BREAKING THE GRIDLOCK OF THE AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL SELF-IMAGINATION

Abstract

In a response to critiques of his On the Postcolony in a 2006 African Identities article, Achille Mbembe declared that the book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Marxian analysis of colonization and its consequences is specifically isolated as one such impotent tool of critical analysis. As an alternative to these “failed” traditional paradigms, Mbembe launches into a deconstructive experimental hermeneutic that leads him to the explication of colonial alterity in libidinal, representational and semiotically analogous language, as exhibited in On the Postcolony. This article challenges the efficacy of this post-structuralist semiotics and phenomenological extrapolations as the proposed way out of his perceived “cul-de-sac” in African postcolonial self-imagination. In particular, his dismissal of Marxian theory is turned around and demonstrated as an analytical paradigm that most radically diagnoses the essence of colonization as it affects the African subject. On the basis of the schema of Das Kapital, which is primarily about the postulation of the expropriation of labour power as the surplus value that fuelled the Atlantic slave trade and colonization, what Mbembe deems hermeneutically as a discursive distortion of the imagery of the African in the past and the present, is exposed as being a material-political misappropriation of the human essence, and as such a historical injustice that remains embedded into the logic of prevailing neo-colonialism.

Keywords:

• alterity
• Mbembe
• Marxian theory
• Das Kapital
• African postcolonial theory

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Engels in Marx and Engels, “Wage Labour and Capital” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works in One Volume 68.

2 See Mafeje, “Apropos.”

3 Archie Mafeje introduced a notion of “a cul-de-sac” in theoretical paradigms in his discussion of the application of Marxian interpretations of pre-colonial African social structures in his 1991 The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations (5–7).

4 Mbembe cites Ricoeur, Time and Narrative [Temps et récit], 3 vols.

5 In addition to Ricoeur, Mbembe built his frame of reference chiefly from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (see “A Brief Response” 153) and Jacques Derrida (he cites Archeology of the Frivolous). From these emerged his underlying enunciation of “absolute Othering.”

6 See also Squire 50–68.

7 “I attempted to carry this labour of de-construction [ … ] in the tradition of Senghor’s ‘shadow song’ (chant d’ombre)” (Mbembe, “A Brief Response” 157).

8 In “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” Engels states: “These two discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these two discoveries socialism became a science” (in Marx and Engels, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Works in One Volume 411).

9 Hegel.

10 Sartre was to apply himself to the implications of Marx’s theory much later in his career, specifically during the writing of Critique of Dialectical Reason during 1960.

11 This refers to my earlier quotation of Mbembe’s statement that “[It] is in relation with Africa that the notion of ‘absolute otherness’ has been taken farthest [ … ]” (Mbembe, On the Postcolony 2).

12 The sum of exchange value (sale price) minus use value (production inputs) equals surplus value.

13 Noetic, as derived from Edmund Husserl’s usage of noesis as the encounter or activity of the subjective mind with what is being experienced.