The supposedly self-evident idea that the nation-state is the logical form of political organization for the destruction of colonialism and for the remaking of African lives is patently false.
By Joshua Myers
However the situation in Burkina Faso is
resolved, it is unlikely that the logic of the nation-state that guide African
political formations will be questioned. The “instability” of African nations
is not only the product of neo-colonial legacies; it is the product of the idea
of the nation-state itself. That is, the nation-state—especially the former
colonial ones—exists primarily to protect the sanctity of capital; they are
fundamentally anti-human. That these constructs are unquestioned reveals the
fallacies of any notion of a “postcolonial” moment when we consider that
African ways of knowing have been effectively eliminated from ways of governing
African people. The mind is still colonized; the “body” is only following.
What the latest coup d’état—and its reversal—has
offered us is an opportunity to think about human existence beyond the
nation-state, beyond the imperial constructions of what is possible. It is
significant that Burkina Faso, a country that was effectively re-imagined under Thomas Sankara’s
anti-capitalist vision, stands at this moment in “crisis.” It is a
crisis made possible by the betrayal of the deeper work of re-imagining began
under Sankara. And it is also the crisis of Haiti, of Brazil, of South Africa and other African states. For it is the crisis of the idea of the state, and
more concretely, it is a crisis of consciousness.
African thinkers the world over are faced with the task of imagining new
possibilities. What has become clear is that making what Mario
Beatty has recently called the ideological rupture, though necessary,
is not nearly enough. As Beatty claims, thinkers like Cheikh Anta Diop remind
us that we must also break from the epistemological logics that have structured
our misery; or Euro-modernity. That requires a fundamental rethinking of the
supposedly self-evident idea that the nation-state is the logical form of
political organization for the destruction of colonialism and for the remaking
of our lives. And here is where Diop’s call for the restoration of historical
memory becomes paramount.[1] For Africans have created forms of human
organization that preceded the notion of the nation-state and necessarily offer
ways of imagining us out of the colonial and the neo-colonial. Notwithstanding
the misguided debates about whether “precolonial” African societies were
“stateless,” what is clear is that these formations did not mirror what exists
today. While it may be true that we “can’t return home,” this is certainly not
an excuse to accept the conditions of statehood that exist today as the only
possible future.
One of the clearest commentators on both the restoration of African historical
consciousness and the imposition of Euro-modernity is Jacob Carruthers. In an
essay entitled, “An Alternative to Political Science,” Carruthers reminds us,
among other things, that the concept of “politics” informs the nature of the
modern nation-state. And within its “nature” lies the kernel of inequality.[2]
But for African peoples, Carruthers argues, the wisdom of African governance
might better guide our actions on our own behalf. As an Egyptologist who views
the legacy of our ancestors as lessons for the present, the work of Carruthers
as well as Diop show us that the past is not to be understood simply as an
relic, an artifact for our museums. In the colonized mind, the perfection of
the Western state model and its corollary, liberal democracy, is the best we
can hope for and achieve (this explains the incorporation of
indigenous models within the machinations of the state; much more
might be said about the politics of these kind of usages of traditional power).
However, with an historical consciousness that extends beyond Euro-modernity,
we can see beyond these claims and better understand why its failures, its
contradictions so consistently manifest themselves in our struggles to create a
new world where Africans can flourish.
Another seminal thinker on these issues is the political theorist, Cedric
Robinson. His work has charted new ways of thinking about radical African
politics and has done so at the level of structural analyses of Western
constructs. In his ruminations on Pan-Africanism, Robinson once argued that
when we consider the significant struggles that animated the national
liberation movements that ushered in “flag independence” in the middle of last
century, the subsequent history of these movements reveals the “nation-state”
as an “undeserving venue” of that energy, a “vessel” that compromised the
genuine revolutionary imaginations of political Pan-Africanists.[3]
Undeserving, largely because what we call African countries are not political
formations that are imagined as vehicles for human freedom. It is necessary to
quote him at length:
“Yet even a casual glance through our historical era will confirm that the
domestic political cultures of nation-states are animated by irrational
impulses which tend toward ethnic domination or in the extreme ethnic
cleansing; and their most constant external impulse is expansionism. This
deceit was the second modernizing mission appropriated by political
Pan-Africanism, so it should not be surprising that we can now add the names of
numerous African tyrants to the list of their Western counterparts. But it is
clear that political Pan-Africanism was an insufficient if not mistaken
mission, so no matter the particular perversions of the Charles Taylors of
today, more profoundly they are the heirs of a flawed, misconceived past. Our
contemporary rapacious hyenas are not blameless but they did not organize the
feast.” [4]
In their stead and in the then (c. 1996) assumptions attached to the idea of
the “withering of the nation-state,” Robinson offers the notion a “Pan-African
commonwealth,” which would have at its core the sense that African humanity
transcends the imperial borders of Euro-modernity and questions of human
survival necessitate a structure that resists the logics of those borders.
While Samir Amin and
others have challenged the notion that the state’s disappearance is imminent,
it is still necessary for African people to develop Pan-African political
organizations that might achieve the objectives which animated the visions of
those ancestors, “renegade revolutionaries, genuine Pan-Africanists”[5] who
viewed global African liberation as more important than “national interests.”
If the core of the militaristic, the fundamentalist, and the anti-human resistance
movements which label themselves “anti-Western” is this misguided understanding
of the state, then our energies might be more usefully spent engaging and
supporting those movements which continue to approach the African future from
the standpoint of decolonization. Achille Mbembe’s recent piece offers
a genuine critique of the amorphous sorts of theorizing attached to the recent
decolonization movement in South Africa and of the kinds of expressions of
psychic release that often attend these moments. Yet it seems what is left
undone is the kind of work that goes beyond the critique-of-the-critique model,
which seems to envelop so much of postcolonial thought. Mbembe’s approach
assumes “whiteness” is the origin and end of that which is to be grappled with.
But what of the grounding philosophies that made possible the event of
“whiteness”? Is the idea of “multiracial democracy” itself a product of these
same philosophies? Though left largely unsaid, perhaps guiding Mbembe’s project
is a desire to see a program of decolonization move Africa consciousness away
from the very ideological and political strictures which made the
dehumanization of Africans necessary. If this is so, the deep conceptual work
of rethinking the state might be one of many new projects that would better
position Africa to free itself from the sources of its colonialism. It seems
implausible that aping the so-called Asian miracle of Malaysia and Singapore
would get us to that point.[6]
The upshot—if there is one—is that we are in a position where our imaginations
do not have to be limited to the philosophical and political visions of Otto
von Bismarck, John Locke, or Thomas Jefferson. We now have thinkers able to
access the knowledge necessary for reconnecting Africans to our own ancestral
visions which might guide our own future possibilities, our own political
formations, our freedom. What a time to be alive, indeed.
This article was first published at Pambazuka News on Sep 29,2015 / Image: Burkina Faso Gen. Gilbert Diendere, center, walks alongside Senegal President Macky Sall, right, after he arrived at the airport for talks in Ouagadougou via Washington Post.
Joshua Myers teaches Africana Studies at Howard University. He is a board
member of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. He
can be reached at joshfmyers@gmail.com
References:
[1] See Diop’s, African Origin of Civilization (1974) and his Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural
[2] This essay appears in his Intellectual Warfare (1999).
[3] Cedric Robinson, “In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth,” Social Identities 2 (1996): 165.
[4] Ibid, 163.
[5] Ibid, 166.
[6] Mbembe: “We are also in control of arguably the most powerful State on the African Continent. This is a State that wields enormous financial and economic power. In theory, not much prevents it from redirecting the flows of wealth in its hands in entirely new trajectories. As it has been done in places such as Malaysia or Singapore, something has to be made out of this sheer amount of wealth – something more creative and more decisive than our hapless “black economic empowerment” schemes the main function of which is to sustain the lifestyles of the new élite.”
References:
[1] See Diop’s, African Origin of Civilization (1974) and his Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural
[2] This essay appears in his Intellectual Warfare (1999).
[3] Cedric Robinson, “In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth,” Social Identities 2 (1996): 165.
[4] Ibid, 163.
[5] Ibid, 166.
[6] Mbembe: “We are also in control of arguably the most powerful State on the African Continent. This is a State that wields enormous financial and economic power. In theory, not much prevents it from redirecting the flows of wealth in its hands in entirely new trajectories. As it has been done in places such as Malaysia or Singapore, something has to be made out of this sheer amount of wealth – something more creative and more decisive than our hapless “black economic empowerment” schemes the main function of which is to sustain the lifestyles of the new élite.”
