THE AFRICAN ANIMAL OTHER

Abstract

The main claim in this article is that the traditionally Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. The racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the older Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. In the Great Chain of Being of Western metaphysics it is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes and separates humans from that same domain. Situated in the border between human and Animal, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. With the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. African Woman, in particular, is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project thus institutes a certain flight from Nature and Animal, which is nevertheless bound to fail for some. This symbolic project finds concrete expression in the uncontrolled sexual and other forms of exploitation of the Black woman’s body, as much as in the rampant destruction of nature and animal in the colony. The main aim of the article is to look at ways to confront and dismantle this highly destructive symbolic. To this end, Merleau-Ponty’s careful reintegration of the intelligible into the sensible, and his understanding that the human mind is a function of the “flesh of the world” itself, is deployed. In his last, incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, we get the most complete vision of human intelligence as a kind of fold in the flesh of being and as merely a moment in “nature’s own self-unfolding expression.” I end with a brief comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and some concrete examples of extra-Western or extra-colonial Southern African understandings of Animal and Nature, and with the hope that this dialogue will be developed further.