THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#21,DEC/2024-FEB/2025
Half a century ago, most of humanity was living under the yoke of colonialism, a particularly primitive form of racial despotism. Colonialism was itself but one dimension of a long history, that of imperialism, “the ruthless drive for dominance” which periodically seized metropolitan states, leading them to trample over the sovereignty of other political communities. Historians identify three waves of active imperialism in modern European history. The first, argues C. A. Bayly, “was marked by the Iberian and Dutch conquests in the New World and Asia between 1520 and 1620.” The second occurred “between about 1760 and 1830 when European empires first seized substantial territory in south and south-east Asia, raced ahead in north America and Australasia, marked out the near east and southern Africa as spheres of dominance, and brought the Atlantic slave system to its peak.” The third age of imperialism “culminated with the Partition of Africa after 1878, the Russian conquest of central Asia and the battle for concessions in China.”[1] In the case of Britain, the empire was defined by conquest as well as by trade and settlement. British power and influence were exerted simultaneously in all quarters of the globe. The global nature of imperial activity in turn raised questions about the ways in which “alien non-Protestant and non-Christian peoples should be governed within the empire,” and “concerns about the effects upon the metropolis of the ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ that were being imported from Britain’s empire of conquest in the east.”[2]
The liberation of part of humanity from the yoke of colonialism constitutes a key moment in the history of our modernity. That this event left almost no mark on the philosophical spirit of our time is in itself hardly an enigma. Not all crimes necessarily engender sacred things. Certain crimes in history have resulted in nothing but stains and profanity, the splendid sterility of an atrophied existence: in short, they show the impossibility of “making community” and rewalking the paths of humanity. Can it be said that decolonization was precisely the spectacle par excellence of the impossible community— rife with spasmodic convulsion and futile static noise? This book will only indirectly tackle this question, the complete and detailed history of which remains to be written.
Its central object is the wave of African decolonizations during the twentieth century. I will not be retracing their history or studying their sociology— even less their typology. Such work has already been done and, with few exceptions, there is very little to add to it.[3] Even less will I be assessing the results of independences. If decolonization was an event at all, its essential philosophical meaning lies in an active will to community — as others used to speak of a will to power. This will to community is another name for what could be called the will to life. Its goal was to realize a shared project: to stand up on one’s own and to create a heritage. In our blasé age, characterized by cynicism and frivolity, such words might cause only snickers. But at the time of decolonization, many were ready to risk their lives to affirm such ideals. These ideals were not pretexts for avoiding the present or shirking action. To the contrary, they acted as catalysts, and served to orient becoming and to impose a new redistribution of language and a new logic of sense and life through praxis.[4] Colonization was perceived as neither a destiny nor a necessity as the decolonized community tried to establish itself on its ruins. It was thought that by dismembering the colonial relationship, the lost name would resurface. The relation between what had been, what had just happened, and what was coming would be reversed, making possible the manifestation of one’s own power of genesis, one’s own capacity for articulating difference and for expressing a positive force.
In addition to the will to community, there was the will to know and the desire for singularity and originality. Anticolonial discourse had, for the most part, espoused the postulate of modernization and the ideals of progress, including where it criticized them either explicitly or implicitly. This critique was animated by the quest for a future that would not be written in advance, one that would mix together received or inherited traditions with interpretation, experimentation, and new creation to leave this world and go toward other possible worlds. At the heart of this analysis was the idea that Western modernity was imperfect, incomplete, and unfinished. The Western claim to epitomize the language and forms in which any human event could arise, and even to have a monopoly on the very idea of the future, was only a fiction. The new postcolonial world was not condemned to imitate and reproduce what had been accomplished elsewhere.[5] Because history was being produced in a unique way each time, the politics of the future — without which there would be no full decolonization — required the invention of new images of thought. This was only possible if one committed oneself to a long apprenticeship in signs and their modes of encounter with experience — an apprenticeship in the time specific to the sites of life.[6]
Does the mixture of realities that prevails today invalidate these propositions and take away their historical density, their actuality? Was decolonization — if such an open concept can actually mean anything — nothing but a fantasy without substance? Was it ultimately only a noisy accident, a crack on the surface, a little chink on the outside, the sign of a future bound to go astray? Does the colonization/decolonization duality have only one meaning? As historical phenomena, isn’t one reflected in the other, implicated in the other, like two sides of the same mirror? These are some of the questions this book will endeavor to examine. One of its theses is that decolonization inaugurated a time of branching off toward innumerable futures. These futures were by definition contingent. The trajectories followed by the newly freed nations were partly the consequences of internal struggles within the societies under con sideration.[7] These struggles were themselves shaped both by the old social forms and economic structures inherited from colonization and by the techniques and practices of government of the new postcolonial regimes. In most cases, these struggles resulted in the implementation of a form of domination that has been described as “domination without hegemony.”[8]
For many, the postcolonial moment, properly speaking, began with an experience of decentering. Decolonization — especially where it was granted rather than won — instead of acting as an intensive sign forcing the formerly colonized to think by and for themselves, rather than being the site of a renewed genesis of meaning, took on the appearance of an encounter with oneself through effraction: it was not the result of a fundamental desire for freedom, something the subject gives him - or herself, something that becomes the necessary source of morality and politics, but was rather an exteriority, something seemingly lacking any power of metamorphosis. As form and figure, act and relation, colonization was in many regards a coproduction of colonizers and colonized. Together, but from different positions, they forged a past. But having a past in common does not necessarily mean sharing it. Here I examine the paradoxes of “postcolonialism” in a former colonial power, France, that decolonized without self-decolonizing (chapter 3). I focus on the disjunctions and ramifications of the gesture of decolonization in the present, especially from the point of view of an apparent inability to write a shared history on the basis of a shared past (chapter 4).
In chapters 2 and 5, I tackle what is considered the central paradox of decolonization: sterile extraction and repetition on the one hand, and indefinite proliferation on the other (terms that are borrowed from Gilles Deleuze).[9] In fact, one of the processes set in motion in the aftermath of decolonization was the destruction of the state form and the institutions inherited from colonization — a destruction sometimes patient and underhanded, sometimes chaotic.[10] The history of this demolition as such has not yet been grasped in its singularity. The new independent entities, henceforth more or less free vessels (in fact, heterogeneous grafts of at first glance incompatible fragments and, in the long run, conglomerations of societies), resumed their course. At great risk. The overlap of successive dramas, unpredicted ruptures, and foretold declines continues against the backdrop of a formidable asthenia of the will. In some places, change takes on the contours of repetition; elsewhere, it takes the form of inconsequential flashes, and still elsewhere, it appears as dissolution and a plunge into the unknown and unpredicted: the impossible revolution.
But the will to live remains. An enormous work of reassemblage is somehow or another underway on the African continent. Its human costs are high. It goes as deep as structures of thought. Through the postcolonial crisis, a reconversion of the mind has taken place. Destruction and reassemblage are so tightly connected that, isolated from each other, these processes become incomprehensible. Next to the world of ruins and what has been called the “house without keys” (chapter 5), an Africa in the process of synthesizing itself, in a mode of disjunction and redistribution of differences, is taking shape. The future of this Africa-in-circulation will be shaped by the force of its paradoxes and its unwillingness to submit (chapter 6). This is an Africa whose social framework and spatial structure are now decentered, and which goes in the direction of both the past and the future — an Africa whose spiritual processes are a mixture of a secularization of consciousness, a radical immanence (care for this world and care for the moment), and an apparently unmediated plunge into the divine, an Africa whose languages and sounds are deeply creole, an Africa that accords a central place to experimentation, an Africa in which astonishingly postmodern images and practices of existence germinate.
Something fertile will spring from this Africa-glebe, this immense tilled field of matter and things: something capable of opening onto an infinite, extensive, and heterogeneous universe, a wide-open universe of multiplicities and pluralities.[11] A name has been found for this African-world-to-come, whose complex and mobile fabric slips constantly out of one form and into another and turns away all languages and sonorities because it is no longer attached to any language or pure sounds, this body in motion, never in its place, whose center moves everywhere, this body moving in the enormous machine of the world: that name is Afropolitanism.
*excerpted from Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021) pp.1-6.
[1] C. A. Bayly, “The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760– 1830,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 2 (1998): 30.
[2] H. V. Bowen, “British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756– 83,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 3 (1998): 7.
[3] See the synthesis by Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2004).
[4] Logique de Sens is the French title of the book by Gilles Deleuze to which Mbembe later refers. It has been translated as Logic of Sense in English, so I have used that expression here.— Trans.
[5] Dilip P. Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
[6] Fabien Éboussi Boulaga, La Crise du Muntu (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1977).
[7] Jean- François Bayart, The State in Africa (London: Polity, 2009).
[8] Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1993).
[9] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Athlone, 1990), 28– 31.
[10] Cf. Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
[11] See Jane I. Guyer, “Africa Has Never Been ‘Traditional,’ ” African Studies Review 50, no. 2 (2007): 183– 202.
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