Source, 1973
NATIONAL LIBERATION AND POPULAR EMANCIPATION
The truth which the event of Haiti 1804 opened up was that of the political emancipation of colonised African peoples, the idea of independence and the formation of African nations achieved by people themselves through their own efforts. It was indeed with the struggles for African independence in mind that C.L.R. James wrote his Black Jacobins (James, 2001: xvi). And it was the idea of the nation that lay at the core of independence and post-independence political subjectivities; in times of struggle it was understood as a pure affirmation, but with the advent of state formation it was to be proposed as a social category. The sequence of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics lasted approximately from 1945, the date of the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, up to say 1975, 1973 being the year of the assassination of both Amílcar Cabral and Salvador Allende (Hallward, 2005). During this period a particular subjectivity developed through which national liberation and freedom were jointly thought in Africa in a specific manner. What makes the following investigation of the NLS mode necessary is that ‘nation’, the category through which freedom was thought is, in Lazarus’s terms, a circulating category, a category of politics as well as one of social science. In my terms, ‘nation’ can either be an ‘excessive’ or an ‘expressive’ category. I propose to look at the relations between the idea of the nation and emancipation primarily through the work of Frantz Fanon and, to a lesser extent, of Amílcar Cabral.
To maintain that nationalism in Africa has failed – or, more subtly perhaps, that it has deployed disastrous state politics, which coerce particular interests, as Chipkin (2007) does, for example – in current conditions when imperial domination and its attendant ideologies are still prevalent, and when these have altered their political form to stress a ‘democratising mission’ and ‘humanitarianism’, is simply to make it impossible to think new forms of nationalism, new forms of (non-identitarian) pan-Africanism, and consequently new forms of emancipatory politics on the continent.1 It means either resignation to the propaganda of liberal democracy and to the idea of the end of history, along with the final admission that ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’, with its massive levels of poverty and oppression and its constant need for war, is the best of all possible worlds with no chance of change in sight, or a simple retreat into dogmatism which can only reduce nationalism to its statist variety. Indeed, we need to bear constantly in mind that ‘we will never understand what constrains us and tries to make us despair, if we do not constantly return to the fact that ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology’ (Badiou, 2006a: 137). For those of us who live in Africa and in the countries of the Global South there is no path to emancipation that does not confront the power of empire in its neo-colonial form, which is only another way of saying that nationalism is not an obsolete emancipatory conception – far from it. The point is to distinguish it analytically and politically from the state itself. It is in this context of popular struggles for national liberation that ‘[the term] “people” here takes on a meaning which implies the disappearance of the existing state ... What is affirmed within large popular movements is always the latent necessity of what Marx considered the supreme objective of all revolutionary politics: the withering away of the state’ (Badiou, 2013a: 16, my translation).
But to affirm this is not sufficient. It is also important to analyse the character of the past sequence for which national liberation was the defining category, in order to bring out the singularity of its politics and to understand its limits and decline in terms of its own categories; to make sense of why it became saturated and therefore why the idea of freedom-in-the-nation lost its original emancipatory content. This requires more than can be done here, but what I wish to argue is that one reason for the saturation of nationalist politics in Africa was that these were not able to sustain an affirmative conception of the nation and that the nation gradually came to refer to a social category in the thought of politics as it unfolded over time. From a universal notion of national emancipation concerning all humanity, which is in Badiou’s terms ‘anobjective’, an ‘incalculable emergence rather than a describable structure’ (Badiou, 2009b: 26, 28), we gradually come to a notion of the nation founded on indigeneity, according to state political criteria.
It is through a discussion of the nation in Fanon’s work that this transformation of politics can be established at its clearest, as he was, with the possible exception of Cabral, the most accurate observer and theorist of this sequence on the African continent from within its own subjectivity. What is significant about Fanon’s three books on the Algerian national liberation struggle (1954–62) – which in the language of his time he refers to as a revolution – is that they were written from within the subjectivity of the sequence, as Fanon was a direct participant in the emancipatory struggle – a mass struggle – and was totally immersed in it personally, intellectually and politically. Fanon writes as an activist, a militant of emancipatory struggle.2 His approach is therefore not an academic one, asking what the essence (definition) of nationalism or the nation is, but rather one that confronts the much more political question of who constitutes the nation.
FANON AND ‘THE PITFALLS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS’
Fanon’s work takes three related forms: firstly, sociological analyses of the struggle process and the transformation of popular consciousness, published in English under the inappropriate title of Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1989); secondly, political analysis and journalistic work, collected posthumously under the title Toward the African Revolution (1967); and thirdly, his critical reflections on the outcome of liberation as he was dying of leukaemia in his deservedly most well-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1990).3 In all three books the dominant theme concerns the change in subjectivities among the masses of the people, the nationalist party, the state and intellectuals both in Algeria and in France. In particular, it is a popular conception of the nation, which he sees as arising when ‘ordinary’ people acquire the confidence of their power, the confidence of control over their destinies, that lies at the core of this work. It is this point that is made again and again, in remarks such as the following: ‘The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent and enlightened praxis of men and women. The collective construction of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on a historical scale’ (1990: 165, translation modified).
We have here the twin ideas that the nation is produced and that it is made – ‘imagined’, to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known term – from the actions of men and women, of people in general, and not by any structural developments (such as markets or print capitalism) or, for that matter, by any intellectual narratives (Chatterjee, 1986). This consciousness is therefore both one of the creation of the nation through the actions of people and its suppression by colonialism. This process, which Fanon sees as people transforming themselves as they make the nation, refers in Badiou’s terms to a ‘subjective becoming’; it is the ‘untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (Fanon, 1990: 31). It amounts to a clear excess over what exists, over the simply extant. As we have seen, this process in Badiou’s ontology is an event for politics simply because something appears that had not previously existed (Badiou, 2006a: 285). Subjectivity is thus transformed in hitherto unimaginable ways. What appears for Fanon is precisely the nation.
For Fanon, then, the nation is constructed in practice, in political struggle by people themselves; it is a purely political notion, much as it was for Jacobin nationalism during the French Revolution. We could say that it is simply ‘presented’ as a prescriptive affirmation and that it does not ‘represent’ anything outside itself. There is no given colonial subject; subjectivation is a political process of becoming. However, the construction of this subjectivity is not a spontaneous occurrence for Fanon, but a revolution in thought. What is spontaneous is rather the Manichaean dualism of the good embodied in the native versus the evil embodied in the settler. But the nation is not in any way to be equated with a social category of the native, as it is a purely political category. In fact, many settlers ‘reveal themselves to be much, much closer to the national struggle
