Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

Abstract

The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe is arguably the most important African thinker in the humanities today. He is best known in the Anglo-American academic community through On the Postcolony, which appeared in English translation in 2001. On the Postcolony sought to rectify a long history of corrupt Western readings of Africa that, when not imposing reductionist analyses on the continent's cultural and political life, are plagued by essentialist visions of the “dark continent.” Its reception is still subject to an unfolding intellectual drama in postcolonial and race studies. Much of the book has still not faced the same critical scrutiny that the introduction (“Time on the Move”), or even the infamous third chapter (“The Aesthetic of Vulgarity”), have undergone. The long-term reputation of Mbembe's first English book will depend on the reception of his latest publication, Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique decolonisée, which begins where On the Postcolony—with its account of the inevitable oscillation between the real and the imagined and between multiple contingent African temporalities that decolonization inaugurated—leaves off. In Sortir Mbembe assesses the past, writes the present, and questions the future of this vast continent in the attempt to write Africa, from Africa, in a world in which Africa's history and fate tend to be either oversimplified or simply dismissed.Sortir is scheduled to appear in English translation in December 2013, three years after its original French publication. Like its predecessor, Sortir has aroused only faint interest among French academics in spite of Mbembe's vehement attack against France's deepening xenophobia and intellectual provincialism, and it is likely to attract more attention from its Anglophone readers than it has among readers in France. In Sortir, Mbembe confronts head on not only a local assessment of the African postcolonial lived experience but also the vital question of Africa's role in a world undergoing globalization. Hence, whereas the theme of temporality was central to On the Postcolony, it is the question of space—geographically, politically, and philosophically construed—that dominates Sortir. From a critique of Europe's gloomy dream of a community without strangers and its nations' parallel efforts to build radically impenetrable borders, to portraying the picture of an exploding cosmopolitan African community, Sortir tackles the postcolonial subject's central question: the question of the relation of identity to geographical position. Africans today more than ever inhabit multiple worlds – at times simultaneously – and in the process are radically redefining cosmopolitanism. For Mbembe, the politics of tomorrow, that political imaginary which would ultimately propel us in a humane era—the question of, to borrow a concept from Jacques Derrida, “a democracy to come”—is a politics of “disenclosure” and of the circulations of worlds.In On the Postcolony, Mbembe attempted to offer a reading of Africa that could account for the complexity of human life in the postcolony and all the phenomena both purely unpredictable and acutely unspeakable, which plagued the continent for decades after the official end of formal colonization. Although, the period dealt with in On the Postcolony—as Mbembe himself points out—“is a period not only of unhappiness but of possibilities,”1 what remains of the seemingly interminable quest for self-determination and the bright promise of a liberated future is, he continues, an unreadable, often inarticulable shadow, a “chimera”, which “suggests that Africa exists only as an absent object, an absence that those who try to decipher … only accentuate.”2 There is no description of Africa, Mbembe concludes, that “does not involve destructive functions.”3 The movement of our thinking will thus always oscillate “between the real and the imaginary” in such a way that “the imaginary realized and the real imagined permeates all form of life.”4This characterization of African space and concrete experience does not change in Sortir de la grande nuit. A number of issues which played a significant role in On the Postcolony—foreignness, otherness, the question of the “absolute Other” of colonial Europe—retain their essential place while their explanatory force now work to describe Europe's deliberately self-induced insularity and xenophobia. Sortir begins with the same questions that haunt us in On the Postcolony—i.e. is the dichotomy “colonization versus decolonization” still valid? Does the duality make any sense at all? Can we think of one without necessarily implying the other? Or are they perhaps both two sides of the same coin?” But the new book seeks to interrogate the nature of the “decolonized community” fifty years after formal independence of much of the continent. Decolonization inaugurated an era of temporal bifurcations whereby multiple contingent futures opened up for each of the newly decolonized nations. In spite of this, terms like nations-states and centralized polity are still not adequate ways to describe postcolonial Africa. Fifty years after formal decolonization, we are faced with a continent plagued by deeply decentralized social frameworks. It is one Africa, Mbembe affirms, that runs in a temporal double sense whereby the past and the future are often met simultaneously. Yet it is also a place where cultural, linguistic, references have become so profoundly creolized that images and practices of existence have become surprisingly postmodern.5Mbembe reminds us that for Fanon decolonization fundamentally meant “shak[ing] off the great mantle of night which [had] enveloped us, and reach[ing] for light”6—it meant leaving this cruel night of “the-before-life” (la grande nuit d'avant la vie).7 The new birth, this emergence into real existence, entailed for Fanon the “provincialization” of Europe. The attempt to leave Europe because its time had come to an end would allow us to return to the question of “the human. In the wake of the fiftieth jubilee, Mbembe asks: What traces, what markers of meaning, what kind of revolutionary vestiges have we all inherited from this moment of utter change that decolonization signaled? Above all, the crucial question becomes: What exactly from this history is there to repossess? If, as Fanon predicted, the task of the decolonized was to redefine themselves in relation to a radically new future with new forms of life and new conceptualizations of humanity, upon whom was the responsibility of redefining the new original content to fall? Who was to take on this work and, most importantly, what have we got now in our possession to accomplish this endeavor? Fifty years later, Mbembe's postcolonial project is to restore meaning to an event which, in the last decades, has appeared as merely an idle haunting figure.Immigration has become both an African and a European problem. The desire of millions to live elsewhere than home, from choice or from having been displaced, has transformed Africa into a place (un lieu) of passage, a location of transit akin to a halfway house. To this, Mbembe continues, we may add poverty, mass murder and genocide, the unrestrained right to kill and to dispose of human lives, sanctioned and institutionalized corruption, endless riots, looting wars, and the like. This sort of “lumpen-radicalism,”8 as Mbembe puts it, is not only to be assigned to the evocative image of the child soldier or the ghettoized unemployed. For this cruel and more than often bloody populism is used as a tool, when needed, by elite classes as a private source of enrichment. It cannot be denied that the economical constraints of the last quarter of the twentieth century have been at the origin of social and political chaos. Among the casualties, Mbembe suggests, is the project of democracy. The perverse double bind—“to flee or to perish”—that engulfs the continent must be left behind. Furthermore, he argues, we must escape the logic of humanitarianism that dominates debates about the continent. We must condemn the mass extraction of raw materials from Africa that has left African lives and territories bankrupt on several levels. Thus, Mbembe attempts to write Africa into a world preaching the virtues of a global community while condemning African people and nations to exclusion.He begins the book with a biographical account of his childhood in the early years of post-independence Cameroon that brilliantly invokes the lives of many on the continent during a period, in which colonial powers took the moment of decolonization as an occasion to transfer power to their African collaborators. He concedes his spiritual and emotional disengagement with his native Cameroon and yet, at the same time, insists on his inability to remain indifferent. In fact, it will be this conflict that will fuel the majority of his work. On his subsequent migration to France, he discovered an arrogant country, conscious of its history and possessive of its traditions. Decolonization in France's colonial territories was a “farce,” a mirage which promised independence without freedom, and bestowed autonomy without relinquishing its tyranny over its former colonial subjects. France's politics on the continent has proved that formal decolonization was not enough when what was needed was a process of self-decolonization. For the victims of colonization, the project of liberation could not simply translate into the physical suppression of the colonizer. Liberation meant demanding justice, relinquishing hatred, and freeing ourselves from the addiction of the “memory” of our past sufferings, which Mbembe argues, characterizes victimized consciousness. Liberation in these terms was the condition for the possibility of speaking anew, of creating Fanon's new world.9This absence of an event (un non-évènement) gave way to neocolonialism: a pernicious modality of power relations between Africa and the West whereby annuities, coercion, violence, destruction, and brutality created new forms of wealth accumulation by means of political and economical extortion. The insidious politics of difference which starkly demarcated the realms of the colonizer and those of the natives were thereby upheld. Throughout the 19th century, Mbembe explains, the forms of popular racism in France were primarily a result of social transformation such as colonization, industrialization, urbanization, or even a growing bourgeois class. These granted a degree of urgency to the problem of “difference” in general but, more specifically, Mbembe notes, to the problem of racial differences. By the middle of the last century, it was quite clear that the French project of assimilation had failed. Race stood between citizenship and French identity proper bequeathing a problem which, if left unresolved, could sink France (and possibly the rest of Europe) into an irreversible age of provincialism, racism, and xenophobia. As Mbembe reminds us, for Fanon the possibility of a humane future is utterly dependent on “escaping the enclosures of races,” the dry and barren region of existence within which Europe sought to imprison the rest of the world.10 To do so, Fanon argued, required us to destroy this space of clear distinctions, separations, borders and enclosures and, consequently, propel us toward the universal which, he affirmed, belonged inherently to the human condition. Thus, decolonization entailed the formulation of a new politics, one that hinged not only on a new conception of the human, but also on a politics of dis-enclosure, of circulations of worlds. This is what the politics of the African future envisages.Disenclosure, déclôre in French, designates the act of lifting of a fence, of removing either a temporal or spatial barrier that initially surrounded an enclosure. It is unclear the extent to which Mbembe draws onto Jean-Luc Nancy's work in Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. However, there is a sense in which the emergence postcolonial thought designates an intellectual moment in which the theoretical enclosure of the Western archive, even if not lifted completely, is radically put to task. Just as for Nancy Christianity challenged Western metaphysics—a metaphysics of “presence” to use the critique of Heidegger, Derrida, or Deleuze in his own manner—by confronting it with inaccessible alterity within its very own world, Mbembe bestows postcolonial thinking capable of spelling out this politics of “dis-enclosure” with the power of opening the gates historically hedging what counts for legitimate thinking from the rest. Both the suspiciously reluctant and the philosophically informal readers of postcolonial theory are in danger not only of disregarding Mbembe's philosophical contribution but is also at risk of missing the sophisticated nature of his critique and appeal to contest Western intellectual history. To be sure, Mbembe neither denies, nor conceals, his heavy reliance on this tradition, especially deconstruction and contemporary French political philosophy. In fact, Mbembe's theoretical gestures remind us of Derrida's characterization of Husserl's itinerary as the latter attempts to move beyond traditional metaphysics. Phenomenology, as the transgressing of metaphysics, “keeps in the field and in the language of metaphysics by the very gesture that carries it beyond metaphysical closure, beyond the limits of all that is in fact called metaphysics.”11 Similarly, postcolonial thought has shown its ability to contravene the Western archive while simultaneously appealing to the concepts belonging to the very tradition it critiqued. This strange situation, that is, this “revival of the critique of Eurocentrism”12 significantly drawing from a European conceptual heritage, have paradoxically opened the path toward a renewal of its concepts even when the latter were historically employed to justify European imperialism. Just like phenomenology, as Derrida has argued, restored the language of metaphysics by rejecting it, Mbembe's discursive gestures demonstrate, in Sortir, that postcolonial theory is in the midst of discarding the blind, naïve, and often willfully ignorant, use of these foundational concepts. It is among these postcolonial discursive practices that one finds the tools capable of spelling out this politics of dis-enclosure. Thus, in a response to On the Postcolony's critics, Mbembe assesses that the postcolonial critique has, from a philosophico-political point of view, “contributed to the project, certainly contested here and there, of a multicultural democracy, founded on the obligation of mutual recognition as the condition of a convivial life.”13The question and dream of a shared world of belonging to a global community has always been central to black thought. And, for black thinkers, the question of decolonization was always inseparable from the question of Europe. To think of a decolonized world was to think with, and in confrontation with, Europe, the borders of which had already penetrated black lives by both on native soil and in the metropole. For instance, Mbembe recalls, Edouard Glissant's emancipatory politics involved encountering the world in its entirety [le tout-monde], practicing a praxis of relationship [une praxis de la mise en relation] whereby one consciously placed oneself in relation with a global world. Hence, practices of black freedom have inherently been intertwined with discourses of circulation, of multiplicity, whereby the world was not only home but also a method of thinking.Mbembe points to three central moments in the development of postcolonial thought. The first moment marked by anti-colonial struggles wrestled with questions of self-determinations and the politics of autonomy. The subsequent phase of the 1980s, the years of “high theory”—to use Mbembe's terminology—brought about such important publications as Edward Said's Orientalism, and the emergence of new modes of inquiry and fields of research like Subaltern studies, African American studies, and Caribbean studies. On the African continent, Mbembe argues, the postcolonial moment originated in literature. This tradition was characterized by a people's yearning for catharsis, the search, or desire for a cure. It was a way of responding to a brutal history of erasure, exclusion, and negation, by affirming that behind the ruins of a fabricated historical past lay a truth which Africans had lost and needed to retrieve. This third moment in the development of postcolonial thought that Mbembe proposes comes the closest not only to his incessant call for a renewal of analytic resources when it comes to thinking Africa, but also represents a peculiarly African postmodern diagnosis equipped to articulate the complexities of current postcoloniality. This tradition, Mbembe tells us, opposes the Western illusion according to which subjectivity is ultimately the product of isolated and individualistic projects characterized by circular and solipsistic return to oneself. Rather, this tradition contends that identity originates from primordial multiplicity and dispersion. The return to oneself that allegedly creates a subject is only made possible in and through multiple recognitions; subjectivity then becomes a movement of “co-constitution”. While echoing a critique of humanism akin to post-structuralism and deconstruction, thinkers of this third postcolonial moment interrogate concepts of humanism and universality with the aim of abandoning a politics of the similar [une politique du semblable] and rethink a politics of universality based on ethically diverse principles. Postcolonial thought takes the world both as method and a place for thinking. A “pensée-monde” par excellence, in Mbembe's words, postcolonial thought arises where European intellectual traditions have failed and writes the world in ways such that thinking becomes a “true” event.Along with the last chapter, “Circulation des mondes: l'experience africaine,” where Mbembe describes the emerging rearrangement of social structures on the continent, the third chapter, which also mounts a vigorous attack against France's social and cultural self-induced recoil and isolation from postcolonial matters, identifies the terrain on which the formulation of politics for an African future must take place. Insular and rigidly committed to building impenetrable walls around itself, Europe may perhaps never take part in the kind of cosmopolitanism, which increasingly describes the concrete experience of multiple communities worldwide. Indeed, Mbembe contends that the problematic of a “democracy to come” is linked to the future of the specific institution of “the border”. For, the border poses questions of the relationship between the constitution of political power and the control of space, as well as general issues of knowing who is my fellow human being, how to treat my enemy, and what to make of the stranger, the foreigner. The inability of Europe to face these issues emanates from the failure to deal with the problem of race. Mbembe reminds us of how in contemporary France the plantation and colonies have now moved within the borders of the Republic. Urban ghettos, or the banlieus, have turned into peripheral territories where rampant crime, poverty, and police brutality form explosive cocktails laced with the frustration and anger of a disenchanted French generation constantly reminded of the illusory nature of its citizenship. This state of affairs has only complicated the definition of the limits of the border and, consequently, has blurred the lines between the inside and the outside.Mbembe accuses France of failing to translate its bogus universalism into cosmopolitanism, a common humanity, a shared history and a collective future. This is the source of France's inability—like that of a number of western communities—to welcome postcolonial thought within its academic boundaries. In light of these discursive limitations, its unwillingness to support democratic movements in its past colonies, and its criminal immigration policies, France has lost the influence it once had on Francophone intellectual elites. The United States has now become the principal beneficiary of this loss of intellectual power and human resources. Indeed, France has never recognized the political significance of new theoretical irruptions in philosophy, in art, and literature, of four important intellectual currents: postcolonial theory, critical race theory, Diaspora studies, and feminist thought. This logic of exclosure which permeates cultural and intellectual worlds in France, especially since the last quarter of the twentieth century, is precisely what has prevented and weakened its ability to think the world and contribute decisively to debates on the “democracy to come.” Mbembe ascribes this lack, often a deliberate exclusion, of all postcolonial thought in the French academe to a number of politically charged intellectual currents of the past few decades in France. As Mbembe points out, at the time when postcolonial studies strongly emerged in the Anglophone academic world, a number of key French thinkers capable of taking up the debate—thinkers previously involved in the French Communist Party and other anti-imperialist radical organizations—had grown tired and suspicious of the left. In this context not only were Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon abandoned, but there was also a massive theoretical migration toward the United States by such key figures as Maryse Condé, Valentin Mudimbe, Edouard Glissant, and even Mbembe himself.Europe is not the only contemporary harbinger of xenophobic sentiments. In spite of its long history of migration and a progressively more cosmopolitan population, Africa is increasingly witnessing the proliferation of ideologies promoting radically dangerous indigenous politics. Indeed, from the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, to the current Congolese tragedy, to the crisis in southern Sudan, race and ethnicity have undoubtedly become the measures by which who counts as a legitimate native is determined. While this principle of ethno-race is gradually serving as a basis for citizenship, new modes of acquisition of the basic means of survival—mainly economic exile in Europe—have resulted in profound modifications of identities and traditional methods of membership. Mbembe contends that two versions of African cosmopolitanism have emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. There is a “practical” cosmopolitanism whereby the migrant still relies on the obligations of membership in a distinct cultural and religious community but leaves nonetheless ample room for intense and commercial exchange with the world, and from which hybrid cultural formations have emerged and are gradually accelerating the African path toward creolization. Then, there is the “cosmopolitanism of the elite,” a phrase that describes the philosophy emanating from the migrations on the part of African elite. From this group's experiences in both European metropolises and North America, new philosophical and political projects have emerged. They are characterized by attempts to reconstruct African identity and public space in relation to the universal demands of reason and its notions of civil government, of equal participation in matters of political representation and sovereignty, and of Africans as legitimate human beings, et cetera.In literature, philosophy, and the arts in general, Mbembe reminds us that African discourses have historically been dominated by three politico-intellectual paradigms: the nationalism of the anti-colonial movements, the rereading of Marxism that resulted in a number of kinds of African socialisms, and Pan-Africanism. It is, however, with today's postcolonial moment in these fields that Mbembe concludes Sortir. Oscillating between a lucidity that some have deemed too pessimistic and an optimism at times radically utopian, Mbembe describes the new moment, explicitly postcolonial in nature, in African modes of expression. He calls: Afropolitanism. Sequential moments mark “afropolitanism.” The first, the postcolonial, may be described as the transcendence of the Negritude movement. For this mode of thinking all origins are fundamentally hybrid, the question is no longer about origins or the loss of a glorious past, but about finding ways of articulating the postcolonial state of violence and the ubiquitous economy of death, human suffering, and raw cruelty. Dominated by an aesthetics of transgression, to write about Africa—to write Africa—for this tradition is to write social rape and human violence. It is indeed no longer about merely speaking and describing the state of affairs than it is about expressing the intolerable. The second moment corresponds to Africa's recent emergence in a new epoch of dispersion and circulation. The intensification of migrations and the endless creation of new African diasporas across the globe have undoubtedly created new cultural and social frameworks. The creation of new forms that can capture the essences and fruits of cultural mobility may well be the task of our new generation of African thinkers.Perhaps more than any other generation, today's Africans will be forced to answer to the true vision of the anti-colonial project, a vision that envisaged the deracialization of power and property for the benefits of all Africans. Paradoxically, however, anti-colonial nationalisms failed to consider the insidious ways in which their political imaginary, as well as their decolonizing practices, had inherited from racist colonial ideology. In addition to equating politics with violence and war, Mbembe argues, armed movements fighting for Africa's independence had also inherited the belief that history was essentially the confrontation of races and that the enemy in the struggle was always, necessarily, of another race. Emancipation therefore involved the purification of acquired independent territories from this other race coupled with radically inversing social roles by restituting lost land, culture, and dignity to black Africans. Rather than envisaging new social structures, the deracialization of power and property took the shape of a mimetic exercise whereby independence signified merely the reversal of relations of power and property. The political and moral bankruptcy of African nationalisms, Mbembe thus continues, is precisely the consequence of their inability to forego colonial politics of race and its concomitant logic of violence. To the political visions of true decolonization, we may add the reclamation of one's body as a legitimate site of life and expression, and a critique of African communalism through which crimes against one another would be taken seriously. Since On the Postcolony, Mbembe's work has opened the door for such critical renewal. Both diagnostic and programmatic, Sortir assesses Africa's multiple spaces and times and devises a rich conceptual platform to think, live, and write Africa in ways most capable of articulating what has largely escaped thought. To be sure, Mbembe's challenges are not easily answered. As mentioned before, whereas the postcolonial question in 2000 seems to be for Mbembe a question of temporality, of thinking postcoloniality as a hydra of temporal bifurcation, multiplicity and, in the white imaginary, a time outside of history thus deeply predictable, ten years later thinking postcoloniality is facing the question of space. More precisely, the task would be to write Africa into the world, and write the world from Africa, as a legitimate, living, and expressive place of dwelling in a globalized world. Hence, African dreams of emancipation will necessarily involve relinquishing mimicking the dangerous games of racial violence inherited from the colonial practices and exiting archaic and corrupt nationalisms in order to envisage a “postracial” conception of citizenship. Without this, Mbembe concludes, non-black Africans have no viable future on the continent.The manifold ways in which we, postcolonial Africans, have inhabited our continent has in fact radically dislocated the fundamental ontological questions that once occupied the centers of African modes of thinking. Such questions as, who we are, what our inner being is, what our past was and how it fell apart, no longer hold center stage. The focus has shifted to the manner in which we “live” Africa—as a place of passage, as a space of glorious returns or even, tragically, as either a nonexistent place or at best a mirage—and the way that has shaped hybrid identities which may well be those that will ultimately spell out new conceptions of the human and the universal, that can meet the critique leveled by postmodernists against a metaphysical universal humanism. Indeed, Mbembe's exposition undoubtedly points to the African strong capacity for articulating a cosmopolitan metaphysics capable of granting Fanon his dream of decolonization as the dislocation of the empire. For, lurking behind Mbembe's claims, is Fanon's tenacious belief in the inherent bankruptcy of the Western archive, which Mbembe tacitly cosigns by his call for Africa's vital responsibility of reimagining modes of expression capable of making sense of today's continent and inventing a politics for an African future. Even if Mbembe, as some critics of On the Postcolony have complained14, makes extensive use of European theory, this only serves to reminds us that, first, postcolonial theory is inherently a globalized thinking by virtue of the multinational, multi-ethnic, and cosmopolitan character of its theorists, and secondly, that at the basis of most radical novelties one often finds the seeds of processes of creative reappropriation.What calls for twenty-first-century postcolonial thinking is the world: the world as a question and the world as method of thinking. For, if colonization exacerbated the initial nomadic character of African individuals and social practices, dislocation may be the blessing in disguise—albeit sometimes with tragic ramifications—that makes it possible to outline the principles of tomorrow's politics of disenclosure that Mbembe imagines. The condition for the possibility of thinking in a shared world, of expression within a global community, or of Glissant's vital praxis of relationship forcefully questions the pernicious institution of “border.”For, just as the inheritance of colonial modes of violence and brutality has tragically resulted across the continent in a generalized circulation of death, it appears that indigenous politics based on borders has recently sunk part of the continent into an endless succession of wars in which citizenship and cultural identity are insidiously conflated. This new politics of disenclosure becomes then a social, ethical, and political enterprise whereby strangeness and foreignness are no longer Europe's ethical Achilles' heel, but the very conditions for the possibility of universality. Europe has always been an African question; that is why African postcolonial thought is perhaps better equipped to lead the way in thinking the question of the future. The event which decolonization failed to become still resides in the political imaginary envisaging the reconstitution of political power based on the rejection of fascist and xenophobic controls of national and cultural space.As with On the Postcolony, Mbembe in Sortir reminds us of the critical conceptual shift that our postcolonial times have inaugurated. Thinking in the postcolony is no longer about revealing the cruelty and blindness of Europe's big ideas, deconstructing colonial prose, or even explicitly naming Europe's history of intellectual insularity or theoretical exclusions. Rather, it seems that to Césaire, Fanon, Senghor, and the canonical precursors of postcoloniality, we must answer with the power of the radically new, which lies in the fragmentary nature of our African condition.