idea of our own times, for which the universality of humanity has been rediscovered in the form of an imperial conception of ‘human rights’, which I will assess in detail later in this book (see Buck-Morss (2000) and also Nesbitt (2008a)). For Hegel, universal freedom (which he equated with reason) was a notion which could not be applicable to ‘Negroes’, for in his eyes they did not belong to humanity, ‘for the essence of humanity is freedom’ and ‘slavery is and for itself injustice’, this being the condition of nature; yet he goes so far as to ‘conclude [that] slavery ... [was] the occasion of the increase in human feelings among the Negroes’ (p. 199, emphasis in original); in other words, European slavery and colonialism were justified by Hegel as ways of turning the inhuman and barbaric ‘Negroes’ into humans. For a good critical assessment of Buck-Morss’s argument, see Stephanson (2010); I am grateful to Peter Hallward for referring me to this last text. For those who may be tempted to believe that Hegel’s views of Africans may no longer be in vogue, I can only refer to the outrageously patronising speech which ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy of France delivered on 26 July 2007 in Dakar, Senegal, and the reactions which followed, for the details of which see Ndiaye (2008). Inter alia, he says (p. 80): ‘The drama of Africa consists in the fact that African Man did not sufficiently enter history’ (i.e. the history of humanity).
3.The seminal work of Cheikh Anta Diop (e.g. 1989, 1991) must be referred to from the outset. His genius lay in inter alia, grasping the original cultural essence of the African continent, which he saw as founded on matriarchal social systems. His work has provided the foundation for rethinking patriarchal and matriarchal subjectivities on the continent (e.g. by Ifi Amadiume (1987)) as well as for a reassessment of the origins of Western civilisation itself by Martin Bernal, who draws attention to the Afro-Asiatic influences on Ancient Greek culture; see Bernal (1987). From the perspective taken here, the limits of Diop’s analyses are the same as with all those who begin from ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’: the stress on the ‘place’ rather than on the ‘out of place’; for the distinction, see Rancière (1994).
4.In this context, it seems to me that the common reference to ‘the colonial subject’ is an oxymoron. It is largely an absurdity, as the colonial state (and indeed neo-colonialism today), to use an Althusserian expression, did not and could not ‘interpellate’ the colonised as subjects, but only as non-subjects or partial subjects (subhumans, children, victims, etc.). In the (neo-)colonial context, full subjecthood has only been acquired through opposition to such interpellation, through exceeding this subjectively, as I shall show below. More generally, as will become apparent, I follow the thinking of Badiou and Rancière in separating political subjectivity from individual consciousness.
5.Lukas Khamisi was the collective pseudonym for some participants in the Dar es Salaam debate.
6.The studies of these issues in Africa are numerous, but see, in particular, those published under the auspices of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, in the 1990s and by CODESRIA into the 21st century up to the present, which have been of high academic quality. The fact that these studies rarely questioned capitalism itself but only its neo-liberal form is probably best summed up in Mkandawire’s (2001) contention that Africa can indeed develop under capitalism (or South African president Thabo Mbeki’s assertion that Africa can and should appropriate modernity, presumably in the manner in which his own country has done so, with half of its population living in poverty). In so far as an alternative was proposed in this literature, it was one that argued for a state and a form of capitalism more responsive to the national interest and for a form of democracy that should be more inclusive. The problem to be noted here is not whether or not African economies can develop under capitalism – after all, the connection between capitalism and Europe has been definitely and permanently broken with the rise of China, India and Brazil as global economic powers – rather, the horizon of thought in these instances is unjustifiably restrictive, to say the least.
7.Writing in the early 1990s, Claude Ake contended that there were ‘several democracies vying for preferment in a struggle whose outcome is as yet uncertain’ (2003: 127); by the mid-1990s, the nature of democracy was no longer the object of contestation, as it had become solidified as a form of parliamentary state. See also Rudebeck (2001).
8.The discipline of anthropology was not considered in this context, being anathema to radical nationalist intellectual discourse, given its erstwhile association with colonialism, especially in Anglophone Africa.
9.Mamdani’s work has concentrated overwhelmingly on the state construction of ethnic identities, which he sees as structurally determined, while popular struggles are seen as reacting within that existing determination; see, for example, his analysis of the problems of the DRC in Pambazuka News (Mamdani, 2011a). More recently, since his return to Uganda, his writing has arguably been less overtly structuralist and seemingly more located and sensitive to the need for popular struggles which eschew the taking of state power; see Mamdani (2012), for example.
10.See Comaroff and Comaroff (2006), who mention the controlling function of bureaucracy through the medium of human rights discourse, but put this down to ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘postcoloniality’ rather than to democracy as such.
11.It is important to note that in our current world historical sequence there is no ‘relative autonomy’ to speak of between class interests and the state. The fact that banks get millions pumped into them even though they are the originators of a world crisis is one example; others are that private accumulation is said to be in the national interest, and the boundary between economic interest and state position is often impossible to ascertain within so-called democratic states in Africa and elsewhere. This point has been made by Balibar (1996) amoung others.
12.Marx puts this point as follows in his analysis of the Paris Commune: ‘The Commune ... was to serve as a lever for the uprooting of the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute’ (Marx, 1871: 72).
13.In fact, in South Africa the main reason why urban social movements are so popular on the left of the political spectrum has arguably been because they are seen as ‘working-class’ movements, an untheorised, intellectually lazy appellation which is simply equated with movements of ‘the urban poor’. In this way a vulgar form of ‘classism’ still lingers on in thought as activists and academics adhere to a crude sociological rendition of Marx’s political economy, which has been systematically emptied of any political content as a substitute for serious thought. It is also social class (with its clear ‘progressive’ ideological attributes) whose absence is invoked by Mbembe’s ubiquitous use of the term ‘lumpen’ as a descriptor to illustrate the currently ‘de-classed’ character of the African continent at all social levels (Mbembe, 2010b).
14.Rancière prefers to talk in terms of a ‘supplement’ rather than of an ‘excess’, but the basic idea is the same. For Rancière, politics only exists when such a supplement – the equality of speaking beings – is effectuated; it enables a particular ‘distribution of the sensible’, i.e. a specific way of framing a sensory space, which is radically distinct from that structured by what he calls ‘the police’ – broadly speaking, the state. See Rancière (1999), in particular.
15.See, in this context, Etienne Balibar’s La Crainte des masses (1996), which tries to deal with the insufficiencies of the Marxist theory of ideology in understanding political subjectivity in life.
16.I discuss Mahmood Mamdani’s work in some detail in chapter 12 below.
17.What is particularly disconcerting is that, even though Mbembe gestures to the centrality of local forces in democratising the continent, these are seen as currently absent or bereft of an Idea, and therefore the need to rely on Western solidarity arises (2010a: 27). At the same time, central to discussions among
