Contemplating Uncertainty
For me, it is impossible to take Achille Mbembe’s essay (“African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239–73) head on. It has facets, some clear and some opaque, some true in their refraction and some distorting. I am not yet sure that they add up coherently, and therefore walk around the argument, picking out striking angles and vantage points, leaving any thought of synthesis to the end.
1. Mbembe’s attack on African modernist self-writing as impoverished (thin, superficial, reductionist) evokes a confusion of ironies and contradictions that would take a much longer comment to dissect. In fact, I have argued that all new anthropological and philosophical writing on self-knowledge in African “traditions” suggests precisely the opposite: a plenitude in the composite internal architecture of personality; a will to self-realization; and an openness to a future that is shaped by divinatory practice, as opposed to resignation to destiny (Guyer 1996). By way of illustration, Mbembe’s aspiration for self-writing can be juxtaposed with Yoruba expositions of self-practice in the here and now.
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