4.The hunters declare:
That each person should watch over the country of their fathers.
By country, or motherland, or ‘faso’,
One must understand also people;
For ‘any country, any land,
Which was to see people disappear,
Would soon become nostalgic’.
5.The hunters declare:
Hunger is not a good thing.
There is nothing worse than this
On this earth.
As long as we hold the quiver and the bow,
Hunger will no longer kill anyone in the Manden,
If by chance hunger were to arrive;
War will no longer destroy any village
For