present. The old idea of the nation has been largely undermined in a neo-liberal context where nationalism as a unifying project has been largely evacuated from thought. As a result, an obscure subject of the nation has come much more prominently to the fore in Africa, producing a simulacrum of Fanon’s national consciousness.
THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE MODE OF POLITICS IN AFRICA
To think purely subjectively about an NLS mode at a Third World level, and even at an African level, in the 20th century is extremely difficult without collapsing into model-building, i.e. into objectivism. Moreover, there is no single major individual who has expressed such a politics intellectually. A situated analysis of the work of Cabral, for example, as one of the major thinkers in this regard, is well beyond the scope of this book. Yet there is an important sense in which such a mode provided the parameters of political thought regarding the colonial and neo-colonial social formations of the immediate post-World War II period up to the mid-1970s. Its main figures included such disparate thinkers as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi as well as Fanon, Cabral and Nyerere closer to home, each of whom expressed a (more or less) different variant of the NLS mode. During this period, it was impossible to think politics in Africa in the absence of some form or other of anti-imperialism, even if only in rhetorical guise. This contrasts with the position today, when all states (if not all peoples) clamour to be part of empire. As Chatterjee (2004: 100) has so accurately observed, today the new ‘empire expands because more and more people, and even governments, looking for peace and the lure of economic prosperity, want to come under its sheltering umbrella’. The underlying conception of state politics today, in what is commonly referred to as the Global South, is to be part and parcel of the new ‘democratic empire’.
We should start first by stressing the irreducibility of the politics of national liberation from colonialism, a point we have already encountered in our discussion of Fanon. Not many European thinkers understood this. One exception was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was able to show that, just as colonisation was centrally a political endeavour, so was the struggle for freedom (Sartre, 2006: 36ff). The solution to the problem of colonial oppression was thus not fundamentally economic (reducing poverty), social (providing health or educational systems) or indeed cultural or psychological, however much these factors may have played a role in oppression and resistance. Poverty, for the majority, was clearly insoluble under colonialism, as it was a necessary outcome of the colonial system. The demand for freedom is thus purely and irreducibly political and was to be found at the core of nationalist politics,14 especially of the mass politics that were in some cases unleashed in the struggles against colonialism, and evidently this required transformation in both personal and collective subjectivities. As Issa Shivji never tires of repeating, nationalism grew out of pan-Africanism and not the other way around. Pan-Africanism was founded on the demand for universal freedom, justice and equality for all African peoples and was perforce irreducible to narrow national interest. It was only a state nationalism that could eventually abandon pan-Africanism for a particular sociological conception of the national interest. At the same time, the struggle for freedom had a universal character given that humanity could not possibly be free in the presence of the colonisation of certain peoples by others. Talk of the ‘human’ and his or her rights under these conditions was totally hypocritical, as Césaire (1972) rightly noted.
Politics as subjectivity was therefore the core issue of the struggle for independence, and politics gradually ‘withered away’ as the state took over nationalist concerns with independence, as the ‘people-nation’ was replaced by the ‘nation-state’, as popular nationalism was transformed into state nationalism, and as democracy was overcome by the need to solve the ‘social question’ (Arendt, 1963) or what was known in the postcolonial period as ‘development’. The excessive subjectivities of the liberation struggle were rapidly replaced by expressive ones. The absence of (emancipatory) politics on the continent in the postcolonial period has been noted by Shivji (1985). Yet he was arguably not able to expand this observation to fully think through the disappearance of politics as being occasioned by the rise of the state and its replacement of popular self-activity, thus arrogating all political agency to itself. The difficulty faced by the NLS mode was its inability to sustain an irreducibly political conception of politics, since freedom for its proponents was to be attained through the building of a new state – a contradiction in terms if there was ever one. Through the medium of the state-party, an excessive affirmative conception of politics with a universal emancipatory content was gradually replaced by a politics founded on interests (economic, power, cultural, rights and entitlements) that were to be managed by the state. This became an obvious intellectual problem for Marxist analysis after independence, as it was clearly a particular state politics that created the social in the form of a ‘bureaucratic bourgeois’ class rather than the expected opposite of politics ‘reflecting’ the socio-economic category of class (Shivji, 1976).
The reasons for the difficulty in thinking the emancipatory character of mid-20th-century anti-imperialist politics are arguably related to the fact that, while ostensibly concerned with emancipating colonial populations from an oppressive state, the NLS mode equated such emancipation with the construction of a nation-state. It thus combined both excessive and expressive subjectivities in a contradictory manner; it had both an anti-state and a statist aspect to it. We have already seen that this was a feature of Fanon’s thought; similar conceptions can be found in Cabral’s writings and in that of all major nationalist thinkers.15 In fact, Cabral (1973: 840) goes so far as to recognise quite lucidly – having had experience of many African states at first hand – the core problem posed by the nature of the postcolonial state in achieving popular emancipation. The problem of the post-independence state, he stressed, is ‘the most important problem in the liberation movement’ (emphasis in original). This fundamental contradiction was apparent in that it was always easier to be clear on what the NLS mode was against – as in ‘decolonisation’, ‘anti-imperialism’, ‘anti-racism’– rather than what it was for. Independence easily became the lowest common denominator, although equality and justice were also present to various extents in popular practices. Indeed, it would have been impossible to sustain any mass popular mobilisation without such practices and assumptions. Cabral expresses the limit of what was thinkable within the NLS mode of politics: the problem was the kind of state built after independence – it could not be the state itself. Today we must not remain prisoners of this limit.
In general, the NLS mode was predominantly a mode conceived, to use Lazarus’s term, ‘in exteriority’ in Africa, and was hegemonic in thought probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People’s Conference in Accra) and the mid-1970s.16 The NLS mode is a truly 20th-century mode,17 and its language was frequently borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode, though the term ‘class’ was usually displaced by that of ‘nation’, with Cabral even speaking in terms of a ‘nation-class’, to reconcile Marxist and nationalist conceptions (de Bragança and Wallerstein, vol. 1, 1982: 69). Following Lazarus, its main external social invariants were the ‘state’ and the ‘nation’ (which was equated with the ‘people’). At the same time, mass struggle against the colonial state and its racist politics contained elements of antagonism to the state as such, particularly the subjective fusion of the nation with the people in practice through an emphasis on equality. We therefore have in this mode a fusion in thought between people, nation and state, with the first two names dominating during periods of mass struggle and the latter two dominating most obviously after independence.
By 1975, the last vestiges of popular-democratic struggles had ended with the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Africa (and Vietnam at a world level), followed in 1980 by that of Zimbabwe. Even though the language of this mode was dominant within the South African African National Congress (ANC) in exile, whose perspective on the liberation struggle was largely congruent with that mode, I shall suggest in the next chapter that during the 1980s in South Africa a new sequence of politics was inaugurated. During 1984–6 in particular, evidence exists for the beginnings of a new singular (internal) mode of politics for the continent, although such a mode was never fully developed (as evidenced by, inter alia, the absence of any figure to systematise
