incomprehensible brutish behaviour on their part.13 The post-independence national leadership, which actually emanated from within the same Kikuyu nationality, chose not so much to echo the colonial view, as Berman maintains (1997), as to stress that nothing of importance had really happened and that what might have occurred was pathological and simply violent, and should therefore be forgotten as quickly as possible. Thus Kenyatta was to assert in 1967: ‘We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred toward one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been [sic] eradicated, and must never be remembered again’ (cit. Furedi, 1989: 212). For this reason, Mau Mau is of more general import for understanding the obscure subjectivity of the imperial world and the reactive nature of postcolonial state subjectivities, as well as some of the African features of emancipatory political subjectivity in the sequence of national liberation.
African political idioms have been systematically and necessarily misrecognised and distorted by Eurocentric scientism, particularly as these have taken the form of subjective affirmations within the idioms of ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’, because, for the scientistic colonial episteme, subjectivity is always related to the objective in the final analysis. In Depelchin’s (2005) terms, silences have been produced in African history by (epistemic) ‘syndromes’, which necessarily lead to the occlusion of African agency, not to mention subjecthood. The character of scientism has meant, as Fanon recognised, that ‘for the colonized, objectivity is always directed against him’ (1990: 61, translation modified). The human sciences in general, and history in particular, are, however, Eurocentric only in a contextual and derivative sense, for they are currently governed by an episteme that ensures that they remain disciplines of state power and not of emancipation, wherever they may be deployed. In other words, it is not the colonial condition that calls forth a specific Eurocentric episteme. Scientism is already in existence and, when deployed under colonial conditions, can only silence the colonised, as it silences all subjectivities beyond objectivism. History is unable to express the subjectivity of displacement because of its epistemic configuration. It therefore cannot express the discontinuity and excess that constitute the defining characteristics of emancipatory subjectivity, with the result that it is wedded to a continuity of time. It is therefore a history of the state.
To corroborate and paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) well-known argument, the subaltern cannot be heard from within the parameters of the scientistic episteme; the only voices to be heard are the monotonous drone of the obscure neo-colonial subject and the oppressive beat of the reactive African state. What binds both today, and what blinds us to the possible political content of African idioms, are the notions of civil society, human rights and multiculturalism, for which politics is fundamentally social and cannot be understood outside of a state domain, as I shall show in later chapters. History, as it exists today, is a state discourse, as are all human sciences. To transform such disciplines means to develop new methodologies for the analysis of political subjectivities within delimited historical sequences. In this manner we can begin to develop categories for the understanding of people as reasoning beings with a will to make political choices which they and we all have to confront in thinking freedom.
NOTES
1.See Ranger (1968) and Hobsbawm (1974), among others. In the Congo, for example, a number of nationalist movements were expressed in religious idioms. The ‘antonian’ movement of Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) (Thornton, 1998) and the Radical Movement of Prophets (1921–51) led by Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951) come particularly to mind. They were spiritual and prophetic movements as well as a nationalist movement; so was the Nyabingi movement in the Great Lakes Region (Murindwa-Rutanga, 2011). I am not counting here the Muslim theocratic states, but one very interesting resistance movement, principally because it combined Islamic fervour with popular nationalism rooted in African culture, was the Somali Dervish movement (1898–1920) (see Samatar, 1982). There are many other such examples in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South.
2.I must make clear here that I am not simply referring to a distinction between the socially constituted realms of the secular and the religious à la Durkheim, but to the broader notion of separating the idea of the human being from any conception of the spiritual, a distinction that was simply non-existent in precolonial Africa; it could be argued that one of the most destructive effects of colonial domination was precisely to enforce such a separation.
3.For important introductory discussions of the land question in Kenya, see Leys (1975) and Leo (1984).
4.Lonsdale does attempt to provide an account of a debate on politics among Mau Mau activists (1994: 142–9) but feels obliged to translate this into Western idioms and hence to anthropologise Kikuyu beliefs.
5.Chakrabarty (1998: 19) rightly emphasises the fact that the original intentions of subaltern studies were both political and intellectual in a ‘modernist’ sense: ‘these original intellectual ambitions and the desire to enact them were political in that they were connected to modern understandings of democratic public life’; they did not necessarily come from the lives of the subaltern classes themselves.
6.It is worth noting that the term ‘subaltern’ itself is used inconsistently, as at some times it refers to a social category and at others to a political category in the work of these writers. This is arguably a symptom of their inability to resolve the problem of equating the subjective with the objective, politics with history.
7.We will see in a later chapter that the same problem is present in sociological accounts of the events of May 1968 in France, for example. See Ross (2002).
8.For a brief account of the rebellion, see Troisi (2000: 342–8). Santals are referred to as ‘tribals’ in the Indian literature. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the Santals and African nationalities. Troisi notes ‘that for the Santals as also for most of the tribals, land provides not only economic security but a powerful link with one’s ancestors’ (p. 346).
9. Interestingly, the current manifestation of ‘tribal’ insurgency in India is the ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxalites’, who are addressed in the same way (militarily as well as discursively) by the democratic Indian state as the Santals were by the colonial state. See, in particular, Arundhati Roy’s brilliant pieces (2010a, 2010b).
10.It can be shown in fact that informality can be functional to state control; see Ananga Roy’s work on Calcutta (2003).
11.In fact, Chatterjee arguably misses out on another mode of rule (and its corresponding domain of politics), namely that prevalent in rural areas. Without my wishing to comment on India, it is apparent that the mode of rule in rural Africa differs fundamentally from those domains that Chatterjee recognises in the urban; in particular, the deployment of ‘tradition’, coercion and violence in rural areas in Africa is something which is not (yet?) so apparent in the urban. The classic text on this mode of rule is Mamdani (1996).
12.This point is also cited in Mamdani (1996: 189).
13.See, in particular, Maughan-Brown (1985) for a detailed textual analysis of fictional accounts of Mau Mau from different perspectives: colonial, liberal, nationalist and radical.
Chapter 4
The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
The colonized’s challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.
– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (translation modified)
The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African
