Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
character of mid-20th-century anti-imperialist politics are arguably related to the fact that, while ostensibly concerned with emancipating colonial populations from an oppressive state, the NLS mode equated such emancipation with the construction of a nation-state. It thus combined both excessive and expressive subjectivities in a contradictory manner; it had both an anti-state and a statist aspect to it. We have already seen that this was a feature of Fanon’s thought; similar conceptions can be found in Cabral’s writings and in that of all major nationalist thinkers.15 In fact, Cabral (1973: 840) goes so far as to recognise quite lucidly – having had experience of many African states at first hand – the core problem posed by the nature of the postcolonial state in achieving popular emancipation. The problem of the post-independence state, he stressed, is ‘the most important problem in the liberation movement’ (emphasis in original). This fundamental contradiction was apparent in that it was always easier to be clear on what the NLS mode was against – as in ‘decolonisation’, ‘anti-imperialism’, ‘anti-racism’– rather than what it was for. Independence easily became the lowest common denominator, although equality and justice were also present to various extents in popular practices. Indeed, it would have been impossible to sustain any mass popular mobilisation without such practices and assumptions. Cabral expresses the limit of what was thinkable within the NLS mode of politics: the problem was the kind of state built after independence – it could not be the state itself. Today we must not remain prisoners of this limit.
In general, the NLS mode was predominantly a mode conceived, to use Lazarus’s term, ‘in exteriority’ in Africa, and was hegemonic in thought probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People’s Conference in Accra) and the mid-1970s.16 The NLS mode is a truly 20th-century mode,17 and its language was frequently borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode, though the term ‘class’ was usually displaced by that of ‘nation’, with Cabral even speaking in terms of a ‘nation-class’, to reconcile Marxist and nationalist conceptions (de Bragança and Wallerstein, vol. 1, 1982: 69). Following Lazarus, its main external social invariants were the ‘state’ and the ‘nation’ (which was equated with the ‘people’). At the same time, mass struggle against the colonial state and its racist politics contained elements of antagonism to the state as such, particularly the subjective fusion of the nation with the people in practice through an emphasis on equality. We therefore have in this mode a fusion in thought between people, nation and state, with the first two names dominating during periods of mass struggle and the latter two dominating most obviously after independence.
By 1975, the last vestiges of popular-democratic struggles had ended with the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Africa (and Vietnam at a world level), followed in 1980 by that of Zimbabwe. Even though the language of this mode was dominant within the South African African National Congress (ANC) in exile, whose perspective on the liberation struggle was largely congruent with that mode, I shall suggest in the next chapter that during the 1980s in South Africa a new sequence of politics was inaugurated. During 1984–6 in particular, evidence exists for the beginnings of a new singular (internal) mode of politics for the continent, although such a mode was never fully developed (as evidenced by, inter alia, the absence of any figure to systematise it theoretically). The nationalist form of struggle had organised military violence at its core. For Fanon, violence liberates both self and nation, i.e. it creatively distinguishes the nation and the people from colonial violence. The combination of the exercise of violence as a counter to colonial violence with the democratic aspirations of the people is located in the people’s army, people’s war and the political practice of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas were to be the people in arms, the armed militants; the guerrilla army was the people at war: ‘we are armed militants, not militarists’, Cabral proclaimed (cit. Davidson, 1981: v). The various sites of a genuinely emancipatory mode of politics, when that existed, varied, but were likely to include the mass movement and its constituent organisations, the guerrilla army and peasant communities. Militarism was a statist deviation from this conception (easily fallen into, given the centrality of ‘armed struggle’), when technical military solutions became dominant over political ones. Given the centrality of organised military resistance, which frequently became a dogma, the dominant trend – however much this was opposed by thinkers like Cabral – was for national liberation movements to end up providing a mere mirror image of colonial politics in their subjective practice.
In general, in the same way that a demarcation of a ‘proletarian politics’ was central to the Bolshevik mode, the demarcation of a ‘national politics’, of the nation itself constituted by such politics, was central to the NLS mode. The questions of this politics were thus: who is the nation and its people? (not, what is the nation?) and what are its politics? The answer provided – at least by the most emancipatory versions of that mode – was that the nation is constituted by those who fight consistently against colonialism and neo-colonialism – hence by a certain amount of political equality. To the extent that this was adhered to, this politics could be said to be partly structured ‘in interiority’. The nation is not race, it is not colour, it is not class, it is not gender,18 it is not tradition, it is not even state, but through transcending these divisions it is open to all Africans, irrespective of ethnic, racial or national origins, i.e. to all people. It is a purely political subjectivity (Neocosmos, 2003). In Cabral’s terms: ‘In Guiné and Cape Verde today the people ... mean for us those who want to chase the Portuguese colonialists out of our land. They are the people, the rest are not of our land even if they were born there. They are not the people of our land; they are the population but not the people. This is what defines the people today’ (Cabral, 1980: 89).
Hence the question of who was a member of the nation or the people acquired a purely political, not a social or historical, answer. As we have seen, for Fanon, the nation during the liberation struggle was also a purely political construct undetermined by any social category other than those who simply lived there (e.g. Fanon, 1989: 152). As a result, this politics was coloured by pan-Africanism, which only gave rise to a contradiction once nation was equated with state. In the meantime, national consciousness was mediated by the popular movement. In Cabral’s words: ‘if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture ... The liberation movement must ... embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture – which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society’ (Cabral, 1973: 43–4 emphasis in original).
Thus, in so far as the nation has a social base, it is the poorest, the most excluded (the ‘wretched of the earth’) and particularly the rural peasantry who form it. The nation has a bias towards the rural; not only are rural people a numerical majority, but they are the most politically excluded (the ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s terms); they have nothing to gain from the continuation of colonialism; only they can be truly universal and consistent in their demand for national freedom and democracy. The (petty) bourgeoisie and workers, as well as the inhabitants of the towns more generally, acquire some benefits from colonialism; they vacillate politically and are not consistently anti-colonial; their political and cultural references are to the metropolis. There is, among the bourgeoisie in particular, a tendency to ‘compradorisation’ evidently realised during the postcolonial period (Shivji, 1985). In the final analysis, the nation is composed of those who fight consistently for national freedom, irrespective of social origins. This is what national politics amounted to for this mode, at least in its popular-emancipatory version, in so far as this existed. Yet the constant reference to the class foundations of the politics of national emancipation throws up a contradiction expressed most clearly in Cabral’s well-known remark concerning the need for the petty bourgeoisie to ‘commit class suicide’ if it is not to betray the objectives of the struggle for national liberation:
in order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one road: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to repudiate the temptations to become ‘bourgeois’ and the natural pretensions of its class mentality; to identify with the classes of workers, not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that ... the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class, to be restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations