‘basket case’, which is said to be incapable of sorting out its own problems and which should therefore be recolonised in one form or another by the West.17 Given the current prevalence of colonial political subjectivities, these types of ‘solutions’, however humanitarian and democratic they may abstractly seem to be, are in essence simply neo-colonial. This became evident in Libya in 2012, when, after having supported the Libyan ruler Colonel Qaddafi for many years, the so-called international community decided to remove him from power by military means under the pretext of his authoritarianism. Moreover, international courts would have greater legitimacy if only they could also put out arrest warrants for Western leaders (such as Henry Kissinger or Tony Blair) for crimes against humanity, but this, of course, is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future (see Žižek, 2002: 265).
Thus a dead end has been reached in thinking emancipation simply because the thinking of freedom is not radically divorced from that of power, of the state. Mbembe wishes for some form of Western regulation of African politics; Mamdani opposes such a position and appeals to the AU instead. Multinational state solutions – African or Western – are seen as the core prescriptions and the only way out of the crisis of African state politics, much as in the early 1960s, when Patrice Lumumba had thought that the problems of the Republic of Congo could be resolved by appealing to the United Nations (UN).18 The result of this deference to the West, reproduced to various extents by African leaders and academic discourse ever since, has been perennial crisis in the Congo, where there is still today a UN military presence. There will be no solution to the crisis of the African state unless people themselves – people from all walks of life – are allowed and encouraged to discover the truth of their situation and not to rely on the powerful, whether local or foreign, to solve their problems on their behalf. There can be no progress unless people19 are able to become again the subjects of their own history rather than its victims. The result of the current poverty of intellectual thought is that ultimately it is the dominant powers of the world (or of the continent) that are simply allowed and encouraged to act in Africa in their own narrow interests; such interventions have a history of being, and indeed they continue to be, totally contemptuous of the working people of the continent. The outcomes of such ‘solutions’ have been there for all to see in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, yet this failure of the imagination is allowed to continue uncontested simply because popularly founded solutions are no longer considered relevant or, more accurately, do not even enter within the parameters of thought. The core problem with both Mbembe’s and Mamdani’s recent work, whatever their specific arguments and the undoubted value of their theoretical innovations, concerns the orientation of their thought. For Mbembe, intellectual thought, and therefore the thought of any emancipatory experiment, is unable to distance itself clearly from conceiving change in state terms despite its Fanonian humanist influences;20 while, for Mamdani, it is clearly focused on thinking changes to the state in Africa. In both cases we remain within the habitual account of power and hence we have difficulty in overcoming the fundamental obstacles to a new thought of emancipation. In this book I focus on explicating a politics ‘at a distance’ from the state and attempt to open a space for thinking the exceptional rather than the habitual precisely in order to make emancipation thinkable again in Africa.
The predominant effect of this crisis in thought has often been the uncritical absorption of neo-liberal and historicist notions such as those of ‘civil society’, ‘human rights’, ‘(post)modernity’ and ‘identity’ into a discourse that purports to be emancipatory. Of course, this has been facilitated by what has become known as the ‘language turn’ in social thought worldwide, although it has simultaneously led to a welcome emphasis on the subjective. The idea of ‘political identities’ has been perhaps the dominant intellectual notion here. But discourses and identities are simply seen as effects of the structure of interests and power; for Foucault, they are themselves a ‘subjective structure’, so to speak, and they constitute the essence of the culture of modernity (2003a: 54). Studies of political identities have become overwhelmingly dominant within all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities today, in the Global South in general and in Africa in particular, so much so that they are consensual. Thinkers as disparate as Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Valentin Mudimbe, Kwame Appiah and Paul Zeleza (not to mention a myriad of feminist writers) have all, in their different ways, thought African society, state and politics in terms of identities: personal, social and political.21 One of the difficulties they have tried to confront has been termed the ‘essentialism’ of identities, which refers all thought to an unchanging kernel or essence of the identity in question and thereby evidently de-historicises and naturalises it. Attempts have been made to overcome this difficulty by reference to the relational side of identity – the idea that there is no ‘self’ without the ‘other’ – but unfortunately this does not overcome the problem, for relations presuppose the existence of differences and only stress their interconnections, even though these may be given a central effectivity.22 Neither does the notion of ‘hybridity’ or the recognition of a complex multiplicity of identities get us very far in thinking a politics of emancipation.23
Africans, of course, have been overwhelmingly analysed – by outsiders as well as by themselves – in terms of their social location in Africa and in terms of Africa’s continental place: in ‘human evolution’, in (colonial) history, in the world economy, in its collective culture and identity, and even in its ‘personality’ (inter alia, its ‘darkness’ or its ‘Blackness’).24 The core of the discourse of African identity has been the African as victim. For Mbembe, ‘modern African reflection on identity is essentially a matter of liturgical construction and incantation rather than criticism’ (2001: 2); such reflection, he adds, reduces an extraordinary history to three tragic acts: ‘slavery, colonization and apartheid’ (p. 3); in other words, Africans are thereby simply reduced to victims of history. The placing of subjectivity within location was, of course, an Enlightenment conception. For Hegel (1952: 196), for example, the supposed absence of history in Africa was to be accounted for by its geographical location.25 Today the study of identities and place has simply become pan-disciplinary in Africa. Displacement – the politics of excess beyond social location and identity – has rarely provided the theoretical foundation for a history of Africans, and yet it is surely displacement that is the truly universal phenomenon of politics and hence of history.26 The once common statement that it is people who make history has largely been forgotten; it is time to revive it and to insist that people can think beyond their social place. In this context, the consequences of recent events in North Africa and the Middle East for thinking emancipatory politics need to be urgently drawn.27
TRANSCENDING POLITICAL IDENTITIES AND IDENTITY POLITICS
The dominance after the 1980s of a concept of ‘civil society’ provided a boost to the sociology of social movements as well as to a Left critique of African state parties, as various dictatorships were replaced by parliamentary democracies, partly as a result of popular protests, partly as a result of external pressure from the neo-liberal consensus. Throughout the continent, but in post-apartheid South Africa in particular, there has been a dramatic increase in the study of so-called organisations of civil society.28 Yet what is important to note as regards politics is that social movements as well as NGOs are always organised interests. In other words, as they invariably represent interests of various sorts, their politics are overwhelmingly the politics of representation, with the result that their mere existence (however much they may ‘resist’, ‘protest’ or ‘critique’) provides us usually with little more than popular examples of state politics. This, of course, is precisely how the sociology of social movements analyses them, even in cases when movements may have been able to invent a politics of excess over their social location.29 Actually existing sociology has not been able to transcend the view of consciousness as representation. A universal politics of emancipation, on the other hand, is not given by the existence of social movements; if it is to exist, such a politics must step out from its limitations of interest, from its confines of place. Any organisation doing so ceases to be a social movement in the strict sense and transcends place while remaining localised. We can call this process a singular process, to distinguish it from the usual notion of the
