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 World’ (Senghor, 1975: 83), and in postmodernist parlance it proposed an ‘essentialist’ mirror image of the colonial one, which had stressed the emptiness, primitiveness or non-existence of Africanness. It did this, for example, in the idea of an ‘African personality’. While this movement was of great importance intellectually and culturally, and totally understandable in a context where assimilation was the main political threat to an independent human and political existence, it reverted to a psychological essence of ‘the African’ and of ‘African culture’ (defined, of course, by intellectual elites) which was unable to focus on the agency of the people of the continent. It was rightly noted by Fanon that it brought together the totally different experiences of Africans in Africa and Blacks in the diaspora under the same umbrella. It thus assumed, despite their clearly disparate experiences, that the main feature they had in common was oppression by Whites (Fanon, 1990: 173–4). Much like dependency theory, which was to appear much later in the 1960s and 1970s, it ended up seeing the core of African history as one of Western domination, to which Africans only reacted. Yet out of the African and Afro-American encounter also grew the idea of pan-Africanism, which had a much more radical history, at least initially, when it gave birth to popular African nationalisms, before it too was engulfed by the statist politics which persist to this day. It had both a more ‘conservative’ wing inclined to stress the racial or cultural similarities of Blacks, and a more ‘radical’ wing keener to emphasise class in anti-colonial struggles by Africans. The name most associated with the former would be that of Senghor, while C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah were perhaps more illustrative of the latter. Both these versions of pan-Africanism eventually saw the capturing of the state as a necessary step towards freedom and were ultimately represented in the opposition between the more ‘moderate’ Monrovia Group of states and the more ‘radical’ Casablanca Group, which eventually combined to form the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
In fact, as a popular pan-Africanist subjectivity rapidly disappeared within a context in which state forms of politics asserted their hegemony, political subjectivities became much more state-focused, with the result that pan-Africanism collapsed into a multi-state conception (Mamdani, 1991b; Neocosmos, 2010b). The Africanist school of history, along with the modernisation school, which after independence was hegemonic in all of the social sciences, asserted the centrality of the state in thought. The only Africans with agency were said to be great leaders of great kingdoms and civilisations. Yet, by the 1970s, the influence of events in the Third World as a whole, in which popular struggles had prevailed over repressive states (Cuba, China, Vietnam), as well as changes in intellectual trends in post-1968 France (e.g. the work of Althusser, Poulantzas, Bettelheim, Meillassoux and others on modes of production and the state) and in the United States (e.g. in the journal Monthly Review) had initiated a shift to emphasising the class struggle as the motor of history or, in its radical form, the view that ‘it is the masses which make history’ (Althusser, 1971: 46). In other words, a sophisticated form of Marxism that stressed the centrality of social relations in the making of history took root in opposition to the vulgar economism of the ‘development of the productive forces’ inherited from official ‘Soviet Marxism’ as well as from Western modernisation theory à la W.W. Rostow (e.g. Temu and Swai, 1981).
The central concept of what became known as the ‘Dar es Salaam debate’ was thus the class struggle and the struggle against neo-colonialism; the two were in fact viewed as part of the same process in a neo-colonial country (e.g. Shivji et al., 1973; Shivji, 1976; Tandon, 1982). While this political-economic perspective – which dovetailed nicely with postcolonial notions of development – produced crucially important intellectual work, it tended to remain within a structuralist Marxism and regularly failed to appreciate the fact that in classical Marxism ‘class’ had been conceived of as both a socio-economic concept and a political category, and that the core issue of political agency concerned the connection between the two. The answer to this problem, when it was indeed addressed, was still sought in terms of a party – particularly a vanguard party (e.g. Lukas Khamisi, 1983)5 – of intellectuals which would provide mass movements of workers and peasants with a political perspective, to turn them into political classes ‘for themselves’. In other words, the idea of agency was still largely conceived of within the parameters of the dominance of intellectual possessors of knowledge; that is, within those of Leninism. Agency was then still thought of, ultimately, in statist terms, as parties were and are quite simply state organisations, central component parts of what is sometimes referred to as ‘political society’; their function, after all, is the achievement of state power. It followed, as Mahmood Mamdani was to point out soon afterwards: ‘From such a perspective, it was difficult even to glimpse the possibility of working people in Africa becoming a creative force capable of making history. Rather, history was seen as something to be made outside of this force, in lieu of this force and ultimately to be imposed on it’ (Mamdani, 1994: 255).
Political thinking was thus still not taking place beyond the subjective parameters provided by the state; simultaneously, political agency was being thought of as some kind of complex reflection of the objectively social, as social relations were seen as determinant of consciousness ‘in the last instance’, to use Althusser’s well-known formulation. After all, it has been a standard view, shared
