some sides of which may have exhibited a popular non-statist perspective. Thus the impression was given in this body of work that little or no agency had been shown by people in their process of identity formation (Neocosmos, 2003). Yet, as many studies have indeed convincingly suggested, tradition is always more or less contested from within, invented, reinvented and imagined, as it is itself the outcome of different political subjectivities that affect power relations, themselves constantly in flux (e.g. Ranger, 1985b, 1993; Vail, 1989). Moreover, a clear-cut domain or sphere of the political is rarely in existence within tradition, as power relations are intimately imbricated within cultural, economic and other relations of domination in African society. Mamdani’s work was concerned with thinking the political, not agency and subjectivity; in other words, not with thinking politics as such (Mamdani, 1996a, 2001, 2009).9
In Africa, then, the study of political identities largely distinguished itself from an apolitical postmodernism, but remained caught within the parameters of state-centredness, as it was the state which was seen as the prime creator of such identities through a process of institutionalisation, exclusion, co-option or whatever (Mamdani, 1996a, 2002; Habib, 2004; Ballard et al., 2006). Concurrently, it has also gradually become apparent in most African countries that democracy as a form of state was more oligarchic than democratic, as states (and powerful elites) ignored or bypassed their own democratic rules systematically, and that long-standing popular-national grievances, such as access to land or employment and housing, were not adequately addressed by the state or were addressed only in the interests of the few.10 These failures have brought forth a contradiction between human rights and national rights, as the latter are neither dealt with nor indeed are resolvable by the former, which insist on the primacy of the right to private property, while the latter require its contestation. The result has been that the issue of freedom remains on the agenda, as the excluded themselves categorically state when they are allowed to express themselves – for example, in the case of Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, who mark the official Freedom Day public holiday with gatherings to mourn the absence of freedom on what they rename as ‘UnFreedom Day’.
Yet this demand to partake in the benefits of democracy and to access the benefits of freedom, much trumpeted in the case of South Africa, for example, now takes place in a situation of political disorientation where the usual ideological signposts are no longer of help, as the standard dichotomies – Left–Right, state–market,11 nationalist–socialist – have become largely meaningless, while the newly arisen contradiction between nationalism and democracy, characteristic of many countries, remains often subterranean, largely unrecognised and hence under-discussed. As a result of the absence of an emancipatory discourse in the political arena, we are today confronted with a political crisis as the masses turn on themselves in a frenzy of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence (e.g. Kenya 2007, South Africa 2008, Nigeria 2009–10, to mention the most evident episodes). We are simultaneously confronted with an intellectual crisis, as those entrusted with the task of asking critical questions and providing an alternative idea to the vacuity of the democratic consensus seem content to proliferate identity studies and to appeal to statist solutions, wringing their hands in intellectual despair.
By the 1980s Mamdani, Mkandawire and Wamba-dia-Wamba (1993: 112) were noting, in their brief but important critique of the limits of (Marxist) political economy, that ‘if democratic practice and democratic theory is to be popular it must not only come to terms with the class principle ... It must also come to terms with the rights of political minorities in Africa’, whether those of ethnicities, women or youth. But the authors were correct in an empirical sense only. They overlooked the fact that the working class in the Marxist tradition was not only conceived of as a socio-economic category with particularistic interests beloved of sociologists; they forgot that it had also been theorised politically as a universal subject of history, that in its political form the proletariat was seen by the classics of Marxism as the only social force capable of emancipating humanity as a whole. The political struggles of the workers were thus not only deemed to be self-liberatory but also understood to provide the foundation for the liberation of the whole people – the ‘uprooting’ of the class system as such – precisely because, as Rancière (1995) has put it, the proletariat was in 19th-century Europe ‘the part of no part’, the collectivity which, because of its exclusion from politics, could only emancipate itself by destroying the whole capitalist system and hence emancipating humanity in the process.12
None of the other identities added onto that of the working class by (largely postmodernist) social analysis (e.g. women’s movements, ethnic and religious movements, youth movements and environmentalism) have ever been said to fulfil in themselves the same universal function.13 However oppressed the groups they represented may have been, and however radical their struggles, these have not generally gone beyond the right to be included in the existing ‘capitalo-parliamentary’ system, as Badiou (2009d) has termed it, the existing framework of power relations from which they had hitherto been excluded. If these identities or movements ever acquired an anti-capitalist character, it has largely been due to their incorporating more universalistic ideologies – such as nationalism or socialism, for example – external to their particular identity politics during periods of mass emancipatory upsurge, such as in urban South Africa in the 1980s.
Thus, the adding of ‘new identities’ and ‘new’ social movements to ‘old’ class identities and movements could not replace the ‘classist’ politics of the Marxist tradition with any alternative emancipatory vision; it amounted to a purely additive empiricist observation bereft of any theory other than the assertion of the inclusion of all into an existing democratic state to be ‘radicalised’ by the Left (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). At best we were provided with the liberal idea according to which ‘respect for or tolerance of the Other’ within a ‘multicultural society’ (the South African version became known as the ‘rainbow nation’) could pretend to be the norm. Unfortunately, such ‘respect for the Other’, it soon became noticeable, meant tolerance only of those others who agreed with one’s own idea of tolerance, not of ‘intolerant cultures’ or those deemed to be ‘outsiders’ (Badiou, 2001). Such an incoherent idea could only provide the foundation for a hypocritical, unprincipled politics (Žižek, 1999, 2008). Yet the roots of this idea are arguably to be found, as I shall show throughout this book, in the deeply ingrained depoliticising effects of social analysis, a fact which we have great reticence in admitting or even recognising today, as we take such effects for granted.
CAN EMANCIPATORY POLITICS BE THOUGHT IN AFRICA TODAY?
An emancipatory political subjectivity or consciousness can only exist ‘in excess’ of social relations and of the social division of labour; otherwise, any change from the extant cannot possibly be the object of thought. Such a politics cannot therefore be understood as a ‘reflection’ or ‘expression’ of existing social groupings, their divisions and hierarchies. Without this ‘excessive’ character which ‘interrupts’ the reproduction of the regular, the habitual, politics can only be sought within the social itself and ends up being simply conflated with ‘the political’, with the state and its ‘political society’. Badiou himself enjoins us to think politics ‘as excess over both the state and civil society’ (1985: 20), for ‘dialectical thought does not begin from the rule but from the exception’ (p. 90, my translation), from the interruption of repetition, of habit; and to understand that a truly ‘political process is not an expression, a singular expression, of the objective reality but it is in some sense separated from this reality. The political process is not a process of expression, but a process of separation’ (Badiou, 2005d: 2). Yet, Badiou argues, this process is more accurately grasped as an exception, as mere separation can be equated with an intervention from beyond the political situation (such as divine intervention, colonial domination or economic growth). ‘It is very important to distinguish separation from ... an exception. An exception remains internal to the situation (made of legal, regular and structural data). It is an immanent point of transcendence, a point which, from within a general immanence, functions as if it were exterior to the situation’ (Badiou, 2013f, 16 January 2013, my translation, emphasis in original).
It
