West Africa Reivew (2002)

ISSN: 1525-4488

BOUND TO VIOLENCE?: ACHILLE MBEMBE'S ON THE POSTCOLONY

Adeleke Adeeko

Achille Mbembe, in this lucid and tightly argued book, first struck me as indeed the “afro-pessimist” he has been accused by some to be. 1 Mbembe carpets both the theory and practice of politics in Africa, condemning as banal most critical reflections on the excesses of the African state. Literary protests and editorial cartoons that caricature the excesses, eruptions, and excretions of Cameroun’s Paul Biya are dismissed as gestures that actually confirm the potentate’s projected self image. Because I am always very wary of social theories that blame hapless citizens for their own social plight, I developed some initial misgiving about Mbembe’s project. But I had a reason to reread Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah soon after reading On the Postcolony. Then I reconsidered my reflex rejection of Mbembe’s thesis that modern existence in Africa is one strange carnival in which a pervasive atmosphere of macabre conviviality binds the potentate and the dominated in a drawn out orgy of violence and death. The more I thought of the conditions of the African society depicted in Achebe’s novel–and Achebe has never been pessimistic about African cultures–in light of Mbembe’s claims, and vice-versa, the firmer my conviction grew that Mbembe’s philosophy may after all be realist, despite its pervasive symbolism and imagism. 2

To the question “what is a colony?” Achilles Mbembe renders an answer which I believe many postcolonialists will quote frequently for reasons other than its arresting aptness: “In the African experience, a territory seized to rule over its inhabitants and grow rich, functions of sovereignty and functions of exaction being part and parcel of this arrangement.” No less important than land seizure is the “freez[ing of] the law of the entity invaded” (183). For colonialism to subsist, Mbembe adds, the conquerors have to invent something called “the native,” a creation from whom “no rational act with any degree of lawfulness proceeds”, and who must be considered incapable of acting intentionally within a “unity of meaning” (187). This creature, that does not “aspire to a transcendence,” is but does not exist: “thing that is, but only insofar as it is nothing” (187).

Mbembe provides ample evidence to endorse the view that colonialism brought Africa and Africans into modernity. But unlike those who make this point axiomatically, Mbembe insists that conjoining African modernity and African conquest should not in itself be intellectually comforting because that peculiar mode of epochal shift carries grave implications for Africa’s lived history. Besides heaping moral invectives on the conquerors, Africanists, unfortunately, have not considered well enough the ramifications of this peculiar route into modernity in their understanding of the malformed ways in which African socio-political structures have evolved in the last two centuries. In the least, Mbembe suggests, it has to be acknowledged that some operational traits inherent to slavery and colonization launched Africa into the “never-ending process of brutalization” (14) we still witness on the continent. For Mbembe, to be defeated in the manner Africans have been is to become a slave in the Hegelian sense, i.e., to become less than human or, to say the same thing, animals. Those interested in the African postcolony, therefore, have to begin to explore the profound repercussions of the past four centuries of the rule of bestiality. Africa’s colonial “entanglements” have something far more fundamental than gross historicity to do with its present state. The book intermittently reminds its readers that colonialism will not forget Africa, despite the effect of the pill of forgetfulness which many of us who are younger Africanists have swallowed under the direction of certain theories of flux identity.

Mbembe makes his usually very keen observations and sometimes venturesome speculations with a very deep conviction. The book’s passion for African renewal also shows despite its frequently harsh pronouncements. The rest of this review essay, acknowledges Mbembe’s contribution to theoretical social history of the African postcolony. In the first part, I carry out an extensive discussion of Mbembe’s monocausal account of the reason the African state is dysfunctional. As the second part of the essay, which examines the blind spots of Mbembe’s adaptation of Hegel’s allegory of the dialectics of subjection, should show, I also have deep concerns about the book’s sweeping interpretation of African history and culture

Since its colonial conquest, Mbembe says, Africa has served as “the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being,’ of identity and difference, of negativeness–in short, of nothingness” (4). Slavery and colonization forced Africans into contact “with the opaque and murky domain of power,” and this domain, as it evolves in Africa, is filled with “obscure drives” (14) whose “essential components” include “animality,” “bestiality” “arbitrariness” and “tyranny.” If the African postcolonial “age” has anything close to a spirit at all, it is defined by these undesirable characteristics. Regardless of vociferous nationalist assertions to the contrary, Africa, as a discursive realm and as an episteme, still functions under the sign of nothingness.

Mbembe is not proposing that African thinkers have not reacted to some of the challenges colonialism formed to existence in the postcolony. He only finds the responses to be not quite adequate, given the appalling conditions that persist on the ground till today. Ideologies of refutation and assertion like Négritude, Afrocentricism, Africalogy, etc. are considered to be largely ineffectual because they do not directly address the persistence of “nothingness” in the lives of the colonized and the enslaved. Mbembe also finds African Marxism wanting for its allegiance to the outmoded way of directly locating the motivation of a social “subject’s consciousness” in the “economic and material conditions of existence” (5). Mbembe declares categorically “human action” in Africa, in reality, serves ends other than “‘resistance’” and “quantifiable calculation” (20).

There is no doubt for Mbembe that modern social theories depend too heavily on Western Europe’s “provincialism.” Testing these theories in non-European contexts, without reworking them from top to bottom, translates them into a universal grammar that they are not. As they are now employed, it does not seem possible that these “conceptual structures . . . used precisely to deny African societies any historical depth” can enable very useful interpretations of “social and political imagination in Africa” (11). The more contemporary approaches to speaking of Africa in more theoretical language, be it Foucauldian (discourse formations), Gramscian (hegemony, civil societies), or poststructuralist, cannot be expected to fare much better than the self-assured nationalisms of earlier historical eras because the contemporary frameworks are daunted by the fear of “single-factor explanations of domination” (5). But as he expresses these feelings about the limited range of practical possibilities that social theories can effect in Africa, Mbembe also acknowledges that Africa and Africans, like other colonized places and peoples, have lost their “‘distinctive historicity’” (9) since the contact with Europe, and they now seem inextricably “embedded in times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination” (9).

With all these repudiations and provisos, the surprise for the reader is the clearly contemporary quality of the book’s underlying theoretical assumptions: (i) African reality consists of “a number of socially produced and objectified practices” that embody “meaningful human expressions”(ii) African subjectivity exists in those same acts that create social reality. Knowing the essence of African subjectivity, therefore, requires no more than a conscientious study of the and meaning investing processes that define and circumscribe that subject. That is to say that any scholar who wants to truly understand Africa should seek and analyze the rationale which living Africans accept as valid: “What African agents accept as reasons for acting, what their claim to act in the light of reason implies . . . what makes their action intelligible to themselves . . .” (7). I am not sure that Mbembe is doing better here than the nationalists he condemns. It is also not certain that this is not applied contemporary theory. But that is an issue for later. All that we need to be content with here is Mbembe’s argument that what the social scientist of Africa traditionally perceives as senseless lavish funerals, official graft and corruption, ineffable violence and tyranny, and other signs of an apparently inaccessible “negativeness” and “lack,” ought to be conceptualized differently. The proper beginning point of research should be to seek why and how African agents constitute meaning in these “monstrous” behaviors.

The chapter titled “Of Commandement” contains, in my view, the book’s most profound contributions to the understanding of Africa’s political and existential predicament. In this chapter, Mbembe analyzes, through a partially evolutionary history of the African state, the parameters of the “relations of subjection” specific to Africa. Beginning with the high age of colonialism, “power and authority” were founded on illiberal grounds that systematically shunned decent notions of rights. From its moments of founding, through conquests, to its dictatorial self-arrogation as the sole source of power and law, colonization rested on violence. Under “colonial sovereignty” the means, usually unjust, is the end. In fact, questions relating to the justness of ends are hardly ever asked because ends are determined arbitrarily. In the colony, the dominated “had no rights against the state. He or she was bound to the power structure like a slave to the master” (31). For Mbembe, here lies the irrefutable origin of the African potentate and dictator whose acts, up till this moment, are largely defined by an overwhelming disregard for the “common law,” the arbitrary ceding of sovereignty to individuals and corporations, a regimentation of “privileges and immunities,” and the deliberate convolution of ruling and civilizing (29).

As it were, the postcolony is a lawless outpost of modern sensibilities from its beginning. In this world, “public prerogatives are privatized violently and, arbitrarily, “power [is] reduced to the right to demand, to force, to ban, to compel, to authorize, to punish, to reward, to be obeyed, in short, to enjoin and direct” (32). Within this structure of commandement also thrives an “imaginary” of the governed, actually the dominated, who is considered to be a “simple, unambitious creature who liked to be left alone.” To this “figure of obedience and domination” (35), the sovereign owes no obligation beyond that “which the state, in its infinite [and arbitrary] goodness, has designed to grant and reserves the right to revoke at any moment” (35). Civility, Mbembe seems to be saying, cannot develop in the colony because the state does not exist to “manage” violence but to subsist on it.

As history shows, the few African “indigenous interests” that were coopted with crumbs of sovereignty–large scale farms, trading licenses, petty trading franchises, native political authorities, etc.–allocated to them for their private use, quickly “reappropriated” the structure of colonial sovereignty most glaringly after WWII when the colonial state suddenly realized the wisdom of developing institutions that require mass participation. The cooptation of indigenous interests during constitution making motions, the Africanization of the bureaucracy, and the token involvement of select natives in governance, all attempts to stem the increasingly swelling tide of decolonization, actually gave wide dispersion to an illegitimate sovereignty.

Decolonization, expressed as the transfer of authority and power to indigenous interests, Mbembe believes, is fatally flawed because the process fails to reestablish the principle of the “reciprocity of legally codified obligations between the state, power holders, society, and individuals” (42). In effect, the potentate that emerges as the ruler after independence simply assumes the role of the colonial Lord and the citizens remain slaves. Hence, “almost universally in sub-Saharan Africa, any practical distinction between the task of conducting what would properly be called public affairs (government) and the institutional and unbridled use of violence and coercion was virtually non-existent” (43).

But Mbembe says that it is not sufficient to simply describe elements of this monstrous reality. The scholar who is genuinely interested in knowing Africa also has to examine the means used to create “internal coherence and rationality,” why and how the African potentate (mis)uses state apparatus to uphold and regulate “inequalities.” To not undertake the latter exercise is to assume, like colonialists, that the rule of reason has gone to bed in Africa. According to Mbembe, there are eminently rational factors devised by the potentate to provide, distribute, and superintend “utilities vital to survival” and to make “political pay-offs” (44). The dictator enjoys his tenure only because he has created some means of subjecting the citizens. As we say in Nigeria, the dictator does not “eat alone.”

Mbembe says that African potentates continue in office by deploying a trinity of factors that enable them to substitute the state for the market: namely, “violence, transfers, and allocations” (45). There are two state allocation methods: salary and embezzlement. While everyone knows that embezzlement creates perfidious clientelism, the nature of the salary system in the African postcolony is more obscure. Beginning from the colonial era, when little correspondence existed between the job done and the wages earned, salaries have functioned as a form of allocation used by the state “to buy obedience and gratitude and to break the population to habits of discipline” (45). It has been “a type of political exchange based, not on the principle of political equality and equal representations, but on the existence of claims through which the state created debts on society” (45). The greatest form of corruption in the African postcolony, Mbembe seems to be saying, is the salary system.

I find Mbembe’s discussion of salaries very intriguing because many of the salary enabled acts he takes to be supporting pillars of the African potentate are committed by countless well-meaning people. I know many people who have shared their first salary with their extended family. A lot of people I know send “home”–from places as diverse as Denver, Colorado, in the United States and Kano, in northern Nigeria–a portion of their wages to defray the cost of wedding parties or one of the countless funerals in the extended family. Many people play hosts to home village buddies new in the city (which may be Paris nowadays), support the schooling of a sibling or kinsfolk, and build their first home in their villages while they remain renters in the city. According to Mbembe, anyone who has engaged in these forms of what is traditionally called African “communality” has been paying an undeclared tax and facilitating the smooth running of the potentate’s postcolony. Mbembe argues that “the most widespread form of transfer was the communal social tie” (46). I should quote him fully on this clearly cynical view of communal social ties:

“the philosophy that underpinned this social tax began with the principle that every individual was indebted to a collective heritage that was not only financial but embraced knowledge, techniques–in short, the material and identitary infrastructure without which the individual could undertake nothing . . . But to pay this tax or debt was at the same time to put others into debt, to cash in claims...” (47)

Characterizing “transfers” as Mbembe does inculpates everyone and isolates the inapplicability to Africa of the parameters of thinking about the social good which elements of civil society can bring about. As Mbembe theorizes it, ideological state apparatuses, especially what will normally be called civil society structures, are instruments of allocating graft and means of creating and distributing social obligations and, ultimately, subjection. In those benign institutions, which Africans consider valid, Mbembe insists, submission and subjection are bred. 3

Mbembe brings the analysis to more contemporary times by discussing the impact of the policies of the I.M.F. and the World Bank on the nature of things in Africa today. Mbembe shows that the structural adjustment strictures imposed on African countries by these institutions are causing fundamental disruptions that make it much more difficult for the potentate to maintain the traditional client state. Because the dislocations brought about by structural adjustment programs resemble those that happened during the transition from slave trade to the so-called legitimate trade in primary commodities in the 19 th century (69-74), Mbembe is not willing to say that the disruptions will necessarily cause positive changes.

He notes, nonetheless, that instruments of subjection are being recalibrated. The economic regime that is being coordinated by the I.M.F., especially as it supervises the transfer into private hands of “public capital,” along with “the means of coercion” (78, 79), makes it difficult for the postcolonial commandement to carry on some of its traditional behaviors. At this point in time, I.M.F. impositions are effectively leading to the “privatization of sovereignty” at an unprecedented rate. Consequently, different forms of “indirect private government” (80) are developing on the continent. In extreme cases, “functions supposed to be public, and obligations that flow from sovereignty, are increasingly performed by private operators for private ends” (80). Salaries are not paid regularly and mines and other means of public revenue are decrepit: “The end of the ‘salary’ as the chief means of reducing the population to the status of clients, and its replacement by ‘one-off payments,’ transforms the bases on which the interplay of rights, transfers, and obligations–that is the very definition of postcolonial citizenship–rests. Henceforth, ‘citizens’ are those who can have access to the networks of the parallel economy, and to the means of livelihood for survival that the economy makes possible” (83-84.)

But the people are not waiting for manna to fall down from heaven, and they are privatizing in their own ways. For example, in many parts of Nigeria, this reviewer’s home country, each household that is still able to survive within the new economy strives to become its own “local government.” Individual households sink boreholes for independent potable water supply, clear septic tanks and soakaways for sewage disposal, hire private tutors for the schooling of their children, employ guards to perform some police functions, form little trading outfits to augment fitful wages, and operate a semi-independent power supply system in the form of diesel generators! Overall, Mbembe says, the IMF regime is fostering the development of widespread underground economies, the redrawing of borders in ethnic conflicts, and, among warlords, savage battles whose outcome is indeterminable.” It is not completely uncertain that the current commotion may not create a set of victors that will subject itself to some obligations as it tries to put the citizens under obligations. In other words, Mbembe is not sure if a genuine democracy is not going to emerge, after all. 4 A lot is said about the vision projected in On the Postcolony when it is realized that this is about the most optimistic speculation Mbembe ventures to make.

In addition to describing the shameful history of the development of modern African polity, Mbembe specifies popular aspects of the overall atmosphere within which domination and subjection are circulated as cultural practices in the African postcolony. The theoretical focus in this section of the book is an adaptation of the Bakhtinian notion of the popular carnival. Mbembe dismisses Bakhtin’s “subaltern” view of things that ordinarily obscene and grotesque unofficial cultures carry some inherent criticisms of official traditions. That notion of subalternity as resistance is too old fashioned for the Foucauldian idea of the pervasiveness of power being used by Mbembe to understand the African potentate’s long tenure. As Mbembe puts the questions, the fact that the African potentate creates “its own world of meanings” and then makes its citizens accept it implies that some operations that can effectively neutralize gestures of resistance must be in place. The long duration of the potentate’s rule confirms for Mbembe that the postcolonial milieu in Africa “is not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can best be characterized as convivial, a relationship fraught by the fact of the commandement and its ‘subjects’ having to share the same living space” (104). He advises therefore that “the [analytical] emphasis should be on the logic of ‘conviviality,’ on the dynamics of domesticity and familiarity, inscribing the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme” (110).

The official parades, the cultural festivals, the shining plaques and medals of honor, the crimson language of official newspapers, the festival style execution of armed robbers, 5 the public humiliation of those who deviate from the glaringly arbitrary official path, 6 and other official and non-official absurd rituals of everyday life, together institutionalize the potentate as “a fetish to which the subject is bound” (104). Under this very large circus tent, the potentate, as newspaper cartoons show, cuts the figure of a grotesque buffoon with an exorbitant belly, a giant but less than virile phallus, and who is constantly engaged in corrupt eating and shameless defecating. To Mbembe, these depictions are not necessarily critical, as traditional cultural studies make them out to be. They may actually be “taking the official world seriously, at face value or the value, at least, it gives itself” (107). In the African postcolony described by Mbembe, obscenity is “an integral part of the stylistics of power” (115). It is apparent too that the subjects are “fed by a desire for majesty” (131). The potentate’s obscene grotesqueness is confirmed in the many official outrages it commits everyday–for example, in the manner of inflicting death penalties not to correct or punish but to simply foreground the bare fact of death itself. In the African postcolony, there is no outside to the pervasive and very evocative “aesthetics of vulgarity.” Everyone wallows in it.

Without doubt this is a very good book, the kind of which is not frequently produced in Africanist social studies. To make bold cosmic statements about African history, the book unabashedly embraces what we today call theory. But in its fidelity to its own theory, the book dismisses too cavalierly some elementary truths, which I must say are also theoretically grounded, about Africa’s modern history. My misgiving about Mbembe’s swashbuckling approach is not with its breaking many Africanist (and postcolonialist) taboos, but with its refusal to address the theoretical validity that recommends those assumptions. As much as I admire Mbembe’s breathtaking coverage of African political history, it is hard for me to accept that the potentate and the dominated share some general conviviality under the circus tent of power. It is equally hard for me to agree that something like death in and for itself is possible in the administration of capital punishment. I am not able to believe that one could say, without an explicitly argued refutation of Fanon’s work, that the “native” who later becomes the postcolonial subject lacks the will to resist. It is contradictory to reject vulgar Marxism, which is never practiced by any respectable African leftist, on one page and lament on the next that “no one asks any more about the market and capitalism as institutions both contingent and violent” (6)! What are those allegedly African vulgar Marxists doing in the first place? I am not sure that a careful reading of the constitution making histories of African countries will support Mbembe’s claim that preparations for decolonization did not include “the reciprocity of legally codified obligations between the state, powerholders, society, and individuals” (42). A strange theory of value must be in place when Mbembe alleges that salaries in African postcolonies bear little correspondence to the work done. I do not know of any place where wages carry the sense of intrinsic value that Mbembe expects to prevail in Africa. At the conceptual level, one has to wonder if Mbembe seriously believes that the character of nothingness imputed to Africa was actually inaugurated at Europe’s successful colonization and enslavement of Africans.

In spite of my concerns with the arguable deductions summarized above, I believe that one of the main reasons the book may have an enduring currency is the controversy that its amalgamation of theories will provoke. In the remainder of this essay, therefore, I want to focus on the book’s symptomatic usage of Hegel’s conception of subjection in his allegory of Lordship and Bondage. Mbembe adapts and appropriates the thoughts of Michel Foucault and Mikhail Baktin, and theories of the fetish and of the simulacrum, for his proclamations on the African postcolony from the vantage point of a reading of Hegel’s ideas on the inescapable influence of internal relations within a unity on the constituent parts.

According to Hegel, the awareness which a consciousness has of itself exists, in the mind of the self-aware, as something that emerges and is known as such in relation to another self-present and self-aware consciousness in the vicinity. On its own, a self-consciousness discovers that there is at least one other self-consciousness that operates like it and desires everything it wants: “each sees the other do the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same” (230). In this interaction of self-consciousnesses, “each is the mediating term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself” (231). In Mbembe’s adaptation, it is implied that this is the order of things among Africans, on one hand, and between Africans and Europeans, on the other, prior to colonial conquest.

So long as this order of mutual recognition and definition prevails, Hegel suggests, no knowledge of independent self-consciousness as self-consciousness can be gathered from the interactions. That is, each party involved in mutual self recognition “has not set aside the opposition it involves and left it there, but has made its account with it and became reconciled to it” (83) and cannot claim, yet, something called “self-conscious freedom.” In order for the self-conscious entities that mutually recognize each other to attain that state called “self-conscious freedom,” each party will try to cancel out the other. A self-consciousness that will proceed to “self-conscious freedom” will attempt to annihilate others and in so doing “risk its own life” (232) in a self-directed investment in life. Hegel captures the essence of this contest for independent “self-conscious freedom” in the proverbial summary that says, “it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained” (233). In the tersely formulated Yorùbá axiom of a similar notion, it is said that “ogun layé” (existence is war).

The parties in the combat for self-conscious freedom duel so vigorously and viciously that only one will “live;” the other will “die.” The consciousness that “lives” retains life or “independence without absolute negativity,” and the one that “dies” succumbs to “‘negation’ of consciousness, negation without independence” and is thus left “without the significance of actual recognition” (233). Having survived the battle for freedom and successfully reconciled itself to its opposition, the “living” consciousness becomes a form of pure self-consciousness that watches the hitherto worthy adversary fall into immediate self-consciousness in its “death.” At this point, Hegel introduces his memorable formulation: “The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman” (234).

We must note that the free Lord or Master that now “exists for itself” (234) is not identical to the one that entered the epic battle of existence described above. Of course, the Master still “mediated with itself through an other consciousness” (234), but the after-battle mediator is a degraded and diminished one who is not close in any way to the opponent that entered the battle earlier. The “dead” mediator, the slave and, according to Mbembe, the colonized, is content in “thinghood” after it has given up the battle for “self-conscious freedom.” As Hegel tells it, determinate existence controls the Bondsman (“the immediate self-consciousness” whose “absolute object” is “the simple ego” [234]), and the Master dominates the state of existence which controls the Bondsman. As an unevolved self-consciousness, the Bondsman cannot do unto the Master what the Master can do unto it. From the general direction of Mbembe’s adaptation of Hegel, when we say that African masters replaced European masters at the moment of flag independence, we mean more than a figure of speech. Speaking philosophically, the European conqueror and the African potentate that succeeds him are the same. By the same token, the slave, the native, and the citizen subjected after independence are all variants of the same political theme.

But Hegel’s adroit dialectics will not be the operative mechanism, if further developments in the allegory are not mind boggling. The newly formed relation of the “dead” and the “living,” the slave and the master, or, in the context of the subject of this review, the colonizing Europe and the subdued Africa, carry transformative consequences for both. The fallen thinghood which characterizes the slave’s bare existence now simultaneously constitutes his own effete independence and the master’s own experience of his victory and material independence. In essence, the office of the Master (“self-conscious freedom”) is filled by virtue of its occupant not really being a Master, because to be a Master means that the position of the Bondsman, to which the Master has to relate, exists still. As a result, the Bondsman remains the “unessential consciousness” which “embodies the truth of his [Master’s] certainty of himself” (236).

If, when the Bondsman is considered in relation to the Master, “the truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman” (237), when considered in itself, the corollary obtains that the truth of the dependent consciousness is that of the Master because in either case there is a gap between the notion and the object. Hegel notes that in the Bondsman’s “serving and toiling” (237) is carried out his “total dissolution” (238) of independent self-consciousness. The same motions of “work and labor” (238) that manifest the Bondsman’s dissolved status also alert him to the exact character of his existence: “In the master, the bondsman feels self-existence to be something external, an objective fact; in fear self-existence is present within himself; in fashioning the thing, self-existence comes to be felt explicitly as his own proper being, and he attains the consciousness that he himself exists in its own right and on its own account . . .” (239). It is not clear from Hegel’s conclusion whether the independence enabled by the relation of the slave to his labor, which services the master’s existence, ever rises to the level of that which the Master enjoys in relation to the slave. In other words, Hegel does not state explicitly if the “dead” and therefore the enslaved self-consciousness can ever be free again. In the allegory, Hegel’s main interest is to describe a phenomenological enclosure within which lives “a continuous relation of elements within their unity” (93; emphasis added). As I read Mbembe, this is the basis of Hegel’s appeal.

The dominant motifs of nothingness, emptiness, and the completely encircling macabre conviviality used to characterize modern African reality show that Mbembe’s conception of Africa’s historical subjugation is not unlike the conditions captured in Hegel’s allegory. For Mbembe Africans became slaves literally and in conceptually at the moment of conquest. The colony, Mbembe says, embodies nothing but “the ability to multiply, the struggle for existence (in terms of space or means of subsistence), pride, and greed” (183). The modes of exercising colonial sovereignty, Mbembe believes, effect practically what Hegel conceptualizes in philosophical allegory. This is the proper theoretical context within which to make sense of Mbembe’s presentation of African modern history as that of the defeated party in the battle of self-consciousness. Mbembe’s description of African being from the philosophical perspective that reduces it to “an animal” is not intended to provoke a moral outrage of any kind, but to portray a stark reality, as he himself says: “From a Hegelian standpoint, what founds the act of killing an animal is simple. The animal has no respect either for itself or for others; more, nothing in it that has anything of the human. And so with the native” (193).

To be conquered is to become either a slave or a native. In either case it is to become less human, to become an animal and to be treated as such. According to Mbembe, “the ‘slave’ is the forename we must give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered–with impunity” (234). Two pages later, he adds: “The object of this book has been to see if, in answer to the question ‘Who are you in the world?’ the African of this century could say without qualification, ‘I am an ex-slave’” (237). Mbembe stresses, in my view, that this kind of answer will be a misconnaisance because Africanists have not even begun to consider deeply the ramifications of what it is to be a slave.

To the extent that he shows, a là Hegel, that the enslaved is not able to attain sel-consciousness, Mbembe is a realist. But some statements made in passing show that Mbembe is not as comfortable with Hegel’s formulations as the book’s main lines of argument depict him. He once makes a snide remark that portrays Hegel as an arché-thinker of colonization: “to force the Negro to learn to be free, what better than to make him or her work?” (180). But the implicit critique in this statement is not developed further because it may, I think, lead the project into studying what Hegel himself calls “accident[s]” that may result in the slave breaking “loose from its containing circumference” of doing the master’s work and “gain freedom and independence on its own account” (Hegel 93).

Within modern self-conscious world history, Africa may be philosophically dead, 7 as Mbembe implies. But should contemporary theoretical thinking about the postcolony be tired of reckoning with the slave’s (or native’s) resistance? Is it really logical to keep on dismissing the resistance of the bonded as mere inversions or, at a dubious best, mimicry of the Master’s will? Should we not begin to consider the implication of the issues Hegel raised about the possibilities of resistance in the preface of The Phenomenology of Mind? According to Hegel,

The circle, which is self-enclosed and at rest, and, qua substance, holds its own moments, is an immediate relation, the immediate, continuous relation of elements with their unity, and hence arouses no sense of wonderment. But that an accident as such, when cut loose from its containing circumference,–that what is bound and held by something else and actual only by being connected with it,–should obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own account–this is the portentous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of pure ego. Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all. (93; emphasis added)

The grim reality of the “containing circumference” of the postcolony described by Mbembe cannot but sober any one interested in knowing the roots of existential problems in Africa. However, we have to wait for another book, perhaps another author, to update Fanon on the specific means which the damned of the postcolonial earth have been using to strive, in Hegel’s words, for profound “freedom and independence on [their] own account.” I know that Hegel blamed the slave for his fate. I should, therefore, not be misconstrued to be making Hegel into a model of radical postcolonialism. My point is that if Hegel indirectly entertained the possibility of the slave’s self-directed revolt, those of us who are fully invested in the slave’s destiny, like Mbembe, have no tenable excuse for our ambivalence. But Mbembe does not think that resistance exists at the present time in a culturally meaningful way. In fact, he seems to be suggesting that such projects, both in theoretical discourse and practical politics, will be patently unrealistic.

One has to be comforted by the fact that fiction writers, at least, do not agree with this view of things in the African postcolony. It is therefore proper that I should give the last words to Ayi Kwei Armah’s narrators in the prologue to Two Thousand Seasons: “‘How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our people’s death? For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at the sight of their own fantastic success?’” (xiii) This is a question Mbembe’s fine book does not answer. Maybe it is not proper to expect it to answer it, in the first place.

References

Achebe, Chinua. Anthills of the Savannah. New York: Anchor Books, 1987.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. Two Thousand Seasons. London: Heinemann, 1979.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967.

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1982.

Copyright 2002 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

Adeeko, Adeleke (2002). BOUND TO VIOLENCE?: ACHILLE MBEMBE'S ON THE POSTCOLONY. West Africa Reivew: 3, 2