Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
of colonised formations is said not to exist, colonialism is now over and was supposedly beneficial anyway, independence was granted by the ex-colonial power, etc. In this way the stage is set for regular antagonism between state nationalism and neo-colonial oppression, as well as for the contradictory character of nationalism itself, partly critic and partly adherent of colonial and neo-colonial discourses (Chatterjee, 1986).
The reactive subjectivity attempts to reduce the Idea to the social and thus depoliticises, statises and socialises it so that the earlier world continues to all intents and purposes; it attempts a distortion of the Idea, often through the use of expertise in social science. The obscure subject, on the other hand, tries to delete the Idea altogether. We can see relatively clearly the reactive and obscure subjects unfolding in subjectivity in the postcolonial period. In particular, the project of ‘nation-building’ understood as a state subjectivity, constituted in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, amounts to a state reaction to the idea of the nation as subjective becoming, which Fanon outlined so clearly and which he wished to extend into a humanist project (Gibson, 2003).12 Fanon’s humanist project, which depended precisely on human agency, ends up being replaced by a ‘nation-building’ project founded on a technicist – technicist because statist – project of national development, which is unavoidably combined with patronage power relations, given the absence of an independently organised popular politics (Neocosmos, 2010b). Concurrently, the shift to xenophobic nationalism noted and deplored by Fanon is an indication of the rise of communitarian politics, as obscurity is allowed to descend on a purely political conception of the nation. Fanon is the only major theorist of African nationalism in the 20th century to develop a conception of nationalism – in his terms, ‘nationalist consciousness’ – that is non-identitarian, while all state forms of nationalism are identitarian in their essence. It is because Fanon’s conception of the nation and nationalism is non-identitarian that it forms the basis of an emancipatory politics of becoming.
Such an emancipatory conception of the nation can only be understood in excess of state politics. As soon as such politics are objectified and related to social categories, we become situated within an identitarian politics that is state-focused (e.g. through the medium of a party or a movement) and that contributes to making a sequence illegible. Moreover, while in the immediate postcolonial period state politics at least had a national project, today the disappearance of any genuinely inclusive conception of the nation, even at the level of the state itself, has allowed for the development of a communitarian identity politics that feeds on the kind of free-for-all which the new forms of neo-colonial domination have enabled. Recent events in Kenya (2007), South Africa (2008 and, even more recently, 2015), Nigeria (2009 and 2010) and elsewhere illustrate this rise in communitarian politics. It is in this context that what used to be known as the ‘national question’ is crying out to be (re-)addressed; it is within this same context that nationalism today must be given new forms in order to recover the kind of subjective becoming that Fanon extolled in the Algerian people’s struggle for freedom.13
The nation today is modelled by a politics of exclusion, itself founded on social indigeneity. Yet, in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, such xenophobia was limited in its extent by a number of intervening conceptions in state politics such as a certain (although recast) statist pan-Africanism, a statist nationalism (which did, however, suggest a certain amount of independence from neo-colonial prescriptions) and a conception of national development along with its frequent requirement for foreign migrant labour. Today, post-1980, these restraints are no longer present. The old idea of the nation has been largely undermined in a neo-liberal context where nationalism as a unifying project has been largely evacuated from thought. As a result, an obscure subject of the nation has come much more prominently to the fore in Africa, producing a simulacrum of Fanon’s national consciousness.
THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE MODE OF POLITICS IN AFRICA
To think purely subjectively about an NLS mode at a Third World level, and even at an African level, in the 20th century is extremely difficult without collapsing into model-building, i.e. into objectivism. Moreover, there is no single major individual who has expressed such a politics intellectually. A situated analysis of the work of Cabral, for example, as one of the major thinkers in this regard, is well beyond the scope of this book. Yet there is an important sense in which such a mode provided the parameters of political thought regarding the colonial and neo-colonial social formations of the immediate post-World War II period up to the mid-1970s. Its main figures included such disparate thinkers as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi as well as Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere closer to home, each of whom expressed a (more or less) different variant of the NLS mode. During this period, it was impossible to think politics in Africa in the absence of some form or other of anti-imperialism, even if only in rhetorical guise. This contrasts with the position today, when all states (if not all peoples) clamour to be part of empire. As Chatterjee (2004: 100) has so accurately observed, today the new ‘empire expands because more and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and the lure of economic prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella’. The underlying conception of state politics today, in what is commonly referred to as the Global South, is to be part and parcel of the new ‘democratic empire’.
We should start first by stressing the irreducibility of the politics of national liberation from colonialism, a point we have already encountered in our discussion of Fanon. Not many European thinkers understood this. One exception was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was able to show that, just as colonisation was centrally a political endeavour, so was the struggle for freedom (Sartre, 2006: 36ff). The solution to the problem of colonial oppression was thus not fundamentally economic (reducing poverty), social (providing health or educational systems) or indeed cultural or psychological, however much these factors may have played a role in oppression and resistance. Poverty, for the majority, was clearly insoluble under colonialism, as it was a necessary outcome of the colonial system. The demand for freedom is thus purely and irreducibly political and was to be found at the core of nationalist politics,14 especially of the mass politics that were in some cases unleashed in the struggles against colonialism, and evidently this required transformation in both personal and collective subjectivities. As Issa Shivji never tires of repeating, nationalism grew out of pan-Africanism and not the other way around. Pan-Africanism was founded on the demand for universal freedom, justice and equality for all African peoples and was perforce irreducible to narrow national interest. It was only a state nationalism that could eventually abandon pan-Africanism for a particular sociological conception of the national interest. At the same time, the struggle for freedom had a universal character given that humanity could not possibly be free in the presence of the colonisation of certain peoples by others. Talk of the ‘human’ and his or her rights under these conditions was totally hypocritical, as Césaire (1972) rightly noted.
Politics as subjectivity was therefore the core issue of the struggle for independence, and politics gradually ‘withered away’ as the state took over nationalist concerns with independence, as the ‘people-nation’ was replaced by the ‘nation-state’, as popular nationalism was transformed into state nationalism, and as democracy was overcome by the need to solve the ‘social question’ (Arendt, 1963) or what was known in the postcolonial period as ‘development’. The excessive subjectivities of the liberation struggle were rapidly replaced by expressive ones. The absence of (emancipatory) politics on the continent in the postcolonial period has been noted by Shivji (1985). Yet he was arguably not able to expand this observation to fully think through the disappearance of politics as being occasioned by the rise of the state and its replacement of popular self-activity, thus arrogating all political agency to itself. The difficulty faced by the NLS mode was its inability to sustain an irreducibly political conception of politics, since freedom for its proponents was to be attained through the building of a new state – a contradiction in terms if there was ever one. Through the medium of the state-party, an excessive affirmative conception of politics with a universal emancipatory content was gradually replaced by a politics founded on interests (economic, power, cultural, rights and entitlements) that were to be managed by the state. This became an obvious intellectual problem for Marxist analysis after independence, as it was clearly a particular state politics that created the social in the form of a ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’ class rather than the expected opposite of politics ‘reflecting’ the socio-economic