Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
through access to power that the state can no longer be said to represent the nation, the general interest. On the contrary, the fact that state power in Africa, independently of its ideological colour, has invariably been oppressive of the majority suggests that the problem resides within power itself, whether formally democratic or not. The Marikana massacre in South Africa, in which 34 miners were slaughtered by the police on a single day in August 2012, is only one powerful recent illustration of this fundamental collapse of an emancipatory vision and its replacement by the increasingly repressive practices of an ostensibly democratic state. At the same time, the simultaneous rise of Right-wing authoritarian nationalisms within so-called democratic societies has not bypassed Africa either. A globalised xenophobic politics is now pervasive. The dream of national liberation so prevalent in the 1960s in Africa, in spite of its brief revival in the 1980s, has thoroughly evaporated and been replaced by a vulgar simulacrum of its vision of freedom.
But to assert the end of history also amounts in fact to asserting the end of thought. At best, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou would say, all that is said to remain is opinions, all of which are of more or less equal value; not truths which are of universal value. Thus, to assert the end of history is at one and the same time to assert the finitude of thought and the absence of the truly human. Yet, as philosophy frequently has insisted, thought is eternal. In the words of the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, thought is ‘in its essential nature, incapable of limitation ... [Moreover] it is in the progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude’ (cit. Diagne, 2010: 44). We must therefore not allow ourselves to succumb to the intellectual laziness of opinion, particularly today, when the temptation to provide easy answers to complex problems is increasingly prevalent.
In order, then, to confront and overcome the crisis of thought, which has provided the conditions for quasi-fascist xenophobic politics to prevail from Nigeria to South Africa (not forgetting India, France, Greece, Russia, Italy and elsewhere), it is of crucial importance to develop new ideas of human emancipation, freedom and dignity; something which neo-liberal thought has abysmally failed to do, as it is obvious that it has presided over ever-widening inequalities. The core problem concerns precisely the provision of new concepts and categories that make a universal emancipatory egalitarian alternative thinkable again and understandable in what may be termed a ‘post-classist’ context. The classical Marxist view that there is a given subject of history, embodied in the social category of ‘the working class’, which will deliver humanity from capitalist oppression when its potential qualities are finally actualised, is no longer tenable. It is impossible to think universality through the simple deployment of identitarian particularities. The result of this problem has been that there is little left today in terms of a thought of emancipatory politics, with which to confront the massive increase in capitalist exploitation and oppression with its consequent economic disasters and wars resulting from unfettered plunder. These are combined with the political exclusion of greater and greater numbers of the world’s population from any ability to control, even in a minimal sense, their own lives – a fact which is itself arguably the main cause of the poverty that everyone deplores.
Of course, it is only from among the politically excluded that a political subject with an emancipatory politics can see the light of day; yet, at the same time, one cannot endow a specific social category in advance with the qualities required to propel history to a given end. Even though it is only the people who make universal history, who the people – more precisely, who the politically excluded – are in any specific situation differs, and they can only be recognised by what they think, say and do. The problem is fundamentally that social science today does not listen to what the excluded have to say; the knowledgeable apparently know what people think (or are supposed to think) in advance, for they speak for them, using a priori scientific categories. That large numbers of such excluded people live on the African continent is certainly not a new phenomenon, yet these people are still not being listened to, despite the historical exit of the colonial state. In fact, their numbers have been increasing under the depredations of an ever-violent and despoliating capitalism, while the fundamental features of colonialism, such as virulent racism and the view that the people constitute the enemy of reason and progress, continue to be crudely and uncritically reproduced.
Today it should be clear that there is no subject of history, neither is there an end to history. This means that there is no end to human agency; there is no end to politics, for politics is irreducible to the state, and this despite the fact that the horizon of emancipation is the disappearance of the state itself, for the notion of an ‘egalitarian state’ is simply an oxymoron. In order to rethink human emancipation (another word for equality) on the African continent, this book has of necessity therefore had to be a work of theory concerned with political subjectivities as objects of investigation and with developing categories for thinking an emancipatory future. It is not a work of history, even though there is much discussion of history in it. It is, rather, a book which opens up an area for investigation – that of emancipatory political subjectivities. It insists on approaching their understanding in a rational manner ‘from within’ – in other words, using their own terms and categories – and not exclusively as reflections or representations of something external to them such as social location within a complex matrix of social relations, or ‘Man’, or history, or culture, or state policies or even discourses of power, inter alia. Emancipatory politics concern not so much power relations as a process of subjectivation.
It follows that the exposition in this book is not chronological but is organised around theoretical questions: in Part 1, the question of understanding historical sequences of popular emancipation during which thought can be seen to exceed the notion, upheld by the discipline of history, of continuous objective time; and, in Part 2, the question of making sense of politics in its own terms and thus of exceeding the socially reductive analyses provided by the discipline of sociology. The absence of a chronological exposition has meant that there is some empirical toing and froing in the argument, although I have attempted to reduce this to a minimum. I thus pursue theoretical issues in depth in a rigorous manner and draw the appropriate consequences for the thinking of emancipatory politics on the continent. Although concerned with the whole of Africa, this book is more focused on South Africa than on any other African country. The easy availability of literature and data on this country, the sophistication of some of its political movements and my familiarity with it made this inevitable; the narrative, however, ends in early 2013, soon after the horrific episode of the Marikana massacre. Apart from Saint-Domingue/Haiti discussed in chapter 2, different parts of Africa feature as illustrations in different chapters: Congo in chapter 2, Kenya in chapter 3, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in chapter 10, the African state in general in chapters 12 and 13, Malawi in chapter 14, and other parts of the continent in chapter 15. It should go without saying that I include South Africa within Africa, which I do not consider as the (more or less exotic, more or less incapable) Other, as much of the South African literature tends to do. As a result, Africa is not considered here as a mere footnote to the South African historical experience; on the contrary, I maintain that South Africa is only understandable within an African historical and political context of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
This book has its origins in comments by two close friends of mine. The first is the Nigerian intellectual Adebayo Olukoshi, who insisted to me during a conversation in Uppsala in the 1990s that those historians who simply accounted for the struggles for independence on the African continent in terms of poverty and economic deprivation were not only empirically wrong but also guilty of racism, as they denied Africans the capacity to think their dignity and agency as human beings. Pushed to its logical conclusion,