Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos

rightly suspicious of the term ‘civil society’, especially as it seemed to imply a Manichaean dualism within neo-liberal discourse, the dark side of which was said to be the state (Mamdani, 1995a, 1995b; Olukoshi, 1998). The postcolonial state, it was maintained, had been, despite its authoritarianism, a nationalist state, which at least had defended national sovereignty in some important ways as well as providing social subsidies for the needy (education, health, etc.), features which were now rapidly receding into the mists of time as Western domination increased within a newly globalised world. Neo-liberal conceptions of democracy were also contested, and it was hoped that the form of democracy – the missing term of political economy – could be debated, as its meaning was being subjected to popular contestation (Anyang’ Nyong’o, 1987; Mamdani, 1987; Chole and Ibrahim, 1995; Neocosmos, 1998; Ake, 2003).⁷ This was not to happen, at least not in any real depth, as both movements and intellectuals finally accepted the christening of the new state form as the ‘democratic state’. The old political elites, predictably with Western support, embraced the name and were able in most cases to survive the transition to democracy with their power intact. The enthusiasm for a genuine change in which the popular masses would finally be able to be the agents of their own history gradually faded as mass poverty and political despondency increased. The disappearance of ‘meta-narratives’, we were told, was all for the better, as they were ‘essentialist’; the postmodern condition, now written without the hyphen, was fluid, classless and characterised by clashes of identity. The study of identity politics became the order of the day, as religious and ethnic identities in particular were said to be core features of the new globalised world: ‘belonging’ provided the only way of accessing increasingly scarce resources, whether material, cultural or ‘political’ (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000). It is therefore not too difficult to see, given the resulting silencing of emancipatory thought, that ‘any postmodern conception is only a form of intellectual connivance with the hegemonic decadence of capitalism itself’ (Badiou, 2011e: 15, my translation).

      Any Idea of emancipatory politics receded into the distance, seemingly to be replaced by atheoretical empiricism in academia and a rapid rise of fundamentalisms – contrary to the predictions of modernisation theory – in politics. It soon became clear that the terms ‘progress’ and ‘progressive’ were no longer part of political vocabulary, while it became impossible to find anyone who did not swear to being a democrat. In such conditions the term ‘democracy’ itself could only become suspect, for it no longer implied a better world for the majority, but formed the core name of a state and imperial consensus in which vast inequalities and continued oppressive relations were tolerated as largely inevitable. In fact, democracy now characterised the politics of the new form of empire (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2001) as, together with humanitarianism, it was imposed on the world – through the exercise of military power if necessary. While the ‘civilising mission’ of imperialism had ended in the 1960s, we were now witnessing a new ‘democratising mission’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2007), through reference to which Western power was being redeployed in the rest of the world (e.g. ex-Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Libya) as the West faced its newly perceived enemy of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In no case has it been thought necessary to think the importance of a demos or popular social foundation for the formation of a democratic state; formal attributes – elections, multipartyism and the ubiquitous notion of ‘good governance’ – were considered sufficient to qualify for entry into the enchanted world of state democracy and globalised neo-liberalism.

      During this period, the most important studies of popular political subjectivity concerned social movements and were, in the best work, given a political inflection. Social movements were seen as the expression of popular political agency, ‘the subjective factor in African development’ (Mamdani et al., 1993: 112), and regularly counterposed to NGOs, which were often visualised as the bearers of a neo-colonial culture of clientelism. Yet, in all this work, political agency was understood as a reflection of the objectively social, of the specific dimensions of the social division of labour. There was never any attempt to conceive subjectivity in terms of itself, understandably perhaps because of the assumption that this meant a collapse into (social) psychology (and hence into idealism), the only discipline understood as attempting to produce an account of the subjective – as, after all, it was psychology that was said to regulate consciousness.⁸

      The justly famous volume on African social movements edited by Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba (1995) was quickly followed by various studies by Mamdani (1996a, 2001, 2009) in which the colonial state and the production of political identities were theorised in a manner that rightly detached them from political economy, but that nevertheless focused exclusively on their institutionalisation as an exclusive effect of state politics, while simultaneously assuming a clearly demarcated political realm in African peasant societies governed by tradition. Groups were said to acquire their political identities largely because they were interpellated by the state in an identitarian (or communitarian) manner; we were not told if there was any resistance to such state interpellation by alternative non-identity politics. Little or no space was devoted to analysing the political contradictions within tradition or popular culture, some sides of which may have exhibited a popular non-statist perspective. Thus the impression was given in this body of work that little or no agency had been shown by people in their process of identity formation (Neocosmos, 2003). Yet, as many studies have indeed convincingly suggested, tradition is always more or less contested from within, invented, reinvented and imagined, as it is itself the outcome of different political subjectivities that affect power relations, themselves constantly in flux (e.g. Ranger, 1985b, 1993; Vail, 1989). Moreover, a clear-cut domain or sphere of the political is rarely in existence within tradition, as power relations are intimately imbricated within cultural, economic and other relations of domination in African society. Mamdani’s work was concerned with thinking the political, not agency and subjectivity; in other words, not with thinking politics as such (Mamdani, 1996a, 2001, 2009).⁹

      In Africa, then, the study of political identities largely distinguished itself from an apolitical postmodernism, but remained caught within the parameters of state-centredness, as it was the state which was seen as the prime creator of such identities through a process of institutionalisation, exclusion, co-option or whatever (Mamdani, 1996a, 2002; Habib, 2004; Ballard et al., 2006). Concurrently, it has also gradually become apparent in most African countries that democracy as a form of state was more oligarchic than democratic, as states (and powerful elites) ignored or bypassed their own democratic rules systematically, and that long-standing popular-national grievances, such as access to land or employment and housing, were not adequately addressed by the state or were addressed only in the interests of the few.¹⁰ These failures have brought forth a contradiction between human rights and national rights, as the latter are neither dealt with nor indeed are resolvable by the former, which insist on the primacy of the right to private property, while the latter require its contestation. The result has been that the issue of freedom remains on the agenda, as the excluded themselves categorically state when they are allowed to express themselves – for example, in the case of Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, who mark the official Freedom Day public holiday with gatherings to mourn the absence of freedom on what they rename as ‘UnFreedom Day’.

      Yet this demand to partake in the benefits of democracy and to access the benefits of freedom, much trumpeted in the case of South Africa, for example, now takes place in a situation of political disorientation where the usual ideological signposts are no longer of help, as the standard dichotomies – Left–Right, state–market,¹¹ nationalist–socialist – have become largely meaningless, while the newly arisen contradiction between nationalism and democracy, characteristic of many countries, remains often subterranean, largely unrecognised and hence under-discussed. As a result of the absence of an emancipatory discourse in the political arena, we are today confronted with a political crisis as the masses turn on themselves in a frenzy of ethnic, religious or xenophobic violence (e.g. Kenya 2007, South Africa 2008, Nigeria 2009–10, to mention the most evident episodes). We are simultaneously confronted with an intellectual crisis, as those entrusted with the task of asking critical questions and providing an alternative idea to the vacuity of the democratic consensus seem content to proliferate identity studies and to appeal to statist solutions, wringing their hands in intellectual despair.

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