Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
contradiction consists in the fact that, despite the insistence on the idea that politics represents class interests, it becomes apparent that if liberation/emancipation is to be achieved, especially after the moment of independence, interests must be superseded by a politics irreducible to class interest. While understanding this crucial problem, Cabral is only able to express it in moral rather than political terms, to move out of politics into psychology and the apolitical: ‘This alternative – to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class – constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle ... This shows us, to a certain extent, that if national liberation is essentially a political question, the conditions for its development stamp on it certain characteristics that belong to the sphere of morals’ (p. 136).19
It is arguably, therefore, the problem of political representation that lies at the core of the difficulties faced by the NLS mode. The fact that representation was mainly understood in Marxist – or, in the case of Cabral, Leninist – language does not constitute its main problem, for even when national liberation came to be understood in liberal terms (as in South Africa in the 1990s) the problem remained. In sum, the NLS mode was caught within its own subjective limits. However, only in a small number of cases was a politics inspired by this mode not thought exclusively by means of external referents. These rare instances, in the writings of Fanon and Cabral in particular, were brief and contradictory. What is interesting to note is that both these figures were spared the status of becoming ‘state revolutionaries’. Fanon in particular was excluded by his foreignness from holding high office in Algeria and died at a young age, while Cabral was assassinated before assuming state power. Of course, it was the national movement (made up of a ‘front’ or ‘congress’ of a number of organisations) that usually embodied the organisational subjectivity of the nation, not always a party as such. However, there were differences here: parties were, for some (like Fanon), Western imports with few roots among the people; for others (like Cabral), the party represented the vanguard: ‘Why have we formed a party and others formed movements? ... We called it Party, because we understood that to lead a people to liberation and progress, the fundamental need was a vanguard, folk who show in fact that they are the best and can prove it in practice’ (1980: 85).20
The dominant tendency, of course, was for political movements to become state parties more or less rapidly as popular politics were gradually fused with the state. This subjective fusion is apparent in Cabral’s last speech before his assassination in 1973:
The proclamation of the existence of our state ... will be the basis of the active existence of our nation ... legitimate representatives of our people, chosen by the populations and freely elected ... will proceed to ... declaring before the world that our African nation, forged in the struggle, is irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonialists and that from then on the executive of our state under the leadership of our Party, the PAIGC, will be the sole, true and legitimate representative of our people in all the national and international questions that concern them (Cabral, 1980: 289).
Yet at the same time Cabral was aware that the character of the postcolonial state is at the source of the problem of the failure of emancipation, although he was unable to think a way out; the NLS mode had reached the limit of what could be thought within its parameters. As I have argued, this equating of the nation with the state was ultimately a necessary outcome of seeing politics no longer as affirmative, but as representing the social in the form of the indigenous, evidently so at independence and in many instances long before that, at which point the emancipatory character of politics had collapsed. In all cases, the first step to freedom was said to be the attainment of state power for the emancipation of the nation. Nkrumah’s aphorism – ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee’ – accurately expresses this collapse into a disastrous state politics, leading often to a simulacrum of national emancipation and culture (as in Mobutu’s notion of authenticité, for example), since the instrumentalist notion of the state which it implied meant that the state was left largely untransformed from its colonial origins. Yet, in a postcolonial situation, the redress of national grievances could not avoid coming into conflict with private property itself, for the private clearly represented racial-national dispossession as well as being the foundation of capitalism. It is also for this reason that anti-colonial struggles often expressed anti-capitalist sentiments and that ‘state nationalism’ and ‘state socialism’ could easily be fused in the 1960s, when national freedom was equated with socialism, which itself was equated with social justice.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As I have shown, the NLS mode of politics was based on a contradiction that it found impossible to overcome: the struggle for freedom was a struggle not only against the colonial state, but to a certain extent against the state itself, like all struggles for freedom; yet at the same time freedom was said to be attainable only under the aegis of an independent state, as it had been frustrated by colonial domination. The nation, which in the struggle for freedom was equated with the people, became gradually fused in thought with the state, evidently so at independence. It was these contradictory tendencies that assured the ephemeral nature of any genuinely emancipatory content to the NLS mode, and the continuation of a colonial set of institutions and practices from which the continent has been suffering ever since. The neo-colonialism that ensued was thus primarily a political phenomenon; the submission to economic dependency on the West was a result of such politics and not its cause, as dependency theory maintained. In addition, the deployment of this mode during the international geopolitical context of the Cold War and its fetishism of state power led to its frequent ideological dependence on either the Stalinist or the Parliamentary modes, a fact that ensured its final disintegration and collapse into statism. One can see, therefore, how easily a politics with an emancipatory content could tip over into relying on external invariants, when subjectivity became derived from the state itself, as the movement became nation, became party, became state. Although this movement from an excessive to an expressive mode of thinking politics was most evident at independence, for many national liberation movements the transition to proto-states or ‘states in waiting’ was effected long before independence (e.g. PAIGC, SWAPO, ANC; see de Bragança and Wallerstein, vols. 2 & 3, 1982), many being recognised by the United Nations as ‘the sole and authentic representatives’ of their nations prior to taking power.
The sequence of this mode of politics in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism, is today clearly over, and has been so for about 30 years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can. I now want to ask the question about the extent to which the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa of the 1980s may have broken with this NLS mode of thinking politics. I will suggest that it did indeed do so in significant respects.
NOTES
1.The South African White Left’s elitism and strident opposition to nationalism are notorious. Such opposition has been paramount among radical social historians and was evident in the 1980s at a time when mass resistance was being unleashed throughout the country and the nation was being constructed on a popular basis, as I shall show in chapter 4. For example, Pillay (2009: 244) notes the lack of engagement with Black nationalist thought among scholars of the History Workshop at Wits University in the 1970s and 1980s; he cites Worger (1991: 148–9) as remarking that two of the leading figures of the History Workshop (which, incidentally, purported to study the consciousness of the oppressed) ‘argue that white radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, feeling rejected by the black consciousness intellectuals and appalled by the “sorry record of independent Africa”, stridently opposed (African) nationalism and supported a “stark privileging of class over race”’. The fetishism of class and the inability to take nationalism and popular politics seriously have, arguably, been two of the major political problems of the independent South African Left as a whole and the reasons for its consequent political irrelevance.
2.In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is said to write less as an activist and more as a philosopher-critic; this is apparently why this particular work is preferred by postcolonial theorists.