Thinking Freedom in Africa

Michael Neocosmos

Description

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)

Sujets

• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• África
• General officer
• History of Africa
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868148677
• Langue: English

Extrait

Couté la libeté li palé nan coeur nou tous! [Listen to freedom; it speaks in all our hearts!]
– Zamba Boukman Dutty, Bois Caïman, Saint-Domingue, 15 August 1791
It is to the mute, to the stutterer, to the stranger, that the poem must be offered, and not to the chatterbox, to the grammarian, or to the nationalist. It is to the proletarian – whom Marx defined as those who have nothing except their own body capable of work – that we must give the entire earth, as well as all the books, and all the music, and all the paintings, and all the sciences. What is more, it is to them, to the proletarians in all their forms, that the poem of communism must be offered.
– Alain Badiou, ‘Poetry and Communism’, 2014
The people and the people alone are the motive force in the making of world history ... The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.
– Mao Zedong, The Little Red Book
Except for cases of genocide or the violent reduction of native populations to cultural and social insignificance, the epoch of colonization was not sufficient, at least in Africa, to bring about any significant destruction or degradation of the essential elements of the culture and traditions of the colonized peoples … the problem of a … cultural renaissance is not posed nor could it be posed by the popular masses: indeed they are the bearers of their own culture, they are its source, and, at the same time, they are the only entity truly capable of preserving and creating culture – in a word, of making history .
– Amílcar Cabral, ‘The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence’, 1972 ( emphasis in original )
If humanity does not work toward its own deployment, toward its own invention, it has no other option but to work toward its own destruction. That which is not under the rule of the Idea will be under the rule of death. The human species cannot be animal-like innocently. Man is that species which needs the Idea in order to inhabit his own world in a reasonable manner.
– Alain Badiou, La Philosophie et l’événement, 2010 ( my translation )

Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Michael Neocosmos 2016
Published edition © Wits University Press 2016
First published 2016
978-1-86814-866-0 (print)
978-1-86814-869-1 (PDF)
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Edited by Karen Press and Russell Martin
Proofreader: Lisa Compton
Indexer: Marlene Burger
Cover design: Hothouse
Typeset by Newgen
Printed and bound by ABC Press
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this work to all our political ancestors on the African continent who sacrificed their personal lives for a world worthy of humanity, and particularly to the memory of Phyllis Naidoo (1928–2013).
Viens, écoute ces mots qui vibrent
Sur les murs du mois de mai
Ils nous disent la certitude
Que tout peut changer un jour
– Georges Moustaki
All I want is equality
For my sister,
My brother,
My people
And me
– Nina Simone
Contents
Foreword by Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
1. Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
2. From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
3. Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
4. The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
5. The People’s Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
6. From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
7. Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
8. Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
9. Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
10. Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
11. Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
12. Renaming the state in Africa today
13. Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
14. The domain of civil society and its politics
15. The domain of traditional society and its politics
16. Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
This is a very important book. It deals with a crucial issue of our times of political crisis, namely: is emancipatory politics still possible today and does it have historical references? Or put differently: can we think anew a politics of universal human emancipation? The Marxist political vision has collapsed; attempts to recalibrate it are in difficulty as they lack historical references. The recourse to neo-liberal ideology has made it difficult to even conceptualise the universality of humanity. In fact, due to deep economic crises such as the aggravation of human inequality, neo-liberalism has given rise to fascistic tendencies in thought throughout the world.
Politics, when it has been thought, has failed to detach itself from the determination of locality and the identity of the subject. In addition, the fact that present dominant forms of capitalist legitimation include religious or spiritual figures (Islamic and other fundamentalisms) generates even more difficulties and uncertainties. Wars are being fought under religious flags. The Arab Spring which generated tremendous hope, as a ‘new beginning of history’, has either failed – given rise to a military dictatorship in Egypt – has run into an unfinished terrorist crisis in Libya, or has faded into a variant of Western democracy in Tunisia.
The book is also a real event in the knowing and thinking of the politics of emancipation through the study of the global history of African peoples’ struggles for liberation – liberty, equality, freedom, independence and dignity – that is African peoples’ historical contribution to universal emancipatory politics. This area of study has been often marginalised if not silenced altogether, partly because thinking has often been denied to African people. And these people, due to deep alienation, have often simply adopted models thought elsewhere. This, of course, does not mean that there have been no experiences of emancipatory politics by African people. The author does bring into focus some new ways of looking at African history, no longer making colonial history the ‘pivot’ of such history and giving voice to the ‘wretched of the earth’.
The author uses some of the most creative and inspiring ideas or categories produced in the contemporary theoretical conjuncture; those particularly found in the conceptual philosophy of Alain Badiou and the nominal anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. The idea that ‘people think and thinking is a relationship of reality’ – or put slightly differently that ‘thinking is real and all people think’ – this idea makes it possible for the thought of silenced categories of people – the damned of the world – to be studied. The concepts of ‘situation’, ‘event’, and their relationships, to mention but a few categories are very helpful in this regard. A true event emerges within a situation. It appears as something completely new in that situation; in that sense, it is an exception to the situation. Ideas of emancipatory politics arise through an emancipatory event. The elaboration of those ideas by militants of the event may give rise to new institutions sustaining the aimed for emancipation. Such creative conceptual developments which begin to constitute a theory of emancipatory politics are proposed in this book. The central focus of the theory elaborated in the book is that emancipatory politics is a politics in excess of place, of the social. It is a politics which is not closely linked or identified with locality, subject or culture, even if those elements do constitute its emerging environment. From that concept of emancipatory politics, the book examines throughout African peoples’ global contributions to world history through specific historical references. The book identifies the Mande Hunters’ Oath or Charter (1222), an idea of politics asserting the universality of humanity in the struggle to resist the rise of Arab slavery. Other historical references include: important ideas of politics of liberty, equality and independence, which arose in the slave revolutionary movement in Saint-Domingue; ideas of politics of restorative healing of society (and the family) through ‘Lembaism’ in Kongo society devastated by Portuguese colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, and the politics of the revolutionary liberation movements. Details can be fou