late 1980s and 1990s in Africa substituted ‘civil society’ for ‘the state’ (political society) at the centre of intellectual discourse. This subjective ‘transition’ occurred as an effect of two related processes. On the one hand, we witnessed increased resistance ‘from below’ by popular movements of various types (such as national, ethnic, religious, gender and youth identity movements, predominantly urban-based) to an increasingly authoritarian state in several African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, Congo-Zaire and South Africa. Identity movements seemed to constitute the foundation for an emancipatory politics, as they provided part of the resistance to state oppression during this period (Ake, 2003). On the other hand, there was a worldwide transformation ‘from above’ as the old bipolar world of the Cold War collapsed and the new neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ put forward the watchword of ‘liberalisation’: ‘deregulation’ of the African economies and ‘multipartyism’ in African politics. The entry of the name ‘civil society’ into the debate within neo-liberal discourse seemed to presage an alternative to state authoritarianism and the possibility of the defence and extension of human rights and democracy; an optimistic mood developed as a bright future was predicted. We had now finally arrived at the neo-liberal nirvana of the end of history, so much so that this period was sometimes referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent. Intellectual work now shifted to a sustained critique of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the international financial institutions (IFIs) – on African states, on the one hand, and to extensive studies of political identities and social movements, on the other. Yet neither of the two contested the existence of the capitalist system as such, and the idea of emancipation has not featured in their vocabulary.6
The neo-liberal critique of the state, which found political expression in the new ‘Washington consensus’, was dismissive of the African state as corrupt, illegitimate and unrepresentative of the general will. This was supposedly represented by civil society. This was sometimes empirically false, as often it was the state which had opposed ethnic chauvinism and communitarianism – for example, in Nigeria (Osaghae, 1995). But in this way the old authoritarian and secular nationalist state was weakened and more easily transformed into a Western-compliant authoritarian state in a democratic shell. Civil society organisations (social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) soon came to work broadly within state political subjectivities; in any case, they had to in order to survive. I shall return to a fuller discussion of civil society and the state later in this book, but at this stage it is useful to note that by the 1990s it soon transpired that the central referent in an attempt to conceptualise African emancipation could not simply be the state–civil society dichotomy. Civil society is a standard domain of neo-liberal capitalism and its politics, the existence of which only varies in intensity according to these organised interests’ ability to operate. As resistance within civil society is founded upon the existence of differences – the organised interests of the division of labour and hierarchy – it is central to modern social organisation, a fact emphasised incidentally by all the founders of Western sociology.
African critical intellectuals were rightly suspicious of the term ‘civil society’, especially as it seemed to imply a Manichaean dualism within neo-liberal discourse, the dark side of which was said to be the state (Mamdani, 1995a, 1995b; Olukoshi, 1998). The postcolonial state, it was maintained, had been, despite its authoritarianism, a nationalist state, which at least had defended national sovereignty in some important ways as well as providing social subsidies for the needy (education, health, etc.), features which were now rapidly receding into the mists of time as Western domination increased within a newly globalised world. Neo-liberal conceptions of democracy were also contested, and it was hoped that the form of democracy – the missing term of political economy – could be debated, as its meaning was being subjected to popular contestation (Anyang’ Nyong’o, 1987; Mamdani, 1987; Chole and Ibrahim, 1995; Neocosmos, 1998; Ake, 2003).7 This was not to happen, at least not in any real depth, as both movements and intellectuals finally accepted the christening of the new state form as the ‘democratic state’. The old political elites, predictably with Western support, embraced the name and were able in most cases to survive the transition to democracy with their power intact. The enthusiasm for a genuine change in which the popular masses would finally be able to be the agents of their own history gradually faded as mass poverty and political despondency increased. The disappearance of ‘meta-narratives’, we were told, was all for the better, as they were ‘essentialist’; the postmodern condition, now written without the hyphen, was fluid, classless and characterised by clashes of identity. The study of identity politics became the order of the day, as religious and ethnic identities in particular were said to be core features of the new globalised world: ‘belonging’ provided the only way of accessing increasingly scarce resources, whether material, cultural or ‘political’ (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000). It is therefore not too difficult to see, given the resulting silencing of emancipatory thought, that ‘any postmodern conception is only a form of intellectual connivance with the hegemonic decadence of capitalism itself’ (Badiou, 2011e: 15, my translation).
Any Idea of emancipatory politics receded into the distance, seemingly to be replaced by atheoretical empiricism in academia and a rapid rise of fundamentalisms – contrary to the predictions of modernisation theory – in politics. It soon became clear that the terms ‘progress’ and ‘progressive’ were no longer part of political vocabulary, while it became impossible to find anyone who did not swear to being a democrat. In such conditions the term ‘democracy’ itself could only become suspect, for it no longer implied a better world for the majority, but formed the core name of a state and imperial consensus in which vast inequalities and continued oppressive relations were tolerated as largely inevitable. In fact, democracy now characterised the politics of the new form of empire (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2001) as, together with humanitarianism, it was imposed on the world – through the exercise of military power if necessary. While the ‘civilising mission’ of imperialism had ended in the 1960s, we were now witnessing a new ‘democratising mission’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007), through reference to which Western power was being redeployed in the rest of the world (e.g. ex-Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Libya) as the West faced its newly perceived enemy of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In no case has it been thought necessary to think the importance of a demos or popular social foundation for the formation of a democratic state; formal attributes – elections, multipartyism and the ubiquitous notion of ‘good governance’ – were considered sufficient to qualify for entry into the enchanted world of state democracy and globalised neo-liberalism.
During this period, the most important studies of popular political subjectivity concerned social movements and were, in the best work, given a political inflection. Social movements were seen as the expression of popular political agency, ‘the subjective factor in African development’ (Mamdani et al., 1993: 112), and regularly counterposed to NGOs, which were often visualised as the bearers of a neo-colonial culture of clientelism. Yet, in all this work, political agency was understood as a reflection of the objectively social, of the specific dimensions of the social division of labour. There was never any attempt to conceive subjectivity in terms of itself, understandably perhaps because of the assumption that this meant a collapse into (social) psychology (and hence into idealism), the only discipline understood as attempting to produce an account of the subjective – as, after all, it was psychology that was said to regulate consciousness.8
The justly famous volume on African social movements edited by Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba (1995) was quickly followed by various studies by Mamdani (1996a, 2001, 2009) in which the colonial state and the production of political identities were theorised in a manner that rightly detached them from political economy, but that nevertheless focused exclusively on their institutionalisation as an exclusive effect of state politics, while simultaneously assuming a clearly demarcated political realm in African peasant societies governed by tradition. Groups were said to acquire their political identities largely because they were interpellated by the state in an identitarian (or communitarian) manner; we were not told if there was any resistance to such state interpellation by
