Considering the political project within Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and “African Modes of
Self Writing”
[Unless quoting from a
particular text, quotation marks are used to indicate air quotes. Information
within square brackets provides further context, in cases where for example
Prof Mbembe referred to an idea that was discussed in the Master classes on 7 and
8 August.]
Erskog: Is there a particular notion or assumption that lies at the foundation
of your work/thinking? (As, from what I have read, I would consider your
conception of “subjectivity as time” (Mbembe, 2002:242) as the underlying
concept towards rethinking African theorization.)
Mbembe: It is difficult to summarize my work because it is made up of many
different streams that, at least in my mind, have not yet come together to make
a river. I can mention the different
themes and the key questions that animate each of them.
Part of the work is an
attempt at taking seriously a reflection on history, a history of Africa that
is not simply of victimization, but also a history of agency. To be sure, a
history with many defeats…but the nature of those defeats and their meanings
have not yet (as far as I am concerned) been the object of deep philosophical
interrogation. One has to make a clear distinction between victimization and
defeat. My critique of certain forms of modes of African self-writing has to do
precisely with the confusion they make between the fact of having been defeated
and the fact of victimization, [the latter] which presupposes some absence of
agency, the fact of simply being a tool in the hands of somebody else and the
fact of never taking responsibility for one’s own actions. So, that has been
one stream and in fact my earlier work has been as an historian (I started my work as an historian writing in
French, and therefore English-speaking people often see that context). So that
was one stream that is a reflection on history that is historically inflected.
The other one is an
attempt at rethinking Africa’s worldliness; rethinking Africa not as an entity
that is out-of-the-world, that is separate from the world, but as an entity or
force that has had and still has the capacity to shape the world in its own
right. So that question of the world and
worldliness has been a central part of my work.
The third has come from a
critique of difference… A kind of work that has been preoccupied with shifting
away from the obsession of difference and trying to think about something we
could call the ‘common’.
In all three instances, I
have found a lot of inspiration from the African diaspora archives in
particular – people like Fanon… like Le Saux. Since I studied in France, and I
speak and write in French, I have also found inspiration in Western archives of
which in any case we are the co-creators – it is not as if the Western archives
were strange to us, we are not a stranger to those archives. We are co-creators
of those archives and as such it belongs to us too…
Erskog: When you say ‘co-creators’, even the absence of our literal
participation in it?
Mbembe: There has been a literal participation if one takes into consideration
for instance what African-Americans have done. There is also a more practical
participation in the sense that it is impossible to think of modernity without
our labour. So, we have rights of co-ownership of that modern Western archive
and we shouldn’t believe anyone who tells us that it is only a property of the
West.
Erskog: What of the more problematic archives in the West where there is a very
obvious colonial perspective created to “fix” Africans, to fix the “African
experience”? How does one, as an African scholar, interpret that in a way that
will be fruitful in a contemporary time and space, and as you have remarked on
before, in a way that does not get stuck within “metaphysics of difference”
(Mbembe, 2002:240)?
Mbembe: I think that one does that by rereading history properly; that we read
our own history and the modalities of its entanglement with other histories
(either before colonialism or slavery or even after slavery or colonialism). If
we read it carefully we will discover the extent to which in fact, first of
all, that history has been constituted through mobility, movement and
circulation rather than attachment to specific geographical localities. It is a
history of circulations and it is a history of formations of Diasporas. That
the African sign is found in every single part of the world, where it manifests
itself under different intonations, accents and so on. It is a universal sign
because of its physical presence but also its symbolic weight in the ways in
which other worlds have constituted themselves either in opposition to “Africa”
or via incorporation of Africa or by illation and repression of African sign.
There is no part of the world where Africa is absent.
So, if we take that as a
starting point of our thinking then we begin to move away from the obsession of
difference in favor of a different kind of framework which has to do with
movement, circulation… with multiplicity and proliferation… [Africa] is a
receptacle of all kinds of migrations… So, we have to think of it in those
terms, as a laboratory of the world and as a laboratory of forms which
circulate.
Erskog: In “African Modes of Self Writing” (Mbembe, 2002), you consider much of
African criticisms of the colonial paradigms as “within a purely instrumental
and short term temporality” (2002: 260) that do not consider the “general
question of being and time” (2002:263). As such, by thinking
time in a more long-term and sustainable way, we are better able, as you have
said, to see how Africa is a center of movement and migration, change and reimagining.
But, one of the main criticisms that came up when our class was discussing your
work (in particular On the Postcolony (2001))
was that it is all good and well to think creatively but when there are people
dying, instrumentalism comes into being because of the practical need to
address pressing issues... So, how does one tackle the ‘question of being and
time’ in a meaningful way that will also address more urgent debates that
deploy more “practical” ideas?
Mbembe: Of course, if people are dying we have to act. We have to make sure that
the cycle of death and killing is broken. In some instances we have to
recognize that that is a matter of urgency. That we cannot wait and that
something must be done now. So the temporality of urgency, or even emergency,
is a temporality that has to be factored in in any attempt at understanding
social/political processes in the continent right now. One just has to think of
all the wars, epidemics and all those disasters (most of which are human-made
by the way), but we cannot entrap an entire continent, an entire history, in
the temporalities of urgency. First of all, sociologically that would be
misleading to say the least because Africa’s time precedes the time of slavery,
the time of colonialism, the time of the now. It’s a history with very deep
time. A continent with a deep, deep time. But it is also a continent with
multiple times: times of acceleration, times of crystallization, times of
saturation, collision, bifurcation… Times that cannot be captured by one single
term. So the question is how is it we take into consideration the multiplicity,
including in very practical policies aiming at alleviating poverty or for that
matter creating capacities.
But personally, I am not
a policy-maker. I am not interested in making policies. I think that we have,
especially here in South Africa, a discourse on relevance that is extremely
impoverishing. We are told to fight poverty but also told not to supply ideas
[as is seen in the public discourse that frames the Humanities in particular
and academia in general as irrelevant to matters of state governance]. We
cannot fight poverty without ideas. The production of ideas, however, requires
a certain detachment which is not indifference, detachment in relation to the
current present if only to allow people to project themselves toward the
future.
The question is one of
disposition towards the future. We have to be able to develop those capacities
to project towards the future in the midst of emergency because what
colonialism, racism and developmentalism do is to cripple our capacity to think
in future-orientated terms, and they try to justify it in the name of
relevance. A relevance that is understood in purely instrumental terms.
Development is also about the capacity to create meanings and symbols to
symbolize our world – that is what makes us humans. We cannot reshape the world
without constituting a reservoir of symbols and meanings. That is the task of
the Humanities and of critical thought… We have to be able to do what we do
[think critically and often ‘distantly’] and not have to apologize for doing
it. Put more positively, we have to expand our concept of relevance rather than
shrinking it so that it corresponds to a purely materialist project which
negates the other dimensions of what it means to be a human being… We cannot
pretend that all questions in South African and Africa are purely technical
questions.
Erskog: Which leads me to part of my next question. In your public lecture on
“Non-racialism and the New Native Question in South Africa” (2014), what really
struck me was your proposal (correct me if I am wrong) that South Africa is
fixated with past and present temporalities, without really considering what a
future should look like let alone what it should mean. Based on my understanding of your concept that
“the only subjectivity is time” (Mbembe, 2002: 240), am I correct in
understanding that in that particular public lecture, you propose that South
African society may be stagnating because the subjectivities employed are too
tied to frames of reference of the past/of historical spaces that deny
reconceptualization in the present towards the future? How does this exhibit
the importance of considering subjectivity as time?
Mbembe: It is not necessarily stagnating but is not producing what it could
produce. By doing that, it is not realizing its full potentialities. It is
limiting itself. It is getting itself entrapped in a historical trajectory that
negates or does not make use of all its potentialities. By doing that, it does
not allow itself to reshape itself in meaningful ways, meaning in such a way as
to address the burden it inherited from the past, especially the racial burden.
It does not equip itself to reshape the world or to bring to the world a
contribution that only South Africa could bring if it were to realize its full
potentialities. By limiting itself in that way [to past and present
temporalities] it forces South Africa to be but a provincial nation not a
universal nation.
Erskog: Back tracking slightly now, I consider On the Postcolony, to be an indictment of the colonial period, its
legacy and (as you have mentioned before) the lack of real historical
reflection that could produce more constructive meaning in the contemporary
Africa and the African Diaspora. What I found most interesting was, quoting
you, “what today remains of the recognition of oneself as free will—a
recognition that has marked African intelligence since at least the nineteenth
century” (Mbembe, 2001:238) and then when you later conclude with, “We must
first learn to enjoy as complete men…a way of living and existing in
uncertainty, chance, irreality, even absurdity?” (Mbembe, 2001:242). Some colleagues of mine felt perplexed by the
ambiguity and generality of this statement. I considered it to have an
existential grounding. So is this an existentialist call to embrace the
unknowable and contingent, as a starting point towards self-determination?
Is that the spirit on
should read it in?
Can you elaborate on how
living ‘as complete humans’ is fundamental to the project of realizing
self-determination and/or self-writing? Or is more of sobering reality check?
Mbembe: First of all, On the Postcolony was
written in the 90s. The 90s were a very difficult time in the continent. The
late 80s, mid 90s. Difficult time in the sense that this was when Africans
realized that the promises of decolonization had not been realized. You found
that observation in most of the literature of the time, in fiction and such.
This is just after the time of Structural Adjustment Programs. Meaning these
were the kinds of policy constraints that were imposed on countries that had
been defeated in wars and had to pay for whatever damage was done, whether they
were responsible or not… It was also a moment of serious conflict, with many
wars going on. Entire states literally collapsing because they have lost the
monopoly of the exercise of power and violence, the emergence of warlords and
the attempt by many Africans to live everywhere else except in their own
country – illustrated by the number of refugee camps at the time. So, it was an
almost apocalyptic moment.
So, what On the Postcolony is trying to do is to
not necessarily capture that apocalyptic moment but to sense it. What does it mean to sense it? It means taking it
seriously, not fooling ourselves (the biggest drama that can happen to us
Africans is to fool ourselves). But what that moment required, it seemed to me
then, was a certain practice of self-scrutiny. Self-scrutiny that is
uncompromising because we don’t want to tell ourselves stories that have no
meaning (especially since we have been told so many by others, so the last
thing we should do is tell them to ourselves). So an uncompromising practice of
self-scrutiny but also an empathy, sympathy, and commitment to Africa. That one
does not speak about Africa as it was something external to me. Of course, it
is not something external to me, I want to be able to speak about it almost
viscerally. So there is a viscerality [in the text] that is formal in the sense
that the book is written, designed and crafted like that, willfully. In order
to do that I had taken inspiration from a number of African writers… so it is
not outside of a certain tradition about how we speak of ourselves and write
about ourselves…Of a dissident tradition within the African canon, a dissident
tradition of speaking about ourselves viscerally…Every time I was writing it, I
would listen to music. I would listen to Congolese music so if you read it
carefully you can hear the Congolese music behind it. And what the Congo was in
those years was somewhat of a Haiti under the equator, and that historical
depth, you try to carry all of that [in the text] otherwise all that suffering
in our history becomes superfluous, We have to collect it and give it some
meaning and symbolism. If not it becomes wasted. So that is what the book is
about. It is about, how is it that you collect that suffering that has been
going on for such a long time and give it some kind of meaning that…cannot be
dissipated.
And it ends like that,
not as a call to dwell in suffering but as we were saying earlier with Fanon to
“recognize the open door of every consciousness” (Fanon, 1952: 181). To ask,
how can you, in spite of all of this, engage in aesthetic of existence that
gives a place for joy… That is the project.
Works cited:
Fanon, F. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press:
London, 1967
Mbembe.
A. On the Postcolony. University of
California Press: Los Angeles, 2001
Mbembe, A. “African Modes
of Self Writing”, Public
Culture, Vol. 14, No.1, 2002
