THE AFRICAN ANIMAL OTHER

Abstract

The main claim in this article is that the traditionally Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. The racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the older Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. In the Great Chain of Being of Western metaphysics it is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes and separates humans from that same domain. Situated in the border between human and Animal, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. With the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. African Woman, in particular, is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project thus institutes a certain flight from Nature and Animal, which is nevertheless bound to fail for some. This symbolic project finds concrete expression in the uncontrolled sexual and other forms of exploitation of the Black woman’s body, as much as in the rampant destruction of nature and animal in the colony. The main aim of the article is to look at ways to confront and dismantle this highly destructive symbolic. To this end, Merleau-Ponty’s careful reintegration of the intelligible into the sensible, and his understanding that the human mind is a function of the “flesh of the world” itself, is deployed. In his last, incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, we get the most complete vision of human intelligence as a kind of fold in the flesh of being and as merely a moment in “nature’s own self-unfolding expression.” I end with a brief comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and some concrete examples of extra-Western or extra-colonial Southern African understandings of Animal and Nature, and with the hope that this dialogue will be developed further.

Keywords:

• animal
• flesh
• Merleau-Ponty
• colony
• South Africa

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I write “Nature” with a capital letter to remind the reader that I am dealing with a particular tradition of objectifying everything on the planet that is not man-made. I am speaking, of course, about the Western philosophical tradition.

2 When I discuss non-Western or pre-Western understandings, I refer to nature (rather than Nature) and animals (rather than Animal), simply to reinforce visually the enormous differences in approach.

3 I use the term “Black” to refer to the portrayal of Africans by the Western imaginary, in order to remind us that racialization of the colonized happened in the service of slavery, subjugation and exploitation. At the same time, I build in an obstacle in the form of the hyphen, to remind us in the very reading of the word that this is a construct with power implications. Fortuitously, the hyphen also illuminates the “lack” in the word “Black,” which I regard as corresponding with the position of less than fully human, or lacking in human qualities, to which persons designated with this label were banished. Similarly, I write “W-hite” with a hyphen, to mark it as equally a social construct which upholds certain naturalized power relations. At the same time it should be noted that within the Western imaginary the meanings of W-hite and B-lack are radically asymmetrical.

4 Against Mbembe’s fairly a-historical treatment of this claim, the animalization of the African starts at a specific point in history. Earlier, the racial prejudice against African cultures was mainly cultural, religious and moral. According to Lewis (200) and Pieterse (41), during the 1770s several works were published that brought about this change, which enabled W-hite colonizers to see B-lack bodies as biologically inferior or degenerate, as a lower “type” of the species.

5 Mbembe does not regard the prejudice to entail that the African is viewed as an animal pure and simple. This is also why he says cautiously, “discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal [ … ]” (Mbembe 1).

6 In her essay “The Contingency of Pain,” Sara Ahmed links pain to a heightened awareness of the lived body and in particular the skin as a “bodily surface” which simultaneously “keeps us apart from others” and also “mediates” our relation to the world and to others (19). She then explains one aspect of the politics of pain with reference to the racist trope that the pain of the racialized other is diminished or denied; the racialized other is seen as “having a thick skin” and being impervious to the nuances of pain that the normative W-hite would experience (31).

7 See, for example, Sandra Harding’s essay “The Curious Coincidence of Feminine and African Moralities: Challenges for Feminist Theory” and Thaddeus Metz’s article “The Western Ethic of Care or an Afro-communitarian Ethic? Specifying the Right Relational Morality.”

8 Of these three labels for indigenous groupings, only the last one, amaXhosa, is the name chosen by the people themselves. This speaks volumes about the hierarchy of peoples created by the Dutch gaze. Both “Hottentot” and “Bushman” are Dutch neologisms denoting inferiority, and erasing the names the people gave themselves. However, some argue that “Bushman” has now again become a term of preference.

9 In this influential Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which G.W.F. Hegel developed and delivered in Berlin from 1822 onwards, he posits Greco-European history as the highest point in the development of history towards human freedom. In the same work he places Africans outside of human history: “The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the category of Universality.” He concludes: “From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been.” The Africans for him represent his picture of the state of Nature: “The state of Nature is, therefore, predominantly that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings” (Hegel 93; emphases added).

10 There are many published accounts of Sarah Baartman’s life, amongst them Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Hottentot Venus.

11 The details are fairly well known. Saartjie was paraded at fairs in England before being sold to an animal trainer in Paris who made her perform to crowds. Georges Cuvier from the Museum of Natural History in Paris investigated her for evidence that she represented the “missing link” between humans and animals. Her remains – brain, skeleton and genitalia, and a plaster cast of her body – were preserved after her early death at 26 (in 1815) in Paris’s Musée de l’Homme. The remains were returned to South Africa in 2002, when they were finally buried in the Eastern Cape.

12 After the book by Louise Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language.

13 In Merleau-Ponty’s radical re-conceptualization, “the material world” of course can no longer have its traditional connotations of “raw,” dead or inert materiality and can also no longer be the absolute inferior opposite of the mental or intelligible.

14 I am by no means the first to make this kind of argument. See Olivier and Cordeiro-Rodriques for a comparison between racism and speciesism with regard to suffering.

15 See Greg Nicolson, “Goodbye Bazooka: Wild Coast Anti-mining Activist Killed.” Daily Maverick 24 Mar. 2016, available <https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-03-24-goodbye-bazooka-wild-coast-anti-mining-activist-killed/#.WuhvOm6FPtQ> (accessed 1 May 2018).