African Modes of Self-Writing

Achille Mbembe

The only subjectivity is time. . . .

Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps

Over the past two centuries, intellectual currents have emerged whose goal has been to confer authority on certain symbolic elements integrated into the African collective imaginaire. Some of these trends have gained a following, while others have remained mere outlines. Very few are outstanding in richness and creativity, and fewer still are of exceptional power.

At the intersection of religious practices and the interrogation of human tragedy, a distinctively African philosophy has emerged. But governed though it has been, for the most part, by narratives of loss, such meditation on divine sovereignty and African people’s histories has not yielded any integrated philosophico- theological inquiry systematic enough to situate human misfortune and wrongdoing in a singular theoretical framework.1 Africa offers nothing comparable, for example, to a German philosophy that from Luther to Heidegger has been based not only on religious mysticism but also, more fundamentally, on the will to transgress the boundary between the human and the divine. Nor is there anything comparable to Jewish Messianism, which, combining desire and dream, confronted almost without mediation the problem of the absolute and its promises, pursuing the latter to its most extreme consequences in tragedy and despair, while at the same time treating the uniqueness of Jewish suffering as sacred at the risk of making it taboo.2 It is true that, following the examples of these two metanarratives, contemporary African modes of writing the self are inseparably connected with the problematics of self-constitution and the modern philosophy of the subject. However, there the similarities end.

Various factors have prevented the full development of conceptions that might have explained the meaning of the African past and present by reference to the future, but chief among them may be named historicism. The effort to determine the conditions under which the African subject could attain full selfhood, become self-conscious, and be answerable to no one else soon encountered historicist thinking in two forms that led it into a dead end. The first of these is what might be termed Afro-radicalism, with its baggage of instrumentalism and political opportunism. The second is the burden of the metaphysics of difference (nativism).3 The first current of thought—which liked to present itself as “democratic,” “radical,” and “progressive”—used Marxist and nationalist categories to develop an imaginaire of culture and politics in which a manipulation of the rhetoric of autonomy, resistance, and emancipation serves as the sole criterion for determining the legitimacy of an authentic African discourse.4 The second current of thought developed out of an emphasis on the “native condition.” It promoted the idea of a unique African identity founded on membership of the black race.

Fundamental to both currents of thought are three historical events, broadly construed: slavery, colonization, and apartheid. A particular set of canonical meanings has been attributed to these three events. First, on the level of individual subjectivities, there is the idea that through the processes of slavery, colonization, and apartheid, the African self has become alienated from itself (self-division). This separation is supposed to result in a loss of familiarity with the self, to the point that the subject, having become estranged from him- or herself, has been relegated to a lifeless form of identity (objecthood). Not only is the self no longer recognized by the Other; the self no longer recognizes itself.5

The second canonical meaning has to do with property. According to the dominant narrative, the three events have led to dispossession, a process in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material expropriation. This was followed by a unique experience of subjection characterized by the falsification of Africa’s history by the Other, which resulted in a state of maximal exteriority (estrangement) and deracination. These two phases—the violence of falsification and material expropriation—are said to be the main components of African history’s uniqueness and of the tragedy that is at its foundation.6

Finally, there is the idea of historical degradation: slavery, colonization, and apartheid are supposed to have plunged the African subject not only into humiliation, debasement, and nameless suffering but also into a zone of nonbeing and social death characterized by the denial of dignity, heavy psychic damage, and the torment of exile.7 These three fundamental elements of slavery, colonization, and apartheid are said to serve as a unifying center of Africans’ desire to know themselves, to recapture their destiny (sovereignty), and to belong to themselves in the world (autonomy).

By following the model of Jewish reflection on the phenomena of suffering, contingency, and finitude, these three meanings might have been used as a starting point for a philosophical and critical interpretation of the apparent long rise toward nothingness that Africa has experienced all through its history. Theology, literature, film, music, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis would have had to be involved as well. But such a synthesis did not occur.8 In reality, the production of the dominant meanings of these events was itself colonized by the two ideological currents introduced above—the one instrumentalist, the other nativist—that claim to speak in the name of Africa as a whole.9

In the remarks that follow, I examine these two currents of thought and draw out their weaknesses. Throughout this discussion, I propose ways out of the dead end into which they have led reflection on the African experience of self and the world. Against the arguments of critics who have equated identity with race and geography, I show how current African imaginations of the self are born out of disparate but often intersecting practices, the goal of which is not only to settle factual and moral disputes about the world but also to open the way for self-styling.

By emphasizing historical contingency and the process of subject formation, my aim is to reinterpret subjectivity as time.

The Instrumentalist Paradigm: Primal Fantasies

The current of thought marked above as Marxist and nationalist is permeated by the tension between voluntarism and victimization. It has four main characteristics. First of all, it exhibits a lack of self-reflexivity and an instrumental conception of knowledge and science, in the sense that neither is recognized as autonomous. They are useful only insofar as they are mobilized for service in partisan struggle.10 To this partisan struggle is attributed an intrinsic moral significance, since it is alleged to oppose revolutionary liberation to the forces of conservatism.11

The second characteristic is a mechanistic and reified vision of history. Causality is attributed to entities that are fictive and wholly invisible, but are nevertheless said to determine, ultimately, the subject’s life and work. According to this point of view, the history of Africa can be reduced to a series of subjugations, narrativized in a seamless continuity. African experience of the world is supposed to be determined, a priori, by a set of forces—always the same ones, though appearing in differing guises—whose function is to prevent the blooming of African uniqueness, of that part of the African historical self that is irreducible to any other.

As a result, Africa is said not to be responsible for the catastrophes that are befalling it. The present destiny of the continent is supposed to proceed not from free and autonomous choices but from the legacy of a history imposed upon Africans—burned into their flesh by rape, brutality, and all sorts of economic conditionalities.12 The African subject’s difficulty in representing him- or herself as the subject of a free will is supposed to proceed from this long history of subjugation. This construction of history leads to a naive and uncritical attitude with regard to so-called struggles for national liberation and to social movements; an emphasis on violence as the privileged avenue for self-determination; the fetishization of state power; the disqualification of the model of liberal democracy; and the populist and authoritarian dream of a mass society.13

The third characteristic is a desire to destroy tradition and the belief that authentic identity is conferred by the division of labor that gives rise to social classes, the proletariat—urban or rural—playing the role of the universal class par excellence.14 The dictum that the working class is the only practical agency that can engage in universal emancipatory activity results in the denial of any possible multiplicity of foundations for the exercise of social power.15

Finally, this Marxist-nationalist school of thought relies on an essentially polemical relationship to the world, a relationship based on a troika of rhetorical rituals. The first ritual contradicts and refutes Western definitions of Africa and Africans by pointing out the falsehoods and bad faith they presuppose. The second denounces what the West has done (and continues to do) to Africa in the name of these definitions. And the third provides ostensible proofs that—by disqualifying the West’s fictional representations of Africa and refuting its claim to have a monopoly on the expression of the human in general—are supposed to open up a space in which Africans can finally narrate their own fables. This is to be accomplished through the acquisition of a language and a voice that cannot be imitated because they are, in some sense, authentically Africa’s own.16

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Notes

Translated by Steven Rendall

Ato Quayson and Ruth Marshall-Fratani critiqued an earlier version of this essay. Sarah Nuttall, Françoise Vergès, Carol Gluck, and Candace Vogler offered additional comments. Sustained encouragement came from Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Pierre Nora, Carol A. Breckenridge, Arjun Appadurai, and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. Excerpts were presented at conferences in Cape Town in August 2000; Patna in February 2001; and Evanston, Illinois, in March 2001.

1. See, e.g., Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Christianisme sans fétiche: Révélation et domination (Paris: Présence africaine, 1981); Jean-Marc Ela, Le cri de l’homme africain: Questions aux chrétiens et aux églises d’Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1980), and Ma foi d’africain (Paris: Karthala, 1985); and Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Tales of Faith: Religion as Political Performance in Central Africa (London: Athlone, 1997).
2. See Gershom Scholem, Aux origines religieuses du judaïsme laïque: De la mystique aux Lumières, ed. Maurice Kriegel (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2000); Yitzhak F. Baer, Galout: L’imaginaire de l’exil dans le judaïsme, trans. Marc de Launay (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2000); Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove, 1978); and Sylvie Anne Goldberg, La Clepsydre: Essai sur la pluralité des temps dans le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).
3. To be sure, the two currents of thought adhere to no single theory of identity, politics, or culture. For different critiques, see Amady A. Dieng, Hegel, Marx, Engels et les problèmes de l’Afrique noire (Dakar: Sankoré, 1978); Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Marx, Afrique et Occident: Les pratiques africanistes de l’histoire marxiste (Montreal: McGill University, Centre for Developing-Area Studies, 1985); and Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 41–46. See also Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 166–91. It can further be argued that in its attempt to reconceptualize the problem of the subject, African feminism does not fundamentally alter the dominant African Marxist, nationalist, or nativist understandings of subjectivity or concepts of human intentionality. See, e.g., Amina Mama, Ayesha Imam, and Fatou Sow, eds., Engendering African Social Sciences (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997); and Ifi Amadiume, Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, and Culture (London: Zed, 1997).
4. This approach contrasts with the politics of black radical activity in the United States during the twentieth century. In the latter case, attempts were made to organically conjoin Marxism and Black Nationalism, to develop a praxis that would attend to both class and race in promoting social transformation. See, for example, Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and the essay by Brent Hayes Edwards, “The ‘Autonomy’ of Black Radicalism,” Social Text, no. 67 (2001): 1–12.
5. Whether discussing it under the term alienation or deracination, it is francophone criticism that has most fully conceptualized this process. See, in particular, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blancs], trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967); Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961); and Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, La crise du Muntu: Authenticité africaine et philosophie (Paris: Présence africaine, 1977), and Christianisme sans fétiche.
6. This is particularly applicable to English-language studies of Marxist political economy, anthropology, or history. Sometimes these also rely on nationalist and dependentist theses. See, e.g., Claude Aké, A Political Economy of Africa (Harlow, England: Longman, 1981); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981); and, on a more general level, Samir Amin, Le développement inégal: Essai sur les formations sociales du capitalisme périphérique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973).
7. On the problematics of slavery and reparation, see J. F. Ade Ajayi, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Africa,” and “Pan-Africanism and the Struggle for Reparation,” in Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J. F. Ade Ajayi, ed. Toyin Falola (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000). Cf., for a more subtle and sophisticated interpretation of slavery and its impact, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and, on “dispersion” as seen from the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8. To be sure, attempts have occasionally been made at such a project. Apartheid has been the subject of constant biblical interpretation. See, among others, Allan Boesak, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition: Sermons and Speeches, comp. Mothobi Mutloatse, ed. John Webster (New York: Orbis, 1984); and Desmond Tutu, Hope and Suffering (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984). Colonization has also been the subject of such interpretations. See, e.g., Oscar Bimwenyi-Kweshi, Discours théologique négro-africain: Problème des fondements (Paris: Présence africaine, 1981); and Ela, Le cri de l’homme africain and Ma foi d’Africain.
9. See, e.g., Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1999).
10. See, e.g., Jacques Depelchin, “African Anthropology and History in the Light of the History of FRELIMO,” Contemporary Marxism, no. 7 (1983): 69–88.
11. This tendency took shape during the last quarter of the twentieth century in ideological production issuing not only from national institutions, such as the University of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania), but also from regional ones, such as the Southern African Political Economy Series (SAPES) Trust, based in Harare (Zimbabwe), and continental ones, such as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), based in Dakar (Senegal). For a theorization, see Claude Aké, Social Science as Imperialism: The Theory of Political Development (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1982), and Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (London: Zed, 1978).
12. See the ideological criticisms of structural adjustment programs and the continuous conceptual dependence on a developmentalist paradigm in Thandika Mkandawire and Adebayo Olukoshi, eds., Between Liberalization and Oppression: The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Africa (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1995).
13. On social movements, see Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, eds., African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1995). On the populist critique of liberal democracy, see Claude Aké, The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2000); and Issa G. Shivji, The Concept of Human Rights in Africa (London: CODESRIA, 1989), and Fight My Beloved Continent: New Democracy in Africa (Harare: SAPES Trust, 1988).
14. See, e.g., Mahmood Mamdani, ed., Uganda: Studies in Labour (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1996); Issa G. Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (London: Heinemann, 1976).
15. One recent example is Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). See also Mamdani, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
16. See, e.g., Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, A Modern Economic History of Africa, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993), and Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997).