<laq10@cam.ac.uk>

[*editor's note: This is the first of our ROUNTABLE REVIEWS. The editors of
H-Africa would like to thank the editors of the African Studies Review and
the African Studies Association, and Professor Ato Quayson for their
gracious permission to carry this review which will appear in print format
in a special issue of ASR due in late September--P.L.*]


BREACHES IN THE COMMONPLACE
Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony

By

Ato Quayson (University of Cambridge, UK)


Achille Mbembe's _On the Postcolony_ (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001, 274 pp.; bibl. + index) is a masterpiece of rhetorical and
discursive styles.  If you come to this book wanting to read only about
political economy in Africa, you would be sorely disappointed.  Even though
its starting point is the African "postcolony", it soon takes off in
different directions.

The book is as much a _philosophical_ treatise on questions of power as such
as it is about African politics and political economy.  My italicisation of
the word philosophical is not idle, for, as I will be demonstrating later,
the philosophical impulses in the book set up a peculiarly rich variety of
perspectival modulations to the text.  These perspectival modulations help
to both generate profound insights, and, more significantly, to raise
interesting questions about the constitutive difficulties that any
discussions of Africa have to contend with.

These difficulties lie at different levels of the text: at the level of
scholarly interlocutors, i.e. the manner by which to discursively postulate
both an audience and a scholarly community with whom to disagree and
debate; the particular philosophical prisms through which any discussion of
Africa has to situate itself; and the ways in which in engaging with these
traditions a curious refraction of assumptions comes to shape one's own
statements.  The final, and perhaps most elusive difficulty to be over come
is that of the manner in which to detail Africa not as a stable identity,
but as itself a field of intersecting transitional realities moving at
different rates of progress.

The difficulty here is on the one hand in having to hypothesize a structure
of effects that might be generally labelled "African" and which provide a
heuristic framework by which to bring certain issues into view, and, on the
other hand the real need to avoid the pitfalls of homogenization attendant
upon such an exercise.

On the Postcolony suggests an engagement with these and other
methodological problems making it a landmark text not just in terms of the
_thematic_ of African colonial and postcolonial realities, but more
significantly, about the _forms_ through which this thematic is to be
methodologically refracted.


An itinerary of discursive forms


The six chapters of the book provide what might be described as an
itinerary of discursive "forms".  These forms have at least three
dimensions, each of which might be isolated for discussion.  These are: 1)
a disciplinary theme, sometimes historical (in terms of the archaeology of
its structure), regularly political, and also, in the second part of the
book, philosophical; 2) a resource matrix of examples, research materials
and scholarly opinions from which the text sets out its own distinctive
positions; and 3) a style of analysis, sometimes directly drawing from the
resource matrix for extrapolations and sometimes more abstract in its
determinations.  These three dimensions of form are often supplemented by a
fourth one which largely remains understated.  This is the dimension of the
personally felt investment in the object under analysis.

Recent well-known scholarly books on Africa allow types of _form_ as I am
elaborating here.  Thus we see, for example, that Manthia Diawara's In
Search of Africa (1998) is loosely set around a quest motif.  This motif
itself has two sides.  On a directly personal note is Diawara's quest for
an old childhood friend with whom he grew up in Guinea before his parents
forced exile into Mali.  But this quest for a childhood friend becomes the
vehicle for an exploration of his own identity as an African in which he
has to excavate different types of knowledge about the continent.  But,
because Diawara is himself a diasporic African, his Africa is shaped by its
relations to an _Africana_ world view.  Thus, various chapters of the book
open with discussions of different African and African American theories
ranging from Negritude through those associated with Sekou Toure, through
Du Bois, Richard Wright and Malcolm X.  We see, then that his quest is
metaphorically through the sedimented crevasse of thinking about how to be
African both on the continent and elsewhere.

Though also ostensibly a quest for an African identity, Anthony Appiah's In
My Father's House (1992) moves from the prehistory of thinking about Africa
through the work of Crummel and others to discussions of the work of
Soyinka and Pan-Africanism.  He ends with an epilogue relating to his
father's death and the difficulties that his side of the family was put to
in their bid to bury the late Joe Appiah. This epilogue might be
interpreted as a poignant personal coda to his quest, which had hitherto
been purely at a scholarly level and provides an interesting way in which
to frame his own quest.  The difficulties he and his family face bring to
the foreground the various tensions in Africa between modernity and
traditionalism that in his case have to be felt and negotiated at a very
personal and painful level.


Valentin Mudimbe's award-winning The Invention of Africa (1988), on the
other hand, is a vigorous excavation of the Western archive through which
an African gnosis is produced in the first place.  His quest comes more
from the rhetorical fervour of his questioning than from any clearly
definable private quest motif, thus offering an alternative way of
configuring the different dimensions of form as I mentioned earlier.  On
the Postcolony is quite different from any of these, precisely because it
configures so varying forms of speaking about Africa that cannot be easily
reduced to any single and overarching form.


Each chapter of Mbembe's book has these elements of form in different
configurations, and it is these varying configurations that contribute to
what I described earlier as the perspectival modulations of the text.  But
as is the case in any book that has had a long gestation period, the
perspectival modulations also come from the different points of focus in
the text, some of which are set up as dialogues between different chapters
in the book and others which are singularly focussed within particular
chapters.


The Introduction, "Time on the Move" sets out the main issues that will be
pursued in the rest of the text.  Among these, the most recognizable in
terms of previous work on Africa are those to do with the place of Africa
in the Western imaginary.  Mbembe notes, like others have done before him,
that the "African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of
our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative
interpretation."  Africa is often discussed in terms of 'elementariness'
and 'primitiveness',  a place of all that is 'incomplete, mutilated, and
unfinished (1).  This theme is taken up more fully in Ch. 5 "Out of the
World", where the discussion centres mainly on an elaborate debate with
some of the classics of Western philosophy to establish what Mbembe
describes as Africa's 'thingness' and its 'animal nature' in as seen in the
history of Western philosophy.  The critical issue for him is that there
has rarely been a discourse of Africa for itself.  Africa has always
featured as part of a Western imaginary, 'the mediation that enables the
West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its
subjectivity' (3).


But these observations of Africa's discursive place in the Western
imaginary are linked to a major methodological problem, one which, as we
shall see, Mbembe himself is not entirely able to resolve successfully:
'There, in all its closed glory, is the prior discourse against which any
comment by an African about Africa is deployed.  There is the language that
every comment by an African about Africa _must endlessly eradicate,
validate, or ignore_, often to his/her cost, the ordeal whose erratic
fulfilment many Africans have spent their lives trying to prevent' (5;
italics added).  The issue then, is not just that of saying something new
about Africa, but saying it under the full burden of a Western discourse
that situates one's own attempt in relation to it, and repeatedly
establishes the new statement as an attempt to eradicate, validate, or
ignore it.


Even though this difficulty recalls what Mudimbe discusses as Africa's
"invention", the idea that its gnosis is always already situated elsewhere,
the issue that Mbembe foregrounds in his remarks is the constitutive nature
of the agonism/antagonism that comes to inhere within the very foundational
process of speaking about Africa and that ultimately shapes the tone as
much as the subject matter of any self-conscious African disquisition about
the continent.


The second central idea raised in the 'Introduction' flows directly from
the previous one and concerns the question of how to establish Africa in
its full historicity.  For this, Mbembe proposes not to go the way of
scholars who are merely satisfied by showing that Africans have had a rich
and complex consciousness and have been capable of challenging their
oppression.  For him the task is to show that Africa is made up of a number
of socially produced and objectified practices which, though embracing
matters of discourse and language, are not simply reducible to
them.  Rather, these socially produced practices have as their main logic
the production of _meaningful acts_ (6).

Multiple Trajectories


Mbembe does not detail this idea through the anthropological discourses
that might be thought to be the obvious framework for such a discussion,
but instead uses Chapters 3 "The Aesthetics of Vulgarity" and 4, "The Thing
and its Doubles" to indicate what he means by meaningful acts from the
examination of the intersection of political, symbolic and ritual gestures
within the public sphere.  More specifically, Chapter 3 centres on his
well-known 1992 published in different versions in _Africa_ 62 (1992) and in
_Public Culture_ 4.2 (1992) on the complex interplay of consent and coercion
in the postcolony and the carnivalesque disposition of both rulers and
ruled in the production and maintenance of hegemonic relations of power and
subversion.  Chapter 4, on the other hand, is a reading of the
representations of the African potentate through the modality of the
derisive and pantomimic form of Cameroonian cartoons.  The two chapters go
together in displaying what the ordinary people think about postcolonial
governmentality, a variegated concept which Mbembe generally discusses
under the rubric of the term _commandement_, the key concept he elaborates in
Ch 1.

Mbembe identifies these politically and socially meaningful acts within
certain historical sites and moments that he suggests are imbued with
meaning that show that Africa, like all other human societies, is a place
of _multiplicity and simultaneities_.  He argues that it participates in a
complex order that has as a defining characteristic: the proliferation of
contingent and unexpected turns.  Crucially, however, the many fluctuations
and indeterminacies that are seen in Africa do not necessarily amount to a
lack of order.  Rather, they show the degree to which African societies are
'rooted in a multiplicity of times, trajectories, and rationalities that,
although particular and sometimes local, cannot be conceptualized outside a
world that is, so to speak, globalized' (9).  The pursuit of such "multiple
trajectories" help to shape On the Postcolony at the micro-level of its
discursive unfoldment, such that we detect a careful pursuit of multiple
lines of argument that sometimes come together in the assertion of a
particular insight, but at other times resist any easy assimilation into
larger transcendent categories.


In situating the general discussion of governmentality or _commandement_, the
second chapter is a masterpiece of multiple trajectories of
focalization.  Even though he opens the chapter by declaring two modest
aims -- the first to reflect upon the types of rationality used to rule and
ensure the provision of goods, and the second to examine the circumstances
that have recently led to a crisis in power and, the attendant situation of
extreme material scarcity, uncertainty, and inertia - he delivers much more
than these modest aims.


This chapter has a form different from the other chapters such as 3 and 4
directly related to contextual political analyses.  In this chapter on the
_Commandement_ Mbembe makes some important programmatic statements.  The
first is that in Africa, both before and after colonization, 'state power
enhanced its value by establishing specific relations of subjection'
(24).  In the colonial era these relations of subjection derived from the
constitutive violence inherent in governing the colonized in the first
place.  The act of colonial governance drew upon a prior act of linguistic
and conceptual violence in which the native was situated as not just wholly
other but as bestial and uncivilized.  This was then used in various guises
to justify acts of expropriation.  Colonial governmentality situated itself
in direct opposition to the liberal notions of right, thus revealing the
essential void of those liberal notions in the first place.  Among the key
features of colonial governmentality was the arrogation to itself of the
sole power to judge its own laws, thus producing a one-sidedness to the
constitution of power.

For, as Mbembe notes, the colonial government gave to itself the supreme
power to 'provide a self-interpreting language and models for colonial
order, to give this order meaning, [and] to justify its necessity and
universalizing mission' (25).  The violence of colonial authority was thus
both tangible and intangible, forming as a whole a particular political
imaginary for the colonized.  What is most significant about this phase of
governmentality, however, is the degree to which the unconditionality and
arbitrariness of colonial power was established and taken for granted.  The
colonial _commandement_ combined in a curious form the prerogatives of royal
authority with a liberal notion of rights, and yet even though these rights
were partially expressed in the various institutional frameworks
undergirding colonialism in different parts of the continent these did not
actually specify a reciprocity of legally codifiable obligations as
such.  The preferred means of the integration of a delimited political
sphere were not freedom and consent, but coercion, violence and corruption
with social policies tried by successive regimes 'heavily determined by
normative and disciplinary concerns' (31).


These features of the colonial _commandement_ then led to the progressive
evolution of particular rituals of legitimation, many of which came
together to shape a culture of impunity.  It must be noted that the
impunity was not just to be seen merely in direct gestures and acts of
authoritarianism, rather it derived from the brutal fact that colonial
authority was not built upon any political contract in which those who
governed were obligated to those whom they governed and had specific
relations of duty and respect.  Worryingly, as Mbembe shows, this colonial
governmentality was bequeathed almost intact to the postcolony, the
situation becoming even more aggravated under African totalitarian regimes
because the postcolonial _commandement_ was articulated within the full glare
of what following Appadurai (1996: 27-47) we might term the transnational
ideoscapes of political ideology.  Subjects no more, the postcolonial
citizen was still under the domination of an unaccountable political order
yet at the same time fully cognisant of what citizenship might mean in a
globalized and transnational world.


The other main facet of the _commandement_ is what Mbembe details as the
evolution of civil society.  For him, the key feature of civil society is
not its mechanisms for overcoming relations of subjection as described in
the existing political science literature in terms of transitions to
democracy.  Mbembe proposes a different trajectory and significance for
civil society, seeing it primarily as evolving from relations of class and
ideas of civility. [1] In Europe both these elements were ultimately tied to
questions of power, of who and which class, displaying the full forms of
civility, had the right to arrogate to themselves the ownership of public
authority, to make war and to raise taxes.  We might also note that
particularly in England in the nineteenth century, civil society as
essentially a mechanism for displaying and negotiating class relations came
together particularly strongly around questions of law and order and on who
was a criminal.  As the literature abundantly shows, the lower classes were
seen to were seen to be in need of policing, harbouring as it were impulses
towards disorder and uncivility   With the progressive secularization of
Western society, distinctions emerged between royal authority (then
assimilated to different ideas of ecclesiastical authority) and more
secular impulses, thus gradually leading to the establishment of laws to
end the force of customs, traditions, and the power of authorities
perceived as unjust and tyrannical.


As Mbembe asserts: 'It is in this sense that the origins of the idea of
civil society lie in the debate over the relationship between right and
force - that is, in the way that, gradually, the juridical sphere became
demarcated and its originality, distinctive value, and autonomy from state
absolutism asserted' (37).  What one gleans from Mbembe's discussion on the
issue is the fact that structurally, civil society comes into being through
various processes of _relational differentiation_ from notions of civil
behaviour as it is expressed by certain class fractions, from an acceptance
of the foundations of ecclesiastical and royal authority and, finally, in
the modern era, from the various forms of state power.  Thus, civil society
is to be understood on the one hand as a particular practice of
constructing, legitimating, and resolving disputes in the public domain,
and on the other, in terms of ways of articulating relational
differentiations among the practices, rituals and gestures that often
separate the ruling classes from those they govern.

The point is the implicit dichotomies between civil society and the state
on the one hand, and between the lower classes and the aristocracy or
bourgeoisie, on the other, have to be sifted fine to disclose the
processual ways in which civil society becomes an intersectional feature of
structure of any polity.  Looked at in terms of relational
differentiations, Mbembe's later discussion of civil society in Cameroon in
his chapter on the 'Aesthetics of Vulgarity' then makes sense because civil
society is seen strictly as a process of relationalities rather than a
pre-given political structure that can be set in any straightforward way
against political authority.  It is the contradictory process of
structuration that is significant in this regard.


Mbembe's discussion of the evolution of civil society in Africa is
intricately interwoven with an account of the material bases of the
indigenization of civil society and the production of social networks.  The
discussion here turns on the establishment of what he describes as the
'social tax', the financial obligations that most successful Africans feel
compelled to make to less successful members of family, clan or
hometown.  This social tax evolved in the colonial period from the
constellation of distinctively indigenous interests that led to the
realignment of alliances _including_ economic ones both between natives and
colonizers and between the natives themselves.  As the major re-structuring
of cash-crop production took place, it led to the development of a stratum
of relatively well-off farmers who came to combine various roles including
acting as a social base, a political auxiliary, and towards the end of the
colonial period, an opposition force.  With time a process of relational
differentiation took place between farmers and local elites on the one
hand, and farmers and the colonial government on the other, the
agricultural nexus thus forming the basis of an ideal of civil society.  At
the same time, these farmers also provided the conduits through which the
African economies were connected to the global markets.

Mbembe's  exploration of the material bases of civil society is quite
insightful and unusual in that he incorporates the agricultural and rural
nexus directly into the discussion of civil society, showing quite
persuasively the flaws in current discussions that see civil society either
solely as an urban form, or, indeed as not clearly articulated with rural
economic base.  Reading this section with the work of _Subaltern Studies_
historiography in mind, one senses the potential for supplementing the
discussions of civil society that have assimilated it to the informal
economy (largely an urban phenomenon; see McGaffey, Keith Hart and others,
for instance) with a more wide-ranging examination of the place of the
rural agricultural nexus in both the history and current directions of
civil society

The Commandement

It is Mbembe's notion of colonial and postcolonial _commandement_ that
provides the link to the special emphases of Chapters 3 and 4.  As I have
already mentioned, Ch 3 is a version of his well-known essay on
postcolonial governmentality.  Mbembe brings an innovative note to the
study of postcolonial African politics in his combination of Foucault, de
Certeau and Bakhtin, and behind them of Castoriadis, Bataille and even
Hegel, Heidegger and Habermas.  The central focus of the chapter is on what
he describes as the banality of power.  Banality, in his terms, does not
mean merely the ways in which bureaucratic formalities are
routinized.  Rather, he refers directly to those elements of the obscene
and the grotesque, which in Bakhtin's formulations are located in
'non-official' cultures 'but which in fact are intrinsic to all systems of
domination' (102).  He also has a wider interest in how such systems are
confirmed or deconstructed.


His identification of the obscene and the grotesque as being intrinsic to
specific systems of domination might be thought to be exorbitant, but he
highlights this collocation to significant effect when he proceeds to trace
the various ways in which postcolonial African leaders regularly focus on
the hedonistic satiation of the body as a means of foregrounding their
power.  This satiation of the body is governed by a specific dynamic of
public rituals, seen most effectively in 'the rounds of administrative
authorities, their discursive performances, ceremonies and banquets,
official visits of foreign dignitaries, national holidays, presentations of
medals, radio and press communications, tax collection; ordinary
interactions between citizens, the police and bureaucracy, school teachers
and pupils, husbands and wives, church leaders and their
flock' [2].  Critically, however, the body and all its functions also provides
metaphors by which the popular imagination also attempts to subvert the
discourses of power.


Here, however, the Gramscian notion of hegemony is being located in a
peculiarly new way.  Consent and coercion go hand in hand in the
totalitarian African postcolony but in such a way as to appear quite
unstable and difficult to completely identify solely with the politically
dominant authorities.  Mbembe grounds this particular instability in two
main ways.  Firstly, he elaborates the degree to which ordinary people
discompose serious political slogans or ideas into metaphors of sexual and
bodily functions.  This is done by various linguistic devices involving
puns, innuendoes and direct misinterpretations of official discourses.  He
draws examples of this from various African countries but focuses mainly on
Cameroon.

The other way in which he consolidates his notion of the unstable relation
between coercion and consent lies at a more complex level of his discussion
and marks the specific configuration of his interdisciplinary model.  In
attempting to describe the special features of the African postcolony, he
notes that it is 'a specific system of signs, a particular way of
fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes' (102).  The influence of
poststructuralist theories of the implicit links between images,
stereotypes and power is very much in evidence.  This would place Mbembe
squarely among those who conflate the power-laden effects of real life
events with the devices and import of textuality, thus rendering the real
world graspable in essentially textual terms.

But Mbembe adds another dimension to his definition of the African
postcolony that serves both to undermine this textualized and sign-oriented
definition and to put it on a more secure footing.  The African postcolony
is not 'just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and _imagined_
self-reflectively.'  It is characterised further by 'a distinctive style of
political improvisation, by a tendency towards excess and a lack of
proportion as well as by a distinctive style in which identities are
multiplied, transformed and put into circulation.'  The notion of excess
takes us back to the notion of arbitrariness and the culture of impunity
already identified in the colonial _commandement_.  The relation between the
governed and the postcolonial _commandement_ is that of meaningful acts, acts
that have a particular political as well as symbolic saturation.  These
acts predominantly centralise bodily functions, converting these into the
idiom of a carnivalesque subversion of state authority.

It has to be noted that the emphasis on bodily functions plays a dual role
in _On the Postcolony_.  Even though in this chapter it relates directly to
the meaningful acts of the governed in relating to and subverting hegemonic
authority, the idea of bodily functions is re-iterated in other parts of
the book to become one of the central organizing tropes and part of the
resource matrix from which the various lines of argument are
drawn.  Chapter 4, for instance, though focusing on political cartoons of
the potentate in fact turns out to be mainly about the bodily functions of
the potentate. The cartoons that are chosen figure the potentate, often
be-whiskered, fat and misshapen, in bed with his wife/mistress afflicted a
nightmare, dressing up in front of the mirror, on a hospital bed, and even
squatting to defecate.

These do not exhaust the cartoons, but seem to provide the main
emphasis.  The chapter is by far the least satisfactory in the book, the
main reason being that we do not get an adequate historical
contextualization of the cartoons.  We do not know, for example, whether
the cartoons have changed in style and content over the years to reflect
changing concerns, and, more significantly, because the cartoons are mainly
from Cameroon, we do not quite get the wider theoretical implications to be
made for this particular form of political engagement in the African
postcolony in general.  The question of bodily functions as an organizing
trope is one to which we will return later in the discussion.

Decentering the Divine

Strictly speaking, the political theorizing of On the Postcolony stops with
Ch 4.  The next chapters, "Out of the World" and "God's Phallus" are more
philosophical in bent, with the last one being an elaborate venture into
theology.  It is perhaps here that another methodological issue in the book
makes itself felt.  For, even though the discussion of 'divine libido' in
the final chapter can ultimately be connected to abstract notions of power,
its relation to the multiple trajectories of the postcolony we have been
served with in previous chapters is not at all straightforward.  The theme
that governs this chapter is that of divine power and some of the ways in
which monotheism can be seen as imperialising.

The key assertion seems to be that Christian norms of monotheism are at
heart a special way of endowing a particular institution (the Church) with
a monopoly on truth.  All contradiction is subsumed under the discursive
disposition of a transcendental signified of ultimate value.  Thus: 'The
imagined conflicts cannot concern either the ultimate meaning of itself or
the ways in which this meaning is constituted, since, like this meaning
itself, the modalities of its constitution belong to the system of
unquestioned truths that are assumed to be unchallenged' (215).  One sees a
tenuous link with the problem of arbitrariness that Mbembe has previously
raised in his notion of _commandement_, but the chapter can be taken as
almost free-standing and seems to be more a testament to his impatience
with power, the divine discussion here representing an excavation of the
primal scene of its articulation.  Furthermore, it also serves to highlight
and render even more central the trope of bodily functions that could be
observed in operation in chapters 3 and 4.


Power is assimilated to the idea of coital excess, something which could be
discerned in different ways in the discussion of the colonial _commandment_
and the postcolonial potentate.  In "God's Phallus" we find that these
earlier sites were displacements of a more divine impulse: the impulse to
exercise the power to name and create without fear of contradiction
whatsoever.  The significance of the chapter then, lies in the way in
which, drawing on a theological discourse, it re-thinks the conditions
under which contradiction is subsumed under the transcendental sign of
(divine) Power that broaches no contradiction.  If the relation between
this chapter and previous ones in the book seems farfetched, it is because
what has remained implicit throughout On the Posctolony is Mbembe's concern
to deconstruct and decenter the object he has concerned himself with.  And
since this object is mutually constituted as both "Africa" and "Power"
their decentering takes him into a decentering of the divine, the ultimate
source of logocentric political ideology.


Indeed, it is this barely glimpsed form of deconstructive disquisition on
Africa and of Power that constitutes the most significant methodological
problem to be faced by Mbembe in the _forms_ in which he takes the African
postcolony as an object of scholarly discussion in the first place.  For,
what the decentering and deconstructive manoeuvre have sought to grapple
with is the problem of critical enunciation.  How does one speak at all
when everything one says is bound to emerge merely as the intimations of
the familiar within an already well-grounded mode of systematicity?

The intimations of the familiar concerning Africa trouble the discursive
forms that structure _On the Postcolony_ in various ways.  The first thing to
note in this regard is the degree to which the discussion of Africa has to
oscillate between vast generalizations about politics and social forms on
the continent and specific case studies grounding these
generalizations.  The generalizations are most strongly felt in Chapter 2,
"On Private Indirect Government." The chapter is mainly about the collapse
of the state in various parts of Africa and the various dimensions of
transition that do not necessarily yield respite from chaos for a mass of
the population.  Two very intriguing points raised in this chapter are the
intricate relations between salary, citizenship and clientelism in Africa,
the central point being that under certain regimes of arbitrariness, the
salary is assimilated to questions of allegiance to ruling governments.


The second point, similar to the one that Chabal and Daloz make in _Africa
Works_ (1999) is that there is in the postcolony a careful
intrumentalization of violence whose main aim seems to be the establishment
of new forms of legitimate domination.  Even the struggles against these
forms of intrumentalized violence end up being reproductions of disorder
such that they cannot easily be traced as movement towards democracy
necessarily.  The discussion in this chapter here sweeps across Africa
without situating either the finer points of distinction between various
forms of state collapse (for instance what is the difference in the kinds
of chaotic transition between say Nigeria and Rwanda, Ghana and Kenya) or,
more critically, in making room for the expression of the ways in which
some African governments have conceptualized these chaotic transitions and
attempted to direct them.

For the thing is not that African governments have not been aware of the
pressures of transition but that they seem to have persistently failed in
avoiding chaos.  What has been the nature of these dreams of order which
have been repeatedly frustrated by history?  We do not get any answers to
these questions in On the Postcolony.  When it comes to specific case
studies, as in the chapters I have already pointed out, the focus is mainly
on Cameroon.  But how does Cameroon come to occupy this discursive position
of articulating in and of itself the whole reality of the African anguish?
And yet, curiously enough, the generalizations about the place of Africa in
the Western imaginary, the shape and style of _commandement_, arbitrariness
and the culture of impunity and such ideas all seem, from the perspective
of anyone conversant with the scholarly literature on Africa by both
Africans and Westerners all appear quite true.  But how is this seeming
truthfulness discursively produced in On the Postcolony itself?  Why is it
that as a reader, I find myself assenting without question, even while
sensing that some of the assertions could well be refuted?  As I want to
show in the closing sections, the force of this apparent truthfulness lies
in the fact that On the Postcolony cannot entirely escape reproducing
intimations of the familiarity of Africa.


Poetic License

Chapter 5, "Out of the World" in its form captures the problem of familiar
intimations most succinctly.  The chapter ranges over a number of ideas in
Western philosophy to do with Africa, but couples them to the foundational
violence of establishing the colony in the first place.  An assemblage of
stereotypes about Africa are brought into view by Mbembe, all of which
spell out certain constantly reiterated features in Western philosophy: the
vertigo of bestiality, the teeming and threatening natural environment, the
brutal and arbitrary social forms.  In a word the total negation of
civilization.

In its resource matrix, however, the chapter generates a particular problem
of scholarly interlocution that is entirely different from what we see
operating in other parts of the book.  Throughout the book this has shown
itself in the particular ways in which Mbembe identifies particular strands
of debate in discussions of African political economy and situates these
within his own texts.  The rhetorical force underpinning On the Postcolony
in its first part comes from the phenomenal powers of synthesis and
assimilation that Mbembe deploys.  Even though regularly citing specific
scholarly works, these are not engaged with directly but are relegated to
footnotes at the end of the text.  This is in itself a rhetorically quite
powerful style, but the problem arises when, in discussing the Western
philosophical tradition, a different structure of interlocution takes over
that induces Mbembe to pose questions and provide answers in terms of
_familiarity_.  But this familiarity has some worrying implications, because
to be familiar about Africa always involves postulating a common position
as to its nightmarish quality.

In engaging with the Western philosophical tradition, Chapter 5 is a rich
engagement with the images of Africa that is discernible in the philosophy
of Hegel, Heidegger and others.  Here, Mbembe sets up a direct structure of
interlocution, extensively quoting from Hegel and others to debate points
of detail and to establish his own argument.  No longer is he content to
intimate the familiar through a broad assimilation of ideas from the
scholarship on Africa.  Now, he feels compelled to identify specific
passages for commentary.

His comments are, as usual, quite pointed and insightful and what he says
about Hegel's dependence on a specific structure of intimations about the
continent is particularly pointed in this regard: 'The verbal economy
operates according to barely concealed laws.  First, one takes anecdotes,
fragments of the real world, scattered and disconnected things, things one
has not actually witnessed but only heard from a chain of
intermediaries.  Then one eliminates all references to time.  All the
variety of the stories is ironed out; all local reference is removed.  From
these remains of the actual and of the froth of rumor, one makes furtive
sketches, scenes rearranged as one likes, pictures full of movement - in
short, a dramatic story in which words and images, in the final analysis,
amount to very little' (177).

But if this regular framework of familiar intimations is what allows Hegel
to speak about Africa at all, what then are we to make of the uncanny
parallels that are established between some of Hegel's remarks and Mbembe's
own comments about the postcolonial African situation.  First, Hegel, as
cited by Mbembe in his text:

         "They do not invoke God in their ceremonies; they do not turn to
any higher
power, for they believe that they can accomplish their aims by their own
efforts.  To prepare themselves for their task, they work themselves into a
state of frenzy; by means of singing, convulsive dancing, and consuming
intoxicating roots or potions, they reach a state of extreme delirium in
which they proceed to issue their commands. If they do not succeed after
prolonged effort, they decree that some of the onlookers - who are their
own dearest relations - should be slaughtered, and these are then devoured
by their fellows . . . The priest will often spend several days in this
frenzied condition, slaughtering human beings, drinking their blood, and
giving it to the onlookers to drink.  In practice, therefore, only some
individuals have power over nature, and these only when they are beside
themselves in a state of dreadful enthusiasm." (177).

Then next, Mbembe speaking about the postcolony through a passage from Sony
Labou Tansi's _The Seven Solitudes_:

         "For a long time, the priest gazed at the pieces, unsure whether
or not he
should bless them.  Mesmerised by the monstrous sight of human flesh mixed
up with cow's flesh, he couldn't decide how many times he should cross
himself in order to secure God's mercy.  Such depth of human crudity sent
him reeling, as if the meat, the blood, the strong odour of flesh had made
him drunk.  And the silence!  The haughty silence of silenced flesh.  And,
above all, the rather silly smile on the corpse's lips, at one mean and
sublime."  The instruments that kill are the same as those used to eat.
"The Providential Guide withdrew the knife and went back to his meat. . .
which he cut and ate with the same bloody knife." (200-01)

In commenting on this passage, he says: 'The fact is that power, in the
postcolony, is carnivorous.  It grips its subjects by the throat and
squeezes them to the point of breaking their bones, making their eyes pop
out of their sockets, making them weep blood.  It cuts them in pieces and,
sometimes, eats them raw (201).  Even though this might be taken as a form
of poetic licence, coming as it does after the Labou Tansi passage which
has been used as a way of illustrating the excesses of power in the
postcolony, it is not at all clear whether this is not to be taken as the
assertion of straightforward opinion of disgust.

There is thus an uncanny parallel between Mbembe/Tansi on the postcolony
and Hegel on Africa in the eighteenth century.  What is the difference
between the two images of Africa? It is as if the structure of
interlocution in which Hegel's intimations of the familiar are taken
seriously as a point of refutation, ends up producing a mirror image of its
familiarity within Mbembe's text itself.  Which then raises a set of other
questions: Might it be the case that in fact, Western philosophy was
actually right about Africa?  The fact that intimations of familiar horrors
concerning Africa might actually have been are of course readily refutable,
especially as can be shown that this generalization was serving a
particular end of privileging the West's own sense of its superiority.  But
if they were not correct, how come that Mbembe manages to slip into the
same form of familiarity, this time, not detailing an anthropological case
study of sacrifice and violence, but referring to a literary rendition of
such a horror, the basis of which allows him to make a metaphorical link
between power and sacrifice in Africa.  Where, we might ask, does the
"truth", (however we like to define it) lie?

I think the cause of this conflation of "truths" comes not merely from any
conceptual weakness in Mbembe's methodological schema as from the fact that
the object of study - Africa - is being examined from the standpoint of an
implicitly historicist and developmentalist perspective.  What we see here
is that because Africa is being viewed from the standpoint of what it might
have been, i.e. a collectivity of modern states with the full paraphernalia
that define the modern state - citizen rights, democratic processes, a
mastery over technology and means of production, a dominant place as an
agenda setter in the league of sovereign nations, etc. -- the discourse
about Africa of a necessity already passes judgement on it even as it is
bringing it into view for discussion.  And this judgement is always
implicitly passed from the perspective of the already modern West.

In other words, so long us Africa seems a "failed" experiment, the
intimations of its familiarity are not of its barbarism but of its failure
_to be modern_.  In this respect, the atavistic register that has marked
discussions of it repeatedly configure the discourse of its backwardness in
relation to a place that is already forward, advanced, or indeed free.  Any
discourse that wants to name Africa is constrained to name it from the
perspective of its not-fully realized potential, that is, from the view of
a developmentalist standpoint that has to mask itself as merely
ethical.  And this is not an affliction solely of Mbembe's text.  It is an
inherent and constitutive dimension of the social science framework that
has, through various mutations, naturalized an evolutionary
logic.  Everything is seen from the implicit purview of this logic.  The
problem, to mis-echo Shakespeare, is not in our stars, but in the framework.

It is by no means clear that there is a way out of this impasse.  The
Afrocentric impulse, which tries to excavate the glory of things past as a
means of rectifying the sorry contemporary picture of Africa and to provide
models of African achievement to aspire to in the future is by no means
unproblematic.  The inherent optimism in the Afrocentric project requires
serious qualifications in the face of what are serious contemporary
problems on the continent.  And the desire to detail as closely as possible
the genealogies of the current confusion and to show the multiplicitous
sources of this disorder are bound to seem somewhat pessimistic if not
utterly devoid of hope.  The third option is what On the Postcolony
suggests, namely, that to think about the African postcolony one has to
shape a restless discourse that in the end abjures easy discursive
closure.  It is an eloquent enterprise, a heady one, full of a righteous
anger as well as a sadness about the failure of potential for the
continent.  But ultimately, it is also a discourse prepared to contemplate
the negation of its own categories of thought even as it desperately seeks
a form of disquisition that would help transcend the details of the
nightmare.  Mbembe shows us this and more.  In the end On the Postcolony
does not stop at intimating the familiar; it is an uncanny breach in the
commonplaces of thought.

NOTES


[1].   For a useful discussion of these and related issues, see for
example, Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of
Robberies (1751), David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century
England (1997) and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(1970) among others.

[2]. This list is taken verbatim from  Mbembe's "Prosaics of Servitude and
Authoritarian Civilities", a eloquent response to the critics of his essay
in Public Culture 4.2 (1992).  Ideally, the reply is best read alongside
the chapter itself as it provides a deepening of some of the ideas he had
developed in the earlier paper.


References

Appiah, Anthony K. (1992). In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy
of Culture. London: Methuen.

Diawara, Manthia (1998). In Search of Africa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.

Fielding, Henry (1751). An Enquiry into the Cause of the Late Increase of
Robberies.  London: A. Miller.

Mbembe, Achille (1992) "Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian
Civilities", Public Culture 4.2.

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

Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988). The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the
order of knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: Currey.

Thompson, E. P. (1970).  The Making of the English Working Class.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Taylor, David (1997). The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.


Copyright, African Studies Review, African Studies Association, and Ato
Quayson, 2001. Reproduced with permission.

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