Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
of critique that is aimed at forging the beginnings of a postcolonial episteme’ (2009: 255). This may be a valid way of proceeding; however, the forging of such an episteme, I maintain, would require an analysis in terms of historical sequences, which may indeed be quite discontinuous, as Foucault (1968) himself pointed out long ago, thus indicating a way around the problematic concept of continuous historical time. Indeed, Foucault notes that it is precisely ‘the episteme [which] is the “apparatus” (dispositif) which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may or may not be characterised as scientific’ (Foucault, 1980: 197). To this Spivak (1988: 298) adds that it distinguishes ‘the superstitious (ritual, etc.) from the scientific’. It is this episteme that I have referred to as ‘scientism’. On the other hand, a postcolonial episteme as proposed by Lalu would have to begin from an understanding of politics as purely subjective and hence sequential in order to fully discard the scientism and historicism inherent in holding to a correspondence between the subjective and the objective.
CONCLUSION
Where, then, does this discussion leave the subjectivity of the Mau Mau rebel in Kenya in the early 1950s? For a start, we do not have to abandon the rational or embrace a distant anthropologising of difference to make sense of this. Lonsdale is caught in the trap of the liberal historian sympathetic to the oppressed, but ultimately unable to break from the scientifically neo-colonial because of an implicit superiority, which can only locate African rebels’ consciousness within a ‘tribal’ context of ‘moral ethnicity’. That the term ‘ethnicity’ is given positive attributes while ‘tribe’ is given negative ones does not overcome the neo-colonial perspective. Such is the idealisation of ethnic life that it not only irons out power contradictions within Kikuyu society, but also fails to allow for the subaltern to speak in his or her own names and categories about what he or she thought and practised in the rebellion. Lonsdale shows very well how Kikuyu ‘moral economy’ or ‘moral ethnicity’ was founded on an understanding of the individual as a ‘subject’. Political agency was seen as central to adulthood in particular; Lonsdale may refer to it as ‘virtue’, but its essence can be read as fundamentally political, not moral.
In other words, in the context of colonial domination and land appropriation, Mau Mau activists could only realise subjecthood and adulthood – their collective and individual being – through fighting the British for the return of their land. But given his liberal proclivities, Lonsdale feels obliged to link this to an idealisation of ethnic culture, something that it is not at all clear the participants themselves were doing. Indeed, it is not clear why Mau Mau political subjectivity could not simply be read as concerning the assertion of human dignity, the simple attainment of their humanity, as Fanon had stated; the kinds of idioms used should not affect recognition of this. We are provided by Lonsdale not so much with a view of what the collective consciousness of militants looked like, but rather with the anthropological context of a very complex subjective system from which we are supposed to deduce a subjectivity that combined the notion of the human as ‘subject’, spirituality, political affirmation and economic demand for land. What is said to hold all this together is ‘ethnicity’, a quite unhelpful notion in this case, as such a ‘holding together’ had to be achieved in actual practice, through collective struggle under conditions of crisis – as Fanon showed in the context of the nation – thus clearly redefining the ‘ethnic’ in the process. Of course, the human individual as ‘subject’ (and thereby culture and being) had to be (re-)created by Mau Mau; it had not been given by colonialism. What had been given in fact were evidently servitude, passivity, victimhood and the attempted destruction of the ‘human subject’. In re-creating their subjecthood, there is evidence that the Mau Mau may have exceeded their ethnic place within the confines of a colonially constructed ‘traditional society’. According to Furedi (1989: 18), the movement ‘put into question the existing socio-economic structures of society’.12 Evidently, Furedi comes to this conclusion from concentrating on the lower-class nature of the guerrillas. Yet we do not have to understand this subjectivity in such a socially reductionist manner; it is perfectly possible to understand Mau Mau’s social ‘radicalism’ as a subjective excess over ethnic consciousness during a limited sequence. The problem of wishing to stress the ethnic, national or class attributes of Mau Mau simply results from the insistence of analysts on noting exclusively the expressive character of their political subjectivities, to the detriment of popular reason.
At the same time, the colonial obscure subject would deny the assertion of humanity by the colonised by emphasising atavism, backwardness and incomprehensible brutish behaviour on their part.13 The post-independence national leadership, which actually emanated from within the same Kikuyu nationality, chose not so much to echo the colonial view, as Berman maintains (1997), as to stress that nothing of importance had really happened and that what might have occurred was pathological and simply violent, and should therefore be forgotten as quickly as possible. Thus Kenyatta was to assert in 1967: ‘We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred toward one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been [sic] eradicated, and must never be remembered again’ (cit. Furedi, 1989: 212). For this reason, Mau Mau is of more general import for understanding the obscure subjectivity of the imperial world and the reactive nature of postcolonial state subjectivities, as well as some of the African features of emancipatory political subjectivity in the sequence of national liberation.
African political idioms have been systematically and necessarily misrecognised and distorted by Eurocentric scientism, particularly as these have taken the form of subjective affirmations within the idioms of ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’, because, for the scientistic colonial episteme, subjectivity is always related to the objective in the final analysis. In Depelchin’s (2005) terms, silences have been produced in African history by (epistemic) ‘syndromes’, which necessarily lead to the occlusion of African agency, not to mention subjecthood. The character of scientism has meant, as Fanon recognised, that ‘for the colonized, objectivity is always directed against him’ (1990: 61, translation modified). The human sciences in general, and history in particular, are, however, Eurocentric only in a contextual and derivative sense, for they are currently governed by an episteme that ensures that they remain disciplines of state power and not of emancipation, wherever they may be deployed. In other words, it is not the colonial condition that calls forth a specific Eurocentric episteme. Scientism is already in existence and, when deployed under colonial conditions, can only silence the colonised, as it silences all subjectivities beyond objectivism. History is unable to express the subjectivity of displacement because of its epistemic configuration. It therefore cannot express the discontinuity and excess that constitute the defining characteristics of emancipatory subjectivity, with the result that it is wedded to a continuity of time. It is therefore a history of the state.
To corroborate and paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) well-known argument, the subaltern cannot be heard from within the parameters of the scientistic episteme; the only voices to be heard are the monotonous drone of the obscure neo-colonial subject and the oppressive beat of the reactive African state. What binds both today, and what blinds us to the possible political content of African idioms, are the notions of civil society, human rights and multiculturalism, for which politics is fundamentally social and cannot be understood outside of a state domain, as I shall show in later chapters. History, as it exists today, is a state discourse, as are all human sciences. To transform such disciplines means to develop new methodologies for the analysis of political subjectivities within delimited historical sequences. In this manner we can begin to develop categories for the understanding of people as reasoning beings with a will to make political choices which they and we all have to confront in thinking freedom.
NOTES
1.See Ranger (1968) and Hobsbawm (1974), among others. In the Congo, for example, a number of nationalist movements were expressed in religious idioms. The ‘antonian’ movement of Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) (Thornton, 1998) and the Radical Movement of Prophets (1921–51) led by Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951) come particularly to mind. They were spiritual and prophetic movements as well as a nationalist movement; so was the Nyabingi movement in the Great Lakes Region (Murindwa-Rutanga, 2011). I am not counting here the Muslim theocratic states, but one very interesting resistance movement, principally because it combined Islamic