‘tribal’, ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-capitalist’ in their ideologies, such forms of consciousness have been distinguished from those of ‘modernity’ precisely by relating them to their social foundations. While so-called ‘traditional’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ expressions of resistance have been seen as typical of ‘tribal’, peasant and other primarily rural-based movements, urban ones have been seen as focused on more recognisably ‘modern’ characteristics such as those of class and nation. Until the 1980s it was rarely thought that ethnic and religious subjectivities could perfectly well be ‘modern’ expressions of resistance (contemporary to capitalism) and that ethnic and religious movements, for example, could also be nationalist idioms. The dominance of historicism in social science was evidenced, for example, by Terence Ranger’s distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ forms of resistance to colonialism, the former being understood as largely peasant, ethnically circumscribed and rural-based, and the latter being urban, nationalist and modern in their thinking. Closely following the arguments of social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, who distinguished between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ rebels (the former being characterised by a ‘pre-political’ consciousness), historians and social scientists of Africa, much like those of Haiti, have restricted their understanding of political subjectivities to their apparently recognisable Western modern forms.
In this view, modernity in political subjectivity could not take other forms than those recognisably articulating issues of citizenship and democracy, organised in political parties, unions and other interest groups, and using a language of rights within a specific domain of ‘the political’. This evident Eurocentrism was unable to come to terms with the fact that supposedly ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or any ‘pre-modern’ cultural idioms could be deployed in the field of politics, not to advocate a return to a supposedly glorious past, but to affirm humanistic and popular-democratic demands for a better future.1 Such a view clearly conflated subjective politics with the objectively political and also assumed a public–private distinction, in the form of an extraction of the human from spirituality, which was largely misplaced and irrelevant to African conditions.2
The problem, however, has consisted in a failure to recognise not only that ‘religious’ idioms, for example, could be in essence political, but also that history and social science have only been able to analyse forms of consciousness by reducing them to the objectively social, thereby disabling any understanding of their possible universal emancipatory content. Moreover, the categories of the social (such as tribe, ethnicity, religion, class, nation) to which colonial people were ascribed were themselves introduced by colonial (and then postcolonial) power (Landau, 2010). These were not the categories that people used to describe themselves. Inevitably, the colonial character of modernity in Africa, as in South Asia and other postcolonial locations, led to an often unrecognisable and indecipherable fusing of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in politics, which could rarely be disentangled from within the logic of a Eurocentric scientistic discourse.
ACCOUNTING FOR REBELLIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS IN AFRICAN HISTORY: THE CASE OF THE LAND AND FREEDOM ARMY, OR MAU MAU, IN 1950S KENYA
One movement that illustrates some of these analytical difficulties is the so-called Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. ‘Mau Mau’ was the term used by the colonial state: the rebels did not use this term for themselves. They referred to themselves in Kikuyu as itungati or the ‘Land and Freedom Army’ (Lonsdale, 1994: 145). The militaristic name associated with the return of alienated land situates their subjectivity within the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics predominant at this time (it will be assessed at length in chapter 4). This uprising of peasants and workers (‘squatters’, in colonial parlance) was clearly an event for Kenyan politics because, although the movement was militarily defeated, ultimately its consequences were far-reaching, as a class of rich peasants was created by the colonial state by means of land redistribution through the Swynnerton Plan, and the country achieved its independence soon thereafter.3
Mamdani (1996a) has rightly rejected the debate between those who see Mau Mau as a tribal movement and those who see it as a nationalist one. It was evidently both, being overwhelmingly an organisation whose main adherents were peasants and workers of the Kikuyu nationality who demanded both ‘land and freedom’ and an ‘African government’, demands that were obviously nationalist in content and that could be supported by all the colonised (Barnett and Njama, 1966: 278 and passim). Obviously the distinction is quite impossible to make in this particular case, a fact that clearly illustrates the limits placed on understanding by historicist and positivist conceptions, governed as they are by their distinction between tradition and modernity. Yet we can also note that whether the literature stresses the socio-economic location of the participants or cultural characteristics, it is always their supposed ‘interests’, in the form of class, ‘tribe’, ethnicity, race or nation, which are seen to be the fundamental explanatory foundation of consciousness (e.g. Maughan-Brown, 1985; Throup, 1987; Furedi, 1989). The guerrilla rebels themselves are then simply depicted in historical accounts as ‘bearers’ of their socio-economic location within a structural context, not as subjects of their own history.
However, there has been one attempt to paint a picture of what participants themselves may have thought and of their motivations, that provided by John Lonsdale (1992). Lonsdale criticises those accounts produced by the colonial state based on tribe, atavism and socio-pathology, by nationalists founded on state nationalism, and by Marxists based on class, and proposes a ‘many stranded narrative’ that connects some of these factors, while he grounds his own account ultimately in a set of cultural practices which he refers to as ‘moral economy’ and a sense of civic virtue and reciprocity which he refers to as ‘moral ethnicity’ (1992: 403, 405, 467). While Kikuyu nationalists did not have one voice, ‘they still argued about one ideal, the civic virtue of self-mastery, some voices were light with hope, others hoarse with despair’ (p. 402). There was simultaneously, he argues, a battle for Kikuyu authority along age and class lines for which ‘the issue was civic virtue, achieved by one party but seemingly out of the other’s reach’ (p. 403). Those for whom ‘civic virtue’ was out of reach were precisely the poor, the young, particularly men without access to land, without the exercise of economic independence and political participation, and without the ability to fulfil their moral and civic duties within their ethnic domain. In the absence of these capacities they were simply excluded and could not be full ethnic citizens, for what ‘the ancestors had taught, or were said to have taught, on the relation between labour and civilization was the only widely known measure of achievement or failure in man- or womanhood’ (p. 316).
In sum, for Lonsdale, ‘Mau Mau fought as much for virtue as for freedom’ (p. 317). Asked by the colonial official, ‘Why did you join Mau Mau?’, a former guerrilla answered, ‘to regain the stolen lands and to become an adult’ (p. 326). In this manner, Lonsdale interprets the answer of the guerrilla to the colonial authority’s question as giving ‘Mau Mau’s open purpose and its inner meaning. His political language ... linked external power to internal virtue. His personal maturity depended on a public power to win land.’ Without ‘moral agency’ Kikuyu men could not achieve the full maturity exercised by elders (p. 326). Lonsdale thus distinguishes what he calls ‘moral ethnicity’ from ‘political tribalism’. The former ‘creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue’, the latter ‘flows down from high-political intrigue; it constitutes communities through external competition’ (p. 466). He concludes:
Moral ethnicity may not be an institutionalized force; but it is the nearest Kenya has to a national memory and a watchful political culture. Because native, it is a more trenchant critic of the abuse of power than any Western political thought; it imagines freedom in laborious idioms of self-mastery which intellectuals too easily dismiss. High-political awareness of the vigilance of moral ethnicity may be, as much as canny political tribalism and a lively civil society, what keeps Kenya at peace (p. 467).
The
