time Cabral was aware that the character of the postcolonial state is at the source of the problem of the failure of emancipation, although he was unable to think a way out; the NLS mode had reached the limit of what could be thought within its parameters. As I have argued, this equating of the nation with the state was ultimately a necessary outcome of seeing politics no longer as affirmative, but as representing the social in the form of the indigenous, evidently so at independence and in many instances long before that, at which point the emancipatory character of politics had collapsed. In all cases, the first step to freedom was said to be the attainment of state power for the emancipation of the nation. Nkrumah’s aphorism – ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be given unto thee’ – accurately expresses this collapse into a disastrous state politics, leading often to a simulacrum of national emancipation and culture (as in Mobutu’s notion of authenticité, for example), since the instrumentalist notion of the state which it implied meant that the state was left largely untransformed from its colonial origins. Yet, in a postcolonial situation, the redress of national grievances could not avoid coming into conflict with private property itself, for the private clearly represented racial-national dispossession as well as being the foundation of capitalism. It is also for this reason that anti-colonial struggles often expressed anti-capitalist sentiments and that ‘state nationalism’ and ‘state socialism’ could easily be fused in the 1960s, when national freedom was equated with socialism, which itself was equated with social justice.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As I have shown, the NLS mode of politics was based on a contradiction that it found impossible to overcome: the struggle for freedom was a struggle not only against the colonial state, but to a certain extent against the state itself, like all struggles for freedom; yet at the same time freedom was said to be attainable only under the aegis of an independent state, as it had been frustrated by colonial domination. The nation, which in the struggle for freedom was equated with the people, became gradually fused in thought with the state, evidently so at independence. It was these contradictory tendencies that assured the ephemeral nature of any genuinely emancipatory content to the NLS mode, and the continuation of a colonial set of institutions and practices from which the continent has been suffering ever since. The neo-colonialism that ensued was thus primarily a political phenomenon; the submission to economic dependency on the West was a result of such politics and not its cause, as dependency theory maintained. In addition, the deployment of this mode during the international geopolitical context of the Cold War and its fetishism of state power led to its frequent ideological dependence on either the Stalinist or the Parliamentary modes, a fact that ensured its final disintegration and collapse into statism. One can see, therefore, how easily a politics with an emancipatory content could tip over into relying on external invariants, when subjectivity became derived from the state itself, as the movement became nation, became party, became state. Although this movement from an excessive to an expressive mode of thinking politics was most evident at independence, for many national liberation movements the transition to proto-states or ‘states in waiting’ was effected long before independence (e.g. PAIGC, SWAPO, ANC; see de Bragança and Wallerstein, vols. 2 & 3, 1982), many being recognised by the United Nations as ‘the sole and authentic representatives’ of their nations prior to taking power.
The sequence of this mode of politics in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism, is today clearly over, and has been so for about 30 years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can. I now want to ask the question about the extent to which the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa of the 1980s may have broken with this NLS mode of thinking politics. I will suggest that it did indeed do so in significant respects.
NOTES
1.The South African White Left’s elitism and strident opposition to nationalism are notorious. Such opposition has been paramount among radical social historians and was evident in the 1980s at a time when mass resistance was being unleashed throughout the country and the nation was being constructed on a popular basis, as I shall show in chapter 4. For example, Pillay (2009: 244) notes the lack of engagement with Black nationalist thought among scholars of the History Workshop at Wits University in the 1970s and 1980s; he cites Worger (1991: 148–9) as remarking that two of the leading figures of the History Workshop (which, incidentally, purported to study the consciousness of the oppressed) ‘argue that white radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, feeling rejected by the black consciousness intellectuals and appalled by the “sorry record of independent Africa”, stridently opposed (African) nationalism and supported a “stark privileging of class over race”’. The fetishism of class and the inability to take nationalism and popular politics seriously have, arguably, been two of the major political problems of the independent South African Left as a whole and the reasons for its consequent political irrelevance.
2.In his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is said to write less as an activist and more as a philosopher-critic; this is apparently why this particular work is preferred by postcolonial theorists. While this book is organised around the opposition White–Black, The Wretched of the Earth is organised around the opposition coloniser–colonised. What connects them both is fundamentally an uncompromising disgust with the degradation of some humans by others. For an important introduction to Fanon’s thought, see Gordon (2015).
3.The version of The Wretched of the Earth referred to here is the 1990 Penguin edition translated by Constance Farrington. Where I have thought that the translation is not particularly accurate (as when the French word ‘colonisé’ is regularly converted into the English word ‘native’), I have translated myself from the French edition (Fanon, 2002). In such cases my translation or modification is indicated.
4.The thesis referred to by Fanon is evidently Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, see Introduction, n. 38
5.‘This principle of inclusion [in the nation] had a special significance for Fanon because it was intimately linked to the idea ... that every new step towards liberation would transform whites as well as blacks, colonizers as well as colonized’ (Cherki, 2000: 106).
6.In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Saïd argues that many African nationalist thinkers, including Fanon and Cabral, distinguished between independence and liberation; in other words, that they did not see an independent state as the sole objective of nationalist politics. It is difficult to disagree with this point; the problem, however, is that, although noted, the distinction is not fully theorised in Fanon’s work in particular.
7.‘... before considering the act by which a people submits to a king, we ought to scrutinize the act by which people become a people, for that act, being necessarily antecedent to the other, is the real foundation of society’ (Rousseau, 1979: 59). For a discussion of this point, see Balibar (1996: 101–29). See also Gordon (2014) for an important discussion of Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ in relation to Fanon’s ‘national consciousness’.
8.It should also be noted that Fanon (1989) insists that the formation of a people is also a process of self-transformation as well as one of the change of social relations in the direction of greater egalitarianism.
9.See David Beetham (1974, esp. ch. 4) on Max Weber’s conception of politics, for example.
10.In what amounts to a brilliant study of Fanon’s thought, Sekyi-Otu (1996) argues that Fanon deplores the absence of an ‘organic’ link, in the Gramscian sense, between the party and the masses characteristic of the independence struggle, as soon as postcolonial power is established. In consequence, hegemony, ‘that mode of political authority in which force is ... tamed by consent to imperfectly shared ends’ (p. 149), is absent, so that crude violence and corruption become the standard rather than the exceptional features of the rule of the postcolonial
