Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
am so grateful to the people mentioned below, it being understood, of course, that I am solely responsible for all errors and omissions herein.
I am deeply grateful to Jacques Depelchin and to Pauline Wynter for their friendship and for extremely stimulating conversations and insights around many of the issues discussed in this work over a number of years. Despite Jacques’ frequent disagreement with many of my positions, his comments on my work have always been reflective and constructive and located within this warm friendship.
I also wish to thank Achille Mbembe for his intellectual generosity. He has been instrumental in the publication of this book despite my disagreements with some of his work. Achille’s enthusiasm contributed enormously to providing intellectual support over the last two years of getting the text together.
I must thank Premesh Lalu and the staff and students of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape who in 2010 criticised many of my formulations and helped me sharpen my conceptions. Premesh generously hosted me at the CHR in 2010 and has been providing critical support and friendship over many years now.
I am grateful to all the coffee-loving people at the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg for discussing with great openness the idea that people think.
I must also thank Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson and Peter Hallward, all three of whom are major thinkers of the politics of emancipation, whose generosity in encouraging and supporting my work intellectually has been invaluable.
I wish to thank Louise Balso for taking time to meet with me in Paris for stimulating conversations around the thought of politics. I am also grateful to Judith Hayem who hosted me at the Université de Lille1 in France on two occasions to lecture on various aspects of my work. Our detailed conversations on thinking politics have always been extraordinarily mutually beneficial and extremely productive.
I am beholden to colleagues at UNISA, in particular to Derek Gelderblom, and subsequently to Greg Cuthbertson and Mamokgethi Pakheng who provided me with employment and support from 2011 to 2013 without which this book could never have been written … and to Peter Clayton at Rhodes University who unhesitantly provided financial support towards its publication.
I am also grateful to the students at UHURU, the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, who have kept me on my intellectual toes, particularly Camalita Naicker, Fezi Mthonti, Sarah Bruchhausen, Mikaela Erskog, Jonis Alasow and Paddy O’Halloran. Together we have been able to build an intellectually stimulating and vibrant space.
I also wish to thank my publishers at Wits University Press, Veronica Klipp, Roshan Cader and Andrew Joseph, for believing in this project and to Karen Press for her incisive and always pertinent comments on the manuscript. We have become great friends. I am also grateful to Russell Martin for his skills at polishing my often cumbersome use of language,
One of the most important influences on this book has been the critical thought and political practice of Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba whose intellectual and political commitment to freedom in Africa has been unwavering and gone largely unrecognised. I am privileged to have had numerous conversations with him over many years. I am extremely grateful to him for taking the time to write the foreword despite his often failing eyesight.
I am especially thankful to my friend Richard Pithouse for his on-going support and critical engagement with my work; his comments and help have been particularly invaluable for the development of the ideas in this book. His steadfast and principled commitment to popular politics, to critical thought and to our students has been unwavering throughout.
Finally I must thank Khulukazi Soldati profusely for ‘hanging in there’ during difficult times. This work would have not been possible without her extraordinarily high levels of tolerance, generosity and support.
A number of the chapters of this book have been based on previously published material; in most cases the material has been systematically revised for inclusion here. The following publishers and editors are hereby gratefully acknowledged: The Nordic Africa Institute for excerpts from The Agrarian Question in Southern Africa and “Accumulation from Below”: Economics and politics in the struggle for democracy, Uppsala: SIAS, 1993 and “People’s Politics to State Politics: Aspects of national liberation in South Africa” in A. Olukoshi (ed.) The Politics of Opposition in Contemporary Africa, NAI, Uppsala Sweden, 1998; The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) for “The Contradictory Position of ‘Tradition’ in African Nationalist Discourse: Some analytical reflections”, Africa Development, Special Issue on “Globalization and Citizenship in Africa” Vol. 28, Nos 1&2, 2003, pp. 17-52; “Development, Social Citizenship and Human Rights: Re-thinking the political core of an emancipatory project in Africa”, Africa Development, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2007; From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Second Edition 2010; “Thinking Political Emancipation and the Social Sciences in Africa: Some critical reflections”, Africa Development, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2014; Sage Publications for “Analyzing Political Subjectivities: Naming the post-developmental state in Africa today”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5, October 2010; “The Nation and its Politics: Fanon, emancipatory nationalism and political sequences” in N. Gibson (ed.) Living Fanon, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; “Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking political subjectivity in the (neo-)colonial world and the limits of history,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 47, No. 5, October 2012. “Transition, Human Rights and Violence: Rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony”, Interface Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 359-399, November 2011; “What does Democracy Name in South African Politics?” Grace and Truth, Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2014; “Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence” in S. Moyo and Y. Mine (eds.) What Colonialism Ignored: African potentials for resolving conflicts in Southern Africa, Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa 2016; “Constructing the Domain of Freedom: Thinking politics at a distance from the state”, Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies on Politics at a Distance from the State: Radical praxis today, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/02589001.2016.1236876
Introduction
Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary ... There is something very disturbing about ... [the] inability to credit ordinary people with being capable of weighing the odds and making their own decisions.
– Arundhati Roy, ‘The Trickledown Revolution’, 2010
If you are serious about victory, about succeeding to humanize the world, even a little bit, then your struggle must be a living politics. It must be owned and shaped in thought and in action by ordinary men and women. If every gogo [granny] does not understand your politics then you are on the road to another top-down system. You also run the risk of being on your own in the face of repression.
– S’bu Zikode, Preface to Nigel Gibson’s Fanonian Practices in South Africa, 2011
Freedom is not identitarian; it is at the very least an inflexion of, at most a rupture with, the identitarian register, insofar as the latter is a prescription of the Other.
– Alain Badiou, ‘Séminaire 2011–2012’, 18 April 2012 (my translation)
THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY IN AFRICA
The end of ‘the end of history’ was finally announced on a world scale in February 2011. That announcement took place in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East. Popular upsurges of extraordinary vitality occurred, which brought back into stark relief what most seemed to have forgotten, namely that people, particularly those from the Global South, are perfectly capable of making history. The fact that this process was initiated on the African continent before it began to reverberate elsewhere is also worthy of note. The mass upsurge here was not of religious inspiration but quite secular, contrary to the thinking of the dominant perspective in the