Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
in that part of the world since the 1980s. In fact, its closest predecessor had arguably been the mass movement in South Africa of the mid-1980s and not the revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1970s.1 This series of events, through their insistence on ‘popular power’ as the driver of the process, has been very much located in a mode of political thought in which both religious organisations and established political parties were initially taken totally by surprise. In this sense, these events have been illustrative of a new sequence in which struggles for freedom are taking place outside the parameters established during the 20th century, when the party was the central organiser of political thinking. It appears that now, in the 21st century, a different mode of thinking emancipatory politics – inaugurated by the South African experience of the 1980s – could be seeing the light of day: one founded within the living conditions of people themselves. While the outcome of the mass popular upsurge in North Africa seems for the moment to have run its course (and counter-revolution in Egypt notwithstanding), it is apparent that popular agency is back on the political and intellectual agendas of the African continent.
A central recurring concern of intellectual thought in Africa has been the necessity precisely to conceptualise political agency and the contribution of Africans to history along with their struggles to achieve emancipation. This is not surprising given hundreds of years of slavery, racism and colonialism during which African agency was not only denied, but seemingly eliminated, to the extent that Africa was said by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hegel to have no history worth speaking of.2 The fact that racial oppression has been inherent in capitalism from its very beginning is often forgotten. This intellectual concern to reassert African agency has been active from the early days of nationalist thought right up to the near present and has informed the study of history on the continent in particular. In its initial phase it emphasised Africans’ contribution to world civilisations and to the formation of states, as state formation constituted the subjective horizon of nationalist historians.3 But the independence movements, born out of pan-Africanism, were also concerned to imagine an emancipatory politics beyond the simple fact of statehood; indeed, independence was seen as only the first step towards achieving such full emancipation. This was, however, a process that was conceived of as achievable only via the state. It was the state, its history and its subjectivities which lay at the core of intellectual endeavour in the early days of nationalism and independence, and I will argue that this has remained the case, though in a modified form and despite contestation, ever since.
Gradually – among those who remained faithful to some idea of emancipation – the emphasis shifted from a sole concern with the state and the elites it represented as the makers of history to the masses and the class struggle as its driving force. After all, it was people, and not just intellectual leaders, who had played the dominant role in the struggle for independence, even though independence may have resulted from a negotiated process. Today this view has been in crisis for some time and has been replaced by an emphasis on parliamentary democracy as the high point of emancipation; this has been accompanied in academia by the study of political identities. Such identities, despite having been instrumental in resisting authoritarian postcolonial states, are today often seen – particularly in their religious or ethnic forms – as possible threats to democracy as well as retrogressive in their politics, rather than as the bearers of a historical telos; in fact, it is not clear whether it is parliamentary democracy or identity that is the source of the current political crisis on the continent (e.g. Sen, 2006). In any case, we can no longer see identity politics as in any way liberating or progressive. The thinking of African agency, which has always been bound up with a notion of subjecthood and emancipation, is in crisis, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Africans have remained in poverty and continue to suffer extreme forms of oppression and deprivation. Rather than attempting to contribute to the thinking of Africans as fully human subjects, intellectuality seems to have reached a dead end. At the same time, the West today simply erects barriers to African subjecthood, either physical in the form of walls against African immigration, for example, or less tangible in the form of the reiteration of the well-worn ideology according to which Africans are incapable of any progressive thought, as Africa is an incurable ‘basket case’. Africans, it seems, are still visualised as incapable of making history. These points will now be developed at some length.
While the ‘modern’ colonial system enforced its ‘civilising mission’, supposedly designed to turn Africans into subjects, it had the contrary effect of denying Africans agency both politically and in thought; modernity was thus tied to colonialism, so that Africans could never contribute to it.4 Partha Chatterjee has recognised the effects of this well:
because of the way in which the history of our modernity has been intertwined with the history of colonialism, we have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse, unfettered by differences of race or nationality ... from the beginning we had a shrewd guess that ... we would forever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would [we] be taken seriously as its producers ... Ours is the modernity of the once colonized (Chatterjee, 1997: 14, 20).
The statist development process which followed upon independence itself mutated from an emancipatory political conception to a technical neo-colonial one of ‘modernisation’, with the result that it too became a ‘development mission’ asserted and imposed by neo-colonial forms of domination (Neocosmos, 2010b). External forms of intervention – whatever their intentions – rather than turning Africans into subjects of their own history, have over the years frustrated their agency, and have only enabled it in so far as Africans have resisted and opposed such interventions. In the long run they have systematically transformed most Africans into victims whose main feature has been passivity, not agency. This process continues today as an effect of humanitarianism and human rights discourse (Wa Mutua, 2002; Neocosmos, 2006a; Mamdani, 2009), but it is also often prevalent among some African intellectuals themselves (e.g. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013), who, insisting on viewing African history as determined exclusively by (neo-)colonial domination, and seeing Africans as victims and not as agents of history, have difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that it is ordinary people who resisted colonialism and made history. Arguably, it is only the most excluded of the continent – the ‘damned’ of the earth, in Fanon’s original meaning – who can fundamentally transform colonial history, for they have the most to lose by its continuation in new forms. A recovery of African political agency, then, must begin from the point of the ‘zone of non-being’, as Fanon (1986: 10) calls the place of the politically (and humanly) in-existent, and from a fidelity to past events of resistance within it, to those historical singularities of emancipation by Africans, however short-lived, which proposed alternatives in practice and which affirmed the dignity (i.e. the being) of the politically excluded and humiliated. In this way, the silencing and occlusion of African historical events (Depelchin, 2005) will be overthrown, and victimhood can begin to be replaced by agency – after all, freedom cannot be separated from the struggle to attain it, for agency is at the core of existence, or, to put it another way, there can be no thought of politics in the absence of the thought of a collective subject. For this to happen, as I will argue at length in this book, political subjectivity and agency must be thought of in their own terms and not as simple reflections of objective social location, whatever this may be, including reflections of the historical marginalisation and oppression of Africans. This means always adhering to an idea of universal humanity as our guiding principle.
THINKING POLITICAL AGENCY IN AFRICA
The manner in which African political agency in the making of history came to be thought has followed, since the 1950s, a number of important intellectual trajectories. The first such perspective was arguably that of the Négritude cultural movement, which, in its manner of asserting African humanity, was constituted in reaction to the oppression of Africans in its ‘assimilationist’ form by French colonialism. Unsurprisingly, these ideas resonated with the situation of African Americans and within the African diaspora more generally, as the main threat to their existence was also one of assimilation, with the result that the cultural movement had intellectual influence throughout the African diaspora and in France itself. Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor were its most well-known members. Négritude consisted largely of an insistence on recovering the ‘whole complex of civilized values ... which characterize ... the Negro-African