The official parades, the cultural festivals, the shining plaques and medals of honor, the crimson language of official newspapers, the festival style execution of armed robbers, the public humiliation of those who deviate from the glaringly arbitrary official path, and other official and non-official absurd rituals of everyday life, together institutionalise the potentate as ‘a fetish to which the subject is bound’ (Adeeko, 2002: 7).
Everyone wallows in the obscene vulgarity of the ruler – his arbitrariness, his buffoonery, his self-importance. In the absence of real state power, sovereignty is reproduced through vulgar performance.
It is necessary to draw attention to the epistemological underpinnings of these arguments, especially as they pertain to the state–nation relationship. What counts is a certain conception of the relationship coloniality–post-coloniality. It is especially evident in the work of Mbembe (2001)9. On the Postcolony pays almost no attention to the form of colonial resistance, the social and political character of the parties that came to power after independence or the avowed aims of the new administrations. This is a very full absence. By omitting these factors from the analysis, Mbembe implies that the form of the postcolony is unmarked by their enterprise. Despite his plea for a mode of writing that acknowledges or respects African agency, rather surprisingly, such agency dissolves before the terms of colonial power. New regimes and leaders can only mimic colonial sovereignty. They are unable to transform the very form of this power itself. Independence thus marks a point of both absolute rupture and continuity. From the perspective of anti-colonial resistance, it marks a moment of radical breach: the very identity of the resistance is erased, and its attributes and form dissolved in the character of colonial power. From the perspective of the state there is continuity in its form, though not necessarily of its empirical existence. Even if, under the strictures of IMF structural adjustment, the post-colonial state is individualised and privatised into a myriad of agencies and organisations, and it therefore lacks coherence in a hierarchical unity. Like the colonial state, it nonetheless produces homologous relations of power, those between master and slave.
We saw at the beginning of this chapter that these were precisely the terms that Dubow suggested obscured the study of nationalism. Marxist essentialism reduces nationalism to a mere epiphenomenon of economic class interests, thereby devaluing studies of nationalism in Africa on their own terms. Post-colonial essentialism treats the postcolony as a mere phenomenon of colonial power. Crawford Young examined the latter point in an address to the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2001. The purpose of his intervention was to consider the merit of such a view, both on analytical and political grounds. He concluded that it lacked any, because despite the fact that
the lexical habit of post-colonial usage to label the African political world persists, … in many countries little remains of the hegemonic apparatus which African rulers inherited and initially sought to reinforce and expand as an instrument of rapid development (Young, 2004: 24).
From the perspective of such studies, however, the colonial state is treated as a Sadeian corpse. It remains immaculate and pristine, even when it is ostensibly overthrown, toppled or when its power is dispersed and privatised. Is this not the form of a simple essence? Colonial power is deemed determinant, but is never itself overdetermined. The social totality (in this case the postcolony) is the development of a simple unity, of a simple principle (the colonial state); so strictly speaking, it is the phenomenon, the self-manifestation of this simple principle, that persists in all its manifestations.10 On these terms, nationalist politics qua nationalist politics is deemed irrelevant to the form of the independent state. What becomes invisible – indeed, unthinkable – on these terms is that African nationalism has, indeed, transformed the colonial state. At stake is the emergence of African nations.
The emergence of nations in Africa, furthermore, is doubly obscured by a sometimes uncritical reflection on the claims of African nationalists themselves. Scholars take the nationalist vision of the postcolony on its own terms, and then judge African nationalism lacking when independent states do not resemble the imaginary. Again, what is at fault is a certain epistemology. We saw that for the Comaroffs, the problem was the hyphenated relation between state and nation. Yet such an appraisal assumes that the state is the subject and the nation is its object. The object remains elusive because the agent is not up to the task. Yet the measure of the nation is not the degree to which the state realises the nation, but the degree to which the nation controls the state.
2 The Democratic Origin of Nations
It has been suggested that the nationalist imaginary must be understood as a particular democratic imaginary. More precisely, nationalism is a response to the question of democracy par excellence: Who are ‘the people’ in whom sovereignty is vested? This relationship between the nation and the democratic imaginary is easily overlooked if the nation is conceived of as, above all, a cultural artefact; worse, if culture is opposed to the political. This is what happens in The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee’s (1993) discussion of post-colonial nationalism in Asia. His argument is that anti-colonial nationalism is unlike European nationalism, precisely because it does not imagine the space of the nation as a political domain. This is an important claim that needs to be addressed.
Chatterjee starts by acknowledging the importance of Benedict Anderson’s influential book, Imagined Communities (1991) for animating fresh discussion about nationalism. ‘I have one central objection to Anderson’s argument,’ Chatterjee writes. ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5). He is worried that Anderson, in a long tradition of European orientalism, denies agency to non-Europeans and/or non-Americans. ‘History, it would seem,’ he writes sarcastically,
has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized (Chatterjee, 1993: 5).
Might Michel Foucault not have, in all seriousness, replied, ‘Yes, as a postcolonial subject, you are indeed a perpetual consumer of modernity’? Let us recall Foucault’s argument about disciplinary apparatuses, at least in Discipline and Punish (1979) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1998): that the very things such apparatuses seek to discipline and control are already their effects. We are told over and over again, for example, that during the nineteenth century, efforts to control and discipline sexuality resulted in its proliferation. Slavoj Zizek extends the logic of this argument to the field of colonialism. Somewhat playfully, he writes: ‘One is tempted to say that the will to gain political independence from the colonizer in the guise of a new independent nation-state is the ultimate proof that the colonized ethnic group is thoroughly integrated into the ideological universe of the colonizer’ (Zizek, 2000: 255). Why? Because it is precisely colonialist oppression that ‘brings about the … eminently modern will to assert one’s … identity in the form of a nation-state’ (Zizek,