Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
It is only the former which can be called politics in the true sense, for it begins with an understanding of people – of all people without exception – as active thinking beings.
The object of this book is thus the understanding of political agency, specifically as conceived in two areas of thought: first, in analyses of emancipatory politics in African history and, second, in recovering the thought of emancipatory politics today – in other words, in making explicit some of the political conditions and categories for thinking political agency on the continent in the 21st century. The first is a methodological and historical project, the second a conceptual and epistemic one. They are held together by the central concern to ‘bring a politics of emancipation back into thought’ in the humanities and social sciences in Africa, from which it has been displaced for a considerable length of time. I should therefore stress at this stage that, although I am studying Africa, I do not begin from ‘culture’ or ‘identity’, which I see as core components of typically state discourses. Rather than starting from what seems to distinguish Africa, its cultural uniqueness, which determined its place in the Western imaginary – a position evidently rooted in Enlightenment thought and central to colonial taxonomy – this book begins from the subversion of place, from how African people themselves thought emancipation when they rebelled, which is precisely what makes Africans fully part of humanity as a whole. All people are capable of thinking beyond their social place and immediate interests. Starting from culture merely forces a concentration on identity, ethnicity, authenticity, race, darkness, natives, ‘Africanity’, periphery, ‘coloniality’, and so on – on difference and not on universal humanity. Ultimately, it is allocation to social place that structures such an analysis. It then becomes easy to fall into a position in which, for example, Africans are simply victims of a history that has been made exclusively by others, in the West. Africans, like other human beings, must be thought of as agents of their history, not as its victims. What is universal is precisely the stepping out of place, a displacement which enables one to affirm one’s humanity independently of where one is situated by the Other, be it the state, culture or the colonial oppressor. As Kristin Ross (2009: 21) puts it, if one begins from place, ‘people’s voices, their subjectivities can be nothing more than the naturalized, homogenized expressions of those spaces’. We therefore need to be able to think how people act and think their displacement themselves; it is this which makes them part of universal humanity rather than of the animal world of interests.
I have put a conception of universal humanity at the forefront of my thinking here, as I believe Alain Badiou (2010b: 112) is right when he notes that ‘thought is worth nothing if it is not structured and ordered by the possibility of an emancipatory politics for the whole of humanity’. I have tried to be faithful to this idea throughout the writing of this book. It is up to the reader to decide whether this attempt has been successful. The core problem we face in thinking emancipation is that the social sciences as currently constituted unfortunately do not possess a universal conception of humanity, what Badiou (2013c: 14–21) calls a ‘generic set’; all they see are differences, not a true universality. When they do recognise universality, it is false, for it is simply generalised from the particularities of the dominant. Yet the answer to this distorted vision of universality inherent in liberalism today is not a cultural relativism, but rather the affirmation of a generic humanity, which happens to be precisely what the African slave rebels of Saint-Domingue in particular emphasised in their practice from 1791, as we shall see in some detail in chapter 2.
That the social sciences regard the majority of the world’s population as living in ‘subhuman’ conditions, from which they deduce the absence of a generic humanity as an empirically verifiable fact, merely leads to the idea that poor people – or the politically excluded more generally – cannot think, as the capacity to think and reason is arguably the essence of the human, at least if we adhere to a universality from which Enlightenment thinkers regularly excluded the majority of the world’s population. For social science, the excluded are said to simply react to their social location – to their interests or identity – and therefore to be ultimately bereft of reason. The currently fashionable insistence on deconstructing social identities, even at the level of philosophy, is only the latest version of this kind of thinking. The idea of colonial ‘epistemicide’ in the Global South, popularised by de Souza-Santos (2014), is fundamentally misleading because, even though Western colonialism did indeed systematically devalue and marginalise local knowledges and cosmologies, it could not fully destroy them; people have still been able to think their condition through them, including for the purposes of rebellion against colonialism and its various neo-colonial avatars. What is in fact being pointed to is the silencing of alternatives from within the liberal discourse of power, especially in the academy, but this does not imply that colonised people have been victims of ‘epistemicide’. Actually, one of the major intellectual figures of the struggle for freedom on the African continent had already observed in 1970 that ‘the freedom struggle of African peoples is both the fruit and the proof of cultural vigor, opening up new prospects for the development of culture in the service of progress’ (Cabral, 1973: 49). The academic tendency to merely produce a victimology when it comes to thinking Africa is extremely prevalent today.
We shall see throughout this book that African people – much like everybody else – have refused to be victims; they have at times been quite able to draw on their heritage of knowledge to contest, often successfully, colonial domination and thereby to create new knowledge in the process. As a result of their exclusive focus on thinking divisions, interests and identities, the social sciences have only rarely engaged in thinking universal emancipation, freedom, justice and human dignity. This is indeed why Marx’s thought was so exceptional, precisely because his was a thought of the universal emancipation of humanity combined with a theory of the social.
Contrary to most social science, Badiou’s philosophy is a genuine contemporary effort to conceive the universal. It shows that today the humanities are quite able to produce a more liberating orientation than the social sciences simply because they enable a concept of the universally human which is radically distinct from the liberal conception. Anyone who makes the kind of universal statements that Badiou consistently and courageously makes and is rigorously faithful to in his work – to the extent, rare in Europe, of understanding Western imperialism in its past and present manifestations – to my mind not only must be taken extremely seriously but is worthy of the utmost attention and intellectual respect. Not that this book is ‘about’ Badiou’s thought – it is not – rather, it is about Africans and the manner in which they have thought and currently think freedom. Yet, given that Badiou’s work is an attempt to rigorously theorise change through the deployment of a subjective exception, an exception both in history and in political practice, it seems to me to be an extraordinarily useful resource. That it may not refer to Africa directly is beside the point. It can be stretched or modified in order to make it more directly relevant, if necessary. But philosophers are not the only intellectuals. Ordinary people are in fact capable of thought beyond the habit of place – excessive thought – and show these capacities in often unpredictable sites. The intellectuals of Abahlali baseMjondolo, notwithstanding their recent controversial decision to vote en masse for a Right-wing party in South Africa, have also had an important influence on this book, as the reader will discover, not least because it is clear that they form part of those people who think.2 This seemed to me to be particularly evident in their notion of ‘unfreedom’, used to denote relations between state and people that are not founded on citizenship rights. Several authors associated with the Subaltern Studies Collective in India have emphasised similar conceptions; they have insisted on identifying multiple domains of politics, although in somewhat different ways from the manner in which I do so here.
There will be much reference to French philosophy in this book, but exclusively to that philosophy which is concerned with the subversion of consensual state thinking, and which helps us to think ‘at a distance’ from the state and power. A number of thinkers will be relied on in this regard, including Jacques Rancière, Sylvain Lazarus, Frantz Fanon, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and others. These all help to provide us with the appropriate kinds of questions and perspectives, as well as with some of the concepts and categories, to begin to think human agency in its own terms rather than as reflective of social place or determined by power.