Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos

Secondly, such an alternative conception is often idealised and seen as unchanging, as ahistorical, with a consequent inability to fully investigate the contradictions within it. Thus Lonsdale takes as evident that Kikuyu ‘civic virtue’ is given in a form which leaves the location, for example, of age differences uncontested; of course, younger men want to become elders – this is why they uphold such civic virtue. Finally, of course, the subaltern does not speak here, as Spivak (1998) would say. The category of moral economy is simply invented by Western intellectuals to make sense of popular consciousness in the ‘non-modern’; it is equivalent to a concept of ‘culture’ in which the Other is located. We have little sense of what the Mau Mau rebel would say, let alone think, about his or her own conception of ‘land and freedom’; if the idea is to understand popular consciousness, then we are not much closer to doing so. The Mau Mau rebel is simply said to think as an (African) peasant; she or he is simply the bearer of that structural category and hence must think access to land in primordial ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ terms, and therefore in moral-cultural terms, which are to be celebrated or deplored depending on one’s political orientation. Moreover, for Lonsdale, there is no attempt to think the Kikuyu as a nationality, like the Scots or the Irish, for example; they are African, therefore they must be ethnic. There is little fundamental difference here between the prejudices of colonial and postcolonial human science. Finally, Lonsdale himself admits that he cannot speak Kikuyu and that his analysis ‘gives weight to the words of senior men’ (p. 321). He thus admits that his work ‘will not explain Mau Mau. It hopes to uncover the moral and intellectual context in which explanations may be found’ (p. 326). Of course, despite the personal diffidence and the protocols of positivist science, what Lonsdale offers is a reading of both the objective location (the Kikuyu peasantry) and the subjectivity (‘civic virtue’) of Mau Mau militants, based on his theoretical assumptions and the evidence which, as a historian, he is able and willing to muster from the archive.

      SUBALTERN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

      It is at this point that some of the debates in the Subaltern Studies Collective become pertinent, for the concern of that historical school has been precisely to understand the political consciousness of the anti-colonial peasant rebel primarily in colonial India. The emphasis here is directly placed on making sense of the political subjectivities of the subaltern. In undertaking this project, Subaltern Studies has been forced to distance itself from colonial, nationalist as well as Marxist social history, with the result that the disciplinary logic of history – what Lalu (2009) calls ‘disciplinary reason’ – has had to be unpacked. I shall draw on their work in order to elucidate the problem of accounting for the subjectivity of popular rebels through a discussion of some aspects of the work of Ranajit Guha, the founding intellectual figure of Subaltern Studies.

      The whole of Guha’s intellectual enterprise, as I understand it, is to begin from the statement that if the anti-colonial peasant rebel is to be understood as the subject of his or her own history, then it is the political consciousness of the subaltern that must be the object of the discipline of history and his or her thought must be taken seriously. It is a fidelity to this axiom which, it seems to me, guides Guha’s historical work on India. This, I will argue, leads him and the Subaltern Studies project into an impasse, as the discipline of history is unable to provide the means whereby this axiom can be fully effectuated, because it comes up against the limits of its own scientism. Ultimately, Subaltern Studies is caught up in a ‘disciplinary’ or, perhaps better, an ‘epistemic’ reason which is unable to transcend a state-thought of politics from which the subjectivity of the subaltern is excluded.⁵ In this sense Spivak (1988) is quite right: the subaltern cannot speak from the confines of history; her voice cannot be heard without transcending the discipline of history itself, as history cannot identify political subjects, only bearers of social locations. The subaltern’s subjectivity is apprehended through and forced into categories (colonial, liberal, Marxist, nationalist, masculinist, etc.) that are not her own and, in any case, when she rebels she is no longer in a subaltern position, at least politically speaking.⁶

      Guha’s starting point is that there existed, during the colonial period in India, a distinct domain of politics beyond the elite domain of state institutions, policies, laws and practices introduced by the British colonial power. This domain was an ‘autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter’. The ‘principal actors’ in this realm were neither the dominant groups of indigenous society nor the authorities, ‘but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is the people’. It is within this parallel and autonomous domain that ‘the politics of the people’ could be found (Guha, 2000: 3, emphasis in original). One of the more important distinctions between the politics of the two domains, according to Guha, related to political mobilisation, for in the elite domain this ‘was achieved vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally’. In the first case this meant reliance on the ‘colonial adaptation of British parliamentary institutions and the residua of ... the political institutions of the pre-colonial period’, while the latter ‘relied on traditional organization of kinship and territoriality or on class associations’; the former was more ‘legalistic’, the latter more ‘violent’; the former more ‘controlled, the latter more spontaneous’ (p. 4). In his commentary on the originality of Subaltern Studies, Chakrabarty (2002: 8) emphasises that

      By explicitly rejecting the characterization of peasant consciousness as prepolitical, and by avoiding evolutionary models of consciousness, Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective action against exploitation in colonial India was such that it effectively led to a new constellation of the political ... Guha insisted that, instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in India. The peasant’s was not a backward consciousness ... Elitist histories of peasant uprisings missed the significance of this gesture by seeing it as prepolitical (emphasis in original).

      Of course, it is evidently not only ‘elitist histories’ that are being criticised here but also the writings of the British and other Marxist social historians. This argument is developed at length in Guha’s justly famous piece on ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’. Guha starts from the observation that ‘peasant insurrections [were not] purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs’ (1992a: 1). Given the risks faced by peasants and how much was at stake for them, it is mistaken to see peasant insurgency in any other way than as a ‘motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses’. Yet historiography has been prepared to deal with the peasant not ‘as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion’ (p. 2), but simply ‘as an empirical person or member of a class’.⁷ As a result, ‘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’ (p. 3). In other words, peasants were considered not as thinking subjects in the historical literature, but simply as bearers of a social location. Guha undertakes a detailed assessment of the discourse of this history from the colonial period to the present and concludes that, whether it is colonial history, liberal history, nationalist history or Marxist history that is produced, ‘the rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion’ (p. 27):

      Once a peasant rebellion has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation or the people, it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebellion and be content to ascribe to it a transcendental consciousness. In operative terms this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other will (p. 38).

      A major consequence of this general perspective is to fail to recognise the central role played in rebellions by the spirituality of the insurgents, which modernist historiography refers to as ‘religion’. Guha uses the example of the Santal Rebellion of 1855–7 to make his point, yet in doing so he opens up a major problem for the history of political consciousness, which he is ultimately unable to resolve.⁸ The leading protagonists of the rebellion express themselves