18.The opposition between state and society seems to be the central motif of radical analyses of Haiti. Trouillot (1995) sees state and nation as opposed in Haiti, Barthélemy (1990, 2000) sees rural equality as being opposed to Creole hierarchy, and Lundhal (1979) sees the ‘government’ as exploiting the peasantry. Nesbitt (2008a: 170–6) largely follows Barthélemy’s argument. Barthélemy is himself heavily influenced by the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1974), who researched the purposeful opposition of society to the state.
19.The first part of the statement tout moun se moun was resurrected politically by Aristide as a guide to action for the Lavalas Party in the 1980s and 1990s (see Hallward, 2007). The term moun is clearly derived etymologically from the Bantu word (u) muntu for ‘a person’. It is interesting to note the origins of this prescription in African traditions, such as the idea of ubuntu, for example, although ubuntu has lost much of its egalitarian content and is considered today as a more or less lived ‘culture’ rather than a political practice (see e.g. Praeg and Magadla, 2014). Much more important as a guide to action is the related statement (in Zulu) by Abahlali baseMjondolo (2014), ‘unyawo alunampumulo’ (a person is a person wherever they may come from).
20.This point seems universally applicable, because knowledges, and particularly those of political change, could rarely foresee the forms emancipatory struggles would take. If the opposite were true, revolutions could be planned with precision or effectuated by a simple act of will. Unfortunately, this is never so. For example, few radical theoretical positions could believe in 1871 that the workers of Paris could run a state, or in 1917 that a Marxist-inspired revolution could take place in a backward agrarian country, or in the 1960s that a communist cultural revolution could take place against the Communist Party in power in China, or that the poor Vietnamese peasants could defeat the armies of France and the US in succession, or, in the 1980s, that apartheid could be overthrown by non-violent struggle in South Africa, and so on.
21.Following the logic of ‘radicalising (state) democracy’, as in Laclau and Mouffe (1985).
22.See also Gauthier (1998, 2004 and 2009). What should be evident is the reactive (in Badiou’s sense) character of the subjectivity prevalent within the discipline of sociology and other social sciences from their inception – emanating as these social sciences did from the ‘conservative reaction’ to the Enlightenment – in sustaining such a notion of human rights by insisting on the individual’s place ‘in society’. In addition, it should perhaps be noted that the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment’s insistence on the social, most notably in Edmund Burke’s criticisms of Locke’s egalitarian natural right, is at the origin of the liberal colonial conception of trusteeship, which itself is central to 19th-century liberalism and to the South African state’s justification for segregation and apartheid through the influential work of Jan Smuts. See Pitts (2005) and Losurdo (2014) on liberalism and empire, and Allsobrook (2014) on South Africa.
23.This is shown quite clearly by the simple fact that pamphlets on the rights of man and the citizen, which were obviously standard fare in the French metropolis, had to circulate clandestinely in Saint-Domingue, as they were considered subversive of the colonial system; see Fick (1990: 111 and elsewhere).
Chapter 3
Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
Insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness ... The [peasant] rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion.
– Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, 1992 (emphasis in original)
THE IDEA OF MODERNITY AND POPULAR POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY
It is important to note that in the academic study of anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa, not only has political consciousness rarely been central, but when it has indeed been the object of study it has been regularly reduced to its social location as well as interpreted, ‘anthropologised’ and translated into an idiom comprehensible to liberal or Marxist post-Enlightenment historical science. Variously described as ‘religious’, ‘tribal’, ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-capitalist’ in their ideologies, such forms of consciousness have been distinguished from those of ‘modernity’ precisely by relating them to their social foundations. While so-called ‘traditional’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ expressions of resistance have been seen as typical of ‘tribal’, peasant and other primarily rural-based movements, urban ones have been seen as focused on more recognisably ‘modern’ characteristics such as those of class and nation. Until the 1980s it was rarely thought that ethnic and religious subjectivities could perfectly well be ‘modern’ expressions of resistance (contemporary to capitalism) and that ethnic and religious movements, for example, could also be nationalist idioms. The dominance of historicism in social science was evidenced, for example, by Terence Ranger’s distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ forms of resistance to colonialism, the former being understood as largely peasant, ethnically circumscribed and rural-based, and the latter being urban, nationalist and modern in their thinking. Closely following the arguments of social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, who distinguished between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ rebels (the former being characterised by a ‘pre-political’ consciousness), historians and social scientists of Africa, much like those of Haiti, have restricted their understanding of political subjectivities to their apparently recognisable Western modern forms.
In this view, modernity in political subjectivity could not take other forms than those recognisably articulating issues of citizenship and democracy, organised in political parties, unions and other interest groups, and using a language of rights within a specific domain of ‘the political’. This evident Eurocentrism was unable to come to terms with the fact that supposedly ‘ethnic’, ‘traditional’, ‘religious’ or any ‘pre-modern’ cultural idioms could be deployed in the field of politics, not to advocate a return to a supposedly glorious past, but to affirm humanistic and popular-democratic demands for a better future.1 Such a view clearly conflated subjective politics with the objectively political and also assumed a public–private distinction, in the form of an extraction of the human from spirituality, which was largely misplaced and irrelevant to African conditions.2
The problem, however, has consisted in a failure to recognise not only that ‘religious’ idioms, for example, could be in essence political, but also that history and social science have only been able to analyse forms of consciousness by reducing them to the objectively social, thereby disabling any understanding of their possible universal emancipatory content. Moreover, the categories of the social (such as tribe, ethnicity, religion, class, nation) to which colonial people were ascribed were themselves introduced by colonial (and then postcolonial) power (Landau, 2010). These were not the categories that people used to describe themselves. Inevitably, the colonial character of modernity in Africa, as in South Asia and other postcolonial locations, led to an often unrecognisable and indecipherable fusing of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in politics, which could rarely be disentangled from within the logic of a Eurocentric scientistic discourse.
ACCOUNTING