Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos

       Introduction

      Politics is thought, thought is real, people think

      The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary ... There is something very disturbing about ... [the] inability to credit ordinary people with being capable of weighing the odds and making their own decisions.

      – Arundhati Roy, ‘The Trickledown Revolution’, 2010

      If you are serious about victory, about succeeding to humanize the world, even a little bit, then your struggle must be a living politics. It must be owned and shaped in thought and in action by ordinary men and women. If every gogo [granny] does not understand your politics then you are on the road to another top-down system. You also run the risk of being on your own in the face of repression.

      – S’bu Zikode, Preface to Nigel Gibson’s Fanonian Practices in South Africa, 2011

      Freedom is not identitarian; it is at the very least an inflexion of, at most a rupture with, the identitarian register, insofar as the latter is a prescription of the Other.

      – Alain Badiou, ‘Séminaire 2011–2012’, 18 April 2012 (my translation)

      THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY IN AFRICA

      The end of ‘the end of history’ was finally announced on a world scale in February 2011. That announcement took place in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East. Popular upsurges of extraordinary vitality occurred, which brought back into stark relief what most seemed to have forgotten, namely that people, particularly those from the Global South, are perfectly capable of making history. The fact that this process was initiated on the African continent before it began to reverberate elsewhere is also worthy of note. The mass upsurge here was not of religious inspiration but quite secular, contrary to the thinking of the dominant perspective in the social sciences, which had been stressing the decline of secular politics in that part of the world since the 1980s. In fact, its closest predecessor had arguably been the mass movement in South Africa of the mid-1980s and not the revolution of the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1970s.¹ This series of events, through their insistence on ‘popular power’ as the driver of the process, has been very much located in a mode of political thought in which both religious organisations and established political parties were initially taken totally by surprise. In this sense, these events have been illustrative of a new sequence in which struggles for freedom are taking place outside the parameters established during the 20th century, when the party was the central organiser of political thinking. It appears that now, in the 21st century, a different mode of thinking emancipatory politics – inaugurated by the South African experience of the 1980s – could be seeing the light of day: one founded within the living conditions of people themselves. While the outcome of the mass popular upsurge in North Africa seems for the moment to have run its course (and counter-revolution in Egypt notwithstanding), it is apparent that popular agency is back on the political and intellectual agendas of the African continent.

      A central recurring concern of intellectual thought in Africa has been the necessity precisely to conceptualise political agency and the contribution of Africans to history along with their struggles to achieve emancipation. This is not surprising given hundreds of years of slavery, racism and colonialism during which African agency was not only denied, but seemingly eliminated, to the extent that Africa was said by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hegel to have no history worth speaking of.² The fact that racial oppression has been inherent in capitalism from its very beginning is often forgotten. This intellectual concern to reassert African agency has been active from the early days of nationalist thought right up to the near present and has informed the study of history on the continent in particular. In its initial phase it emphasised Africans’ contribution to world civilisations and to the formation of states, as state formation constituted the subjective horizon of nationalist historians.³ But the independence movements, born out of pan-Africanism, were also concerned to imagine an emancipatory politics beyond the simple fact of statehood; indeed, independence was seen as only the first step towards achieving such full emancipation. This was, however, a process that was conceived of as achievable only via the state. It was the state, its history and its subjectivities which lay at the core of intellectual endeavour in the early days of nationalism and independence, and I will argue that this has remained the case, though in a modified form and despite contestation, ever since.

      Gradually – among those who remained faithful to some idea of emancipation – the emphasis shifted from a sole concern with the state and the elites it represented as the makers of history to the masses and the class struggle as its driving force. After all, it was people, and not just intellectual leaders, who had played the dominant role in the struggle for independence, even though independence may have resulted from a negotiated process. Today this view has been in crisis for some time and has been replaced by an emphasis on parliamentary democracy as the high point of emancipation; this has been accompanied in academia by the study of political identities. Such identities, despite having been instrumental in resisting authoritarian postcolonial states, are today often seen – particularly in their religious or ethnic forms – as possible threats to democracy as well as retrogressive in their politics, rather than as the bearers of a historical telos; in fact, it is not clear whether it is parliamentary democracy or identity that is the source of the current political crisis on the continent (e.g. Sen, 2006). In any case, we can no longer see identity politics as in any way liberating or progressive. The thinking of African agency, which has always been bound up with a notion of subjecthood and emancipation, is in crisis, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Africans have remained in poverty and continue to suffer extreme forms of oppression and deprivation. Rather than attempting to contribute to the thinking of Africans as fully human subjects, intellectuality seems to have reached a dead end. At the same time, the West today simply erects barriers to African subjecthood, either physical in the form of walls against African immigration, for example, or less tangible in the form of the reiteration of the well-worn ideology according to which Africans are incapable of any progressive thought, as Africa is an incurable ‘basket case’. Africans, it seems, are still visualised as incapable of making history. These points will now be developed at some length.

      While the ‘modern’ colonial system enforced its ‘civilising mission’, supposedly designed to turn Africans into subjects, it had the contrary effect of denying Africans agency both politically and in thought; modernity was thus tied to colonialism, so that Africans could never contribute to it.⁴ Partha Chatterjee has recognised the effects of this well:

      because of the way in which the history of our modernity has been intertwined with the history of colonialism, we have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse, unfettered by differences of race or nationality ... from the beginning we had a shrewd guess that ... we would forever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would [we] be taken seriously as its producers ... Ours is the modernity of the once colonized (Chatterjee, 1997: 14, 20).

      The statist development process which followed upon independence itself mutated from an emancipatory political conception to a

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