BREAKING THE GRIDLOCK OF THE AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL SELF-IMAGINATION

Abstract

In a response to critiques of his On the Postcolony in a 2006 African Identities article, Achille Mbembe declared that the book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Marxian analysis of colonization and its consequences is specifically isolated as one such impotent tool of critical analysis. As an alternative to these “failed” traditional paradigms, Mbembe launches into a deconstructive experimental hermeneutic that leads him to the explication of colonial alterity in libidinal, representational and semiotically analogous language, as exhibited in On the Postcolony. This article challenges the efficacy of this post-structuralist semiotics and phenomenological extrapolations as the proposed way out of his perceived “cul-de-sac” in African postcolonial self-imagination. In particular, his dismissal of Marxian theory is turned around and demonstrated as an analytical paradigm that most radically diagnoses the essence of colonization as it affects the African subject. On the basis of the schema of Das Kapital, which is primarily about the postulation of the expropriation of labour power as the surplus value that fuelled the Atlantic slave trade and colonization, what Mbembe deems hermeneutically as a discursive distortion of the imagery of the African in the past and the present, is exposed as being a material-political misappropriation of the human essence, and as such a historical injustice that remains embedded into the logic of prevailing neo-colonialism.