Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
1982). There are many other such examples in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South.
2.I must make clear here that I am not simply referring to a distinction between the socially constituted realms of the secular and the religious à la Durkheim, but to the broader notion of separating the idea of the human being from any conception of the spiritual, a distinction that was simply non-existent in precolonial Africa; it could be argued that one of the most destructive effects of colonial domination was precisely to enforce such a separation.
3.For important introductory discussions of the land question in Kenya, see Leys (1975) and Leo (1984).
4.Lonsdale does attempt to provide an account of a debate on politics among Mau Mau activists (1994: 142–9) but feels obliged to translate this into Western idioms and hence to anthropologise Kikuyu beliefs.
5.Chakrabarty (1998: 19) rightly emphasises the fact that the original intentions of subaltern studies were both political and intellectual in a ‘modernist’ sense: ‘these original intellectual ambitions and the desire to enact them were political in that they were connected to modern understandings of democratic public life’; they did not necessarily come from the lives of the subaltern classes themselves.
6.It is worth noting that the term ‘subaltern’ itself is used inconsistently, as at some times it refers to a social category and at others to a political category in the work of these writers. This is arguably a symptom of their inability to resolve the problem of equating the subjective with the objective, politics with history.
7.We will see in a later chapter that the same problem is present in sociological accounts of the events of May 1968 in France, for example. See Ross (2002).
8.For a brief account of the rebellion, see Troisi (2000: 342–8). Santals are referred to as ‘tribals’ in the Indian literature. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the Santals and African nationalities. Troisi notes ‘that for the Santals as also for most of the tribals, land provides not only economic security but a powerful link with one’s ancestors’ (p. 346).
9. Interestingly, the current manifestation of ‘tribal’ insurgency in India is the ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxalites’, who are addressed in the same way (militarily as well as discursively) by the democratic Indian state as the Santals were by the colonial state. See, in particular, Arundhati Roy’s brilliant pieces (2010a, 2010b).
10.It can be shown in fact that informality can be functional to state control; see Ananga Roy’s work on Calcutta (2003).
11.In fact, Chatterjee arguably misses out on another mode of rule (and its corresponding domain of politics), namely that prevalent in rural areas. Without my wishing to comment on India, it is apparent that the mode of rule in rural Africa differs fundamentally from those domains that Chatterjee recognises in the urban; in particular, the deployment of ‘tradition’, coercion and violence in rural areas in Africa is something which is not (yet?) so apparent in the urban. The classic text on this mode of rule is Mamdani (1996).
12.This point is also cited in Mamdani (1996: 189).
13.See, in particular, Maughan-Brown (1985) for a detailed textual analysis of fictional accounts of Mau Mau from different perspectives: colonial, liberal, nationalist and radical.
Chapter 4
The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
The colonized’s challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.
– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (translation modified)
The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence.
– Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source, 1973
NATIONAL LIBERATION AND POPULAR EMANCIPATION
The truth which the event of Haiti 1804 opened up was that of the political emancipation of colonised African peoples, the idea of independence and the formation of African nations achieved by people themselves through their own efforts. It was indeed with the struggles for African independence in mind that C.L.R. James wrote his Black Jacobins (James, 2001: xvi). And it was the idea of the nation that lay at the core of independence and post-independence political subjectivities; in times of struggle it was understood as a pure affirmation, but with the advent of state formation it was to be proposed as a social category. The sequence of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics lasted approximately from 1945, the date of the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, up to say 1975, 1973 being the year of the assassination of both Amílcar Cabral and Salvador Allende (Hallward, 2005). During this period a particular subjectivity developed through which national liberation and freedom were jointly thought in Africa in a specific manner. What makes the following investigation of the NLS mode necessary is that ‘nation’, the category through which freedom was thought is, in Lazarus’s terms, a circulating category, a category of politics as well as one of social science. In my terms, ‘nation’ can either be an ‘excessive’ or an ‘expressive’ category. I propose to look at the relations between the idea of the nation and emancipation primarily through the work of Frantz Fanon and, to a lesser extent, of Amílcar Cabral.
To maintain that nationalism in Africa has failed – or, more subtly perhaps, that it has deployed disastrous state politics, which coerce particular interests, as Chipkin (2007) does, for example – in current conditions when imperial domination and its attendant ideologies are still prevalent, and when these have altered their political form to stress a ‘democratising mission’ and ‘humanitarianism’, is simply to make it impossible to think new forms of nationalism, new forms of (non-identitarian) pan-Africanism, and consequently new forms of emancipatory politics on the continent.1 It means either resignation to the propaganda of liberal democracy and to the idea of the end of history, along with the final admission that ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’, with its massive levels of poverty and oppression and its constant need for war, is the best of all possible worlds with no chance of change in sight, or a simple retreat into dogmatism which can only reduce nationalism to its statist variety. Indeed, we need to bear constantly in mind that ‘we will never understand what constrains us and tries to make us despair, if we do not constantly return to the fact that ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology’ (Badiou, 2006a: 137). For those of us who live in Africa and in the countries of the Global South there is no path to emancipation that does not confront the power of empire in its neo-colonial form, which is only another way of saying that nationalism is not an obsolete emancipatory conception – far from it. The point is to distinguish it analytically and politically from the state itself. It is in this context of popular struggles for national liberation that ‘[the term] “people” here takes on a meaning which implies the disappearance of the existing state ... What is affirmed within large popular movements is always the latent necessity of what Marx considered the supreme objective of all revolutionary politics: the withering away of the state’ (Badiou, 2013a: 16, my translation).
But to affirm this is not sufficient. It is also important to analyse the character of the past sequence for which national liberation was the defining category, in order to bring out the singularity of its politics and to understand its limits and decline in terms of its own categories; to make sense of why it became saturated and therefore why the idea of freedom-in-the-nation lost its original emancipatory content. This requires more than can be done here, but what I wish to argue is that one reason for the saturation of nationalist politics in Africa was that these were not able to sustain an affirmative conception of the nation and that the nation gradually came to refer to a social category in the thought of politics as it unfolded over time. From a universal notion of national emancipation concerning all humanity, which is in Badiou’s terms ‘anobjective’, an ‘incalculable emergence rather than a describable structure’ (Badiou, 2009b: 26, 28), we gradually come to a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, according