Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos

the emptiness, primitiveness or non-existence of Africanness. It did this, for example, in the idea of an ‘African personality’. While this movement was of great importance intellectually and culturally, and totally understandable in a context where assimilation was the main political threat to an independent human and political existence, it reverted to a psychological essence of ‘the African’ and of ‘African culture’ (defined, of course, by intellectual elites) which was unable to focus on the agency of the people of the continent. It was rightly noted by Fanon that it brought together the totally different experiences of Africans in Africa and Blacks in the diaspora under the same umbrella. It thus assumed, despite their clearly disparate experiences, that the main feature they had in common was oppression by Whites (Fanon, 1990: 173–4). Much like dependency theory, which was to appear much later in the 1960s and 1970s, it ended up seeing the core of African history as one of Western domination, to which Africans only reacted. Yet out of the African and Afro-American encounter also grew the idea of pan-Africanism, which had a much more radical history, at least initially, when it gave birth to popular African nationalisms, before it too was engulfed by the statist politics which persist to this day. It had both a more ‘conservative’ wing inclined to stress the racial or cultural similarities of Blacks, and a more ‘radical’ wing keener to emphasise class in anti-colonial struggles by Africans. The name most associated with the former would be that of Senghor, while C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah were perhaps more illustrative of the latter. Both these versions of pan-Africanism eventually saw the capturing of the state as a necessary step towards freedom and were ultimately represented in the opposition between the more ‘moderate’ Monrovia Group of states and the more ‘radical’ Casablanca Group, which eventually combined to form the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

      In fact, as a popular pan-Africanist subjectivity rapidly disappeared within a context in which state forms of politics asserted their hegemony, political subjectivities became much more state-focused, with the result that pan-Africanism collapsed into a multi-state conception (Mamdani, 1991b; Neocosmos, 2010b). The Africanist school of history, along with the modernisation school, which after independence was hegemonic in all of the social sciences, asserted the centrality of the state in thought. The only Africans with agency were said to be great leaders of great kingdoms and civilisations. Yet, by the 1970s, the influence of events in the Third World as a whole, in which popular struggles had prevailed over repressive states (Cuba, China, Vietnam), as well as changes in intellectual trends in post-1968 France (e.g. the work of Althusser, Poulantzas, Bettelheim, Meillassoux and others on modes of production and the state) and in the United States (e.g. in the journal Monthly Review) had initiated a shift to emphasising the class struggle as the motor of history or, in its radical form, the view that ‘it is the masses which make history’ (Althusser, 1971: 46). In other words, a sophisticated form of Marxism that stressed the centrality of social relations in the making of history took root in opposition to the vulgar economism of the ‘development of the productive forces’ inherited from official ‘Soviet Marxism’ as well as from Western modernisation theory à la W.W. Rostow (e.g. Temu and Swai, 1981).

      The central concept of what became known as the ‘Dar es Salaam debate’ was thus the class struggle and the struggle against neo-colonialism; the two were in fact viewed as part of the same process in a neo-colonial country (e.g. Shivji et al., 1973; Shivji, 1976; Tandon, 1982). While this political-economic perspective – which dovetailed nicely with postcolonial notions of development – produced crucially important intellectual work, it tended to remain within a structuralist Marxism and regularly failed to appreciate the fact that in classical Marxism ‘class’ had been conceived of as both a socio-economic concept and a political category, and that the core issue of political agency concerned the connection between the two. The answer to this problem, when it was indeed addressed, was still sought in terms of a party – particularly a vanguard party (e.g. Lukas Khamisi, 1983)⁵ – of intellectuals which would provide mass movements of workers and peasants with a political perspective, to turn them into political classes ‘for themselves’. In other words, the idea of agency was still largely conceived of within the parameters of the dominance of intellectual possessors of knowledge; that is, within those of Leninism. Agency was then still thought of, ultimately, in statist terms, as parties were and are quite simply state organisations, central component parts of what is sometimes referred to as ‘political society’; their function, after all, is the achievement of state power. It followed, as Mahmood Mamdani was to point out soon afterwards: ‘From such a perspective, it was difficult even to glimpse the possibility of working people in Africa becoming a creative force capable of making history. Rather, history was seen as something to be made outside of this force, in lieu of this force and ultimately to be imposed on it’ (Mamdani, 1994: 255).

      Political thinking was thus still not taking place beyond the subjective parameters provided by the state; simultaneously, political agency was being thought of as some kind of complex reflection of the objectively social, as social relations were seen as determinant of consciousness ‘in the last instance’, to use Althusser’s well-known formulation. After all, it has been a standard view, shared by both Leninists and liberals, that political parties ‘represent’ interests (class or otherwise) in the political arena.

      The late 1980s and 1990s in Africa substituted ‘civil society’ for ‘the state’ (political society) at the centre of intellectual discourse. This subjective ‘transition’ occurred as an effect of two related processes. On the one hand, we witnessed increased resistance ‘from below’ by popular movements of various types (such as national, ethnic, religious, gender and youth identity movements, predominantly urban-based) to an increasingly authoritarian state in several African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, Congo-Zaire and South Africa. Identity movements seemed to constitute the foundation for an emancipatory politics, as they provided part of the resistance to state oppression during this period (Ake, 2003). On the other hand, there was a worldwide transformation ‘from above’ as the old bipolar world of the Cold War collapsed and the new neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ put forward the watchword of ‘liberalisation’: ‘deregulation’ of the African economies and ‘multipartyism’ in African politics. The entry of the name ‘civil society’ into the debate within neo-liberal discourse seemed to presage an alternative to state authoritarianism and the possibility of the defence and extension of human rights and democracy; an optimistic mood developed as a bright future was predicted. We had now finally arrived at the neo-liberal nirvana of the end of history, so much so that this period was sometimes referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent. Intellectual work now shifted to a sustained critique of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the international financial institutions (IFIs) – on African states, on the one hand, and to extensive studies of political identities and social movements, on the other. Yet neither of the two contested the existence of the capitalist system as such, and the idea of emancipation has not featured in their vocabulary.⁶

      The neo-liberal critique of the state, which found political expression in the new ‘Washington consensus’, was dismissive of the African state as corrupt, illegitimate and unrepresentative of the general will. This was supposedly represented by civil society. This was sometimes empirically false, as often it was the state which had opposed ethnic chauvinism and communitarianism – for example, in Nigeria (Osaghae, 1995). But in this way the old authoritarian and secular nationalist state was weakened and more easily transformed into a Western-compliant authoritarian state in a democratic shell. Civil society organisations (social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) soon came to work broadly within state political subjectivities; in any case, they had to in order to survive. I shall return to a fuller discussion of civil society and the state later in this book, but at this stage it is useful to note that by the 1990s it soon transpired that the central referent in an attempt to conceptualise African emancipation could not simply be the state–civil society dichotomy. Civil society is a standard domain of neo-liberal capitalism and its politics, the existence of which only varies in intensity according to these organised interests’ ability to operate. As resistance within civil society is founded upon the existence of differences – the organised interests of the division of labour and hierarchy – it is central to modern social organisation, a fact emphasised incidentally by all the founders of Western